3 March 2024
Get out your headphones! Today we’re going on a musical jaunt. The subject of today’s Stack is minimalist music.
On Friday night, I went to see a piece I have always loved, and which I had seen performed once before in New York, Music For Eighteen Musicians (1974-76). It’s constructed on the musical concept of ostinato, but taking it from a means of support to an operational system of control and musical form.
Background Concepts
For context, let me digress a moment to cite a few examples of ostinato, a compositional technique with a continuously repeating motif. You have heard it in pop music, indie rock, rap of all eras, and electronic music, whether it’s in the percussion, the harmony or the melody.
When we look at how traditional classical music of Europe uses the repeating figure, we can start with the Baroque period, and the basso continuo, used extensively in pieces by Bach, Händel, Purcell or Vivaldi (eg.The Four Seasons, Summer, Presto 17:46), a similar strategy for creating a sonorous springboard over which a melody can flow.
Historical Context
Minimalism across the arts emerged in the 1950s and 60s with the New York School in painting, and Downtown School in music.1 When La Monte Young wrote The Tortoise in 1959, and Robert Ryman painted only all-white paintings, both were trying pare their mediums down to the bare essentials, creating a more enthralling and sensitizing experience by forcing the listener or the viewer to pay strict attention to all that was left after most of the furniture and trappings like imagery, conventional color or representational figures, in the case of Ryman, or key signatures, chords and harmonic structures in the case of Young. Without these elements, one must focus on texture and variation and subtle contrasts.
This was the experimental music of sixty years ago, which quickly expanded into the musical language of popular music, while becoming itself a niche genre, practiced by a surprisingly robust number of artists of many generations and countries. Philip Glass, Terry Rily, La Monte Young, and Steve Reich were all members of the Downtown School.
Before I talk about Steve Reich, I’d like to spotlight Philip Glass and the years before Einstein On The Beach. What’s austere and uncompromising in Philip Glass’s earlier work is the fact that there’s no tonal or dynamic shift. It’s sheer repetition mitigated only by the addition or subtraction of voices. Each pitch is the same in length and volume—an earful. Hit the link and listen. The painting below might be a very good way of visualizing what I mean by austere.
Later Glass favored harmonic modulation much more in his later work, and it’s this phase that people might know better, through his many film scores, for instance, The Hours or The Illusionist. My favorite Philip Glass piece, though, is Einstein on the Beach.
It was a sensation, revolutionary in terms of music and theatre, and as groundbreaking as the premiere of Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire of 1923. Schoenberg’s opera also pushed boundaries, however, was met with derision and hostility in a way that Einstein On The Beach never was. That’s not to deny its difficulty, but Susan Sontag claimed it as ‘one of the greatest theatre pieces of the 20th century’, and with this I’m inclined to agree. Be that as it may, it defies categorization, and is in no way familiar to the culture at large. Yet it is a cultural touchstone. I think of it as the culmination of that first, most difficult period in Glass’s oeuvre.
Other minimalist composers use ostinato with softer instrumentation and phrasing. La Monte Young, who I mentioned earlier, is credited with being the first to call himself a minimalist when he wrote a second piece in 1959 called Trio For Strings. It’s made of very long notes that phase in an out of one another, a kind of sfumato that envelops the listener in an ephemeral soundscape, and is more in line with composers like John Luther Adams, who is ten years younger. Becoming Desert does indeed sound like a continual burgeoning or becoming that you can also read as an environment.2
The minimalist compositional technique was the solution to a crisis in contemporary classical music at the time in the same way that Schoenberg’s 12-tone system had provided a new conceptual way forward after the deaths of Debussy and Wagner. Additionally, if Dada was the ethos of Schoenberg’s early years, the post-WWII years, Buddhism also has its part to play in the world of the Downtown composers and as well as the poets and painters of the years after World War II. This paring down of attention to minute changes is exactly what the Tao is all about.
And this brings me to Music For Eighteen Musicians, which you might want to play now, as I talk about it. It is a long piece, an hour and five minutes, but it offers constant change that’s broad and deep. A steady pulse greets a host of emerging and receding elements against the constant lattice of mellow staccato notes from the mallet instuments (marimbas and xylophones). It has hierarchy. There is a lead instrument (vibraphone) which punctuates and marks moments of complete transition. Time is texture, with voices alternating very rapidly. And like paradiddle patterns on the drums, each instrument group (of the eighteen total) plays just a fraction of figures in the 2/2 time signature. The sounds combine to create a wonderfully constant rhythm of the piano and mallet instruments from which seems to arise the melodic voices that also adhere to the established pattern. There is melody but it is fragmented by rhythmic structure in such a way that you could not call the piece melodic. There are repeating figures, cycles of 11 chords that leave and come back either as second or third inversions, or transposing to other keys (eg. starts out in A major, gradually changes to E major and eventually returning to A)
I love the textures of the instrumentation. The bass clarinets and saxes give the bottom its raspy quality, the tenor note of that being the cello. Then the violins work with the human voices, imitating the staccato of the struck instruments, and the vibraphone announces big changes in direction.
And somehow—I don’t know how the composer managed it—the piece grabs you by your feelings. Once inside, you are walking in a world that has things to tell you. Somehow, you connect with it emotionally, it feels uplifting in places, striving and searching, mysterious, lonely; there is sadness followed by resilience, action and rest. Your mind may see the mathematical beauty of a spray of flowers or imagine neutrons and protons in a nucleus, moving in orbitals.
The music cycles fast, in and out of so many emotional states that at the close of the performance, the audience needed a full twenty seconds before there was a single clap. If you see it live, you might find yourself needing a moment to right yourself at the end. That is magic I don’t know how to explain.
Refers to downtown Manhattan, NYC
Brian Eno’s work is also wonderfully spacial but not as repetitive, so I won’t be citing it here.
Thank you. I’ve been listening to some of the Glass, and doing some writing. Beautiful. (Now I can hear more as well as see more Glass.)