On Minimalism: Documenting a Musical Movement 9780520382091

Table of contents :
Contents
Foreword
Introduction
Part One
Introduction
1 Improvisation and Experimentation
2 Dream Music
3 Loops and Process
4 Altered States
5 Gurus and Teachers
6 Cultural Fusion
7 Across the Arts
8 Ensembles
Part Two
Introduction
9 1976
10 The New Downtown
11 Instruments and Environments
12 Ambient and New Age
13 Canons
14 Backlash
15 Politics, Identity, and Expression
16 Postminimalists
17 Spiritual Minimalism
18 Popular Culture
Part Three
Introduction
19 Histories
20 Silences
21 Futures
Acknowledgments
Listening Guide
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

On Minimalism Documenting a Musical Movement

Kerry O’Brien and William Robin

university of california press

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University of California Press Oakland, California © 2023 by The Regents of the University of California The book epigraphs are from Pauline Oliveros, “On Sonic Meditation,” Painted Bride Quarterly 3, no. 1 (Winter 1976): 57; William Duckworth, Talking Music: Conversations with John Cage, Philip Glass, Laurie Anderson, and Five Generations of American Experimental Composers (New York: Schirmer, 1995), 270–71; and Jace Clayton, “Reverence Is a Form of Forgetting,” in Creative Black Music at the Walker: Selections from the Archives, ed. Simone Austin and Danielle A. Jackson, vol. 4 of the Living Collections Catalogue (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2020). Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: O’Brien, Kerry, 1983– editor. | Robin, William,  editor. Title: On minimalism : documenting a musical movement /  [compiled by] Kerry O’Brien, William Robin. Description: Oakland, California : University of  California Press, [2023] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2022035676 (print) | lccn 2022035677  (ebook) | isbn 9780520382077 (hardback) | isbn 9780520382084 (paperback) | isbn 9780520382091 (ebook) Subjects: lcsh: Minimal music—History and criticism. |  Ambient music—History and criticism. Classification: lcc ml197 .o48 2023 (print) | lcc ml197  (ebook) | ddc 781.68—dc23/eng/20220817 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022035676 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc  .gov/2022035677 32  31  30  29  28  27  26  25  24  23 10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

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praise for On Minimalism “For anyone interested in the quirks and turns taken by postwar music in the twentieth century, it wasn’t so much a big bang/bhang as it was a collective hummmmmm. Was it somehow a reaction to the absolute bleak blankness of the atom bomb? Was it gazing East to find a spiritual purity and stillness? Was the paring away of harmony and motion a reaction to the ever more complex complications of the modern world? Whatever it was, musicians from all sorts of wide-ranging backgrounds, jazz players, contemporary composers, inventors, scientists, tricksters and seekers, men and women (not to mention filmmakers, dancers, painters, writers) were seeking new forms and demanding that new experiences be brought forth from their compositions, seeking a suspension of time, an expanding NOW—like a river, ever changing yet ever the same. They were seeking to quiet the madness of modern life and refocus the thought process, to examine one single flower rather than the field, to strike one single note and understand how it related to the many, to turn off their minds and float downstream. On Minimalism is the story of this music. Turn the pages and witness this revelatory process unfold in a myriad of inventions and directions. Boom went the bomb and hummmmmm came the revolutionary response.” —Lee Ranaldo, founding member of Sonic Youth “There’s something in here for anyone with a sensitive ear, anyone seeking creative inspiration and a glimpse into how artists have zoomeddeep-in to their sound sources, producing fruitful collectives of generative energy that radiate from the past to the future, giving rise to ever new ones.” —Julia Holter, singer-songwriter and producer “A tremendous success. Kerry O’Brien and William Robin bring a freshness and vitality to even the most familiar material, while centering lesser-known figures pushed to the margins. On Minimalism will delight readers with fresh perspectives on experimental and mainstream musics of the past sixty years.” —Sarah Hill, author of San Francisco and the Long 60s “Outstanding. A major contribution to music studies that will be used and referenced for years to come. Never has there been such an expansive yet incisive collection of texts on this topic.” —Benjamin Piekut, author of Henry Cow: The World Is a Problem

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Publication supported by a grant from The Community Foundation for Greater New Haven as part of the Urban Haven Project.

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for Leo and Ira

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My interest and fascination with long tones was centered in attention to the beauty of the subtle shifts in timbre and the ambiguity of an apparently static phenomenon. Why was a tone which went nowhere so seductive? —Pauline Oliveros

Did you ever think you were a minimalist?   No.   What was your term?   I felt like a transcendentalist, an illusionist, or a magician. Something that has to do with magic. I feel it’s my field to try to create magic in sound. Magic in the sense of transcendence of this ordinary life into another realm. An awakening, you know. To use music to try to awaken ourselves. —Terry Riley, interviewed by William Duckworth

The carefully ordered canon is better thought of as a site to traverse rather than a resting place. . . . Spotlights create shadows—how to turn off these bright lights? —Jace Clayton

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Contents

Foreword by Joan La Barbara

xiii

Introduction

1

part one

9

1. Improvisation and Experimentation

15

Amiri Baraka on Miles Davis’s “penchant for minimalism”

16

John Coltrane on his recent music ( DownBeat, 1960)

18

Dom Cerulli’s liner notes to John Coltrane’s Africa/Brass (1961)

20

Henry Flynt on La Monte Young in the early ’60s

21

Jonathan Cott profiles Yoko Ono ( Rolling Stone, 1971)

26

The New York Times on John Cage’s marathon of Erik Satie’s Vexations (1963)

29

2. Dream Music

32

Jill Johnston on La Monte Young and Dream Music (Village Voice, 1964)

33

The Theatre of Eternal Music at the East End Theatre (1965)

37

Tony Conrad replies to critic Peter Yates (1965)

40

Kate Lloyd on Four Evenings of Music with La Monte Young (Vogue, 1966)

43

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Tim Souster on “sustained sounds” in “pop” and “serious” music (1969)

46

John Cale, Tony Conrad, and Lou Reed on the early history of the Velvet Underground

48

3. Loops and Process

52

Alfred Frankenstein on the premiere of In C ( San Francisco Chronicle, 1964)

53

Janet Rotter on the Columbia recording of In C (Glamour, 1969)

54

Terry Riley’s notes on Poppy NoGood’s Phantom Band (1967)

55

Carman Moore reviews Steve Reich’s tape music ( Village Voice, 1966)

56

Steve Reich, “Music as a Gradual Process” (1968/1971)

58

Philip Glass, “Program Notes” (1972)

60

Michael Nyman interviews British composers on discipline and process (1971)

62

Henry Higuera on Mother Mallard’s Portable Masterpiece Company (1972)

64

Sally Banes on Meredith Monk’s Our Lady of Late (1974)

66

4. Altered States

69

Terry Riley’s liner notes for A Rainbow in Curved Air (1969)

70

Marcus Boon interviews Jon Hassell on hashish at the Dream House

71

Robert Palmer on the musical trend of trance ( New York Times, 1975)

72

Tom Johnson reviews Éliane Radigue’s Psi 847 ( Village Voice, 1973)

75

Annea Lockwood and Julie Winter describe their 1970s healing group

77

Charlie Morrow on Rhys Chatham’s chanting (1974)

78

Linda Cousins interviews Edward Larry Gordon (Laraaji) on “celestial vibration” (1978)

79

Pauline Oliveros, “On Sonic Meditation” (1976)

81

5. Gurus and Teachers

87

La Monte Young on Pandit Pran Nath ( Village Voice, 1970)

88

Alice Coltrane’s liner notes to Journey in Satchidananda (1971)

94

Chungliang Al Huang on Pauline Oliveros and the ♀ Ensemble (1973)

96

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San Diego Magazine interviews Pauline Oliveros (1979)

97

Tricycle: The Buddhist Review interviews Philip Glass (1991)

99

6. Cultural Fusion

104

Carman Moore on Terry Jennings and his All-Star Band ( Village Voice, 1968)

105

Angela Dews profiles Alice Coltrane ( Essence, 1971)

106

Steve Reich, “A Composer Looks East” (New York Times, 1973)

109

Jan Bruér’s liner notes to Don Cherry’s Organic Music Society (1973)

112

Arnie Passman on Terry Riley ( Berkeley Barb, 1974)

115

7. Across the Arts

118

Robert Morris, “Blank Form” (1960)

119

Yvonne Rainer, “A Quasi Survey of Some ‘Minimalist’ Tendencies in the Quantitatively Minimal Dance Activity Midst the Plethora, or an Analysis of Trio A” (1966)

120

Alfred Frankenstein on “extended timers” at the Whitney ( San Francisco Examiner, 1969)

121

Lizzie Borden on Charlemagne Palestine’s body-as-instrument (1974)

123

John Rockwell on Yoshi Wada’s Earth Horns (New York Times, 1974)

125

Deborah Jowitt on Laura Dean and Steve Reich’s Drumming ( Village Voice, 1975)

126

Joan La Barbara on Alvin Lucier’s “sound geographies” (1975)

129

Amanda Smith profiles Meredith Monk (Ms. magazine, 1977)

131

8. Ensembles

134

Steve Reich, “Notes on the Ensemble” (1973)

135

Meredith Monk on Dolmen Music (1980)

138

Willoughby Sharp interviews the Philip Glass Ensemble (1974)

139

part two

163

9. 1976

167

Tim Page on the ECM release of Music for 18 Musicians (1978)

168

Steve Reich’s program note for Music for 18 Musicians (1976)

170

John Rockwell on Einstein on the Beach ( Village Voice, 1976)

172

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Henry Flynt on Catherine Christer Hennix’s The Electric Harpsichord

10. The New Downtown

179 186

Rhys Chatham on “Post ’60s Traditionalism” ( EAR Magazine, 1978)

187

Peter Gordon replies to Rhys Chatham ( EAR Magazine, 1978)

188

Julius Eastman, “The Composer as Weakling” ( EAR Magazine, 1979)

189

Peter Zummo profiles Arthur Russell ( SoHo Weekly News, 1977)

191

Lee Ranaldo on Rhys Chatham’s Guitar Trio

192

Beth Anderson’s “Report from the Front” on the festival New Music, New York (1979)

196

Wim Mertens interviews John Cage about Glenn Branca’s performance at New Music America (1982)

198

11. Instruments and Environments

203

Ellen Fullman on her Long String Instrument (1987)

204

James Fulkerson on Phill Niblock’s music (1982)

207

Yoshi Wada’s liner notes to Lament for the Rise and Fall of the Elephantine Crocodile (1982/2007)

208

Eliot Handelman interviews Maryanne Amacher (1991)

211

12. Ambient and New Age

216

Anthony Korner interviews Brian Eno (1986)

217

Stephen Hill, “New Age Made Simple” (1988)

220

Dean Suzuki & Bob Doerschuk interview Harold Budd (1986)

225

Paul Bowler interviews Midori Takada on Through the Looking Glass (2018)

229

13. Canons

232

Tom Johnson, “What Is Minimalism Really About?” ( Village Voice, 1977)

233

Tim Page and Mark Abbott, “Aspects of Minimalism,” WKCR festival playlist (1980)

236

Peter Goodman, “Minimalist Music: Is Less More—or a Bore?” ( Newsday, 1984)

238

Alan Licht, “Minimal Top Ten” (1996)

247

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14. Backlash

253

Beth Anderson on the first night of New Music, New York at the Kitchen (1979)

254

Ian MacDonald on minimalism ( The Face, 1987)

255

Charlemagne Palestine, interviewed by Alan Licht (1989)

265

15. Politics, Identity, and Expression

268

Rudy Koopmans interviews Louis Andriessen, Reinbert de Leeuw, and Misha Mengelberg “on the occasion of a concert tour by Phil Glass” (1976)

269

Renate Strauss profiles Julius Eastman ( Buffalo Evening News, 1976)

274

Julius Eastman introduces his concert at Northwestern University (1980)

278

K. Robert Schwarz profiles John Adams (1985)

279

Steve Reich’s program note for Different Trains (1988)

284

16. Postminimalists

286

Kyle Gann, “Enough of Nothing: Postminimalism” ( Village Voice, 1991)

287

Libby Van Cleve interviews Michael Gordon on his 1983 composition Thou Shalt!/Thou Shalt Not! (1997)

291

Libby Van Cleve interviews David Lang (1997)

292

Julia Wolfe’s program note for Lick (1994)

294

Elodie Lauten, “Composer’s Notes” (2009)

294

Kalvos & Damian interview Ann Southam (1998)

297

John Adams on the music of Ingram Marshall (1984)

299

Elena Dubinets interviews Alexandre RabinovitchBarakovsky (2010)

300

Elena Dubinets interviews Sergei Zagny (2020)

302

Elena Dubinets interviews Nikolai Korndorf (2000)

305

17. Spiritual Minimalism

307

John Rockwell on mystical minimalism ( New York Times, 1993)

308

Jamie McCarthy interviews Arvo Pärt (1986)

311

Paul Jamrozy on Henryk Górecki’s Symphony No. 3 ( The Wire, 2014)

318

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18. Popular Culture

321

Stephen Holden on disco ( High Fidelity, 1979)

322

Kenny Berkowitz on minimalism’s impact on techno ( Option, 1997)

324

part three

331

19. Histories

335

Arnold Dreyblatt, “An Open Letter to La Monte Young and Tony Conrad” (2000)

336

Nico Muhly on Philip Glass’s Music in 12 Parts (2017)

339

Jace Clayton, “Reverence Is a Form of Forgetting” (2020)

341

David Toop, “Black Minimalism” (2018)

346

20. Silences

357

Alex Ross, “Silent Song” ( The New Yorker, 2016)

358

Jürg Frey, “And On It Went” (2004)

361

Eva-Maria Houben, “Presence—Silence—Disappearance” (2010)

364

21. Futures

371

Brandon Stosuy interviews Sunn O)))’s Stephen O’Malley ( The Believer, 2006)

372

Randy Gibson, “On Tuning” (2018)

375

Philip Sherburne on ambient jazz ( Pitchfork, 2021)

379

Steve Smith profiles Sarah Hennies ( New York Times, 2020)

384

Éliane Radigue, “The Mysterious Power of the Infinitesimal” (2009)

388

Acknowledgments Listening Guide Notes Bibliography Index

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Foreword joan la barbara

The first work I performed with composer Alvin Lucier, Still and Moving Lines of Silence in Families of Hyperbolas, is enigmatic. We rehearsed in the Merce Cunningham studio at Westbeth in 1972. Lucier explained that he would play sine tones from four audio speakers placed at the edges of the “stage” and that I was free to “play” within the situation. I moved onto the dance floor, closed my eyes, and continued moving until I felt I was in my acoustical center within the space, being “bombarded” equally by the sounds, and then began singing softly, matching exactly the pitch of the sine tones. I then began to move my pitch microtonally away from the unison, causing the waves to move away from me. I played with this situation for some twenty minutes, and then stopped and returned to where Lucier was seated. “Tell me what you were doing,” Alvin said. I explained, and he replied, “That’s the piece.” Curiosity. Openness. Innovation. Experimentation. Change was in the air, along with individual freedom and a sense of wonder. Let’s try this. Let’s see what would happen if one went further into a single pitch and explored the myriad possibilities within. Musicians were questioning the limits of their instruments, pushing boundaries to discover a new sound, a new idea, looking to regions of the world that were outside the mainstream. There was no “movement” per se; each individual was exploring ideas, thoughts. But the energy, drive, spirit of individualism went hand in hand with cooperation, as performers moved from band to band, sharing ideas. xiii

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xiv   |   Foreword

Arriving in New York City in the late sixties, I became part of the burgeoning “downtown” experimental scene. I asked composer/trombonist Garrett List to play long tones and imagined that sound coming from my voice and body. Each time I sang I analyzed it, adjusting timbre and placement to better approximate the trombone. It seemed almost like building a new instrument. Breaking away from my classical training, I tried everything. I learned jazz tunes and joined a rock band. I learned of improv sessions taking place Thursday nights at the Free Music Store and began showing up with my mic in hand. Composer Michael Sahl hired me for several commercials; when Steve Reich was searching for singers who could imitate instruments, Michael recommended me. In 1970, Reich was developing Drumming, and I went to his loft on Broadway just north of Canal St. for several sessions. I was intrigued by the task of imitating the marimba and improvising patterns that I heard resulting from new interlocking relationships, the result of a player “phasing” ahead, increasing the tempo in what temporarily felt like an exciting chaotic jumble until settling into the new interconnected location. During the three years of development, premiere, and extensive tour of Drumming, I realized that I was actively participating in the compositional process. Reich had selected the patterns that Judith Sherman and I (and later Jay Clayton) were singing, incorporating them into the score, leading me to begin identifying myself as a composer. At an early performance of Drumming, someone pointed out Philip Glass. I walked up to him, introduced myself, and asked if he ever considered using a voice in his music. He smiled and responded that Yvonne Rainer sometimes came by and screamed but, other than that, no. Then he said, “Do you know my music?” I told him I didn’t and he said he was doing a small performance the next weekend and gave me the address. I gamely wandered across Bleecker Street toward the Bowery— vastly different from the sanitized version we find today—and climbed up what I remember as ten flights of stairs, past heavy metal doors with barking guard dogs, arriving at perhaps the top floor, where I found five guys sitting around in a circle, playing electric organs, saxophones, and flutes, and fifteen or so people sitting on the floor around them. When they finished, I went up to Philip and said I liked it. “Great!” he said, “our trumpet player just left the band so you can come sing the trumpet part.” And so began my years working with the Philip Glass Ensemble. I sang the existing trumpet part in several major works and, after a short hiatus, rejoined the ensemble as Philip was working on Music

