Minimalism surveyed - 4.6.2011

[french frank]

A Sat'dy night music feature, 50 Years of Minimalism in Music, 9.30-10.30, preceding H&N on June 4:

"American conductor Richard Bernas [...] traces its origins in both the San Francisco and New York underground cultures of the early 1960s, exploring the relationship between music and the visual arts, but also theatre and dance. He also assesses how Minimalism, arguably the newest style proper to emerge in Classical music, evolved into a mature and powerful force during the 1970s and 80s, eventually becoming part of the cultural mainstream..." - and talks to lots of composers.

[hackneyvi]

Last month I heard the long Reich piece, Drumming, at the Queen Elizabeth Hall. It was ok but I couldn't really understand why it was 70 minutes rather than 10. If it was done in a dance hall, it's length might have had purpose but as concert music I missed the point. But it'll be interesting to hear the music's original spur and context.

[Serial_Apologist]

I v much enjoyed Drumming when it was first toured here in (?) 1970, and I wasn't even stoned. The problem was what happened to minimalism when the systems aspect of it appeared insufficient for the genre's future. BTW hackneyvi that joke (which I hadn't heard before) - a bit bad taste, given Reich being Jewish.

[hackneyvi]

BTW hackneyvi that joke ... a bit bad taste ...

It offends thee. I have plucked it out.

[Serial_Apologist]

[Boilk]

"Crossing the Atlantic, he examines its influence in the wider field of European composers, such as Michael Nyman and Louis Andriessen - who've created their own brands of Minimalism"

Why the complete ignorance of British Minimalism in the early '80s ... BEFORE Nyman made it big and was in fact somewhat unknown? Composers like Orlando Gough and Andrew Poppy wrote a lot of systems pieces (as individuals and as part of collectives like The Lost Jockey and Man Jumping). This was the heyday of British Minimalism. As usual Radio 3 has a very selective memory in its "survey" of any musical genre whatsoever.

The problem was what happened to minimalism when the systems aspect of it appeared insufficient for the genre's future.

The systems aspect of it was by no means insufficient, as the aforementioned British composers (amongst many others) proved. In fact this first generation of post-Minimalists showed that the excessively SLOW evolutionary processes at work in many pieces by Glass and Reich (hence the 70-minute Drumming) was a drawback that needed to be rectified in order to keep the music more stimulating and less nauseating.

[Serial_Apologist]

I thought early minimalist composers were out to address the expansion of the attention span, not its contraction. Ah yes, you might answer, but we're talking of the early 80s, when art really started reflecting the values of its time. That kind of reflection seems to have really taken over now. Hegemonized everything. Every concert hall, airport lounge, church, alternative therapy centre, has to bow to the invisible might of the hidden hand. I did business studies at college, and one thing we learned was that impulse buying is not compatible with an expanded attention span.

[Boilk]

There's nothing wrong with an expanded attention span for music, providing there's enough content to justify such a span. Failing that, such music becomes audio wallpaper, and serves a rather different purpose.

[hackneyvi]

I thought early minimalist composers were out to address the expansion of the attention span, not its contraction. Ah yes, you might answer, but we're talking of the early 80s, when art really started reflecting the values of its time. That kind of reflection seems to have really taken over now. Hegemonized everything. Every concert hall, airport lounge, church, alternative therapy centre, has to bow to the invisible might of the hidden hand. I did business studies at college, and one thing we learned was that impulse buying is not compatible with an expanded attention span.

Could you explain 'the hidden hand', SA? I sense a disagreement between your positions on the music but I don't quite see it. Excuse me, I think I'm being thick.

There's nothing wrong with an expanded attention span for music, providing there's enough content to justify such a span. Failing that, such music becomes audio wallpaper, and serves a rather different purpose.

My struggle with Drumming was two-fold. First, I was largely only able to appreciate the larger changes of instrumentation, not the subtleties. Second, though I might be able to detect one rhythmic change from another, the individual variations are so rapid and so similar, I'm not able to remember enough of what I've previously heard for a sense of difference to exist across the piece.

It seems almost to do the opposite it's designed for if I correctly understand the remarks about 'expanded attention'. A sort of musical dementia arises wherein nothing is memorable beyond a general sense of the instrumentation.

