Totalism

Tonight's blog is unlikely to be a long one.  Why is that?  Well, here's what happened.  I started to listen to the listening examples given for totalism, then started to do my standard research on the composers, related pieces, etc.  This led to more articles, and more and more pieces worth checking out and listening to, more scores worth skimming through.  Now it's four hours later, it's very late, and I have only just started writing this blog.

This is some of the music that, subjectively, I seem to love the most.  John Luther Adams, Michael Gordon, David Lang, etc.--these are composers whose music I could listen to for days, and always be finding something new, always enjoying each next piece.  Totalism is (according to Wikipedia) about the balance of background complexity with surface rhythmic complexity.  I love this.  I could even reframe it as such: totalism is a method through which composers create intelligent music that also grooves and maintains a sense of fun.  This does not apply in every case (e.g. JLA's music is rarely "fun" to my ears), but it is a decent summary of why I so often and deeply enjoy it.  I can truly enjoy it on the very first listening, unlike many composers I quite like, because I can groove along with it, and thereby really involve myself in the affect.  Then, I can enjoy it more with each subsequent listening, as I pick out more and more of the legitimate intricacy and intelligence of composition going on underneath the rhythmically complex surface.

I do have one major question here: how do we distinguish between totalism and post-minimalism?  Having read some different things about both topics tonight, I've come to several assumptions, but I don't know if they are correct.  I've listened to lots of both styles before, but no one has ever been there to tell me "This one is post-minimalist; this one is totalist."  As a result, I have no frame with which to distinguish between the two.  It seems to me, from my minimal reading tonight, that totalism focuses more on rhythmic complexity, whereas post-minimalism, while placing emphasis on importance of rhythm, is not always dependent on complexity of rhythm.  It also seems that post-minimalism is usually "pretty" and centric in some fashion, whereas totalism does not feel the need to do the same, and is often dissonant (though it often maintains a sense of fun and audience-friendliness through groove).  Are my assumptions here correct?  I might be totally off-base.  Kyle Gann has a discography list of post-minimal, totalist, and rare minimalist music, which can be found here.  How do he and others make these distinctions?  He does say that the line between the two is fairly arbitrary, but I'm not even sure what the arbitrary line is based on--how do they differ?

John Luther Adams (JLA) is often an exception to several things I've stated here.  His music only occasionally has a "groove," and when it does, it is often more of an insistent pulsing, or otherwise an incomprehensibly dense rhythmic texture, instead of a groovy beat.  JLA's music is almost exclusively based on or taking inspiration from the nature of Alaska, where he lives.  His sound is wide open and often has a sense of isolation.  He talks about Alaska as a "great reservoir of silence," and this enters his music, keeping it wide open in timbre and lending value to many of his textural ideas.

One thing that absolutely anchors JLA in totalism is his rhythmic complexity.  It is not always immediately apparent, but it is almost always present.  For example, in his work "In the White Silence," the entire piece sounds to exist simply as slowly evolving textures.  However, while most of the notes last over a measure long and are legato in nature, when a note changes, it is usually in a strange rhythmic position--the second half-note triplet of the bar, or the third quintuplet of the half-measure, etc.  This reaches the ears as gradual a metric changes, but using complex changing points allows for the voices of this "chorale" to avoid changing at the same time, activating the texture of the work without it sounding like a bland, homorhythmic romantic chorale.

It's worth taking a minute to discuss JLA's massive recent work Inuksuit for 9 to 99 percussionists.  It is a spatial, outdoor work, usually spread out across a park or several acres of field or forest.  The audience is invited to wander among the performers at will, allowing each to construct his or her own experience (just like Cage's HPSCHD).  I mention the work not only because it is a recent passion of mine (and I finally get to perform it for the first time this May), but because the work has become something totally unique to the musical world--it has created a new series of mini-festivals based around itself.  I don't think JLA realized it when he composed the work, but he was creating the perfect storm for weekend percussion getaways.  It is now the norm for any city or university to host an Inuksuit--"Inuksuit Rochester," "Inuksuit Wisconsin," "Inuksuit Brooklyn," etc.  A loving and devoted community has developed around the piece, and when someone decides to put the piece together the Inuksuit crowd always comes out of the woodwork from a radius of hundreds of miles around.  They gather for the weekend to hang with other interesting and fun musicians and put together a huge percussive work, then head back to their respective homes and wait for the next Inuksuit festival.  At this point, there is an Inuksuit somewhere in the country at least once every two or three months.  JLA attends many of them, and most are run by Doug Perkins (current percussionist of eighth blackbird, champion of cool new music, and in many ways a mentor/father figure to the young chamber percussion community--I've mentioned him several times in this blog, and he continues to be relevant).  I wonder if there are currently or have ever been pieces of music that have elicited a similar response, in galvanizing many mini-festivals and creating a widespread community who travel long ways to make the piece happen once in a while in different locations.  Any ideas for pieces that have created similar movements?