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Foreword   |   xv

figure 1. Joan La Barbara with Philip Glass Ensemble performing Music in Twelve Parts at the Idea Warehouse, February 1975. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY.

in 12 Parts. We premiered the entire piece in 1974, in a six-hour event at Town Hall. We did several European tours as Philip was beginning work on his opera. Einstein on the Beach was two years in development, gathering the resources of the downtown community of performing artists to work collectively. It premiered amid great sound and much fury in Avignon, August 1976. Plans were being made for several months of touring, but I had had enough. From 1974 through the premiere run of Einstein, I had worked within Glass’s music, inserting my personal interest in altering my vocal timbre to blend with the other instruments. I felt it was time to focus more on my own work. For my 1974 Voice Piece: One-Note Internal Resonance Investigation, I explored the myriad possibilities producible by focusing pure vocal sound in specific resonance areas in the head, neck, and body. My rigorous Circular Song (1974) uses repeating figures, inhaled and exhaled, progressing to a central multiphonic, then reversing back to the starting figure. The Solar Wind (1982), for voice and chamber ensemble, is often considered my most minimalist work. It begins with a steady staccato vocal pulse (my translation of the movement of particles from the sun toward the earth), and adds individual instruments to

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xvi   |   Foreword

the pulse until sudden crashing sounds (explosions on the surface of the sun) cause the flow of the “particles” to accelerate into new tonalities and rising currents of sound (changing the magnetic field of Earth). In the mid-1970s, I was living in a loft on upper Greene Street in SoHo, which was still sparsely inhabited at that time; the streets very dark at night. But there was a community of artists: musicians, painters, sculptors, poets, dancers who gravitated to the relatively cheap rents and enormous spaces. Performances sprang up in artists’ studios, other lofts, a few galleries. The area was humming with creative activity, and its intense energy was palpable, attracting a lot of attention but not much comprehension. My friends and colleagues gave concerts but were receiving quizzical reviews at best. So when the SoHo Weekly News began arriving free on the doorsteps in the neighborhood, I approached the editors about writing a column. Over several years, I wrote about my experiences discovering La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela and their devotion to Pandit Pran Nath; I compared and contrasted the work of minimalists Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and Philip Glass; I described the somewhat masochistic performances of Charlemagne Palestine and thoroughly delighted in realizations of vintage Fluxus works such as “Feed the Piano.” Documenting much of the exciting activity that I experienced firsthand, Kerry O’Brien and William Robin elaborate on the wellknown names while acknowledging vital contributions by artists whose work deserves wider recognition: jazz giants John Coltrane and Miles Davis’s work paring down sonic material, streamlining chords, extending modal patterns, and freeing soloists to soar gains long-overdue credence; offshoots like the Wandelweiser composers who took John Cage’s silence and plumbed the edges of fragility with incredibly small and delicate sounds at the threshold of audibility; and others who remained mavericks, taking their own idiosyncratic paths.

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Introduction

There’s a story you may have heard before; it gets repeated a lot. It’s one story, but it’s about four people. In 1958 in Los Angeles, a twenty-twoyear-old composer named La Monte Young wrote a piece in which, over the course of nearly an hour, hardly anything happens: three string instruments play extraordinarily lengthy, still tones interspersed with silence. A short while later, in grad school in Berkeley, Young met Terry Riley, who became similarly preoccupied with music that moved at a glacial pace. After a stint in Paris, Riley wrote In C, a score that instructs a group of instrumentalists to repeat a series of short riffs that accrue into a wash of sound. At a rehearsal for In C before its premiere in 1964, Riley’s San Francisco neighbor Steve Reich—a percussionist and budding composer—suggested that the musicians might be able to stay together more easily if someone constantly struck two C keys on the piano, to provide a steady pulse. Not long afterward, Reich spliced recordings of a street preacher’s voice to create a soundscape of eerie and unexpected acoustic effects. After moving back to New York, Reich held a retrospective of his music, where he reencountered an old Juilliard classmate, Philip Glass. Glass joined Reich’s ensemble of musicians, whom he recruited to play new scores based on his tape experiments with close musical canons. And Reich joined a similar group created by his friend, with which Glass was developing an idiosyncratic style, influenced by Indian ragas, in which repetitive musical phrases hypnotically expanded and contracted. 1

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2   |   Introduction

Young’s drones, Riley’s loops, Reich’s pulses and phasing, Glass’s additive processes. Each composer pioneered a set of techniques that built the most important and influential movement in avant-garde music of the late twentieth century: minimalism. Over the span of a little more than a decade, minimalist music went from austere long tones and grating harmonies to toe-tapping, accessible tonality. Glass and Reich have since become household names, selling millions of records and influencing pop culture from movie soundtracks to David Bowie songs; Young and Riley remain cult figures, but essential protagonists in minimalism’s origins. They weren’t the Beatles, but sometimes the quartet is called the “Fab Four.” This is the classic story of musical minimalism.1 It’s a good story: it’s a clean narrative. It has a happy ending: it suggests that, decades after Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue and Copland’s Appalachian Spring, there could be a movement of contemporary composition that trickled out into mainstream culture, a popular and harmonious avant-garde. (Or, for others, it’s a sad ending: a radical style developed in lofts and galleries sells out to the Carnegie Hall establishment.) It’s a story that keeps getting told, again and again: in memoirs and monographs, liner notes and lecture halls. But it’s far from the only story. It leaves out key players, like the composer-performer Julius Eastman, who created work so iconoclastic that he seemed to deliberately write himself out of the story. It leaves out others, like composer and meditator Pauline Oliveros, who didn’t look or act like the typical founding father. When it talks about the major figures—Young and Riley, Reich and Glass—it breezes past the weirder aspects of their work, from failed technological research to discipleships with gurus to the imbibing of psychedelic drugs. And it sidelines musicians considered essential in other genres and who should be considered essential to this one, like John Coltrane, Brian Eno, and Donna Summer. Chances are, anyone who wasn’t a white man who consciously assumed the identity of a capital-C Composer in the Western classical tradition didn’t make the cut.2 They were the loose threads to be snipped away. The history of minimalism was too tidy for them.

what is minimalism? We’d like to tell you a different story. It’s about how minimalism became minimalism, and it’s also about many things that are minimalism but

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Introduction   |   3

haven’t been called minimalism. It’s a retelling of the history of musical minimalism—a revisionist history—through the presentation, and contextualization, of important documents. These documents come in many forms: newspaper reviews, magazine features, interviews with composers, and more. Some involve detailed, technical explanations of compositional approaches or unconventional tuning systems; some involve quasi-indecipherable, seemingly hallucinogenic rants. (Occasionally, there’s both at once.) Many take the form of manifestos: artists arguing for the necessity of their practices, or critics proposing farreaching, new musical developments. All illuminate aspects of minimalism’s musical history, whether the stories of lesser-known figures, or lesser-known stories about the bigger names. So what is minimalism, anyway? In its beginnings, minimalism was not “Minimalism.” When critics and musicians started to buzz about the uncanny, slowed-down music that they were hearing in San Francisco and downtown New York in the 1960s, they used terms like “drone-based,” “repetitive,” or “modal.” Writer Robert Palmer examined the emergence of “trance music,” critic Alfred Frankenstein declared Riley’s In C an example of “extended-time music,” and musician Joan La Barbara dubbed Reich and Glass members of the “steady state school.”3 “Minimalism” was just one more name in this nominative jumble. Scholars agree that the actual descriptors of “minimalist” and “minimal” music first cropped up in the British press, when critic Jill Phillips described a 1968 performance of La Monte Young’s Death Chant as a “minimalist piece.”4 In his decade writing for the Village Voice, composer Tom Johnson had a front seat to the musical phenomenon developing in the neighborhood known as SoHo. He declared the existence, in 1972, of a “New York Hypnotic School” comprising Young, Riley, Reich, and Glass. “Some of their pieces employ traditional scales and some do not,” he wrote of this new school. “Some of them chug along with a persistent beat and some float by without any rhythmic articulation. Most of them are loud and employ electronic resources. And some employ standard instruments without amplification or electronic manipulation of any kind. Yet they all have the same basic concern, which can be described as flat, static, minimal, and hypnotic.”5 Two years later, in his influential book Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond, composer Michael Nyman perpetuated that four-man grouping under the heading “minimal music,” with lengthy musical descriptions, accompanying scores, and the addition of a few similarly

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4   |   Introduction

minded English composers. Nyman described the music as a response to serialism, the atonal style developed by Arnold Schoenberg, which had found prominence in the American academy; and as a response to indeterminacy, John Cage’s radically deconstructive approach to composition. Minimal music, for Nyman, “not only cuts down the area of sound-activity to an absolute (and absolutist) minimum, but submits the scrupulously selective, mainly tonal, material to mostly repetitive, highly disciplined procedures.”6 And that was basically it. The style’s musical qualities were clearly defined: minimal materials, mostly tonal, repeated with discipline; sometimes amplified, often static, almost always hypnotic. And the four-man grouping responsible for it endured, in scholarly histories and the popular imagination, from Time magazine features to musicological inquiries. (The subtitle of Keith Potter’s major study says it all: Four Musical Minimalists: La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass). Glass was the most popular of the “Big Four,” a celebrity with mainstream film scores, crossover records, and iconic Chuck Close portraits; Reich served as the most prestigious and classically credentialed, with a belated Pulitzer recognition in 2009; despite his eclectic oeuvre, Riley’s role in the story was secure because of the seismic influence of In C; and the ever-experimental Young was treated as the founding father, whom Brian Eno once dubbed “the daddy of us all.”7 The work of many musicians, critics, and scholars, over time, created this category of “minimalism”: the Big Four grouping is as much a description of historical truth as it is a historiographical action performed again and again.8 But even if they have long been presented as preordained, such groupings do not have to endure, this same way, forever.9 Still, this is a book titled On Minimalism, and not a book titled On Trance Music, or On the Steady-State School. We acknowledge the gravitational pull of traditional narratives, and the weight (and power) of those who argued, again and again, that “minimalism” was the way to describe this important musical movement. But we also argue—and we are by no means the first—that the Big Four view of musical minimalism has left us with an impoverished understanding of its history. Rather than compile a comprehensive overview of the music-making of Young, Riley, Reich, and Glass, we instead look back to ask: Where was repetition- and drone-based music happening, in the 1960s and onward? Who was there? What did it sound like? How was it described? And what is missing from how it is now remembered?

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who is a minimalist? So, if minimalism was much more than the Big Four, who did it include? Who can be called a minimalist? Because Reich and Glass are widely considered card-carrying minimalists—despite their aversion to the term itself—can everything they ever composed be labeled, ipso facto, minimalism? What about when Pauline Oliveros spent years droning on her accordion—was that her “minimalist period,” or was she always a minimalist? Can Frederic Rzewski write a handful of influential minimalist pieces, like Les Moutons de Panurge and Coming Together, but not be considered a proper “minimalist composer”? And why is it that Reich, Young, and Riley are frequently described as “former jazz musicians”— they were all postbop performers in their early years—but radical Black musicians who improvised with drones, including Don Cherry, McCoy Tyner, and John and Alice Coltrane, are not considered minimalists?10 These are some of the questions we began to ask when we started to compile this book: we made a massive list of names of musicians who had been called minimalists, along with those who hadn’t been called minimalists but who created music shaped by drones and repetition. We couldn’t include everyone, but we wanted to try. (Sadly, Rzewski didn’t make the cut.) And as we gathered documents related to their artistic work, we realized that these figures actually weren’t always left out. When Robert Palmer wrote about trance music for the New York Times in 1975, he highlighted Tyner and the Master Musicians of Jajouka alongside Reich and Glass. In 1980, when the Columbia radio station WKCR presented a marathon festival of minimalist music, it included Cherry, Julius Eastman, and Catherine Christer Hennix. As it turned out, in the documentary history, some minimalists were hiding in plain sight. Still—like pop and R & B, or bebop and Cagean experimentalism— minimalism, as a musical genre and historical phenomenon, has been racially segregated, even when the reality of the music-making was not: Cherry improvised with Riley, and Anthony Braxton sat in with the Philip Glass Ensemble.11 To follow this music as it radiated outward from the avant-garde—to understand it as a style that influenced rock producer Brian Eno, and that was produced, too, by disco legends Donna Summer and Giorgio Moroder—we document minimalisms that are often instead categorized as “jazz,” “pop,” or “ambient.” These artists’ work was often much more entangled than genre boundaries make it out to be. As we track minimalism from its origins to its current status, we dwell on the droning rituals of the Theatre of Eternal Music in the sixties,

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6   |   Introduction

the resonating wires of Ellen Fullman’s Long String Instrument in the eighties, and the menacing incantations of metal band Sunn O))) today. To tell this story, we include some of the more iconic primary sources in the history of musical minimalism, such as Steve Reich’s manifesto “Music as a Gradual Process,” and we reprint work from well-known publications like the New York Times and Village Voice. But we also look to other sources, from other communities, to tell other stories: the feminist magazine Ms., the Black women’s magazine Essence, the journal Black American.12 Studies of musical minimalism tend to follow proleptical patterns— history written with the benefit of hindsight, which can distort just as it attempts to reveal.13 When Tom Johnson, perhaps the greatest chronicler of minimalist music, repackaged his writings into a 1989 book, he made some small but significant tweaks—ones that we only began to notice after we looked past his easily accessible compilation to his original newspaper clippings.14 In Johnson’s book, the 1972 article in which he first theorized the existence of the “New York Hypnotic School” is given an updated title: “La Monte Young, Steve Reich, Terry Riley, and Philip Glass”; the original Voice article, though, had the vaguer headline “Changing the Meaning of ‘Static.’ ” The revised, reframed headline bolstered a backwards-gazing, Big Four narrative.15 This might seem like a pedantic point, but—as anyone who knows that Milton Babbitt’s infamous essay “Who Cares If You Listen?” was originally titled “The Composer as Specialist” —headlines make history. Johnson’s invaluable collection has become the most widely cited group of sources on minimalist music, and many of the most influential studies unknowingly cite Johnson’s revised titles.16 Restoring the original titles of newspaper articles is a relatively minor task, compared to the main work of this book.17 But it emblematizes a central goal of our project: to make enough tweaks to minimalism’s traditional history that new narratives can be revealed. We are not naïve enough to think that this book won’t, of course, produce new and fraught categories and hardened, canonic histories. But we hope to present a bigger, more unruly set of juxtapositions, and, because our aperture is wider, we hope to capture a bit more of the landscape.

what is this book? This is a revisionist history, but it’s still a history: we start at minimalism’s beginnings and conclude today. We have divided the book into

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three main chronological sections: the early years, from the late 1950s to the mid-1970s; from 1976—the year of Glass’s pivotal Einstein on the Beach, Reich’s classic Music for 18 Musicians, and C. C. Hennix’s undersung Electric Harpsichord—to the late 1990s; and from the year 2000 onward. Each chapter brings together multiple documents and centers on a single theme. Some, like a chapter on the loops and processes that Riley and Reich developed in the sixties, are necessary to any minimalist history; some, like a chapter on the role of gurus, highlight crucial aspects of the style’s evolution that have been understudied; some, like a chapter that brings together Miles Davis’s modal jazz and Yoko Ono’s Fluxus provocations, complicate and trouble conventional categorizations; some, like chapters on canonization and backlash, address the broader cultural phenomenon that minimalism became. If you read this book cover to cover, we hope you discover the full and rich tradition of minimalism, described a bit unconventionally. But if you prefer, you can crack open the book at any page and dive into a world of metaphysics, of homemade instruments, of meditation and healing. If you’re a college professor teaching a course on minimalism, you can use these documents to supplement academic scholarship; if you’re a percussionist preparing to perform Reich’s music, you can read helpful essays and reviews; if you’re a longtime Julius Eastman or Meredith Monk fan, you can explore how they contextualized their work; if you’re skeptical of all of this, you can read a handful of skeptical takes on minimalism too.18 And of course, this is hardly half the story, because the real story is the music itself. We wish we could devise a book that blares out the cacophonous sounds of Yoshi Wada’s Earth Horns or the quietly entrancing lullabies of Eva-Maria Houben when you turn each page, but alas. The easy fix would be to design an accompanying online playlist for quick consumption, but that would fall into a familiar trap: assuming that minimalism’s history can be fully represented in widely available, commercial recordings. Much of minimalism’s musical lineage cannot be found on Spotify; for decades, many crucial recordings were only accessible at specialist shops, or in mail-order catalogs, or on illegal file-sharing platforms, or not at all. So, in the back of the book, you can instead find a list of recordings that correspond to each chapter: a quick internet search should help you find all of them, whether commercially released (and easily streamable) albums, or Bandcamp indie and vinyl releases, or bootlegs that crop up on YouTube. We encourage you to pay for the music you listen to, and support the musicians who continue to make this movement enduring and vital.

