Noise* Minimalism

Noise* is a fairly regular night which celebrates either a particular genre, label or period in the history of music. Each time, as well as being able to listen to a DJed retrospective of the music, there are also free CDs and a brief history given to anyone who attends. Previous retrospectives have included  New York No Wave, Italo Disco, Krautrock, Detroit Techno and Stones Throw Records – future ones may include Dubstep, Black Metal or Free Jazz.

The guys from Noise* were kind enough to let me joint curate their exploration of Minimalism a few months ago, where I both wrote the brief history (concentrating mainly on the contemporary classical side of things rather than the techno side of things) and played a few tracks. It was an enjoyable night, and well attended – the mixing of Shackleton’s Blood On My Hands with Reich’s Piano Phase was particularly affecting. Without any further ado, here is the short history I wrote for i, designed to be printed on two sides of A4 and wrapped around the double CD I put together – sufficently persuasive comments might encourage me to upload it somewhere so you can all have a listen. This post was inspired because I saw Reich’s Four Organs performed last night to spectacular effect.

Noise* presents Minimalism

First emerging in the late 1950s, minimalism as contemporary classical music focuses on a steady rhythmic pulse or drone, repetition of phrases, motifs or groups of notes and (sometime very) slow development and harmonies that often rely of psycho-acoustic effects. Minimalism is in origin a broadly American cultural artifact. One can trace the origins of minimalism well by understanding the mutual influence of a series of American composers upon one another: La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Phillip Glass. Although other minimalist composers were important for the genre’s origin and development, these composers produced both the most critical turns in it, its best examples, and arguably its greatest works.

Minimalist technique arose in part as a reaction against the orthodoxes prominent in the academy during the 1950s and 60s. One one hand, minimalism was a negative reaction against the complex and atonal compositional techniques of serialism, first codified by Arnold Schönberg. All of the prominent minimalist composers had learnt serialist technique during their college years, but all had eventually come to reject it as unnecessarily complicated and overly cerebral. Minimalism, by contrast, was perceived by many in the academy as simple music for equally simple minds, leading to a severe lack of coverage for its early experiments. On the other hand one had the aletorical experiments of John Cage and his contemporaries, that emphasised chance as an element in composition: Cage’s (in)famous 4.33 leaving everything to open chance. Minimalism sought a middle way between the two avant-garde forms: to be open to the interpretation by the performers (as in Riley’s In C) yet written along specific simple rules and patterns of notes, a move that can be seen only natural after a period of introspective and often austere complexity.

Early minimalists also sought more positive influence from what is badly termed ‘world music’ and  jazz, as well the French impressionists (such as Claude Debussey and Olivier Messiaen), early electronic composers like Edgard Varèse and repetitious works of the orthodox classical canon such as those of J.S. Bach. Young was influenced by Indian classical music. Both he and Riley studied with Hindu classical singer Pandit Pran Nath. All have spoke of there love for gamelan and african drums. It is interesting to note that all these musical forms come from specifically ritual and spiritual contexts. They are an intensely human form of music, that it was felt needed to be recovered, in contrast to the serialists and modernists. In these non-European musics, constant repetition is intended to induce a state of trance in the listener. All were also influenced by the burgeoning modal jazz scene and in particular John Coltrane.

The first recognisably minimalist piece was a series by Young in 1962 entitled Compositions 1960. Composition #7 in particular instructed to play B and F# ‘for a long time’, to create an effect that caused time to be disorientated. In Young established The Theater of Eternal Music with John Cale, Terry Riley and Tony Conrad future to realise his project of creating music that ran, for 24 hours, or potentially, forever – his Dream House. Each member went on to pursue their own minimalist directions.

After a falling under the spell of Young at the University of California, Berkeley and being a vocalist in the Theater, Terry Riley began experimented with tape loops in his parent’s garage. Leaving the US after university to play piano in US military bars in France, he became more exposed to techniques used in radio production such as the use of feedback loops. On his return to the US, Riley began working at the San Francisco Tape Music Centre. It is here in November 1964 that the first all Riley programme was performed which included a number of tape pieces including Music for the Gifts, using a looped piece of trumpet solo, but at its conclusion the seminal piece for 13 musicians In C – considered by some to be the most significant piece of classical music since Stravinsky’s Right Of Spring. Each musician played at their discretion a series of 56 extremely short musical “loops”, all in C, with a (‘played by a pretty girl’ instruct the score – the influence of Young’s often bizarre musical direction is certainly felt) piano keeping time. The technique Riley used in this piece and has continued to use with variations throughout his career represents the blueprint for minimalist music.