A fun little video about the making of the Inuksuit recording,

which is a wholly remarkable recording--it never should have

worked nearly as well as it did, and it makes for an incredible album.

With Inuksuit, again JLA has created a work about atmosphere, not groove, but using incredibly intricate rhythmic relationships in order to create the shifting atmosphere.  He stacks rhythms using unique notation methods, and it ranges from static droning to a wall of frenetic percussive chaos.  Alex Ross of the New Yorker called it "one of the most rapturous experiences of my listening life."  It's a heck of an experience.

JLA is also important right now as the most recent winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Music, which he won just last weekend for his orchestral work Become Ocean.  I have yet to hear the work, but I cannot wait to (it's not yet available anywhere).  It's classic JLA, for a multitude of reasons--symmetrical form, long cascading waves of intensification and subsiding, lush string sounds, strongly and actively environmentalist, and deeply entrenched in Alaska and Alaskan issues.  All of these are hallmarks of nearly all JLA's works.  His totalist style allows his music to float, free of rhythmic chains, through its own unique rhythmic complexity.  This, added to the intelligence running through the pitch material, scoring, etc. is where the term totalism becomes appropriately descriptive of his work.

Rock and the Avant Garde

In connection with my last post about jazz connections, it's worth taking some time to look at rock's interactions with this lovely world of concert music.  These tend to come in two types, determined generally by performance setting: we are either talking about 1) concert music using rock styles and techniques, or 2) rock music using concert styles and techniques.  In other words, option 1 is music played in a concert hall, often by more "classical" musicians, often composed using concert notation; while option 2 is rock music played in rock concert venues and settings, often by more "rock"ish musicians.  It's a question of presentation that makes this artificial separation.  I have strongly caring feelings toward both--much of the classical music I love is rock-influenced, and much of the rock music I love is concert-influenced.  Today, I'll be focusing more on the former.  Why?  I'm not sure.  Because I'm exhausted and that's what I happen to be leaning toward right now.

One man who has been working on this frontier for decades is Rhys Chatham.  He began his career as a piano tuner for La Monte Young and harpsichord tuner for Glenn Gould (WHOA).  He moved on to study extensively with La Monte Young and become active as a composer and performer in that scene of minimalism.  Eventually, in the late 70s, he began on what would become the focus of his life's work: guitar ensemble music.  His works are influenced by rock and punk, as well as early minimalism.  Often they have a vibe of process to them, as he focuses on one or two techniques or attributes to follow through to their full potential to compose a piece.  He has worked with classical musicians like Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Meredith Monk, and Pauline Oliveros, and rock musicians such as members of Sonic Youth and more.  I listened to a large sample of his first evening length work, and his first work for 100-guitar ensemble: An Angel Moves Too Fast To See.  Listening without video, I could easily see this as either 1) a highly effective classical composition, performed by modern chamber musicians with a great sense of groove, or 2) a very smart rock tune, in the progressive but drivingly groovy vein of Rush or Floyd.  As far as I can tell upon further research, Chatham's works tend to be performed in classical concert settings, which is interesting.  Are they sometimes performed in rock settings?  I hope so.

I can see that I've been clearly separating these two ideas of rock-ish classical music and classical-ish rock music, as designated by performance setting.  Does music NEED to be distinctly one or the other? No, but it usually is.  I have no idea how one would branch this gap.  One good step would be performing concert music in a rock setting or vice versa.  I've definitely seen that in a few places.  For instance, the prog rock percussion quartet Kraken, based in Ithaca, has been known to slip some concert music into their live shows, seamlessly with their rock tunes.  At a show last August, they used Reich's Music for Pieces of Wood and merged it into their own rock tune "Mad Libs."  They also used several movements of Jason Treuting's meditative work "Amid the Noise" as quieter parts of their show.  On a more famous note, one group doing things like this today is Radiohead, and especially its guitarist, Jonny Greenwood.  Greenwood has often been known to play Reich's Electric Counterpoint during otherwise rock concerts.  Greenwood is also an avant garde composer in his own right.  He is good friends with Krzysztof Penderecki, and the two have collaborated on several works together.  Greenwood is also an INCREDIBLY effective film composer, having scored Paul Thomas Anderson's most recent two films (There Will Be Blood and The Master) and Lynne Ramsay's film "We Need to Talk About Kevin."  But amidst all this, he is known to the world almost exclusively as the guitarist from Radiohead.

