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To Repeat Or Not to Repeat, That Is the Question1 by Kyle Gann

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To Repeat Or Not to Repeat, That Is the Question1 by Kyle Gann To Repeat or Not to Repeat, That Is the Question1 By Kyle Gann Steve Reich In the good old 1960s, the Bohemian life was cheap in lower Manhattan, the streets were relatively safe, and artists drove cabs for a living. Steve Reich, for example. He had been experimenting with tapes of interesting voices he found, and he rigged up his cab with a tape recorder so he could tape some of his passengers. One day he recorded a young African- American man who had been beaten up in the Harlem riots of 1964. By the young man's account, the police were taking away victims and would only take those who were visibly bleeding to the hospital. This young man wasn't bleeding, so, as he said, "I had to, like, open the bruise up and let some of the bruise blood come out to show them." The inner melody of that phrase intrigued Reich. He took the tape home and made tape loops from the words "Come out to show them." He started two of the tape loops together and, because his cheap tape recorders weren't precisely the same speed, he listened to them inevitably out of phase. This gradual phasing process obscured the words and turned them into a little repeated melody in C minor. Reich taped the whole process and called the resulting piece Come Out. Describing how it felt the first time he heard two tape loops go out of phase, Reich said, "The sensation that I had in my head was that the sound moved over to my left ear, down to my left shoulder, down my left arm, down my leg, out across the floor to the left, and finally began to reverberate and shake... and then it started going the other way and came back together in the center of my head." Fascinated by what he had found, Reich started making works based on gradual processes. He tried it with two live pianists playing at slightly different speeds in a piece called Piano Phase. He did it with a percussion ensemble in a major work called Drumming. He experimented with other processes, gradually lengthening melodic lines or compressing them. He built up a repertoire of music, and other composers started doing similar things. A movement was born. No one knew what to call it at first: "Process music" seemed appropriate for awhile. Then "trance music." "Hypnotic music." "Modular music." Those who weren't so enamored of it suggested "wallpaper music" and "going-nowhere music." But the term that stuck, coined in 1968 by composer and critic Michael Nyman, was: "Minimalism." The word had come from the visual art world. It was applied by critics to the black paintings of Ad Reinhardt, the boxes of Donald Judd, the geometric prints of Sol LeWitt, and the large, simple steel forms of Robert Serra. In music, the term would apply to flatness of form, long stretches of music with only a few pitches, little or no textural change, and either a relentlessly steady pulse or long, sustained drones with no pulse at all. Despite its initial austerity, minimalism would become the most important musical movement of the late 20th century, attracting back into the concert hall thousands of people who had given up on contemporary music as too abstract and ugly. 1 http://musicmavericks.publicradio.org/features/essay_gann08.html Music history, like just about any other kind of history, swings back and forth in cycles. After a period of extremely complex music, it's a pretty safe bet that what's going to come next is extremely simple music. And that's what happened. The 1950s and early '60s produced the most complicated music in the history of the world. Composers in Europe like Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Boulez, Lucaino Berio, and Bruno Maderna, and in America like Milton Babbitt and Mario Davidovsky, were making hypercomplex music based on the 12-tone technique of Arnold Schönberg, adding to it mathematical techniques for the scientific structuring of rhythm, timbre, and every other conceivable aspect of music. The resulting style, known as serialism because it was based on the concept of a row or series of pitches, rhythms, and so on, was extremely abstract, nearly impossible for the average untrained listener to follow, as an excerpt from Stockhausen's Gruppen for three orchestras may indicate. La Monte Young Whatever its advantages - and serialism did allow for a vast expansion in the number of ways to conceptualize musical forms - the style did not allow much room for intuition, nor for a composer's personality to emerge. By the late 1950s, some young composers who had been involved in serialism already began thinking it was time for something else. One of these was La Monte Young. Born in tiny Bern, Idaho, in a log cabin, Young was not much