Steve Reich (among other minimalists like Jon Gibson and Pauline Oliveros) was present at this performance and had been at the centre to escape the stuffiness of New York academia since 1963. He and Riley had become friends since Riley had stormed out of a performance of Reich’s group who unsuccessfully attempted to combine serialism and jazz. On returning to New York in 1965, Reich, inspired, began developing his own techniques, also using tape loops. The technique for his first recognisably minimalist piece, 1965’s It’s Gonna Rain, was discovered quite by accident. Reich had been dubbing a recording of Brother Walter, an apocalyptic preacher, and had accidently played two records of the same loop at slightly different speeds. Rather than correcting the mistake, Reich was intrigued by the interaction between the two recordings and their phasing, and the new and different sounds made by combining the same sound with very slight difference. Reich also enjoyed using an essentially inhuman process, tape playing, to bring out the subtities in the preacher’s voice and intonations – hence the phrase ‘process music’. After using a similar method for his civil rights piece, Come Out (as sampled by MF Doom and Madlib in the introduction to their Madvillainy track America’s Most Blunted)  Reich moved to use the same ideas on live musicians, in pieces such Piano Phase and Violin Phase where one instrument remains static, playing a series of notes and the other instruments (or recordings of those instruments) play the same series of notes at different speeds, faster or slower, creating a marked phasing effect. Reich’s 1972 piece Clapping Music demonstrates this technique at its most simple, requiring only two performers and their hands to work. His piece Four Organs, featuring the titular electric organs and a two maracas keeping time, explores all the contours of a dominant eleven chord (D E F# G# A B with an E in the bass) by having the performers slowly augment the chord, increasing its duration, in something that in spirit recalls Young’s earliest experiments (and is directly influenced by the church music of Pérotin that so influences the sacred minimalists below).

After a 1971 trip to Ghana to study African drums and to Seattle to study gamelan, Reich produced the pieces that are seminal in his career and for the what most people would recognise at the minimalist sound: Drumming (1971) and Music For Eighteen Musicians (1974-6). At this point, inspired by jazz instrumentalists and his inability to get his pieces played inside the academy, Reich established his own ensemble. Moving away from his early process orientated work, these pieces utilised large ensembles of percussionists, vocalists and flutists to create more complex pieces that were based around slow moving additions and subtractions from the music, with many cyclical loops. Reich’s later career is marked by a combination of these techniques and a deepening of subject matter and sound sources. For example, 1988’s Different Trains is a highly personal peace concerning his own Jewish identity and its relation to the holocaust. It uses loops of interviews of his family and holocaust survivors, where the instruments anticipate or repeat the intonation of the phrases, to incredibly emotional effect.

Returning from a trip to France where he studied classical composition and indian music in 1967, Phillip Glass watched Reich’s performances at the Park Price Gallery. While it is a point on contention as to how much he was there inspired, Glass began developing similarly cyclic, rhymical pieces, for example Music In Twelve Parts. His work tended towards the larger canvas than the others had, his Portrait Trilogy of operas, Einstein on the Beach, Satyagraha, and Akhnaten painted with broader brush-stroke, while maintaining a vital minimalist insistence on repetition. His collected Glass Works contains some on the most breath-takingly simple meditations for piano ever created and his work continues to be used for film, most notably in the soundtrack for The Hours. His masterpiece in this regard is his contribution to the ethical-political-ecological Qatsi film trilogy, where a thunderous minimalist soundtrack is married to complex, often time lapsed images speeding up and slowing down with regard to the score – a technique recently revisited in an advertisement for the computer game Grand Theft Auto IV.

Worldwide, an intriguing phenomena is the creation of so-called ‘holy’ or ‘sacred’ minimalism (a misnomer in part due to the sacred contexts from the East that initially influenced the minimalists and has remained influential throughout, as well as the later development of many of the composers, including Reich, to consider religious themes), by Arvo Pärt an Estonian, the Polish Henryk Górecki and the English John Tavener. Here the simplicity and repetition of the American pioneers is combined with the also unobstructed (particularly sung) music of the churches of the East and overtly religious themes of Russian Orthodoxy (and in Górecki’s case Catholicism), not to mention (like Young) the mystics of this tradition. Górecki’s Symphony No. 3 is a terrifyingly subtle and evocative requiem for the love of mothers and their losses of war, mothers both cosmic and human. Arvo Pärt’s Tabula Rasa moves at gorgeous, glacial pace, while his Te Deum waits in almost silence ruminating on space, time and God – a minimalist prayer. His Cantus In Memoriam Benjamin Britten is an absolutely fitting tribute, as the composer says, like light passing through a prism.

John Adam’s in his opera’s Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer combines minimalism with a traditional libretto and a political theme. Phil Niblock takes Young’s challenge to a natural conclusion, spinning out single notes digitally to create hours of music via digital processing. Charlemagne Palestine turned definitively way from the commercialism he perceives in the work of the ‘big four’ with his. His Strumming Music is primitive, physically demanding and intense: two notes expanding out to full thick chords for 52 minutes, causing the piano itself to detune and the strings snap. Tony Conrad’s post-Theater work cannot be under-appreciated. Four Violins is 18 minutes of blissful ur-drone, his collaboration with Faust is a masterful combination of classical and popular avant-gardes. Glenn Branca and others similarly combined the poles of the avant-gardes in his “guitar symphonies”, his has been producing since the 1980s.

The influence of minimalism on genres outside contemporary classical music is large-scale, in particular upon electronic music and drone. Minimal techno, in particular that of the German Kompakt label can be seen as an excellent example. The recent acclaimed album by The Field operates on soundly minimalist principles, a single loop being allowed to gradually unwind through time. Both Brian Eno and Aphex Twin have spoken of their debt to the minimalists. The recent Battles and Panda Bear albums could not have occurred without the work of Reich. There is little doubt the influence on music will only continue to grow.

Track Listing

1. Tony Conrad – Four Violins
2. Terry Riley – In C
3. Steve Reich – Piano Phase
4. Phill Niblock – Didjeridoos and Don’ts
5. Richard Youngs – Part I
6. Arvo Pärt – Cantus in memory of Benjamin Britten
7. Charlemagne Palestine – One + Two + Three Fifths in the Rhythm Three Against Two For Bösen