Jonny Greenwood performing Electric Counterpoint

at a rock show in Krakow, Poland, 9/11/2011

As a percussionist, I have never seen as much separation between rock music and classical music as I think many other musicians do.  We percussionists play an awful lot of rock-influenced music, all the time.  Plus, most of us also actually play rock music, and in a given day we will often work on both in the practice room.  We all talk about both, and rarely make much separation in discussions between them.  Our rep classes often include both rock--old and new--and concert music.  So we try to stay connected to both the "popular" idiom and the concert idiom, and mixing them is everyday.

One up-and-coming composer who is branching these divides is percussionist/composer Ivan Trevino.  Ivan is a recent graduate of the Eastman percussion studio, and he is currently EXPLODING in the percussion world.  In the past 2 years, he has gone from mostly unknown, to having his music performed at MOST music schools in the country.  There have been over a dozen performances of his works on IC student recitals this year alone.  All of Ivan's music is very audience-accessible, it all grooves really hard, and it all is basically rock music written for percussion instruments.  He is currently in the process of branching out into wind/brass and string instruments, but as of yet, all his music is for percussion.  Here is his work that has received the largest exposure, due to a well-publicized performance at PASIC 2013 (Percussive Arts Society International Convention).  The work is Catching Shadows, and is played here by the commissioner, the Eastman Percussion Ensemble (including several good friends of mine).

Catching Shadows (2013), Ivan Trevino

Performed by Eastman Percussion Ensemble, 11/2013

Little fun fact: the work started as a marimba duet, and I was lucky enough to perform it with its commissioner, Eastman Prof. Michael Burritt, about a week after he premiered it with Ivan.

Ivan's works are taking the percussion world by STORM right now.  Why?  Most people like rock music, and most percussionists love both rock and percussion music.  Mixing them seems obvious, but it hasn't been done this effectively and effortlessly until now.  And Ivan seems to be able to put forth these pieces unceasingly, each one as effective as the last.  The world is eating up his rock/classical music.

Even Reich has ventured down the road of rock music, to an extent.  His work 2x5, for the instrumentation of two rock bands (two groups each of two guitars, one electric bass, piano, and "drum set") is an incredibly beautiful and effective work.  Its sound is right in line with most of his compositions of the last decade or two, with the exception that the untuned percussion (drum set) part adds a purely rhythmic element that is mostly new.  It doesn't sound much like rock music, but it uses rock's timbres and palette, and takes some inspiration from it.  This is much more conservatively close to classical concert music, but pretty adventurous for a composer in his late 70s.

Reich's 2x5, performed by Bang On a Can All Stars

This performance is by Bang On a Can All-Stars, which for decades has been blending large elements of rock into concert music.  The ensemble, usually consisting of percussion (often drum set), guitar, bass, piano, cello, and clarinets, uses amplification, a sense of groove, and rock techniques and styles in a wide variety of compositions written for them, often by Bang On a Can founders David Lang, Julia Wolfe, and Michael Gordon.  They are an INCREDIBLE joy to experience live, and I hope to see them many more times.  I have several times driven many hours to see them perform, and I would do that any number of times.  They're unbelievable.

Jazz and the Avant Garde

It seems quite natural to me that jazz would and should find common ground with both the worlds of experimental music and the avant garde.  As far as avant garde music goes, jazz is a rapidly developing art form the was invented only 100 years ago and has made rapid and tremendous strides since then in many different directions.  All of these directions were "avant garde" for a time, be it the first bop (Bird and Dizzy), the first cool jazz (the California scene), and more.  Jazz met with classical music in the works of several composers, especially Bernstein (who actually composed at least one work for big band, Prelude, Fugue, and Riffs), and Duke Ellington, a jazz composer/bandleader who composed several works for "classical" ensembles.  And where worlds like these collide, that is where we find a new area of the avant garde.

Bernstein, Prelude, Fugue, and Riffs (1949): composed for the Woody Herman band--part of the same project that also resulted in Stravinsky's Ebony Concerto

It was only a matter of time before jazz and the more adventurous region of the avant garde met and formed a union.  We see examples of this in many works of John Zorn, such as Forbidden Fruit (work for string quartet, with many jazz elements).