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Part One

In April 1955, the renowned violinist Yehudi Menuhin penned an article for the New York Times introducing an upcoming concert he planned to present at the Museum of Modern Art. The music that audiences would hear, he wrote, was “monotonous yet full of rich variety, simple yet so intensely subtle.”1 Menuhin’s column was not an endorsement of minimalism, although it certainly could characterize the music that La Monte Young began making only a few years later; Menuhin was instead describing the sound of Hindustani sarod virtuoso Ali Akbar Khan. The MoMA concert, featuring Khan and his ensemble of musicians playing “hypnotic” ragas, was historic: a recording of a rehearsal became the first full-length album of Indian classical music ever produced.2 To understand the beginnings of minimalism, it is perhaps best to leave singular or simple “origin stories” behind.3 Instead, we can embrace the movement’s capaciousness by looking to what made minimalism possible right around the beginning of the 1960s and the emergence of American postwar counterculture. What caused various experimental figures, in different but often overlapping musical worlds, to start slowing down, thinning out their harmonies, and repeating patterns over and over? New encounters between musicians from India and musicians from the United States made minimalism possible. “I literally flew to the record store when I first heard it on the radio,” recalled La Monte Young, of Khan’s music; not long afterward, he wrote his Trio for Strings, in which 9

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prolonged tones stretch into infinity.4 In 1957—a year after releasing Khan’s LP—Angel Records put out Ravi Shankar’s album Music of India: Three Classical Rāgas.5 American musicians paid close attention, incorporating the repetition of Shankar’s sitar playing and the stasis of its accompanying drones into their work. As John Coltrane said of Shankar, “When I hear his music, I want to copy it—not note for note, of course, but his spirit.”6 Coltrane immersed himself in North Indian ragas, with compositions like the 1961 “India,” in which he unfurled chant-like melodies over a vamping bass and a steady pedal-point.7 A few years later, Philip Glass collaborated with Shankar on an experimental film score in Paris and, in attempting to transcribe Shankar’s techniques for the session musicians, came to a realization about the undulating rhythms of Indian music that he soon incorporated into his own developing aesthetic.8 These early minimalists—Young, Coltrane, Glass, and many others— found that South Asian and African music offered a pathway out from the cul-de-sacs of earlier avant-gardes.9 In contrast to the fast-moving chord changes of bebop, the academic complexity of serialism, or the unpredictability of John Cage’s indeterminacy, repetition and stasis provided a welcome return to rhythm and meter, to the subtleties of intonation, and to the slowly shifting nuances that emerged from developing a single drone or pattern over long durations. Serialism commanded significant prestige in the American postwar university, and Young’s 1958 Trio for Strings was both an extension and a rejection of twelve-tone writing. The composer took the language developed by Arnold Schoenberg and simply extended its pitch structures for extraordinarily long durations, moving away from the atomized, pointillistic abstractions of his peers and teachers. While studying twelve-tone technique in grad school, Steve Reich kept finding himself writing tonal music instead. “Most of my teachers thought I was a fanatic,” Young recalled of his own graduate studies. He decamped from Berkeley to downtown New York, where he fell in with the experimentation of Cage and Yoko Ono. Ono and Young oversaw a series in Ono’s loft on Chambers Street that featured realizations of radical pieces based on simple text instructions. “Draw a straight line and follow it,” read one of Young’s scores, in its entirety. Ono had her own approach: “Draw a line with yourself. Go on drawing until you disappear.”10 Minimalism was made possible by such Cage-inspired performance art. Jazz, too, made minimalism possible. Miles Davis’s 1959 Kind of Blue injected a laid-back form of musical minimalism into popular cul-

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ture. Under the sway of Davis’s modal approach—and Nigerian drummer Michael Babatunde Olatunji—John Coltrane released Africa/Brass, which, for a young Steve Reich, “proved that against the drone or against the held tonality anything eventually was possible.”11 In Coltrane’s image, Young and Riley took up the saxophone and started improvising; Young developed his own, idiosyncratic take on Coltrane’s famous “sheets of sound” that involved playing sopranino saxophone so quickly that the notes seemed to become clouds. He formed the Theatre of Eternal Music—a crucial ensemble in the early history of minimalism—which soon transitioned from eerie blues improvisations to ritualistic, evening-length performances of drones. In 1963, Terry Riley used looped and delayed tape recordings he made of trumpeter Chet Baker’s band playing Davis’s “So What” to create an unnerving sound collage called Music for the Gift.12 Such new technologies enabled further minimalist explorations. As Theatre violinist Tony Conrad observed in 1966, “Ours is the first generation with tape.”13 Riley’s work with tapes led to the landmark loops of In C, which in turn inspired Reich’s pioneering It’s Gonna Rain and Come Out. Composer Pauline Oliveros played accordion at the 1964 premiere of In C and worked in the same San Francisco electronic music studio as Riley and Reich, but also found herself drawn to the technology of the body: tuning and turning inward.14 Toward the end of the 1950s she began dwelling on single pitches, inspired by the steady buzz of freeway traffic and fluorescent lights. “The mantra of the electric age is hum rather than Om,” she later noted.15 But it was really both: minimalism interlaced technology and spirituality into a grand, cosmic-futuristic stew. Coltrane studied Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam; Glass and Reich practiced yoga; Oliveros and Meredith Monk learned tai chi. And it wasn’t just about reading books or listening to “world music” records: many musicians became disciples to South Asian gurus. Glass and Alice Coltrane both traveled to India to study with the teacher Swami Satchidananda. An entire generation of minimalists—from Young and Riley to Catherine Christer Hennix and Yoshi Wada— apprenticed with the North Indian vocalist Pandit Pran Nath, learning the Kirana tradition of North Indian classical music and its deep exploration of pitch and intonation. Pran Nath’s Tantric lineage celebrated the use of bhang—a form of cannabis—and it is perhaps unsurprising, given the music they made and the circles they moved in, that drug use was pervasive among the minimalists.16 (Hence the title of Terry Riley’s early tape piece

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Mescalin Mix.) But there were other paths toward enlightenment, too: Oliveros and her peers embraced meditation, often working in private and intimate gatherings to investigate the healing effects of drones. There was also violence. Along with creating relentlessly repetitive pieces like Strumming Music, the gonzo pianist-organist-composer Charlemagne Palestine performed a work in which he sang a single, sustained note and repeatedly slammed his shoulder against a wall, faster and faster, “until pain and exhaustion” forced him to stop.17 This was perhaps the most literalistic form of minimalism’s abrasiveness, which more typically involved extraordinarily loud amplification. “Pain is also part of his esthetic,” wrote New York Times critic Harold C. Schonberg of a 1969 performance by Riley at the Electric Circus. “At times the volume was so far up that eardrums started to flap, and it was not a pleasant experience.”18 Those more sympathetic to Riley and his ilk typically came less from Schonberg’s highbrow milieu than from the worlds of modern dance, theater, film, and visual art—disciplines that were inventing their own conceptions of minimalism, and from which the musical minimalists drew influence.19 Glass worked as a studio assistant for sculptor Richard Serra, and was shaped by his process-based works; artist Sol Lewitt’s serialist aesthetic and the slow-moving films of Michael Snow left a lasting mark on Reich’s early style.20 Much minimalist composition was interdisciplinary by nature, whether Phill Niblock’s integration of drones, film, and dance, or the Gesamtkunstwerk that was Meredith Monk’s 1976 Quarry. “I work between the cracks,” Monk once said. “Where the voice starts dancing, where the body starts singing, where theater becomes cinema.”21 Monk formed her own group, Meredith Monk & Vocal Ensemble, to navigate this intermediary space.22 Much early minimalism was designed for similar bands. Some were short-lived experiments like the Theatre of Eternal Music or Oliveros’s ♀ Ensemble, while others continue to this day: Monk’s vocalists, Steve Reich and Musicians, and the Philip Glass Ensemble still tour, performing new compositions alongside repertory that the composers developed nearly a half-century ago. Back in the sixties and seventies, downtown lofts were where many of these musicians lived and worked: Yoko Ono’s apartment, or the sixth-floor walkup that housed rehearsals of the Philip Glass Ensemble, or more formalized spaces such as the venue Experimental Intermedia. Galleries and museums like the Guggenheim and Whitney hosted Reich, Glass, and Monk. But as their music grew in popularity, these spaces

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could no longer accommodate minimalism’s larger audiences. In 1976, Glass’s Einstein on the Beach made its American debut at the Metropolitan Opera house, and Reich premiered his Music for 18 Musicians at Town Hall. Around this time, some longtime observers began to ask whether minimalism had abandoned its avant-garde origins and become something else entirely. In a column in 1975, Village Voice critic Tom Johnson described Reich as a “minimalist turning away from minimalism.” “I miss the strength, toughness, and severity which characterized his earlier works,” he mused, after hearing an initial preview of Music for 18. “I even miss the repetition and the predictability.”23 Reich was the textbook example of how some minimalists began to shed their previous selves. As a grad student in the Bay Area, he abandoned serial composition to focus on improvisation, agitprop theater, and tape experiments; after moving back to New York and finding frustration with electronics, he turned to live performance with his own ensemble; he tried to fuse music and spirituality through yoga and meditation; he drove a taxi and moved furniture with Glass to pay the rent; he wrote aggressively confrontational works that caused an uproar at Carnegie Hall; he traveled to Ghana to learn Ewe drumming techniques; he toured Europe, where his work was met with adulation and outrage.24 And now, in the mid-1970s, he seemed to leave that all behind, to write plain old musical works—works that were extraordinarily powerful, influential, and popular, but absent the refulgent, countercultural weirdness that pervaded early minimalism. Johnson noted that he was not “questioning the actual merit of the music,” but was instead “merely reacting to the sharp stylistic change” of Music for 18. But the critic, who had forecasted the rise of a “hypnotic school” just a few years earlier, nevertheless concluded that he was “feeling a little sorry that the era of New York minimalism has come to such an abrupt end.”25

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chapter 1

Improvisation and Experimentation

“I think a movement in jazz is beginning away from the conventional string of chords, and a return to emphasis on melodic rather than harmonic variation,” Miles Davis told The Jazz Review in 1958. “There will be fewer chords but infinite possibilities as to what to do with them.”1 A few months later, he put this theory—influenced by the pianist George Russell—into practice in the album Kind of Blue, in which a cast of luminaries improvised over modes and scales rather than the fast-paced harmonic changes of bebop. Jazz had never been so minimalist. John Coltrane found the sessions a necessary pretext for his own experimentation, helping him unlock a quicksilver style of playing in his breakthrough albums of the early 1960s. These developments were eagerly welcomed by other avant-gardists. La Monte Young and Steve Reich both found experimental jazz a refreshing alternative to the academic environs of “serious music” and the twelve-tone composition they were studying.2 In the early 1960s, Young dedicated himself to a post-Coltrane style of improvisation, first on piano and then on sopranino saxophone, with sustained drone accompaniment. The total strangeness of his approach—which built on the glacial pace of his 1958 Trio for Strings—found Young a home not in Harlem clubs, but in art galleries.3 The crucial precursor to Young’s odd improvisations, though, was a brief period of John Cage–style theatrics. He spent 1960 dabbling in such exercises, composing a series of text scores with simple, sometimes 15

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16   |   Improvisation and Experimentation

bewildering instructions: asking performers to release a butterfly into the audience, or feed a bale of hay to a piano. Of these Compositions 1960, #7 pointed forward to the full-blown minimalism that Young developed with the Theatre of Eternal Music a few years later: it included the notated pitches B and F♯, accompanied by the instruction “to be held for a long time.”4 Young gave a summatory lecture that included plenty of absurdist goading—he stated that he preferred eating mustard on a turnip to listening to Beethoven—but also more mystical musings: “I could see that sounds and all other things in the room were just as important as human beings and that if we could to some degree give ourselves up to them, the sounds and other things that is, we enjoyed the possibility of learning something new.”5 Some of Young’s provocations took place at the loft series that he organized with artist Yoko Ono, who had cut her own path through the New York avant-garde—and later made radical, repetitive pop with John Lennon in the Plastic Ono Band.6 A couple years after the loft concerts ended, Cage himself assembled a team of pianists to mount a truly minimalist spectacle: the first-ever full realization of Erik Satie’s Vexations, eighteen hours of music with fewer than two hundred notes, repeated.

amiri baraka on miles davis’s “penchant for minimalism” Miles Davis’s music, like African-American culture generally, originates as a specific reflection of African-American life and perception in the still mostly segregated black communities of the society, but it, like Miles, reaches in all directions within the whole of that society and transforms them. So that African-American culture (and indeed to varying degrees all the other minority cultures within the society) touches and changes and “darkens” any “objectively” American culture. There is virtually no “American music” that exists untouched and unshaped by black music of one kind or another. So it would seem that there could be almost no “pop” music in the United States untouched by the Milesian perspective. [. . .] Excerpts from Amiri Baraka, “Miles Davis: One of the Great Mother Fuckers,” in The Music: Reflections on Jazz and Blues (New York: Morrow, 1987): 289–91, and 304–5; adapted and expanded from Baraka, “Miles Davis,” New York Times, June 16, 1985, 24–25, 43–45, 48, and 50. Courtesy of Chris Calhoun Agency.

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figure 2. Recording studio for Kind of Blue, NYC, 1959. From left: John Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley, Miles Davis, and Bill Evans. Photograph by Don Hunstein. © Sony Music Entertainment. Courtesy of Hunstein Artist Services.

[Davis’s] music has always had that single vulnerable feeling, like a lone person beautiful and solitary, moving gracefully, sometimes arrogantly, through the night. Now, I was asking what he thought of his own music, from those first records and residence with Charlie Parker, and his later changes. “Later on, when I was playing [with Bird] we were always playing way up there [referring to the tempi]. It was all so fast, nobody knew what we were playing. Blam. It was over. I thought people needed a bottom. Something to refer to.” He was referring to the 1945–1949 tenure with Bird around Fiftysecond Street where the revolutionary music of BeBop and the hottest of the Swing players congregated downtown after the initial uptown developments. He also probably meant the recordings of the period that helped define the reconstruction and renovation of advanced black music in the forties after the corporations and racist commercialism had tried to transform swing from a Dukish and Countly verb into a hundred bands with identical commercial arrangements. [. . .] Kind of Blue is the stripped-down recombining of the two musical tendencies in Miles (the American and the African-American) to where

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they feed each other like electric charges. Here the mood, the lush, the bottom is also sketched. Miles has discovered chords and the implied modal approach that link up object and background as the same phrase and note. Blue is not contrapuntal, it is pointillistic, yet its dots and its backgrounds are the same lines flowing together. The harmonic bottom of Miles is sometimes translated as Eastern drone, what Trane later made even further use of. The drone here is that the chords link up, continue each other like a single modal insistence. Miles’s penchant for minimalism has gone back to his earliest music. It is the “fill-in” quality we remember with Bird. Only the essentials. Bird’s ever-flowing elaboration must have consolidated in Miles the need to try to fill the “other” space (Bird did not fill). So that throughout Miles’s playing days he has always cautioned his sidemen against playing “too much.” Miles says when he listens to his music he is listening for “what can be cut out.”

john coltrane on his recent music ( downbeat, 1960) On returning, this time to stay until I formed my own group a few months ago, I found Miles in the midst of another stage of his musical development. There was one time in his past that he devoted to multichorded structures. He was interested in chords for their own sake. But now it seemed that he was moving in the opposite direction to the use of fewer and fewer chord changes in songs. He used tunes with freeflowing lines and chordal direction. This approach allowed the soloist the choice of playing chordally (vertically) or melodically (horizontally). In fact, due to the direct and free-flowing lines in his music, I found it easy to apply the harmonic ideas that I had. I could stack up chords— say, on a C7, I sometimes superimposed an EH7, up to an FG7, down to an F. That way I could play three chords on one. But on the other hand, if I wanted to, I could play melodically. Miles’ music gave me plenty of freedom. It’s a beautiful approach. About this time, I was trying for a sweeping sound. I started experimenting because I was striving for more individual development. I even

Excerpt from John Coltrane, in collaboration with Don DeMicheal, “Coltrane on Coltrane,” DownBeat, September 29, 1960, 27. Courtesy of DownBeat Archives.