inclined to fade into the wallpaper wherever he was, and he didn't fit into the University of California at Berkeley as a student anymore than he did anywhere else. He started out writing 12-tone and serialist music like a good boy. But he heard another music in his head, and had a mischievous streak anyway. He's always said that his earliest musical influences were long, continuous sounds: the wind blowing through a chink in the log cabin he was born in, and the hum of the power line outside. In 1958 he wrote a trio for violin, viola, and cello in approved 12-tone style - except for its speed. The opening chord lasted four and half minutes. There were only a few dozen notes in the whole piece, each one held for a very long time, and the entire trio lasted almost an hour. Young's teacher Seymour Shifrin allowed a performance of the Trio hoping to persuade Young he was on the path to decadence and despair. But it only egged him on. Young had a fellow student at Berkeley named Terry Riley, and the two gave concerts together. They would drag a gong down the street with a contact mike attached to it to create a deafening roar, or make a tone poem of chairs and tables dragged across a wooden stage floor. But long, continuous tones were the idea that appealed to Young most, and in 1960 he wrote down what might be thought of as the first truly minimalist piece, Composition 1960 #7. It consisted of nothing more than the pitches B and F# with the instructions, "To be held for a long time." Young and Riley moved to New York, although Riley would go from there onto Paris and Morocco. In Manhattan, Young formed an ensemble to play drone music with, called the Theatre of Eternal Music. Working over drones from electronic oscillators or even a aquarium water- pump motor, Young and his wife Marian Zazeela sang, Tony Conrad played violin, John Cale played violin, Angus MacLise drummed on a hand drum, and sometimes Terry Jennings would join in on sax or Terry Riley singing or playing violin. Bathed in Zazeela's colored light projections, this group would give concerts of harmonics sung and played over drones, the whole thing so loud that it could be heard outside the building and down the street. One 1968 Village Voice article described it as an "almost unbearably loud, low-pitched electronic hum.... At first even to enter the auditorium seemed too dangerous to risk, for the sound was painfully loud even with the doors closed. Entering was like being hit in the face with a blast of hot wind or like walking into a room full of brine and discovering that surprisingly enough it was still possible to breath." The point of the music was to create a feeling of involved well-being by singing and playing overtones - the resonant frequencies of a low fundamental tone, perfectly in tune. Tony Conrad, a violinist, had taught Young about the mathematics of tuning and overtones, and performances consisted of singing through a series of numerical relationships over the drone pitch. Creating panoramas of swirling overtones beating against each other, it was the perfect arual illusion music for the psychadelic age. Unfortunately, the Theatre of Eternal Music's work remains commercially unavailable today, due to a litigation standoff between Young, Cale, and Conrad. Young claims that he was the sole composer of the music, and the others were his performers; John Cale and Tony Conrad allege that the music was created collaboratively, and that all should get equal billing. As a result, the tapes remain unreleasable in Young's loft, although in 2000 a 30-minute bootleg disc of a 1965 performance called *Day of Niagara* was released. Today, only a handful of minimalist composers remain well-known - mostly Riley, Reich, and Glass - but the original movement was actually widespread, with dozens of composers in New York and California. Besides Young, Phill Niblock in New York was also working with drones - sustained pitches that slowly changed, sometimes creating amazing effects in which a consonance would very gradually changed to an extreme dissonance and back. Young's most extravagant competitor for star of the Downtown scene was Charlemagne Palestine, a powerhouse of relentless energy known for all-night performances in which he would endlessly strum the keyboard, stirring up tornados of jostling overtones. Naturally, California minimalism was much mellower, represented by Harold Budd. These days, Budd has veered more into the pop music world, having created albums with Brian Eno and the Cocteau Twins. In the early 1970s, he wrote pieces so simple that one piece, The Candy Apple Revision, was nothing more than the instruction: "D-flat major." Budd's pieces, like Madrigals of the Rose Angel, tended to consist of merely a few languid chords that floated around the listener like incense.
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