That said, it seems to me significantly more inevitable that jazz would meet with experimental music frequently and in a big way.  Both have strong ties with improvisation; both have required a great deal of physical invention in the last 100 years (new ensembles, new instruments e.g. drum set, etc);  both have required innovations in electronics (amplification of instruments for jazz, all sorts of stuff in experimentalism).  The key here is that both have a huge stress on musical play.  Jazz started as a way for talented musicians to make up stuff together, on the spot.  The earliest jazz was collective improvisation, with full groups improvising at once to create on-the-spot compositions.  Though collective improv is now rare in the jazz idiom, improvisation is still a key and central facet of the art form, and groups are flexible to adapt on the go during performances.  Similarly, experimental music has always been about playing with sounds, playing with electronics, playing around with instruments, and general interplay of musicians to create--always something new, always unexpected.

And though collective improv has all but died out in jazz, it has grown in experimental music in recent decades.  There are many groups dedicated to experimental improvisation.  A favorite of mine is Meridien, a trio consisting of Ithacan Nick Hennies, former Cornell professor Tim Feeney, and Greg Stuart.  

Meridien, in a performance from 2012

In fact, I am part of an experimental improv group called the Convergence Quintet, with fellow IC School of Music students Aaron Walters, Tom Smith, Andrew Hedge, and Christina Christiansen.  We hope to have some videos online at some point, but at the moment we have a recording from an early rehearsal that can be found here if you want to check it out sometime:

Convergence Quintet, "rehearsal" 10/26/13

All this goes to say that jazz and experimental music have vast amounts in common, especially a sense of play, and the idea of not knowing what exactly will happen in a work.  They were bound to meet, and in very colorful ways, like John Zorn's game piece Cobra.  I would sincerely love to play Cobra someday (emphasis on play).  It looks massively fun to be a part of.  I do not have any idea how exactly it works, but it must be fun when you're with a group of musicians who dedicate themselves to the piece alongside you.

Cobra also brings up the question of the line between music and performance art.  Sure, the players are all making sounds with musical interments, but so much of it is interplay between people and a very active referee, who does not play an instrument -- he only referees, which is much closer to acting than music-making (though perhaps now that I say that, an orchestral conductor may also be rather closer to an actor than a music-maker -- not sure what I think about this, but it's worth pondering.  Maybe when I'm less tired.)  This work relies on the acting, visual interplay, and outright performing in addition to the music to create its overall effect.  In this way, it is as much a work of performance art as it is a piece of music.

Electronic Music

As I began to look into several major examples of innovations in electronic music, something struck me: many of these composers seem very connected.  Pauline Oliveros and Morton Subotnik both helped found the San Francisco Tape Music Center.  Both also taught at Mills College.  Subotnik helped to found CalArts in 1969, and was its first Associate Dean.  David Rosenboom is currently a professor and Dean of the School of Music at CalArts.  Contrastingly, Alvin Lucier has been doing his own thing in Connecticut, and Varèse's career took him between much of Europe and various parts of the US, including NYC and the West Coast.

This tells me that electronic music is one area of music that did not relegate itself entirely to the New York scene, and whose principal development may have even been more central to the West Coast.  We have seen avant garde composers on the West Coast before now (Henry Cowell, LaMonte Young, etc.), but this is a movement for which the West Coast is central to its development.

I'll be honest, I have little interest in most of the important, pioneering steps in this movement, i.e. Varèse, Oliveros, etc.  I am not against it; I'm glad that this music exists, and I can certainly see how it might lead to music that would interest me more.  Why doesn't it interest me?  I can't be entirely certain, but I can try to examine it.  For the most part, there is nothing for me to grab onto.  Without a tonal center OR rhythmic pulse OR single drone or other sonic artifact that grounds it in one place, I find myself searching for something that isn't there.  Much of this music is arhythmic and atonal, but very busy.  Often when these conditions occur in music, I find myself lost in a sea of uninteresting confusion.  Lots of stuff is happening, but I can't find a reason or way to care about it.

Case and point here are works like Varèse's groundbreaking "Poème electronique" and Morton Subotnik's "Silver Apples of the Moon."  (Note: WIkipedia informs me that the Subotnik is important for being one of the first electronic works that IS rhythmic, but I hear most of its sounds as being utterly unrelated to the underlying, background pulsing.)  I hear a lot of interesting sounds here that would be interesting on their own, but they are thrown together with compositional intent that I can't even begin to fathom, and so it just sounds like unrelated sounds trying desperately to be related.

This brings me to Alvin Lucier, the only composer we are looking at today with whose work I can connect and find something interesting and worth listening to.  Our example of his work is Music on a Long Thin Wire (1977), a sound installation in which a piano string is stretched across a room, oscillators and magnets are coupled with it, and with these it produces a long, slowly changing tone.  To be honest, I don't fully understand the science of what's going on here, but it sets in motion a fascinating sonic experiment.  I can say the same of most of the several other Lucier pieces I have encountered.  In Music for a Solo Performer (1965), he attaches electrodes to his head in order to use his brainwaves as a method for controlling sound output through percussion instruments.  Again, I'm confused on the "how," but the "what" is very interesting.