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tried long, rapid lines that Ira Gitler termed “sheets of sound” at the time. But actually, I was beginning to apply the three-on-one chord approach, and at that time the tendency was to play the entire scale of each chord. Therefore, they were usually played fast and sometimes sounded like glisses. I found there were a certain number of chord progressions to play in a given time, and sometimes what I played didn’t work out in eighth notes, 16th notes, or triplets. I had to put the notes in uneven groups like fives and sevens in order to get them all in. I thought in groups of notes, not of one note at a time. I tried to place these groups on the accents and emphasize the strong beats—maybe on 2 here and on 4 over at the end. I would set up the line and drop groups of notes—a long line with accents dropped as I moved along. Sometimes what I was doing clashed harmonically with the piano—especially if the pianist wasn’t familiar with what I was doing—so a lot of times I just strolled with bass and drums. I haven’t completely abandoned this approach, but it wasn’t broad enough. I’m trying to play these progressions in a more flexible manner now. Last February, I bought a soprano saxophone. I like the sound of it, but I’m not playing with the body, the bigness of tone, that I want yet. I haven’t had too much trouble playing it in tune, but I’ve had a lot of trouble getting a good quality of tone in the upper register. It comes out sort of puny sometimes. I’ve had to adopt a slightly different approach than the one I use for tenor, but it helps me get away—lets me take another look at improvisation. It’s like having another hand. I’m using it with my present group, McCoy Tyner, piano; Steve Davis, bass; and Pete La Roca, drums. The quartet is coming along nicely. We know basically what we’re trying for, and we leave room for individual development. Individual contributions are put in night by night. One of my aims is to build as good a repertoire as I can for a band. What size, I couldn’t say, but it’ll probably be a quartet or quintet. I want to get the material first. Right now, I’m on a material search. From a technical viewpoint, I have certain things I’d like to present in my solos. To do this, I have to get the right material. It has to swing, and it has to be varied. (I’m inclined not to be too varied.) I want it to cover as many forms of music as I can put into a jazz context and play on my instruments. I like Eastern music; Yusef Lateef has been using this in his playing for some time. And Ornette Coleman sometimes plays music with a Spanish content as well as other exotic-flavored

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music. In these approaches there’s something I can draw on and use in the way I like to play. I’ve been writing some things for the quartet—if you call lines and sketches writing. I’d like to write more after I learn more—after I find out what kind of material I can present best, what kind will carry my musical techniques best. Then I’ll know better what kind of writing is best for me. I’ve been devoting quite a bit of my time to harmonic studies on my own, in libraries and places like that. I’ve found you’ve got to look back at the old things and see them in a new light. I’m not finished with these studies because I haven’t assimilated everything into my playing. I want to progress, but I don’t want to go so far out that I can’t see what others are doing. I want to broaden my outlook in order to come out with a fuller means of expression. I want to be more flexible where rhythm is concerned. I feel I have to study rhythm some more. I haven’t experimented too much with time; most of my experimenting has been in a harmonic form. I put time and rhythms to one side, in the past. But I’ve got to keep experimenting. I feel that I’m just beginning. I have part of what I’m looking for in my grasp but not all. I’m very happy devoting all my time to music, and I’m glad to be one of the many who are striving for fuller development as musicians. Considering the great heritage in music that we have, the work of giants of the past, the present, and the promise of those who are to come, I feel that we have every reason to face the future optimistically.

dom cerulli’s liner notes to John coltrane’s africa/brass (1961) Most recently, as this album will attest, Coltrane has become absorbed by the rhythms of Africa. During the editing sessions for this album he noted, “There has been an influence of African rhythms in American jazz. It seems there are some things jazz can borrow harmonically, but I’ve been knocking myself out seeking something rhythmic. But nothing swings like 4/4. These implied rhythms give variety.” [. . .]

Excerpts from Dom Cerulli, liner notes to John Coltrane Quartet, Africa/Brass (Impulse!, 1961). Africa by John Coltrane © 1974 (Renewed) JOWCOL MUSIC LLC. International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard LLC.

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AFRICA has an unusual form. Its melody had to be stated in the background because Coltrane is not tied down by chords. “I had a sound that I wanted to hear,” Coltrane remarked of this composition. “And what resulted was about it. I wanted the band to have a drone: We used two basses. The main line carries all the way through the tune. One bass plays almost all the way through. The other has rhythmic lines around it. Reggie and Art have worked together, and they know how to give and take.” This work began with Coltrane’s quartet. He listened to many African records for rhythmic inspiration. One had a bass line like a chant, and the group used it, working it into different tunes. In Los Angeles, John hit on using African rhythms instead of 4/4, and the work began to take shape. [Tyner] began to work chords into the structure, and, in John’s own words, “it’s been growing ever since.” The instrumentation—trumpet, four French horns, alto sax, baritone sax, two euphoniums, two basses, piano, drums, and tuba—is among the most unusual in jazz. But, Dolphy explained, “John thought of this sound. He wanted brass, he wanted baritone horns, he wanted that mellow sound and power.” Coltrane heard the playbacks and nodded. “It’s the first time I’ve done any tune with that kind of rhythmic background. I’ve done things in 3/4 and 4/4. On the whole, I’m quite pleased with Africa.”

henry flynt on la monte young in the early ’60s Serious music was centered in Western Europe and New York, and its exponents lived socially on the border between academic music and upper bohemia.7 In the universities, musicology and composition were confined to European art music. Musicians with serious jazz chops either were African-Americans who had come to the bebop scene, or came from commercial entertainment (Tin Pan Alley, etc.). Ever since jazz was labeled as a genre, there had been exhortations to upgrade it to classical music’s level. But the wing of modern music called new music was vehemently opposed to any accommodation with jazz. [. . .] Thus, on the East coast, there tended to be no social contact between new

Excerpts from Henry Flynt, “La Monte Young in New York, 1960–62,” in Sound and Light: La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1996), 50, 58–59, 67–68, 70, 72, and 77. Courtesy of Henry Flynt.

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music and those who defined jazz. That was obvious at concerts at the Living Theatre and at Harvard. The fact that Young and some of his friends were proficient, and assertive, as jazz musicians was a turning point in new music. Also notable: Young had had classes in Asian music8 as part of his undergraduate work at U.C.L.A. and was beginning to learn about Hindustani music. [. . .] Let me expand on the views Young expressed at the time. John Cage, [Nam June] Paik’s rampages, and the Events and Happenings which were current in 1960 were already passé for Young. Cage had overthrown Stockhausen’s definition of newness as serialism. Now Young overthrew Cage’s practice of the phantasmagoria. Young told me that Happenings were corny; and we agreed in conversation that all opera and all dance, for example, were worthless because their premises were inherently corny. Young declared in favor of a monotony which avoided “expression” and tumult—and whose more important implication was, as I said, the production of an altered state through narrowed attention and perceptual fatigue or saturation. Tonal music could be rehabilitated as the most radical: if a single fifth was sustained for three hours, for example. [. . .] There was not a moment at which Young announced that some or all of his works were Minimalist. The label was not really put into play until 1966, when it was used for shows of artists who had already been called Pop and would shortly after be called Conceptual. As I briefly noted, there was an outburst of monochrome painting in the fifties by painters who may reasonably be said to have had a neoDada bent. These painters were not understood as committing to Minimalism. (In fact, their early experiments were not who they were.) With Young, the sensibility becomes explicit and programmatic. . . . (Legend has it that the flat, empty landscapes of the Southwest were an inspiration.) The label had not yet appeared, though. A minimalist work is not diminutive, and it is not underdetermined or open to ambient events. It saturates the field with uniformity or monotony. The audience has to supply the psychological modulations, not because the experience is underdetermined—but because the program is a saturation of uniformity. It mattered greatly that Young’s medium was a temporal one whose carrier was “surround sound.” With fatigue, or engrossment, one’s perception altered spontaneously. The experience, therefore, was mindaltering. As Cage said in a Roger Reynolds interview:

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La Monte Young is doing something quite different from what I am doing, and it strikes me as being very important. Through the few pieces of his I’ve heard, I’ve had, actually, utterly different experiences of listening than I’ve had with any other music. He is able either through the repetition of a single sound or through the continued performance of a single sound for a period like twenty minutes, to bring it about that after, say, five minutes, I discover that what I have all along been thinking was the same thing is not the same thing after all, but full of variety. I find his work remarkable almost in the same sense that the change in experience of seeing is when you look through a microscope. You see that there is something other than what you thought was there.9 [. . .]

By the mid-sixties, Young became known, even best-known, for improvised modal music in a theatrical setting: a development which would not have occurred without his jazz preparation. But during 1961–62, he made his move in jazz itself, when he was primarily playing the piano. This development was not chronicled at the time, but it needs to be remembered. A piece played by a jazz combo in the fifties would typically open and close with a Tin Pan Alley tune stated in syncopation. That was, at least in part, a concession to the supper-club audiences’ expectations. The guiding feature of the tune was the harmonic progression or changes. Successive members of the combo took solo choruses, spontaneously providing the changes with a “line.” That left a noticeable disparity in intensity between the tune and the solos. In musicological terms, a bop cut was structured by a harmonic cycle. In musicology, the word modal has at least three meanings. First, a tonic pedal point or constant root. Second, an intervallic scale with unequal intervals (Sanskrit that). Third, a family of melodic shapes presupposing a that (Sanskrit raga). As the era of bop ascendency neared an end, tonic-pedal-point playing appeared more frequently in jazz. It was not perceived as a challenge to the ascendency of bop. As the fifties ended, a few jazz musicians rejected bop form as confining. Certain of us who approached art music as aspiring composers found ourselves wondering where jazz stood relative to the dogmatic vanguardism of International Style. In 1959 Tony Conrad reported back that Young and his California friends were jazz musicians who “knew about” Stockhausen, or who had reached the Stockhausen frontier. As I mentioned, Young commended Coltrane to us; it was the Coltrane who accompanied the Bartók-like Cecil Taylor on Double Clutching. Bop was dethroned by Ornette Coleman, who took the jazz world by storm in 1959–60. Importantly, Coleman’s Free Jazz came from jazz’s

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own core. His innovations included, but were not limited to, discarding the harmonic cycle. Then John Coltrane, who was already eminent, moved to the Impulse label. Coltrane’s breakout came, for example, with the stunning “Chasing the Trane” on Live at the Village Vanguard. Meanwhile, Sonny Rollins, already eminent also, was agonizing over how to radicalize his mainstream sound.10 I see the critical turn in Young’s development in jazz as coming at the moment of Coleman’s notoriety—also the point when Coltrane took up the soprano saxophone and released My Favorite Things on Atlantic. Young was devoted to the model provided by Coltrane. He was skeptical about Coleman’s innovations, which largely abandoned harmonic knowledge, as I just said. He felt that simply freeing the lines from the center yielded an improvised music which was perfunctory. (One might make the same observation about acid rock.) It is worth noting that there was a two-record Coleman album called Free Jazz for which the art was a Pollock painting. (As for me, I was wildly enthusiastic about Coleman. Indeed, free-form jazz appeared concurrently with a sudden upsurge of the civil rights movement. One has to make allowances for my naïve eagerness to affiliate with the developments.) Instead of trying to escape the foundations of jazz into abstraction, Young did the opposite. In the duets he played with Terry Jennings and with me, his piano was the entire “rhythm.” Dropping the disjunction between tune and solo, he isolated a basic “house” piano à la Horace Silver and repeated the chorus ad infinitum with lapidary variations. There was no tune; the line instrument was all solo. In the summer of 1961 Young recorded five jazz takes. Some of them have been aired in Young retrospectives. They are all duets with Terry Jennings, but composer credit varies: Young, Blues in BH; Jennings, Tune in E (take 1); Jennings, Tune in E (take 2); Jennings, Tune in A; Dennis Johnson, 109-bar Tune. Young and I made our only recordings in this format on January 9, 1962. I convinced Young to change his division of the beat from a swing “triplet” to a rock “duplet” (à la Little Richard). Young had not yet gone tonic pedal point; he was paying blues with the changes I7 I7 I7 I7 IV7 IV7 I7 I7 V7 IV7 I7 I7 (eliciting the V–I cadence). In this session, I most successfully used the violin. We played the tape for Earle Brown, and it wowed him; but he told us that the company he worked for would never release it, that I should send it to Nesuhi Ertegun at Atlantic. I did so, and received a letter from Ertegun saying that he had listened with amazement, that it was abso-

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lutely unlike anything else he had ever heard. He said Atlantic could not release it, that I should submit it to Earle Brown. I told Young in a letter that we should play in clubs. Actually, when one listens to the new jazz now, without the prejudices which greeted it at the time, one realizes that new jazz was obviously a treatment of bop—and that the performers possessed a superb bop polish. Patrons of nightclubs expected to hear treatments of bop, no matter how “out” they became.11 As for Young and myself, we could not have found our ways to our respective destinations if we had had to have a polished sound. As Ertegun’s reaction may have indicated, I may have been wholly unrealistic in imagining that we could play in clubs. When I returned to New York in June of 1962, Young had committed to tonic-pedal-point and switched back to line—to saxophone. He was rehearsing in the East Village with Angus MacLise on hand drums and Marian Zazeela on voice drone. Significantly, the venues for this music would be art galleries. When Terry Riley moved to New York, he would play clubs, but as a house pianist rather than as a composer. Young’s episode as a jazz pianist-composer was little celebrated, but it provided me with a permanent inspiration. Young’s way out of fifties bop was not one anybody would have expected. One might have expected him to apply the modernish devices of confusion and combinatorics; but he did nothing of the sort. He stripped the form to a core element and saturated the field with that element. He then left the line instrument to make of it as one wished. (Since my playing was free form, the result was an adjunction of free form to “roots,” not wholly satisfying to me now as a solution.) Musicologist William Thomson has written with amazement that the positions which modernism had defeated were brought back by sixties composers. Who would have guessed that the arcane complexities of Total Serialism, assiduously cultivated in the decades after Schoenberg’s death by Boulez and Babbitt, would be dethroned as the fashion of the day by—of all things— Minimalism? Who would have predicted that any serious composer after 1955 would dare to circulate a piece of music whose very title, In C, would reveal its outré disregard for the evolutionary plateau vaulted by Schoenberg almost a half-century before?12

It may not be as inexplicable as Thomson thinks. Couldn’t Riley have been corroborating the example of Young’s jazz piano—which rested in turn on the conviction that jazz was legitimate?

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jonathan cott profiles yoko ono ( rolling stone, 1971) The following scene takes place in a hotel room one Sunday evening: John [Lennon] is turning on the radio to hear Alex Bennett’s WMCA phone-in program on which tonight he’s playing tracks from Yoko’s album [Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band]—the first time Yoko’s music has been featured on AM radio. “There are people who are going to love it and people who are going to hate it,” Bennett says enthusiastically. “Think that in 1980 music will probably sound like this. Here’s a track called ‘Why,’ so phone in and tell us what you think of it.” “IT’S TODAY’S TUTTI FRUTTI,” John writes on a note pad, so as not to interrupt the music. “I’m 49 years old,” a listener phones in, after listening to “Why Not.” “Forty-nine and I dig it. I heard trains going through a tunnel, then rain—I’m just using my imagination—then what sounded like a bunch of Indians. I dig it, but I really like songs with a melody.” “It was truly disastrous,” a nasal-voiced listener calls up to say. “It’s music, you idiot!” John explains to the radio. “Because it’s not got da-da-da, there’s nothing for him to hook onto.” “You don’t mind hearing the program?” “I want to,” John says. “You see, with Yoko’s and my album, we’re both looking at the same thing from different sides of the table. Mine is literate, hers is revolutionary.” “Paper Shoes” comes on the air with its train sounds. “On one side, at the end of ‘Why Not,’ you’re in the train itself.” “Life is a train, and train is a life,” Yoko says. “The shadows of a train of thought,” someone mutters in the hotel corridor outside. “She’s got a 16-track voice,” adds John. The radio program ends, and John and Yoko are relaxing on the bed, John half-watching the soundless television screen and reading an essay called “Concept Art” by violinist and composer Henry Flynt whom John and Yoko have just visited in New York. “The notion of a concept,” John is reading, “is a vestige of the notion of a platonic form (the thing which e.g., all tables have in common:

Excerpts from Jonathan Cott, “Yoko Ono and Her Sixteen-Track Voice,” Rolling Stone, March 18, 1971, 24–26. Used by permission of Jonathan Cott.