I can remember sharing a bed with a friend in my teens and he coughed in his sleep. A cough has something enough of an individual's voice that - in a predictable context, at least - the individual is recognisable by their cough. I found this surprising, that a person was recognisable by sound, completely independent of conciousness. Waking, a cough may be moderated by the person depending on the surroundings (a concert hall, an interview, a funeral, the bus). A cough in sleep isn't moderated. Some measure of intention, what I think of as the person, doesn't intrude and astonishingly the person is still recognisable by a wholly involuntary sound (I suppose a scream might be the same but how many times in our lives do we hear someone scream in his sleep? I, not ever.). The significance surprises me still when I think of it.

In Drumming, I hear a recognisable voice expressing nothing, expressing no idea at all. Coughing in sleep. Voice without intention, communicating only a timbre of sound.

Reich - either talking or in a programme note - referred to a crucial African trip where he heard live drumming. It seemed to me - though perhaps that African drumming was absolutely arranged and unvarying, too -, it seemed likely that the hot life in that African drumming was the thing squeezed out by Reich in his music. Lively drumming and Reich are as different from one another as flowers in a field are from those pressed in a book.

[Bryn]

"Crossing the Atlantic, he examines its influence in the wider field of European composers, such as Michael Nyman and Louis Andriessen - who've created their own brands of Minimalism"

Why the complete ignorance of British Minimalism in the early '80s ... BEFORE Nyman made it big and was in fact somewhat unknown? Composers like Orlando Gough and Andrew Poppy wrote a lot of systems pieces (as individuals and as part of collectives like The Lost Jockey and Man Jumping). This was the heyday of British Minimalism. As usual Radio 3 has a very selective memory in its "survey" of any musical genre whatsoever.



The systems aspect of it was by no means insufficient, as the aforementioned British composers (amongst many others) proved. In fact this first generation of post-Minimalists showed that the excessively SLOW evolutionary processes at work in many pieces by Glass and Reich (hence the 70-minute Drumming) was a drawback that needed to be rectified in order to keep the music more stimulating and less nauseating.

Never mind this nearly new stuff by Andrew Poppy et al. They were very much late-comers to the feast of English minimalism. What of Cardew's The Great Digest, Paragraph 2 (later re-titled The Great Learning, Paragraph 2), of 1969, or the composers of Promenade Theatre Orchestra (PTO) who were very active in what at the time was more commonly labelled "process music". Check out the latter's concert at the Holland Park Orangery on EMC102 (which concert I had the good fortune to be able to record on a Tandberg reel-to reel recorder purchased just one day before the event).

[Serial_Apologist]

Could you explain 'the hidden hand', SA? I sense a disagreement between your positions on the music but I don't quite see it. Excuse me, I think I'm being thick.



My struggle with Drumming was two-fold. First, I was largely only able to appreciate the larger changes of instrumentation, not the subtleties. Second, though I might be able to detect one rhythmic change from another, the individual variations are so rapid and so similar, I'm not able to remember enough of what I've previously heard for a sense of difference to exist across the piece.

It seems almost to do the opposite it's designed for if I correctly understand the remarks about 'expanded attention'. A sort of musical dementia arises wherein nothing is memorable beyond a general sense of the instrumentation.

I can remember sharing a bed with a friend in my teens and he coughed in his sleep. A cough has something enough of an individual's voice that - in a predictable context, at least - the individual is recognisable by their cough. I found this surprising, that a person was recognisable by sound, completely independent of conciousness. Waking, a cough may be moderated by the person depending on the surroundings (a concert hall, an interview, a funeral, the bus). A cough in sleep isn't moderated. Some measure of intention, what I think of as the person, doesn't intrude and astonishingly the person is still recognisable by a wholly involuntary sound (I suppose a scream might be the same but how many times in our lives do we hear someone scream in his sleep? I, not ever.). The significance surprises me still when I think of it.

In Drumming, I hear a recognisable voice expressing nothing, expressing no idea at all. Coughing in sleep. Voice without intention, communicating only a timbre of sound.