Wonderfully overdramatic shot of Alvin Lucier at one end of the wire

Music for a Long Thin Wire sets up a deep sonic atmosphere.  I can start it, sit down, and zone in and out as it changes gradually.  I will listen intently for a while, then zone out for a bit, then be pulled back in as I hear it alter slightly.  I can understand the sonic process (minus the scientific details), and a composer's will is not getting in the way.  I think that too often, when music lacks such things as meter and any form of standardized pitch collection, the composer's will can easily get in the way of this music.

Lucier's words back this up consistently.  He doesn't want music to be about "Look what I can do;" he wants it to be about what can naturally occur when some parameters have been set up.  I connect with this easily.  It's the concert music equivalent of going outside, listening to birdsongs, and enjoying them as they are instead of wishing to write them into pieces for a purpose (sort of Cage vs. Messiaen there -- neither one right, but serving opposite goals).  As he says, "It's nothing to do with performers being virtuosi, or audiences having a good time by participation.  Rather, you're quiet and you pay attention." As for composers getting in the way of music, he says "Hammering and shaping materials never feels right to me….I'm concerned in music with exploration and discovery, rather than manipulation and control."  His pieces are built toward this, and they work incredibly well through that lens.  Maybe others will find this boring, and it's not like I want to listen to Lucier's music for 10 hours nonstop, but I really do find his works interesting to experience.  I also think that they can only truly work live, because a recording just doesn't convey what's physically going on, and doesn't carry the incredible timbal detail that is necessary in listening to his works.

Even Lucier's works that require a performer in the more traditional sense of the word follow his musical ideals.  For example, "Silver Streetcar for the Orchestra" for amplified triangle is a study in the sounds of the triangle.  It asks the performer to beat the triangle repeatedly and evenly, while VERY gradually changing the beating spot, rate of striking, and use of muffling.  While the performer does change what they are doing over the course of the piece (via these parameters), it is gradual and allows for a sense of non-intention--simply gradually changing in a linear fashion to allow the triangle to do what it will.

Here's one great performance by an Ithacan, Nick Hennies: "Silver Streetcar for the Orchestra" (1988) (the YouTube embed wasn't working).

Lucier's stress on disciplined attentiveness to gradually shifting sound patterns is a fascinating standpoint to pursue when listening to such music, and I really enjoy the music that arises from it.  That said, Oliveros et al's pursuit of ostensible randomness soaking in compositional intent does not interest me (though I'm glad it exists and some continue to pursue that avenue).

Minimalism and Performance Art

In his article "Minimalist: Aesthetic, Style, or Technique," Timothy Johnson discusses these three concepts as they apply to minimalist in the compositional world.  At first glance I had difficulty seeing what the distinctions would be, but upon reading it became clear.  It is essentially a question of whether minimalism is a toolbox, or a tool in a toolbox.  It asks whether a composer must choose for their palette to be a minimalism-specific set of methods, or whether minimalist methods may form just a part of their compositional style.

Before reading this article, I didn't realize this was a question.  I grew up in a world where minimalism already existed, and had for decades.  I grew up in a world where I heard Philip Glass via one of his film scores before I knew what minimalism was.  It never seemed radical or boundary-pushing to me.  Mark Swed wrote the following of composer Michael Torke:

"Torke represents a generation of young American composers who take Minimalism for granted and who came of age in an environment where the distinctions between pop and so-called serious musics did not have to be observed rigidly.  It is a generation for whom the tonality and atonality wars had already been fought, a generation as unselfconsciously at ease with the metric complexities of Stravinsky as with the repeated formulae and radiant harmonies of Philip Glass or with the brazen energy of Madonna."

The same applies to me.  As a result, I didn't know there was such strong debate about minimalism until well after I had acquainted myself with some of the music.  I also didn't know that Glass or Reich objected to the title until I already know some of their music.  When I learned that they hated the title, I was confounded.  I couldn't understand what was objectionable about being called minimalist.  Dr. Johnson's article clarified this for me, finally.  Evidently, minimalism was once seen as a very specific aesthetic.  Soon, this evolved into the notion of a self-contained style of composition.  I can see why a composer would have a problem with being labeled as such.  Glass and Reich were labeled into a box. They composed some music, then people told them that that exact music was what they were doing with their lives.  That leaves no room for growth or change, and it also was such a narrow definition that it even excluded some of their work that they had already written.