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tableness), which notion is replaced by the notion of a name objectively, metaphysically related to its intention (so that all tables now have in common their objective relation to table).” “Before I met John,” Yoko is saying, “and when I had become sort of famous because of my bottoms film shots of 365 backsides for one hour, a film John describes as Many Happy Endings, that was the loneliest time in my life. Some people resented me because of my fame and made me feel isolated. Now when my record is played on the radio, I’ve got someone who’s pleased.” “When I met John originally, he said it was OK for me to listen to the Beatles’ sessions . . .” John: “I had to get permission!” “So I asked John, why don’t you use different rhythms, not just going ba-ba-ba-ba. It was a kind of avant-garde snobbery on my part because my voice was going [vibrating: uhguh . . . ghuhhh], but there was no beat. So I thought to myself (simpering tone) ‘Well, simple music!’ You see, I was doing music of the mind—no sound at all, and everybody sitting around just imagining sounds. At the Chambers Street Loft concerts I was throwing peas from a bag at the people and I had long hair and I was circling my hair and the movement was a sound. Even then, some people were saying that maybe it was too dramatic. Then there was my Wall Piece, which instructed you to hit the wall with your head, and that was called too dramatic as well. But I felt stifled even with that. I was dying to scream, to go back to my voice. And I came to a point where I believed that the idea of avant-garde purity was just as stifling as just doing a rock beat over and over.” [. . .] “When I was going to Sarah Lawrence, I was mainly staying in the music library and listening to Schoenberg and Webern; they thrilled me, really. And I was writing some serial works at that time. But I was lazy writing out a whole score. And further I was doing the Match Piece in those days, just lighting the match and watching until it disappeared. And I even thought that maybe there was something in me that was going to go crazy, like a pyromaniac. See, I was writing poetry and music and painting, and none of that satisfied me; I knew that the medium was wrong. Whenever I wrote a poem, they said it was too long, it was like a short story; a novel was like a short story, and a short story was like a poem. I felt that I was like a misfit in every medium.” [. . .] “Draw a line with yourself,” Yoko writes in her Line Piece. “Go on drawing until you disappear.” Many of these “pieces” are printed in Grapefruit (Simon and Schuster)—compositions of “Music, Painting,

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Event, Poetry, and Object”—in which the idea of dismembering and disrobing is seminal. Thus in one of her Events, Yoko asks each participant to cut off a piece of her dress until she is naked. And one remembers John and Yoko naked on the cover of Two Virgins and in their two Self-Portrait films. Yoko once wrote: “People went on cutting the parts they do not like of me finally there was only the stone remained of me that was in me but they were still not satisfied and wanted to know what it’s like in the stone.” The point is that the act of taking off one’s clothes is merely a metaphor for the uncovering of the self. [. . .] Yoko’s “Music of the Mind”—e.g., “Peel. Peek. Take off.” (“Pieces for Orchestra,” 1962)—came to fruition in the winter of 1960. She rented a loft on Chambers Street in New York. “All the windows were smoked glass so that you couldn’t really see outside, but there was the skylight, and when you were in the loft you almost felt more connected to the sky than to the city outside. It was a cold water flat, $50.50, and it was great. I didn’t have chairs or beds, and so people downstairs gave me orange crates and I put all the crates together to make a large table, crates for the chairs, and at night I just collected them and made a bed out of them. And I started to live there. “A friend of mine told me that there was a group of artists who were thinking of putting on their works and would I mind if they joined me and did things together. And I said, no, I wouldn’t mind, and perhaps they wouldn’t mind painting my loft for free. But everyone was lazy and didn’t get around to painting it white, but I got used to the grey.” The famous Chambers Street loft concerts featured artists, musicians, poets, a list of whose names reads like a roster of the avant garde hall of fame: Ray Johnson, Walter De Maria, Joseph Byrd, Al Hansen, La Monte Young, Jackson MacLow, Iris Lezak, George Maciunas, Philip Corner, George Brecht, Diane Wakoski, Simone [Forti], Yvonne Rainer, Terry Jennings, Bob Morris, Henry Flynt, David Tudor, and Richard Maxfield.13 “But there was no mention that I should have a concert there, and I wasn’t going to be the one to mention it,” Yoko says. “Somehow my work was still suffering. The idea had been to stop my suffering by getting a place to present my work and at last letting everybody know what I was doing. But it just went on like that. Many people thought that I was a very rich girl who was just ‘playing avant-garde.’ And some others thought that I was a mistress of some very rich man, which wasn’t true either. I think that the reason that some people thought the whole thing was organized by some Chinese man was because La

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figure 3. Yoko Ono with her friends at her loft during the Chambers Street Loft Series, c. 1961. From left: Yoko Ono, Simone Forti, John Cage, David Tudor, Kenji Kobayashi, La Monte Young, Toshi Ichiyanagi, and (standing on Ono’s Painting to be Stepped On) Toshiro Mayuzumi and Isami Noguchi. Photograph by Minoru Niizuma. © Yoko Ono. Courtesy of Yoko Ono.

Monte’s name is Young. And meanwhile I was just surviving by teaching Japanese folk art.”14

the new york times on john cage’s marathon of erik satie’s vexations (1963) Satie’s ‘Vexations’ Played 840 Times by Relay Team Whatever it was, it made musical history, from 6 P.M. Monday to 12:40 P.M. yesterday at the Pocket Theater, 100 Third Avenue near 13th Street.15 In 18 hours and 40 minutes, the 180 notes of Erik Satie’s “Vexations,” an 80-second work, were played 840 times—a grand total of 151,200 notes that took 67,200 seconds to play, and took a relay team

Excerpts from Harold C. Schonberg, “Music: A Long, Long, Long Night (and Day) at the Piano,” New York Times, September 11, 1963, 45. From The New York Times. © 1963. The New York Times Company. All rights reserved. Used under license.

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of 10 pianists, plus two pianists who made an occasional appearance, to play them. The idea was John Cage’s. He had located the music, and the result was conceivably the longest concert since Homer sang the entire “Iliad” and “Odyssey.” As no one man could cover this heroic effort, a relay team of critics was formed, to pass on the baton at, roughly, two-hour intervals.

6 to 8 P.M. Monday By Harold C. Schonberg Viola Farber led off. Before her was a photostat of the “Vexations” manuscript. On it were written, in Satie’s hand, instructions to the effect that the music is to be repeated 840 times. Why 840? It could as easily have been 1,000. Or 329. But he wrote 840, for reasons best known to himself. He was, after all, the great eccentric of French music. “Vexations” was composed around 1920 (Satie died in 1925) and it is a rather pretty, slow-moving, chordal piece of 13 rhythmic beats. There were no program notes. But, thinking that a concert lasting a day and a half might need some kind of come-on, the management did print some house rules: $5 for first admission, refund of 5 cents for each 20 minutes, and a 20-cent bonus to anybody who stayed the entire program. Time cards were issued at the beginning. Miss Farber started promptly at 6, before an audience of seven persons, two of them critics and one a critic’s wife. But everybody felt the hot breath of a historic event. The hall rapidly began to fill. By 8 there were 22 in the audience. They did not stay put; many moved in and out of the hall. Behind the pianist were seated two others—one a score-keeper, the other the relief. At 6:20, Miss Farber rose as Robert Wood moved in. His left hand played the bass theme, and then he slipped behind the vacated keyboard. And so to the others—to MacRae Cook, John Cale, John Cage, Christian Wolff, David Del Tredici, David Tudor, Philip Corner and James Tenney. Joshua Rifkin helped out one 20-minute spell. Note succeeded note: implacably, doggedly, swinging back and forth like a windshield wiper of an automobile, and staying in much the same orbit. Bass line, tritones, bass line, tritones.

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Time meant nothing, and the listener floated in a suspended animation as seconds flowed into minutes with the idiot repetition of beat after beat. Nirvana? Shantih, shantih, shantih . . . [. . .] 11 A.M. to 12:40 P.M. Tuesday By Harold C. Schonberg The strain is beginning to show. Some of the pianists got as much as three hours of sleep. Some did not sleep at all, and looked it. But the music went unfalteringly on. Outside a few theoreticians were discussing the significance of the event. “This kind of music,” said one, “leads to the elimination of conscious control.” “Hell,” said one of the pianists, “All I was trying to do was maintain control.” He yawned. At noon, 30 in the audience, half of them newspaper reporters and photographers. Viola Farber, the last to play, as she had been the first, came out with something added—a rose in her hair. Promptly at 12:40 she finished. A spattering of applause, then great applause. All came on stage twice. Cries of bravo and one yell of encore. One person collected the full refund of $3. He was Karl Schenzer, an actor in the Off Broadway production of “The Brig.” “It was a great experience,” he said, unsmiling. “I feel exhilarated, not at all tired. Time? What is time? In this music the dichotomy between various aspects of art forms dissolves.” Mr. [Charlie] Morrow and Mr. [James] Lee collected $2.50 refunds. They had been in the theater from 8 P.M. Downstairs the pianists were drinking champagne. There was very little talk. “Esthetics? Esthetics has disappeared,” said David Tudor tiredly.

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chapter 2

Dream Music

If you were lucky, in the early 1960s, you might receive a handwritten invitation, with ornate and enigmatic calligraphy, to an unusual event; if not, you might learn about it via a small advert in the Village Voice.1 If you decided to attend one of these mysterious-sounding performances— at a loft, or a farm, or a seemingly abandoned building—you would be greeted with a shock to the senses: the pungency of wafting incense, and the visceral force of profoundly noisy drones. You might sit attentively, or lie down on the floor, and take in the slowly shifting shapes and colors of Marian Zazeela’s light show.2 This was Dream Music: an immersive, multihour spectacle of early minimalism. La Monte Young had relinquished his sopranino saxophone in favor of singing alongside Zazeela; John Cale and Tony Conrad played searing viola and violin; occasional guests, including Terry Riley, joined as well. Dream Music was much more than a concert: the droning began before the audience arrived and continued, in theory, forever. The Theatre of Eternal Music, or the Dream Syndicate, embraced a cosmic grandeur, with lengthy, opaque performance titles that evoked sawmills, black tiger tapestries, and visions of tortoises.3 (Initiates to the cultish ethos of the group would recognize that these were opaque in-references: hacking away at his viola, Cale was the sawmill; Young and Zazeela, who dressed in black, were the tigers; the “dream of the tortoise” referenced the fact that the performers often improvised atop the amplified hum of an aquarium of turtles that Young and Zazeela kept in their 32

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loft.)4 Inspired by a heady mixture of mysticism and mathematics, the Theatre occupied themselves with the relentless pursuit of pure, static harmony. Rather than use the traditional tuning system of most Western music (centered on the black and white keys of the piano), the ensemble employed the “pure” tunings of just intonation, in which harmony could be expressed in whole number ratios.5 Ear-piercing loudness helped them hear slight but crucial nuances in this unconventional tuning method.6 Like other utopias of the period, the Theatre was short-lived—active from 1962 to 1966—and subsequent conflicts between its members have kept recordings from being released for decades. (The tension centered on issues of authority and ownership: Was the group creating collective improvisations, or were they performers executing Young’s compositions?)7 But minimalism wouldn’t be the same afterward—Riley likened a 1964 performance to “the sun coming up over the Ganges.”8 And their influence rippled outward: Cale brought his “jet-engine” viola drones to the feral protopunk of the Velvet Underground; Conrad forged a multidisciplinary, outré path as a conceptual artist, musician, and filmmaker; and Young and Zazeela continued the Dream Music project in celestial compositions and installations.

jill johnston on la monte young and dream music ( village voice , 1964) “Welcome to this presentation of Dream Music” was the first sentence of La Monte Young’s sheet of program notes for three concerts at the Pocket Theatre on October 30 and 31 and November 1. That this music should begin and end at all is merely a limitation of the human condition, for Young’s idea is that such music might persist eternally. As a composer he has always been involved with things that go on a long time, and he says that his longest performed piece was one of the Dreams from “Four Dreams of China.” This piece began at George Segal’s farm nearly two years ago, and since silences were included in the composition and the last silence could continue for an indefinite period of time, the Dream is still going on and presumably it will endure forever. One of Young’s exquisite ideas for eliminating mortal anxiety is the erection of Dream Houses in which performances of this type would be going on

Jill Johnston, “Music: La Monte Young,” Village Voice, November 19, 1964, 14 and 20. Courtesy of The Village Voice.

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continuously in various rooms. One could visit it or reside as a recluse in this “living musical organism.” Holy Meditation Sitting cross-legged in a symmetrical formation in the center of the small Pocket Theatre stage, lighted very dimly, before a large gong with a black painted bull’s eye (made by Robert Morris), the four performers could have been holy people at meditation in a shrine of no particular religion. The setting seems more Oriental than Western, and the music itself is closer to the Orient than to any Western modes of composition, unless you think of a composer like Morton Feldman, whose music is also notable for its drifting static quality, but who prefers the muted tone, often nearly inaudible, to anything remotely approaching the high-powered amplification typical of Young’s music. Speaking of Feldman I am reminded of what Cage said about him, that the flavor of his music struck him as erotic, that the inclination is toward tenderness, with a sensuousness of sound or an atmosphere of devotion. I wouldn’t ascribe tenderness to the shrill abrasion of Young’s music, but I find it even more erotic in its sensuous harmonies amplified to penetrating vibrations. Not only does it pierce your vitals, it also induces rest and sleep. A hypnotic state can be caused by pneumatic drills or dripping Chinese torture water so long as the sound persists in regular intervals, and Young intensifies the persistence by having the “intervals tuned exactly according to frequency ratios.” Young’s concept is harmonic in terms of concomitant or simultaneous frequencies (and by amplification he makes the overtone series of a fundamental pitch audible up to the number of 21); but his work is not rhythmic or melodic in any historical sense. Indian music, upon which he must have modeled his “drone” (a pitch which is held constantly), remains rhythmic in that certain elements of the ensemble maintain a beat which is not fast enough to turn into a pitch. Moreover, to continue the comparison, most classical Indian music assumes a dramatic structure by beginning slowly and building up to a pyrotechnical tour de force. Eternal Extension The drone in Young’s “Tortoise” consists of two voices (his own and Marian Zazeela’s) and two stringed instruments (played by Tony Conrad and John Cale), one of them a viola converted into a three-string drone.

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(The bridge has been redesigned so that the three strings are more or less parallel and can easily be played simultaneously.) There is a contact microphone on each instrument and an ordinary microphone for each singer. The gong has two contact mikes, for “Gong Contests,” Miss Zazeela bows the disc gently for a long time standing on either side of it. Both “Tortoise” and “Gong Contests” are related in strange or obvious ways to Young’s other compositions, like the 29 pieces of 1960, each one titled “Draw a Straight Line and Follow It,” which were performed by Young and Robert Dunn in one of a series of concerts at Yoko Ono’s loft on Chambers Street, and which, if taken literally, as verbal instruction, might extend eternally.9 This important series at Yoko Ono’s loft (an equivalent of the underground cinema without the publicity) was organized by Young shortly after he arrived in New York from California (1960), when his appearance (black velvet suit, voluminous black cape) was such that he might have reminded anyone of what Oscar Wilde said about himself: that he devoted his talent to writing and his true genius to living. Possibly he was taken more seriously as a character than a composer. A number of pieces written in 1960 (printed in the “Anthology” published by Young and MacLow in 1963) were simple instructions, such as “The performer should prepare any composition and then perform it as well as he can” or “This piece is little whirlpools out in the middle of the ocean” or a piece about bringing a bale of hay and a bucket of water onto the stage for the piano to eat and drink. George Brecht’s Yam Festival (1963) and George Maciunas’ Fluxus operations are full of these serious inanities, more Neo-Dada (without the political implications of the original Dada) than anything the critics called Neo-Dada by the new painters of the ’50s. Continuum of Music The pieces by Young quoted above are far from trivial, but taken by themselves they hardly reveal Young’s intense dedication to a continuum of music as a way of life, and to a system of multi-dimensional harmonies that may well be, as he says, a major new development in musical history. Young’s first appearance in New York as an underground dandy also belied the fact that he arrived here on an Alfred Hertz Memorial Travel Scholarship in music composition after a spell of graduate work in Berkeley on a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship. Young says that his far-out activities at the university in California were only tolerated because he was a whiz at conventional harmonics, thereby fulfilling his conventional

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figure 4. Theatre of Eternal Music, December 12, 1965. From left: Tony Conrad, La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela, and John Cale. Photograph by Fred W. McDarrah. Courtesy of Getty Images.

obligation as a conventional student. Last spring Merce Cunningham used Young’s “Two Sounds” to accompany a new work, “Winterbranch.” I described the source of the “Two Sounds” as ashtrays pulled gently over mirrors but apparently it was cans scraping slowly on windows. Both sources were enunciated in California in another form, in a concert with choreographer Ann Halprin, as a piece with Young dragging a gong over a section of cement floor and Terry Riley scraping a wastebasket against the wall. The noise was so deafening that the audience screamed the National Anthem and any other obscenities they could think of to induce a termination of proceedings. A three-hour happening in California, called “Avalanche, Number 1,” included “Poem for Tables, Chairs, and Benches” (the constant wail and moan of that furniture as it was pushed across the floor) familiar to New York from the Yoko Ono series and as the accompaniment to a section of Yvonne Rainer’s “Three Seascapes.” Transcendental Purity Young’s present plans include another series of three concerts at the Pocket Theatre, on November 20, 21, 22, and a project for selling original

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tapes of his music. Some artists remind us of real or impending disasters. Others couldn’t care less about anything outside of a canvas and a pot of paint if that’s what they happen to be involved in. Whether Young cares or not, his music is of transcendental purity, and it certainly suggests a cure if a cure seems necessary, a cure not to resolve conflicts but to simply forget them. Baptism by music. The dissemination of culture by way of original tapes by Young in house, office, and brothel could conceivably raise the culture to an unusual level of sanity.

the theatre of eternal music at the east end theatre (1965) THE AMERICAN THEATRE FOR POETS, INC. presents THE THEATRE OF ETERNAL MUSIC at THE EAST END THEATRE 85 East 4th Street New York City THE OBSIDIAN OCELOT, THE SAWMILL, AND THE BLUE SAWTOOTH HIGH-TENSION LINE STEPDOWN TRANSFORMER REFRACTING THE LEGEND OF THE DREAM OF THE TORTOISE TRANSVERSING THE 189/98 LOST ANCESTRAL LAKE REGION ILLUMINATING QUOTIENTS FROM THE BLACK TIGER TAPESTRIES OF THE DRONE OF THE HOLY NUMBERS THE THEATRE of ETERNAL MUSIC

The American Theater for Poets, Inc. presents The Theatre of Eternal Music at the East End Theatre, 85 East 4th Street, New York City, [March 4, 1965], program notes. Copyright La Monte Young 1965.