Reich - either talking or in a programme note - referred to a crucial African trip where he heard live drumming. It seemed to me - though perhaps that African drumming was absolutely arranged and unvarying, too -, it seemed likely that the hot life in that African drumming was the thing squeezed out by Reich in his music. Lively drumming and Reich are as different from one another as flowers in a field are from those pressed in a book.

Sorry, not sure I get your point either, this time, hackneyvi!

The "hidden hand" if I remember correctly, could be wrong (a bit rusty these days) was Adam Smith's idea that, unregulated, capitalism's demand-met supply could ensure market equilibrium.

To explain my point about attention span.

Previous to Reich's early minimalist instrumental pieces, he has experimented with superimposed taped materials played back at different speeds. What he thought interesting, as he maintained concentration, were the interesting rhythmic patterns resulting in passing from phasing, and how a cyclic process could take place in which the original pattern eventually returned, and could mark the conclusion of the piece. To cut a long story short he then tried replicating this in real time with real performers, discovering that by means of intense concentration it was possible for musicians to accelerate or slow down said materials, replicating this phasing.

States of intense concentration are part of mantric practices in many spiritual traditions. This is of course, or, rather, was, a different approach to music making and listening from the normal Western concert tradition of having some kind of narrative to maintain interest - tone poem programme, sonata form etc, harmonic stress, contrast and resolution. In Buddhism they do not believe in beginnings, middles or endings, and through meditation, i.e. attention to the here and now, seek recalibration to a mindset more at home in the present. Also harmony with the processes of nature - including our own - so human practice needs cailbrating to that end. One can see the possible congruence between minimalist thinking, the practices of eg African drummers, and the idea of not living at the expense of the environment, at the same time presenting this as an alternative to Western notions of progress. Western culture needs the goals that are provided by narratives with their happy or unhappy endings, such as we are conditioned to feel, hmmm, how much longer is this boring piece of repeated noise going to go on, It all sounds the same to me - instead of paying attention. A Buddhist would interpret such an attitude as symptomatic of the overstimulated mindset of Western consumptionism.

John Cage - himself no minimalist, though some of his ideas helped give rise to it - describes in "Silence" how he played a buddhist service in front of a class of music students. After four minutes a man at the back screamed "Take it off! I can't stand any more!" Cage took the recording off, whereupon another man said, "Why did you take that off? I was just getting interested".

S-A

[prokkyshosty]

If I can embellish a bit on S-A's excellent description of phasing, indeed Reich thought it wasn't possible for two performers to smoothly go in and out of phase with the same precision as two tape loops running at different speeds. His performers proved him wrong, and the quality of performance has gotten to the point where I've now seen a video on youtube where ONE pianist is performing his "Piano Phase" on two keyboards; his left hand going slightly out of phase with his right hand, and back again.

What gets me about Reich's phasing experiments, speaking generally (I have to admit, Drumming is not necessarily my favourite), is that sometimes you hear such unusual and different patterns percolating out of the music when the two figures are out of phase, you have to take it on faith that the performers haven't changed the notes they're playing!

[Serial_Apologist]

Thanks Prokky. As I was saying to Hackneyvi on another thread earlier, you've put it better than I!

[MrGongGong]

Never mind this nearly new stuff by Andrew Poppy et al. They were very much late-comers to the feast of English minimalism. What of Cardew's The Great Digest, Paragraph 2 (later re-titled The Great Learning, Paragraph 2), of 1969, or the composers of Promenade Theatre Orchestra (PTO) who were very active in what at the time was more commonly labelled "process music". Check out the latter's concert at the Holland Park Orangery on EMC102 (which concert I had the good fortune to be able to record on a Tandberg reel-to reel recorder purchased just one day before the event).

not forgetting Grainger's Random Round (now did Terry Riley know about that before In C ???)

though Drinking and Hooting Machine is one of my all time faves (particularly good when done with bottles of Adnams Broadside ....... The Aldeburgh version as it's known in our house !!)

[french frank]

The "hidden hand" if I remember correctly, could be wrong (a bit rusty these days) was Adam Smith's idea that, unregulated, capitalism's demand-met supply could ensure market equilibrium.

The term Adam Smith used was actually 'invisible hand'. Sorry, can't add anything about minimalist music though ...