As a result, we came to see minimalism as a technique.  It is one tool in the compositional toolbox, which any composer may call upon, or use in whole or in part.  This is how I have always seen it, and I didn't know it was once seen another way.  Are there still musicians and scholars who view minimalism as a distinct and self-contained style or aesthetic?  I have listened for so long to so many composers who use elements of traditional, classic minimalism without emulating it outright.  I've heard such strong influences of classic 60s minimalism in the film scores of Clint Mansell and Michael Nyman; the meditative beauty of Arvo Pärt and John Luther Adams, the Bang On a Can scene populated by founders David Lang, Michael Gordon, and Julia Wolfe, and their comrades Evan Ziporyn and Ken Thomson; and the percussion writing of most percussion composers (Glenn Kotche, Paul Smadbeck, Eckhard Kopetzki, even Gordon Stout at times).

John Luther Adams, "Red Arc / Blue Veil"

Just one example of a work that definitely uses minimalist techniques,

without obeying all the attributes of the style or aesthetic.

Apparently some people would object to such works having the "m"-word attached to them.  This is crazy.  It just means that they share some influence and characteristics with the classic Reich/Riley/Young/Glass scene of the 1960s.  Now, decades later, even Glass and Reich go against the original definition of the minimalist style in the majority of their works.  Take a listen to a popular recent Reich work, his Mallet Quartet.

Mallet Quartet (2009), performed by So Percussion

Almost the entire duration of the work utilizes lengthy melodies, of anywhere from 2-16 measures in length.  Listen to the start of the work: the marimbas enter in a classic minimalist texture, interlocking pulses to create an aggregate framework or near-constant 8th notes.  Then the vibraphones enter, playing what is unmistakably a long melody.  This goes against the inside-the-box definitions of minimalism as aesthetic or style, neither of which allows for melodies of any real scope.

As a listener, I hear this in a completely different way from how I listen to Piano Phase or Music or 18 Musicians, for example.  Instead of wallowing in one tiny melodic/harmonic cell for a long time, I listen as a melody gradually unspools, then as soon as it finishes, another one takes its place.  This is a compositional world of change, not stagnation -- both this piece and the world of minimalist composition.

Similarly, take note of Glass's opera Einstein on the Beach.  It may not have a traditional dramatic narrative, but it definitely does have a sense of program.  It has something to say beyond the pure musical notes.  As Glass himself says, "What I saw in fact that we had done with Einstein was that, we had taken a person and made it the subject of the piece. It was a way in a certain way of: the person replaces the idea of plot, story.  In other words, the character of the person becomes what the piece is about."  This clearly goes against one of the tenets of early minimalism, which was strongly non-narrative, and never "about" anything other than the pure music.

As such, even the inventors of minimalism don't use it as a singular aesthetic or style.  Even for them, it is a technique.  Hasn't everyone always seen it that way?  If not, then I am proving my youth here, because I didn't realize we could see it as such a small box.  Perhaps Johnson's article was useful in its day for proving this point, but today, it seems redundant to my long-held absolute assumptions.


This brings me to the matter of performance art.  Performance art is arguably the most directly, strongly, and consistently political artistic medium.  Such a strong percentage of performance art has a political agenda.  Frank Skinner points this out with such instances as the Dada Manifesto as a way to subvert societal assumptions in a corrupt society, or Stuart Bristley's study of endurance called And for today…nothing, which apparently protested something about the governmental establishment.  This point of politics in music keeps arising, over and over again.  John Cage and HPSCHD; Cardew and The Great Learning; etc.  As Skinner says, "At the heart of performance art is strong social critique.  It asks important questions about how we perceive the world around us and our place within it."  Something I keep wondering, and always have, is this: Does this ever accomplish anything?

These artworks are not being used in governmental debates; they are not repurposed for politician campaigns; they are not evidence in arguments held in courts, international tribunals, environmental conventions or legislation meetings.  So why do we keep making such political art?  Is it simply because the artists feel so strongly about their opinion that they have a need to express it via performance?  To this, I say NO, because these political opinions are being expressed in aggressive and confrontational ways much of the time.  So can they accomplish anything, when they are only works of art viewed in artistic spheres?

The natural argument here, I think, would be for you to tell me that they cause people to think about the issues at hand, so that they will have more thought to bring to the table when the time comes for such discussion, debate, legislation, and governmental jurisdiction.  However, who is seeing these artworks? The educated and thoughtful.  These people don't need Nam June Paik to tell them to think about feminism, or Cage to tell them to think about environmentalism.  They are already thinking deeply about these and nearly any other important topic worthy of political discussion.  So who is being affected by the political nature of these works?  I can't think of anyone, but I sincerely want to here the contrarian opinion.  I feel like I am missing something here.  How can political art actually DO anything political?