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LA MONTE YOUNG voice drone TONY violin CONRAD

4 string drone



JOHN CALE

voice drone MARIAN ZAZEELA design & stage Welcome to this presentation of Dream Music. We are pleased to be continuing our performance of “The Tortoise, His Dreams and Journeys.” In “The Obsidian Ocelot, The Sawmill, and The Blue Sawtooth High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer Refracting The Legend of The Dream of The Tortoise Traversing The 189/98 Lost Ancestral Lake Region Illuminating Quotients from The Black Tiger Tapestries of The Drone of The Holy Numbers,” we have chosen to demonstrate only a select group of pitches which are found in the structure of the overtone series of bowed strings and vocal cords. In Dream Music there is a radical departure from European and even much Eastern music in that the basis of musical relationship is entirely harmony. Not European harmony as textbooks have outlined it, but the intervallic proportions and acoustical consequences of the particular ratios which sound concomitantly in the overtone series when any simple fundamental is produced. Melody does not exist at all (The Disappearance of Melody) unless one is forced to hear the movement from group to group of various simultaneously sounded frequencies derived from the overtone series as melodic because of previous musical conditioning. Even before the first man moved successively from one frequency to another (melody if you like) a pattern for this movement, that is the pitch of the second frequency—whether in a scalic relationship to the first or not—was already predetermined (harmonically) by the overtone structure of the fundamental of the first sound. And in the life of the Tortoise the drone is the first sound. It lasts forever and cannot have begun but is taken up again from time to time until it lasts forever as continuous sound in Dream Houses where many musicians and students will live and execute a musical work. Dream Houses will allow music which, after a year, ten years, a hundred years or more of constant sound, would not only be a real living organism with a life and tradition all its own but

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one with the capacity to propel it itself by its own momentum. This music may play without stopping for thousands of years, just as the tortoise has continued for millions of years past, and perhaps only after the Tortoise has again continued for as many million years as all of the tortoises in the past will it be able to sleep and dream of the next order of tortoises to come and of ancient tigers with black fur and omens the 189/98 whirlwind in the Ancestral Lake Region only now that our species has had this much time to hear music that has lasted so long because we have just come out of a long quiet period and we are just remembering how long sounds can last and only now becoming civilized enough again that we want to hear sounds continuously. It will become easier as we move further into this period of sound. We will become much more attached to sound. We will be able to have precisely the right sounds in every dreamroom, playroom, and workroom, further reinforcing the whole number integer proportions resonating through structure (re: earlier Architectural Music), Dream Houses (shrines, etc.) at which performers, students, and listeners may visit even from long distances away or at which they may spend long periods of Dreamtime weaving the ageless quotients of the Tortoise in the tapestry of Eternal Music. We recall from the performances of “The Tortoise Droning Selected Pitches from The Holy Numbers for The Two Black Tigers, The Green Tiger and The Hermit” and “The Tortoise Recalling The Drone of The Holy Numbers As They Were Revealed in The Dreams of The Whirlwind and The Obsidian Gong and Illuminated by The Sawmill, The Green Sawtooth Ocelot and The High-Tension Stepdown Transformer” that in order to produce convincing textures exemplary of more complex rational frequency ratios than are used in almost any other music and at the same time to maintain the forcefulness of just intonation as found occasionally in Oriental, Country and Western, or pre-Baroque music and often in sounds of electrical equipment and machinery, the performers avoid vibrato or other rhythmic changes and employ intonation tolerances closer than two cents, which is ordinarily the smallest pitch change considered audible. This particularly high intonation accuracy has further led the group to amplify each sound source, so as to make the presence of partials and combination tones accessible to the listener. Normal intonation standards have resulted in the currently customary amplification and recording techniques, which eliminate or de-emphasize these delicate tones. All of this, however, should not be taken as an indication that the listener cannot expect to appreciate these subtleties, since the effect of

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this degree of control is clearly audible and vividly immediate. This is to be expected, since the physical basis of this harmonic pitch usage lies close to the very nature of musical perception by the ear. The production of closely in-tune intervals is at least a nominal objective in most musical styles. But it is rarely concentrated in so pure and audible a state as in the static form and drifting quiet of The Tortoise since the performers allow harmonic tension to absorb all the nervous impetus usually found in formal musical structure, and to retire to the sedate motionlessness of complete sensory involvement in the sound. If one is listening consciously to many frequencies concomitantly, it is understandable that more time is desirable to properly appraise and work with the situation. Given a 3/2 interval produced by bowed strings or voices, over a period of a few hours we begin to know the upper partials engendered by the particular combination of instruments at hand and then gradually we develop techniques for controlling these partials. To be caught up in the simple game of organizing or permuting fundamentals is almost as archaic as being involved in the rather popular world-wide game of permuting rhythms slower than pitches, although this is a sport that most of the fundamental-organizers are engaged in anyway. But we can consider this a folly of only a few hundred or at worst a few thousand years, and as long as we are willing to learn from it we should be able to move on, thus allowing the continuation of several thousand years of careful development in the world of sound, maintaining ancient tradition while exploring new formulations and equations which can be held within the realm of consciousness only now that the species has had this much time to experience the tradition.

tony conrad replies to critic peter yates (1965) Dear Mr. Yates,   I was pleased to read in your encyclopedic “Travels” (No. 5), among much other interesting and significant reportage, that you had been so favorably impressed by the work that I have been involved in for the last several years in collaboration with La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela, & John Cale.10 I am also happy to hear from La

Tony Conrad, letter to Peter Yates, November 13, 1965, Peter Yates Papers, MSS 14, University of California, San Diego, Box 3, Folder 36. Courtesy of Ted Conrad.

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Monte that you intend to disseminate your opinions further in a forthcoming book. I understand that he, as leader of the group, is presently wording a reply to you in which he will clarify certain points as to titles, etc.; upon the importance of which we all agree. However, as a string player, I feel compelled to try to clarify a few points myself, since I feel somewhat responsible for the development of the most radical and effective new technique of violin playing since the time of Biber, or at least Paganini. The crux of the matter is the “play of overtones and difference tones which, via loudspeaker, seemed almost orchestral.” No more concise and inspired description of the sound we work toward has yet appeared, yet because we do achieve exactly this, it is practically impossible for the uninitiated listener to decipher the inter-instrumental rapport and follow the motion of a single part. It is actually a tribute to the smoothness of the string players tone that you found us each to be sustaining a single note, whereas in fact between us we almost always sound five discrete pitches! John plays a viola that has been modified to allow the production of sound from three strings at once with essentially equal intensity, and I play nothing but double-stops on the violin, with the additional reinforcement of a substantially audible resonating string. The effect is all the more remarkable when one considers that we play harmonies selected from a gamut of up to 20 or more tones to the octave. The only way to convert such a bewildering array of material into a mosaic so fine that it seems nobody even changes pitch is to maintain extremely exact intonation. When overtones and especially difference tones are artificially made loud enough to contribute significantly to the total sound, they must be kept in tune as surely as the fundamentals, or their audibly recognizable relationship will be lost in a torrent of pulsating arbitrary beat rhythms. For the performer, this means a number of things. First, every nuance of bowing or breathing will be amplified along with the combination tones, so that one’s style is already unusually constricted—“no slight task of concentration.” Second, it means that a carefully articulated balance must be maintained among the fundamentals so that the combination tones will keep fairly stable. And primarily, since difference tones move out of tune 6 to 12 times as easily as the fundamentals that are actually fingered, it means that the accuracy & stability of intonation demanded is about 6 to 12 times more precise than even the usual type of just-intonation playing. It took me more than six months at first before I felt confident enough about my intonation of the first two fingered notes that I attempted, to

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figure 5. Marian Zazeela, concert invitation for La Monte Young, the Celebration of the Tortoise. © La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela 1966. Courtesy of Betty Freeman Papers, UC San Diego.

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go on to others. Even now, we must maintain a regular daily group rehearsal schedule, to keep in shape enough to avoid being completely absorbed in the problems of technique confronting each of us, and to work effectively on the problems of coordinating ensemble playing. I hope that this glimpse of our dedication to “Dream Music,” which may not be readily apparent on stage, will help to substantiate the impression which our end-product has created. Sincerely yours, Tony Conrad P.S. If it should prove useful to you to incorporate any of the above in your discussion of “Dream Music,” please feel free to do so, in any form whatever.

kate lloyd on four evenings of music with la monte young ( vogue, 1966) “Where” has almost as much to do as “what” with the impact of La Monte Young’s music. To hang his piercing, sustained sounds timeless in space requires a conditioned space.11 Carefully hand-lettered invitations directed hand-picked guests to Four Evenings of Music with La Monte Young, and to one of those evenings, not long ago, I went. To start with, a building—named “The Four Heavens”—a tall, gutted, blistered, nineteenth-century building: Larry Poons’s studio on Church Street, five storeys high, three windows wide, almost empty inside and largely painted white, including the floors—a scurfy white, pocked and sooted into elaborate textures. Entrance floor: only a white stairway leading up to a closed door. First floor, through the closed door: a Pinkerton man with guest lists at a card table, two coat racks at the back of the one large room. At the front are a silver-striped painting by Frank Stella, another painting, yellow, Z-shaped, by Neal Williams, a John Chamberlain car-bash sculpture, and a man, live, cross-legged on the floor tinkering with some wiring. A black telephone on the floor, an FM radio shoved on a windowsill behind one of the coat racks. A small electric clock is balanced

Kate Lloyd, “. . . And One Evening When Listeners ‘Floated Away,’ ” Vogue (May 1966): 198 and 242–43. Kate Lloyd, Vogue © Condé Nast.

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on a jutting pipe in a wall. From the ceiling hangs a big, green, industrial-sized hot-air blower, blowing hot air. No other sound. Later, it seemed to me that the noise of this serviceable blower was, like everything in the building, a deliberate effect—an exploited accident. I am surrounded by lessons in the art of the exploited accident. On every floor there are “No Smoking” signs scrawled in black paint on white paper, and signed, “L. Poons, L. Young.” Two flights up the sign reads: “No Smoking of Any Kind.” The stairways, designed originally to be open, were at some time in the remote past roughly enclosed in board-and-batten. Now the door to each upper floor hangs open. Through the first of these doors, I go up another flight. Silence. Apparently. The drone of the hot-air blower below is lost, the drone of the music above not yet found. Second floor: a painter’s studio, stripped. Larry Poons’s towering canvases turned face to the walls and protected by great, ragged-edged sheets of tan corrugated cardboard as high and wide as spite fences. A white-canvas-covered mattress on the floor. At the front of the room, a black-leather “analyst’s” couch splashed and daubed with paints. Beyond it, under the windows, a store of paints—row on row of Boatlife enamel and acrylic paints—a massed display of cardboard cartons and jars of colour. No one here. On the side of the next flight of stairs, painted a tired brown, are two large smears of bright paint, each a vivid, different pink. On the white brick wall opposite, a clustered series of short painted lines in various colours like the marks prisoners make to keep track of the days. Strong overhead lights. White walls, white ceiling, white floor. A sense of waiting. People have been here and will return. A man walks down the stairs, through the room, and out. The backs of our heads pass. Neither of us looks at each other. I climb another flight through another gaping door. Third floor: Suddenly ominous, I almost panic and run. The light is washed out, the embossed metal ceiling, a rusty brown. Wainscotting and window frames are a surly, threatening green. A red-and-white exit sign on one of the bleak windows suggests a macabre joke. One more canvas-covered mattress. The sound now filtering from the floor above suggests further alarm—a long, harsh drone, not bagpipes, not buzzsaws, not amplified mosquitoes; more deliberate, more unequivocal, a distant juggernaut of noise. In a corner of this unsettling room, near the stairs, below a vertical track of slightly corroded electrical conduits, three pieces of wrapping twine are tacked and pulled tautly, horizontally, across the corner to the

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adjacent wall and tacked again there. Above this second point, on two small pieces of notepaper, exquisitely penned information describes the electronic sound equipment upstairs. Everything, and nothing, about this house is an accident. Top floor: I go up into a caustic bath of sound, a room half-dark. The only lights are from one rectangular light box with, on the white, translucent glass of its face, a symmetrical, silhouetted pattern of calligraphic tendrils and curves (a “votive design” implicit of suspended motion), and from small spotlights projecting on the white wall behind the four performers overlapping, curled pink and green patterns similar to the one on the light box. Three singers sit in a row cross-legged on an Oriental rug with one violinist perched near them on a low stool. The singers: two men, one of whom is La Monte Young, and his wife, all wear pale silk kimonos and dark glasses; the violinist—no glasses—trousers, shirt, stocking feet, and a glittery ruby-red open vest (hints of Arabian Nights).12 Before them on the rug lie the scattered viscera of excellent sound equipment, individual microphones, boxes with switches and dials, sound boxes, wires—and a brass Indian ash tray with three punk-shaped sticks of incense—King of Mogra, Laxmi Dhoop, and Lord Krishna Puja—burning. In the gloom of the deep room an indeterminate number of bodies sit on the floor or on mattresses, lie down where there is room to, or huddle against the walls. We are all submerged, swamped in light, sound, and scent. Endlessly drawn-out notes continue with no noticeable start or finish, sometimes as appeasingly coherent as a Beethoven finale, sometimes a wrench of dissonance, music going nowhere, simply existing, almost slightly more in space than in time. The human tones fall between nasal billy-goat bleats and saying a-a-ah for your doctor. The effect is curiously satisfying. All intellectual criticism suspended—there is neither content nor performance to criticize. Concentration impossible— here is no circumscribed body of sound or climaxes to concentrate on. Dismissal impossible—there is no turnoff point, no intermission with orange drinks. There is nothing to do but accept, and the acceptance is singularly relaxing. Occasionally, in the half-light, people arrive or leave quietly, a few tiptoeing as self-consciously as children “excused” in a Young People’s Concert. Within this fluctuating group of thirty to fifty people, one man sits immobile in a yoga posture, the pink and green spotlights edging his face.

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Above the performers a part of the ceiling seems to be painted the colour of dried blood. To one side of them a target-like disc several feet across painted white with a black circle in the centre hangs like a Chinese gong. (It is, in fact, a gong.) The patterned light box on their other side faces the stairs, stunning the eyes of those arriving. Three young men sprawl in identical poses, like Roman banqueters, on a mattress in the middle of the room. Against one wall a young woman in black trousers is sitting, her knees up, her head bent so that her hair falls in a thin screen like willow branches around her face. With one hand she gropes quietly in her black bag and pulls out a Kleenex. Is she crying? Briefly, at one point, the musicians stop, sip from mugs of Mu tea—or rose-hip tea, or dandelion coffee—and talk softly among themselves. The lights behind the slides of calligraphic squiggles, which have been minutely moving, brightening, darkening, are turned off for a short while. Then, apparently arbitrarily, everything starts again. With closed eyes, I can scarcely locate the direction of the sounds. They surround me. When I leave, things are slightly different on the various stories of the house—a mattress removed; a couple now earnestly talking on the black-leather couch; the man who had been wiring now departed. These accidental changes drop upon these rooms like further steps in an art. Outside on the street a man ushering two women into a taxi is braying one long note. He thinks he is poking fun at the music, but he persists, taking the absent-minded pleasure in his long-drawn tone that small children find in pure, unqualified sound.

tim souster on “sustained sounds” in “pop” and “serious” music (1969) Playing long stretches of music is a commonplace to “pop” and “serious” musicians. It seems natural in both contexts that, if a sound feels as if it should go on for some time, it should be allowed to do so. It has been learnt in both fields that a sustained sound which, objectively measured, changes scarcely at all, can, on the subjective level, come alive and fascinate us with its constant internal modifications. The modifications are in reality operating mainly within us, while the sound remains fixed, like a pivot. Excerpt from Tim Souster, “Through the Sound Barrier,” Observer, October 5, 1969, 56–57. Copyright 1969 Tim Souster. Courtesy of Penny Souster.