"Mood Swing" (2014)

Today, I present to you my most recent composition, a graphically notated work for my American Avant Garde class.  Entitled Mood Swing, it is based around a game of frisbee.  The frisbee we will be using will function in four capacities, to be explained later:

1) to instruct method and vague details of sound production
2) to create of real-time, spontaneous, interpretive scoring via flight patterns
3) as a "found" graphic score
4) as an instrument in the work

The skeleton of the piece is fairly simple: 3 or more people throw the frisbee to one another, in any order.  Each person produces vocal sounds to interpret the frisbee's flight pattern as real-time score (#1) (for example, height = pitch, speed = intensity).  When the frisbee is thrown, each person makes sounds as it flies to represent the flight, then repeats these sounds when it is in the catcher's hands.  The types of sounds each person produces are determined by the notation on the frisbee when they catch it (#2).

The frisbee contains two types of instructions: emotions, represented by facial expressions, and types of vocal production (hum, shout, etc.)  Before the piece begins, each person tosses the frisbee in the air several times, choosing an emotion and a vocal production method by the randomized pictures near their hand where they catch the disc.  For the entire piece, each person has an emotion and a vocal production method.  Each time a player catches the frisbee, he or she changes their emotion or vocal method to whatever symbol is closest to his or her right thumb or index finger.  They use these emotions and vocal methods to vocalize the real-time notation of the frisbee's flight.  Each time it is thrown, everyone vocalizes.  Then, it is caught, and while the catcher examines his/her new result, the others repeat the same vocal flight path.  Next, that person throws it to the next person, and the process repeats.

There's an additional wrench thrown into this piece/game format.  There is one additional symbol on the disc: three exclamation points surrounded by a spiky bubble.  If you land on this symbol with a catch, then you perform a very brief solo.  To do so, toss the disc to yourself quickly.  Wherever your right thumb or index finger lands, look at the printed design on the frisbee in that area.  Use this as a small chunk of graphic score to perform, using any vocal production method, as well as the frisbee as an instrument (#3 / #4).  This printed design is thus being used as a "found" graphic score, as I realized after beginning to conceptualize this piece that the design on this particular frisbee is RIFE with capabilities as an interesting graphic score.

The person performs this bit of score as a solo, using the frisbee instrument and their voice however they want (approx. 3-10 seconds).  Next, the other players mimic the solo while the player starts to throw it to the next person, and the game continues.

When a player has performed 2 solos, he or she will sit down.  They have finished performing the piece, and wait for all players to finish.  When only one remains, he or she must continue to throw it to him- or herself until they too have performed two solos.  They must vocalize each of these throws on their own, making the ending of the piece likely to be a long solo by one person.  As such, the work begins with all players, then gradually peters down to just one, until all are sitting and the game is over.

I'm sure some of this is a tad unclear.  All will be clarified with the work's performance in class today.

the frisbee, before adding my additional notation 

detail, "found" graphic score 

Completed frisbee: note emotions (faces), vocal production methods (words),

and exclamation points to signal a solo

In Defense of Minimalism

I speak here on behalf of minimalism.  Typically, when I use the term, I am referring to minimalist, post-minimalist, totalism, and various strong minimalist tendencies outside the strictest sense of the genre.  That said, today I will be discussing the classic meaning of the term, referring to the innovations in the 1960s and 70s of major figures such as LaMonte Young, Terry Riley, Philip Glass, and Steve Reich.

A warning: this blog post is about to be biased.  Sure, all of mine are; but this is discussing some of my truly favorite music.  This is the music that I listen to when I want to relax; when I want to do some good active listening; when I want something for listening while going for a run; when I go for a long drive; when I want to procrastinate listening to music I should be studying.  This is music that I often prepare with chamber groups and as soloist, and program on recitals.  I have rarely had more fun playing music than when I've played In C, Clapping Music, Music for 18, and more.  In fact, when I was writing my previous blog post (on Cage's HPSCHD), I was listening to two of the assigned listening pieces for today's blog: Reich's Piano Phase and Music for 18 Musicians.  This was pure coincidence--I had no idea that the next blog would be about minimalism; I just wanted to listen to Music for 18 and Piano Phase (well, it was Marimba Phase, but it's just the same piece with different instrumentation).

(Go here for my favorite video of Marimba Phase.  I was at this performance, and it was spellbinding.  In a small but massively echoey church, the shifting pitch combinations resonated far longer than usual, and the result was beautiful.)