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This fascination with single sounds is not necessarily a lack of inventiveness in the composer or a self-indulgent surrender to mindlessness in the listener. Having heard the sustained sounds of composers such as La Monte Young, Terry Riley and Cornelius Cardew, of groups such as The Who and the Velvet Underground, one realizes that their inventiveness lies in the choice of a sound with a rich internal structure which only reveals itself during a considerable passage of time. The music of Young, Riley and Cardew does not meet its audiences halfway, but once grasped it soon repays the effort. Young is perhaps the most way-out musician at work in the world today, the only composer that John Cage, composer, philosopher and sociologist and the most challenging and influential of all avant-garde thinkers, has found puzzling. Young has a penchant for unprepossessing sounds; which he prolongs for hours on end at shattering volume in his New York concerts. Young’s influence on Cornelius Cardew, for years the enfant terrible of British music, has been strong. He is the gentlest person I know, but with a fanatical streak which gives such strength and originality to his latest and best works, the “Great Digest” series to texts by Confucius. Terry Riley on the other hand is Californian to the core. A brilliant saxophonist and keyboard player, he has developed whole new instrumental techniques and a phenomenal stamina essential to playing his marathon instrumental hammering pieces, one of which, “In C,” will I feel come to be looked back on as a masterpiece of the 1960s. In comparison with this The Who’s music is scarcely way-out. Even so, at first hearing, their album “Tommy,” which is a song-cycle rather than an opera, seemed both too mosaic in form and insufficiently contrasted in its components with their relentlessly pounding rhythms and restricted range of instrumental color. After repeated hearing, though, the very insistence and simplicity of the beat unify the mosaic song elements by means of an unfailing momentum which affects the listener in a manner comparable to the sustained rhythmless sounds described above. It is here that the largest area of common ground has been discovered. The pounding chordal pop of The Who and the Velvet Underground is not just a link with the music of Riley and Young, it occupies the same sound-world. The Velvet Underground was formed in 1966 at the instigation of Andy Warhol, the high priest of anti-variation. His notorious films are the visual counterparts of La Monte Young’s endless unvarying sounds. John Cale, the Welsh viola player and one of the leading musical spirits of the Underground, is also a member of Young’s and Riley’s

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Society for Eternal Music, whose members get together to play for hours on end if they happen to be in the same city at the same time.13 Cale is the main reason why the Velvet Underground sounds as though it has been influenced more by the principles of Cage, Young and Warhol and the music of Young and Riley than by anything to do with “pop” music. A term which is commonly made to embrace both them and the Beach Boys needs inverted commas to hold it together. Perhaps the best track the Velvet Underground have yet recorded is the 17-minute “Sister Ray” from the album “White Light, White Heat.” It is remarkable not just for the way in which its extended form gives its massive sound time to develop. During “Sister Ray” an uncanny process of paring down seems to be at work, as it were, beyond the control of the players. First, the blue notes are discarded, then the harmonies, then the vestiges of melody, leaving the key-note G in full command. The music is a barbaric and frightening experience, but it is also some of the most truthful yet to have come out of electric instruments. One can listen to it in exactly the same way as one listens to Stockhausen, or Cardew, or Riley, or Young, who for me are the most vital forces in “serious” music today. One should not want all “pop” music to sound like the Velvet Underground or all “serious” music to sound like La Monte Young, and of course they never will. But their convergence is already quite marked and growing more so. The main point is that when the Soft Machine talk about the influence on their music of Satie, the diminutive, umbrellahoarding Rosicrucian hydrophobe who left such a deep impression on Debussy and Stravinsky at the beginning of the century, or Messiaen, they are not talking in the same terms as Stan Kenton on Bartók—or Gunther Schuller, New York hornist, composer, conductor and playsafe third stream jazzman, on anything. They are talking about the very roots of their music. They are the roots of today’s “serious” music too.

john cale, tony conrad, and lou reed on the early history of the velvet underground Cale:  La Monte was perhaps the best part of my education and my introduction to musical discipline.

Excerpts from Victor Bockris and Gerard Malanga, Up-Tight: The Velvet Underground Story (London: Omnibus, 1983), 13, 14, 18, and 20. Courtesy of Omnibus Press.

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  We formed The Dream Syndicate, which consisted of two amplified voices, an amplified violin and my amplified viola. The concept of the group was to sustain notes for two hours at a time. La Monte would hold the lowest notes, I would hold the next three on my viola, his wife Marian would hold the next note and this fellow Tony Conrad would hold the top note. That was my first group experience and what an experience it was!   It was so different. I mean the tapes are art objects. Some people who came to our concerts know what it was like, but it is the only example of that kind of music in the world. The Indians use the drone also, but they use a totally different tuning system and though they attempt a scientific approach, they don’t really have it buttoned down like we did.   When we formed The Dream Syndicate I needed to have a strong sound. I decided to try using guitar strings on my viola, and I got a drone that sounds like a jet-engine! Playing the viola in the just intonation system was so exciting. [. . .] Tony Conrad:  In the fall of 1964, John Cale and I were sharing an apartment at 56 Ludlow Street, which is now sealed up. We had been working with La Monte for some time doing very austere regimented things which were pretty intense. We had been talking about serious things like intervals, and Indian music and theory and avant-garde music, but when John moved into my place on Ludlow Street it turned out that when I went home I sat around listening to Hank Williams records and was blasting a huge 45 collection. John started getting interested in rock & roll, although there was a great ambiguity in his mind about how somebody could be interested in both rock and classical music. But there was something very liberating about the whole rock thing, and in a sense 56 Ludlow Street came to stand for a lot in terms of some kind of liberating musical influence. [. . .] Cale:  When I met Lou, he was a staff writer for some publishing company. He played me the songs he’d written for them, but they were nothing new or terribly exciting. They were just like every other song on the radio. But then he played me several which he claimed they wouldn’t publish. He played “Heroin” first and it totally knocked me out. The words and music were so raunchy and devastating. What’s more, his songs fit perfectly with my music concept.

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Conrad:  So Lou began coming into the city and began getting together with John. I took off, so there was more room in the pad and Lou soon moved in, which was great because we got him out of his mother’s place. Lou was like a rock & roll animal and authentically turned everybody on. He really had a deep fixation on that and his lifestyle was completely compatible and acclimatized to it. He was definitely a liberating force for John, but John was an incredible person too.   He was very idealistic in the sense of putting himself behind what he was interested in and believed in in a tremendous way, and anytime you do that you wind up with fantastic abilities and experiences, so there was a tremendous amount of resonance going on there musically. Lou was definitely possessed by rock & roll. He was definitely a rock & roll punk straight from the books, but the books were only written twenty years later. On the other hand there was no group of people in music more sophisticated than the group we were involved with. This was an unbelievably alert group of people who were engaged in a way which was part of and in touch with everything, open to everything, particularly John—the way that he sought out La Monte and engaged himself directly with the group and the way that he lived, which was extremely ascetic and barren and weird. John was a very interesting person in terms of his personal aura and the kind of creative presence that he brought about, and inventive in terms of ideas about techniques. In terms of musical influence what John was doing with the viola, which had grown out of the kinds of things we were doing in our group, was obviously tremendously important and yet it was extremely odd that we wandered into this group of people who tuned their guitars all to one note.   Rather than suggesting that there was an influence that flowed one way or another I’m trying to suggest that it seemed like a very powerful encounter in a sense, each of them moving in a direction which was daring and audacious for the other as well as themselves. John was moving at a very very fast pace away from a classical training background through the avant-garde and into performance art and then rock. It was phenomenal for Lou considering his interest in what would be referred to today as punk—somebody who is really living rock and is interested in an extremely aggressive assertive position—to discover that classical musicians and avantgarde artists were also engaged in that. There was a real bonding

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that occurred between John and Lou in that particular relationship. [. . .] Reed:  I first started thinking about “Metal Machine Music” as far back as when John used to work with La Monte Young. It took a long time. It’s way more complex than people realize, but that’s alright. I wasn’t going to put it out even; I made it for myself.

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chapter 3

Loops and Process

Terry Riley’s In C was, according to Glamour magazine, “the global village’s first ritual symphonic piece.” The hallucinogenic, pulse-based revolution of Riley’s music evoked, for writer Janet Rotter, the globalized ethos theorized by countercultural icon Marshall McLuhan.1 McLuhan famously argued that the medium was the message, and the minimalists’ 1960s medium of choice was tape.2 Though written down and performed by live instrumentalists, In C was rooted in Riley’s prior work splicing, manipulating, and looping tape recordings for Mescalin Mix (1961) and Music for the Gift (1963).3 The looping technique in particular stuck, and translated to In C, a jam session score comprising fifty-three repeating, modular riffs, to which Steve Reich famously introduced a driving pulse to hold the musicians together at the 1964 premiere.4 More seismic than that San Francisco concert was the hit 1968 recording released on Columbia’s Music of Our Time series, which brought minimalism to a broader public (and Glamour); soon the Who paid tribute to Riley’s loops in their song “Baba O’Riley,” and Mike Oldfield imitated his techniques in the chart-topping Tubular Bells.5 Reich eagerly integrated Riley’s approach into his own experimentation, beginning with his tape piece It’s Gonna Rain—originally titled It’s Gonna Rain, or Meet Brother Walter in Union Square after Listening to Terry Riley.6 In a fruitful accident, after cuing up two identical recordings he made of the Pentecostal street preacher Brother Walter intoning an apocalyptic sermon, Reich realized that the tapes slowly 52

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shifted out of phase, producing unforeseen acoustic effects. His followup, the 1966 Come Out, sampled the recorded testimony of Daniel Hamm, one of the “Harlem Six,” a group of Black teens who had been wrongfully incarcerated and beaten by the police (the electronic work was created for a benefit concert raising funds for their retrial); Reich phased two identical tapes of Hamm’s voice, which he split into four and then eight voices.7 The composer soon translated this approach to live instruments in Piano Phase—in which two pianists repeat the same, simple melodic line and incrementally fall out of sync—and, in 1968, codified his aesthetic with the manifesto “Music as a Gradual Process.” In this watershed essay, the composer rejected the inaudible techniques of indeterminacy and serialism and instead argued for the importance of musical processes that could be clearly heard, in real time, by the listener.8 Suddenly, it seemed that everyone was interested in musical processes. A likeminded cohort of British composers including John White and Michael Parsons operated under the banner of the “machine concept” and “systems music”; Philip Glass developed an “additive process” for his groundbreaking work of the late sixties and early seventies; Riley honed a style of improvisation called “timelag accumulation”; the Moog synthesizer band Mother Mallard’s Portable Masterpiece Company used tape-looping procedures; and Meredith Monk wove together the droning whirs of a stroked wine glass with repetitive vocal phrases, in her own intuitive systems.9

alfred frankenstein on the premiere of in c (san francisco chronicle , 1964) Terry Riley, who got his training as a composer in the Bay Region, is back after several years in Europe, and he reported in to the local public in a concert Friday night at the San Francisco Tape Center. During his sojourn abroad he has developed a style like that of no one else on earth, and he is bound to make a profound impression with it. He uses a variety of structural devices, but they all seem to eventuate in much the same effect. He begins with very simple melodic material, restricted in compass to only a few notes. This is very simply harmonized, Alfred Frankenstein, “Music Like None Other on Earth,” San Francisco Chronicle, November 8, 1964, 28. From San Francisco Chronicle. © 1964. Hearst Newspapers. All rights reserved. Used under license.

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at least at the start. The rhythms are as axiomatic as the other elements, the tempo is brisk and rigidly unchanging, and the volume level is consistently loud. This primitivistic music goes on and on. It is formidably repetitious, but harmonic changes are slowly introduced into it; there are melodic variations and contrasts of rhythm within a framework of relentless continuity, and climaxes of great sonority and high complexity appear and are dissolved in the endlessness. At times you feel you have never done anything all your life long but listen to this music and as if that is all there is or ever will be, but it is altogether absorbing, exciting, and moving, too. One is reminded of the efforts of Carlos Chavez to reconstitute the ceremonial music of preColumbian Mexico. Terry Riley may have captured more of its spirit than Chavez did. Not that the pre-Columbian analogy is Riley’s ultimate value. The style discussed here reached its peak in a piece for instrumental ensemble called “In C,” which stayed on C for the better part of an hour but left one refreshed rather than satiated.10 Riley does other things, too. A piece called “I” turned out to be a dramatic sketch based entirely on inflections of the perpendicular pronoun as taped by John Graham. This was the furthest from the manner of “In C.” But “In C” was the evening’s masterpiece and I hope the same group does it again.

janet rotter on the columbia recording of in c (glamour , 1969) This month I’m also driving for a non-pop piece of abstract music, In C, composed by Terry Riley, a former piano player and saxophonist. In it, one can discover the identical kinetic tension (inner motion) of the wildly popular sculptures of Jean Tinguely or Venice Biennale winner Julio Le Parc, and I’m happy to say that In C fills a complete record album (Columbia) which has been brightly produced and attractively packaged. It is too improvisatory for classical music, nor does it show jazz roots. If I have to call it something, then that would be “the global village’s first ritual symphonic piece.” Here’s what happens: “The pulse,” a steady drumming of notes on the top two C’s of the piano

Excerpt from Janet Rotter, “Sound,” Glamour (February 1969), 66. Copyright Janet Rotter, courtesy of Stephen & Zoe Rotter.

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figure 6. Katrina Krimsky (formerly known as Margaret Hassell), Terry Riley, and Jon Hassell rehearsing in Buffalo, 1968. Courtesy of Terry Riley. Used by permission.

keyboard, creates a spine of energy for improvisation from vibraphones, saxophones, flutes, violas, oboes, woodwinds, bassoons, etc. Constantly playing, it plays tricks on the listener’s ear, creating illusory sound patterns the way optical illusions are created by the blur of motion in kinetic sculpture. You’ll hear vibrations and echoes which Riley never put in the basic score that comes written down on the inside of the album jacket. That pulse sends out the kind of energy excitement that electrifies a pop-concert audience or a political crowd hearing a victory speech or football fans seeing the last-minute touchdown in a tie game. Terry Riley has not yet reached the mass concert audience that the Beatles have, but he has written in his own way to that audience. In C, I believe, celebrates with honesty and guts the mass life we live today.

terry riley’s notes on poppy nogood’s phantom band (1967) The music heard on these two evenings will consist of sections from the following two compositions: Terry Riley, Poppy NoGood’s Phantom Band, New York, Steinway Hall, April 25–26, 1968. Copyright Terry Riley. Used by permission.

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Solo Time Lag Music for Soprano Saxophone (1963–present) This composition utilizes the time lag accumulation technique I first explored in the music for “The Gift” in 1963. All the material that I am playing subsequently recycles and combines in an accumulative manner. In this way many generations of the material can be quickly built up without having to add each track one at a time, therefore adapting itself naturally to use in live performance. This is the freest of all my recent work as the automatic ordering of the material in the timelag accumulation process allows me to play quite complicated material which then is arranged into loops and recycled. I have found this such an effective way of producing music that it has occupied the larger part of my time since 1963. I have written no scores for this music as so far it has all been governed by an intuitive relationship developed between me and the machines. I do have a catalog of material which I use as a basis for these improvisations and am constantly adding new patterns. However, I want to keep the music in the tradition of unwritten improvised music. Keyboard Studies (1965–present) The keyboard studies are a part of the work begun in 1964 and are also improvisatory in nature. The two hands combine repeated patterns of varying lengths. Cycles that combine 2–9 beats and any combinations thereof are matched in spontaneous selection, either hand capable of shifting independently to another cycle. The product is polymetric cycling and combined patterns can range to any length—a result of being the common denominator of the 2 component patterns. All patterns are built on a preselected mode or scale. Occasionally melodic passages may be introduced which are composed of a number of patterns linked together.

carman moore reviews steve reich’s tape music ( village voice, 1966) Composer Steve Reich presented two evenings and a Sunday afternoon (May 27–29) of tape music at the Park Place Gallery utilizing simple musical means to a complex end. There seems to be a new listening style for electronic music audiences, presumably to call attention to the

Carman Moore, “Park Place Electronics,” Village Voice, June 9, 1966, 17. Courtesy of The Village Voice.