As Kyle Gann writes in his article "Minimal Music, Maximal Impact," minimalism gets a bad rap from the high-brow, academic music field.  This is not remotely fair.  In my experience, this is because it is "simple" and "tonal," instead of impenetrably complex and wildly atonal, and therefore does not help to push music forward.  In response, I would argue that just because it tends to have a sense of pitch centricity does not mean that it is not innovative, boundary-pushing, and worthwhile.  In addition, minimalist is, more than any other concert-based classical music, the music that can and does reach out to atypical audiences--and this is a very good thing.

Generally (with definite exception), minimalism tends to be "pretty"--that is to say, tonal/modal without an awful lot of chromaticism.  However, this is only an examination of pitch material--what about every other parameter of music? Texture, timbre, rhythm, meter, time, form, instrumentation, and so much more are massive aspects of music, but so often we only discuss pitch material when defining and discussing areas of music.  LaMonte Young innovated in form, timbre, tuning and instrumentation with The Well-Tuned Piano; Reich innovates in time with most of his works, such as Piano Phase, Clapping Music, all the way to his most recent works; Terry Riley hugely innovated in form with In C; Glass innovates in texture in all his oeuvre.  Why, then, should they be seen as composers of music that is less worthwhile than Boulez and Stockhausen?  Just because they have a fondness for repeat signs?

It is also important to note that minimalism is massively effective at reaching audiences who would not typically listen to concert music, much more so than any other area of concert music.  Could Babbitt have found himself composing a piece for Sesame Street?  Certainly not--but Philip Glass did, and it's awesome.

Glass, "Geometry of Circles," as aired on Sesame Street (1979)

Sure, it doesn't fit in with the general vibe of the show, but I'm betting that the kids who have seen this segment on this show during any of the multiple times it has aired have had a much more positive response than if it had been 20th century cutting-edge classical music of a different sort.  How often does cutting-edge contemporary music reach out to young children?  Almost never, and I love that minimalism has that power.

A personal anecdote: years ago, in freshman or sophomore year of high school, I was riding in my good friend Adam's car, and I was controlling the music.  Adam was always interested in the arts, but leaned more toward film, theater, and various areas of popular music.  He did not have much interest in "classical music."  I put on a recording of Reich's Vermont Counterpoint.

 Reich, "Vermont Counterpoint" (1982)

Adam was instantly transfixed.  It was groovy, fun, intense, and intelligent but followable.  I hooked him.  We didn't even finish the piece before arriving at our destination, and he was asking me everything about where he could find more like it.  Since then, I have taken him to Bang on a Can Concerts; we have seen the BSO premiere a new work at Tanglewood; I have seen Reich in concert with him twice; he has gone on his own accord to see So Percussion concerts; and he is an avid listener of Cage, Xenakis, Reich, Glass, and more.  Minimalism was the gateway drug for him into concert music, and he hasn't looked back.  I again attribute this to minimalism's power to reach out, without compromising its artistic integrity.  Some musicians seem to think that one has to pander, to lower one's art to reach the masses.  Minimalism negates this outright.

One more quick example.  Last year, I went on tour with the Ithaca College Symphony Orchestra to Long Island and NYC.  We made a stop at a Long Island High School to play a concert, and the next morning we had an informal session with the high school's musicians where chamber groups from the ICSO played works for the high schoolers.  The percussion section decided to play Clapping Music.  Our section leader, Chris Demetriou, quickly summarized the compositional process at play so that they could listen for the phasing and the re-syncing at the end.  The result?  The kids loved it.  All around the band room, they all were clearly enthusiastic about their applause, and a bunch of them came up to me afterward to talk about how cool it was.  Sure, at this point it's a bit of a novelty gimmick for us trained musicians, but for them it was new, it was understandable, and it was cool.  All from one of the earliest works in the genre of minimalism.

Another argument that the over-arrogant members of the music establishment often have against minimalism is that it has little variation.  I could not disagree more.  I look at the diversity between works like Music for 18 Musicians and The Well-Tuned Piano, and while both are pretty, they are different in nearly every other way.  One is rhythmic, metric, and groovy; the other ametric and improvisatory.  One is intense and driving, the other meditative.  One is six hours long, the other is one hour.  The differences are huge; they just both have enough common traits that they are both minimalist.  Minimalism only lacks variation if you don't listen for anything other than pitch material (though even then, the variety of scales, modes, and other devices can vary widely).

To conclude, in short: minimalism IS innovative, varied, intelligent, and worthwhile; and it reaches out to new audiences without compromising this, which adds infinitely more value to it.

Just for fun, I'll end this post with this: Clapping Music as you've never heard (or seen) it before.