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figure 7. Steve Reich and Art Murphy perform Reich’s Piano Phase, 1970. Photograph © Richard Landry.

humanity of it all, because, as I’ve noticed at other such presentations, foam-rubber pillows were made available for sitting or sprawling. In all of the three pieces I heard, Mr. Reich employed a compositional approach involving the presentation of the material over a stereo track, probing that material by kaleidoscopically shifting its relationships against itself, and finally pushing the transmutation to the point of incomprehensibility. These procedures, while not at all unfamiliar to non-electronic composers, seemed to be Mr. Reich’s central musical concern. If his opening material were the words “come out to show them,” as was the case in the third work, those words would be always present, reiterated for the entire piece in various transmutations.11 One found the “sh” sound of “show” assuming the sound of maracas, and that the normal phrase speech contains pitches and becomes a kind of tune when employed in a round against itself. Elements such as rock and roll and the fan belts of large machines are of our time and in a sense experientially validate and clarify Mr. Reich’s strident, reiterative work, though on one level Mr. Reich’s work suggested a raga exercise, distorting and distorting to incandescence. On the debit side, I should like to have heard a quiet piece or some dynamic variance on such an evening’s essay. I found that once one

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understood the technique, listening to the pieces became like watching sea waves; only so much can happen—fascinating though it be.

steve reich, “music as a gradual process” (1968/1971) I do not mean the process of composition, but rather pieces of music that are, literally, processes.12 The distinctive thing about musical processes is that they determine all the note-to-note (sound-to-sound) details and the overall form simultaneously. (Think of a round or infinite canon.) I am interested in perceptible processes. I want to be able to hear the process happening throughout the sounding music. To facilitate closely detailed listening a musical process should happen extremely gradually. Performing and listening to a gradual musical process resembles: pulling back a swing, releasing it, and observing it gradually; turning over an hour glass and watching the sand slowly run through the bottom; placing your feet in the sand by the ocean’s edge and watching, feeling, and listening to the waves gradually bury them.

Though I may have the pleasure of discovering musical processes and composing the musical material to run through them, once the process is set up and loaded it runs by itself. Material may suggest what sort of process it should be run through (content suggests form), and processes may suggest what sort of material should be run through them (form suggests content). If the shoe fits, wear it. As to whether a musical process is realized through live, human performance or through some electro-mechanical means is not, in the final analysis, very important. One of the most beautiful concerts I ever heard consisted of four composers playing their tapes in a dark hall. (A tape is interesting when it’s an interesting tape.)

Steve Reich, “Music as a Gradual Process,” Source: Music of the Avant-Garde 5, no. 2 (1971): 30; first published as “Music as a Gradual Process” in Anti-Illusion: Procedures/ Materials, ed. Marcia Tucker and James Monte (New York: Whitney Museum of Art, 1969), 56–57. Copyright Steve Reich.

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It’s quite natural to think about musical processes if one is frequently working with electro-mechanical sound equipment. (All music turns out to be ethnic music.) Musical processes can give one a direct contact with the impersonal and also a kind of complete control, and one doesn’t always think of the impersonal and complete control as going together. By “a kind” of complete control I mean: by running this material through the process I completely control all that results, but also that I accept all that results without changes. John Cage has used processes and has certainly accepted their results, but the processes he used were compositional ones that could not be heard when the piece was performed. The process of using the I Ching or imperfections in a sheet of paper to determine musical parameters can’t be heard when listening to music composed that way. The compositional processes and the sounding music have no audible connection. Similarly in serial music, the series itself is seldom audible. This is a basic difference between serial (basically European) music and serial (basically American) art, where, in the latter, the perceived series is usually the focal point of the work. What I’m interested in is a compositional process and a sounding music that are one and the same thing. James Tenney said in conversation, “Then the composer isn’t privy to anything.” I don’t know any secrets of structure that you can’t hear. We all listen to the process together since it’s quite audible, and one of the reasons it’s quite audible is because it’s happening extremely gradually. The use of hidden structural devices in music never appealed to me. Even when all the cards are on the table and everyone hears what is gradually happening in a musical process, there are still enough mysteries to satisfy all. These mysteries are the impersonal, unattended, psycho-acoustic by-products of the intended process. These might include sub-melodies heard within repeated melodic patterns, stereophonic effects due to listener location, slight irregularities in performance, harmonics, difference tones, etc. Listening to an extremely gradual musical process opens my ears to it, but it always extends farther than I can hear, and that makes it interesting to listen to the musical process again. That area of every gradual (completely controlled) musical process, where one hears the details of the sound moving out away from intentions, occurring for their own acoustic reasons, is it.

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I begin to perceive these minute details when I can sustain close attention and a gradual process invites my sustained attention. By “gradual” I mean extremely gradual; a process happening so slowly and gradually that listening to it resembles watching a minute hand on a watch—you can perceive it moving after you stay with it a little while. Several currently popular modal musics, such as Indian Classical and drug-oriented rock and roll, may make us aware of minute sound details; because in being modal (constant key center, hypnotically droning and repetitious) they naturally focus on these details rather than on key modulation, counterpoint and other peculiarly Western devices. Nevertheless, these modal musics remain more or less strict frameworks for improvisation. They are not processes. The distinctive thing about musical processes is that they determine all the note-to-note details and the overall form simultaneously. One can’t improvise in a musical process—the concepts are mutually exclusive. While performing and listening to gradual musical processes one can participate in a particularly liberating and impersonal kind of ritual. Focusing in on the musical process makes possible that shift of attention away from he and she and you and me outwards towards it.

philip glass, “program notes” (1972) The main concern of my work has been repetitive structures and additive process based on a steady eight note beat. From the beginning, this music has been strongly tonal. The melodic material emphasizing simple pitch relationships. Counterpoint, harmony, modulation, and other traditional materials and procedures may not appear at all in the music, and if they do, do so in unfamiliar ways. In 1968, the present ensemble of amplified instruments was formed, using electric keyboards, amplified winds, strings and voices. Everyone plays from the same score with differences of timbre and range becoming part of the overall rhythmic texture. The written music, depending on the piece, can consist of between thirty and eighty simple melodic figures. Again, depending on the piece, the figures may be written in a system consisting of one to eight parts. The music proceeds as the ensemble repeats one of these figures until, at a nod from me, we move on together to the next, playing throughout rhythmically in unison. Philip Glass, “Program Notes,” Interfunktionen 10 (Cologne: Verlag Heubach, 1972): 131–41. Copyright Interfunktionen, courtesy of editor Friedrich Heubach.

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The logic of the musical sequence derives from an idea of additive process which first appeared in my music in 1968 in a piece titled “1 + 1.” This was a percussion piece for solo performer tapping with his finger on an amplified table. In this piece, two simple rhythmic units are given and the piece is realized by combining them in continuous, regular arithmetic progressions. The music that followed—“Two Pages,” “Music in Fifths,” “Music in Contrary Motion,” “Music in Eight Parts,” “Music in Similar Motion”—was based structurally on extensions of this principle. These pieces reflect a broadening interest in musical texture. Starting from music based on simple monophony (one line of music without harmony or counterpoint played in unison by the ensemble) I introduced the notion that the music, though played rhythmically in unison, can be played with different parts on different “plateaus” which would move in parallel, contrary or similar motion in relation to each other. In this way I have been able to enlarge my work in the areas of timbre, range and instrumentation, and use the concept of rhythmic structure to hold on to a clear overall musical shape. “Music with Changing Parts” is the most thorough working out of additive process with an evolving musical texture. In it, players are free to change parts at fixed points throughout the music (called “changing figures”) to new melodic plateaus (there are eight possibilities in the score) giving the piece a continuous textural development in the course of an evening-length performance. A recent development has been the appearance of sustained tones in the music. This occurred spontaneously as a psycho-acoustical phenomenon for the first time in “Music in Similar Motion,” perhaps the first of my pieces containing sufficient textural richness to allow this to happen. The effect of repeated musical figures rhythmically played in unison in four widely separated parts was to spontaneously produce in the music sustained tones as acoustical by-products of repeated tones, overtones, combination figures, etc. When they first appeared in the music, no one was actually singing or playing these tones although they were clearly audible. In “Music with Changing Parts,” I have tried to allow a situation in which sustained tones could appear in the music and evolve tonally throughout the piece. Throughout the music there are specific sections where some players are free to add unspecific pitches by either playing or singing notes. The duration is controlled by the length of the breath. The player tries to find those pitches which are most intrinsic to the musical texture (the ones most strongly “heard”) and to bring these forward by joining with them. Not all pitches sound equally well. We have noticed, for example, that as the pitches appear less close to the

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implied tones, they tend to separate from the music, so the choice of pitch by the players becomes crucial during these sections of the piece. In a sense one might say that if sustained tones can be analyzed as being composed of minute musical patterns, I am in this case reversing the process: using repeated patterns of complex musical material to produce sustained tones. These recent developments mark a move away from a primary interest in structure and musical shape to a music which exists more in “time-present.” Accordingly, it seems increasingly natural for the music to span a greater period of time. Whereas “Music in Fifths,” written several years ago may take about twenty minutes to perform, “Music with Changing Parts” lasts one hour and a quarter. Additive process as a compositional principle has remained as the form while the content of the musical experience is becoming increasingly involved with sound, texture and “presence.” “Music in Twelve Parts” is conceived as a large work taking 3 to 4 hours to perform. The piece probably will not be performed in its entirety in any one concert. However, any sequence of three or four sections can make up a concert length program. Each section is concerned with its own “sound” and musical ideas. The transitions to new sections are marked by abrupt harmonic and rhythmic changes. The above will do as a summary of my musical interests except to add that working with the ensemble since 1968 has motivated changes in my musical ideas. It has provided a vehicle in which my musical instincts could freely develop. Often, the instrumental make-up of the ensemble has been a key factor in developing my musical thinking. At one point, for example, the addition of a cellist to the group motivated the writing of more substantial bass parts. Or again, a player with a particularly good voice led me to encourage singing as a possibility for parts of the music.

michael nyman interviews british composers on discipline and process (1971) Discipline is now the watchword, after the years of indeterminacy and improvisation.13 It is expressed in its most severe form in three sentences

Excerpts from Michael Nyman, “Believe It or Not Melody Rides Again,” Music and Musicians 20, no. 2 (October 1971): 26–28. © Michael Nyman.

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of Howard Skempton’s communication: “The composer is concerned with communication of the form, and concerned with sound as the most powerful means of communicating the form. The form is the single idea motivating a piece; without this concentration of attention there is no unity. And without economy there is no power; and without self-control there is nothing.” It was [Cornelius] Cardew’s supposedly “free” works that [John] White found “seemed to me to emphasize the need for a stricter discipline in the performer, an attitude of great chivalry towards the internal needs of the material despite the apparent loopholes left by the instructions (or lack of them).” [. . .] Cardew’s influence on White’s music (and one he might least have expected) “lay in the formulation of the Machine concept. The sound and the activities of the performers are fed like raw materials into a machine or process and emerge as a pattern unique to the occasion on which the particular Machine is being performed. The sounds tend towards a sort of ragged consonance, the procedures usually involve much repetition with changes happening almost imperceptibly over large spans of time, and the atmosphere is usually pretty calm and unruffled however fast the pace of the music.” This is the model of a new total determinacy, with analogies to the Americans Steve Reich and Terry Riley, enshrined in the [Promenade Theatre] Orchestra, which for [Brian] Dennis “has accelerated a progress towards consonant harmonies which had already stemmed from an interest in the harmonic series which I studied in great depth (wrote several harmonics-based works from 1967—before [Karlheinz Stockhausen’s] Stimming, incidentally). Had also anticipated multirepetition as well as the use of ready-made material in a piece called Programmes (1968). Have never had a loose Terry Riley approach to repetition and have always specified the precise number of repeats of a given unit (many in simple multiples.)” [Alec] Hill is interested in the use of structures derived from change ringing: “the basic concept is simple, almost naïve, although the structure of each performance may be extremely complex and consists of playing the bells in a series of regular permutations of order, no sequence ever being repeated. On seven bells for instance there are 5,040 possible changes.” Similarly the pieces which [Hugh] Shrapnel has written since his first “musical” piece, Bells (February 1970) “are the antithesis of the verbal pieces. Whereas the latter attempt to define a very wide field in a very vague way, the newer pieces consist of exhaustive exploration

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of a single (usually very simple) musical entity (often by means of permutation).” During the fifties and sixties [Alexander] Goehr, [Peter] Maxwell Davies and [Harrison] Birtwistle used change-ringing schemes in their music, but they used them to generate maximum audible variety, while the method itself remained hidden and inaudible. Dennis: “The simple geometry inherent in later Webern is the nearest parallel in past music to my present work, although it is much more rigorous than Webern; not as economical perhaps but totally rigorous. The simple geometry of my own music is always audible, the proportions are simple and exactly measured.” Michael Parsons emphasizes a different principle is involved in these single process-reduced material-pieces: “The idea of one and the same activity being done simultaneously by a number of people, so that everyone does it slightly differently, and so the ‘unity’ becomes ‘multiplicity,’ gives one a very economical form of notation for one thing—it is only necessary to specify one procedure, and the variety comes from the way everyone does it differently. This multiple interpretation of one activity seems to follow on from La Monte Young’s ‘unitary’ activities, such as ‘Draw a straight line and follow it’ (particularly doing them as group pieces rather than solos.) What applies to successive attacks in the piano piece X for Henry Flynt (however uniformly you play the chords they are bound to come out differently—this is discussed by Cardew in the Treatise Handbook) is also true of a lot of people doing the same thing together— however much they are trying to do it the same, they all do it differently.” Similarly it is the social aspect of change-ringing that most interests Alec Hill: “Small groups of people gathering together for an evening to perform a ritual game lasting several hours according to the very precise rules in which the technique of performance is not so much to listen to the overall sound produced, but to watch the movements of each of the other performers in order that one might steer one’s path amongst them without ever colliding (ie so that no two bells ring simultaneously).”

henry higuera on mother mallard’s portable masterpiece company (1972) Mother Mallard’s Portable Masterpiece Company is an electronic music band; they do a lot of superb stuff, do it very well, and don’t get nearly Henry Higuera, “Mother Mallard, Newman Hall,” Ithaca Journal, May 4, 1972, 5. © Henry Higuera—USA TODAY NETWORK.

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the attention they deserve around here. They played last night at Helen Newman, which is Cornell’s girl’s gym; they drew maybe 90 people, which is a real shame, considering the quality of events offered. The Moog synthesizer is a notoriously difficult instrument to manage in a live situation. In the group’s early days, in 1969, it sometimes took them 45 minutes to get those things (they have five of them now) set up and tuned up for the next song. Nowadays they have cut down the lead time considerably; and last night they used some very interesting films, as well as a theater piece, “Morton Feldman Says,” to fill in the gaps. The evening was under complete control and moved very smoothly. It’s hard to decide how to describe their music: in the playlets, Morton warned the kids in no uncertain terms about “revisionists” who rationalize the divine, forces which reduce the mystical to the political, and, most especially, art which feeds upon other art for its vitality—all of which us musical-critical types cringed a lot at. Still, one must try, so I offer a comparison: their music was much less like “Switched-on-Bach” than like—surprise—“Who’s Next.” It really had somewhat the same flavor as Townshend’s Moog work on that album, even though MMPMC’s range, complexity, and strength were much greater. Furthermore, in many ways the music made a lot of sense. They used steady tones for the most part—there wasn’t much percussion and few really weird effects. They stuck to the chromatic scale, and the music never got ugly or even very dissonant. It was all strict and complicated rhythmically, and generally very dense—there are usually a lot of lines and rhythms going on at once. The reason it could be so dense with only three people playing is, of course, that it is electronic in origin and outlook. Repetition and reproduction are very important in MM’s music, both as techniques and as organizing principles. The structure of the evening’s two most impressive pieces, “All Set” and “Tetrahedron,” was roughly the same, and very nice—there was a first section where the performers laid down three lines, in contrasting meters, and slightly out of phase so that the entirety only repeated itself once every 12 bars or so. Then, they stopped playing, but a pattern or a chord was held while they fiddled with various knobs, and then, everything they had just played came back at us, from the beginning on a tape loop. They used that as accompaniment and springboard and laid second and then third layers of sound on it, embellishing it, commenting on it, and taking it in different directions. So, the structure was a-b-c: first, second, and third layer.

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The results were especially spectacular in “Tetrahedron.” The first time around there were three lines, one in a very fast 7–4, one in a slower 6–4, and one in a lord-knows-what. In the “b” section a lot of very striking booming and sliding bass notes were added in various interesting places in and around the chord. The third time around, they added a new set of lines but in a different key, so that the bass notes and the original swirl of lines sounded completely different subordinated in this new framework. It was a beautiful section, and a very satisfying progression. In a way, however, it is wrong to talk about either technique or progression here: Technique, because it was much less intellectual or virtuosic music than music of mood and impression; progression, because it did not deal primarily with tension and release or evoke a progression of emotion. It was more static, a music of plateaus. At its best, it was almost hypnotic—complicated and strong enough not to let your attention wander on other paths, but not really leading it down any paths itself. One’s mind wandered within the music, and any kind of critical detachment was, in the end, a disservice to the experience. I hope I get to hear them again.

sally banes on meredith monk’s our lady of late (1974) Sunday night I went to the Columbia College Dance Center to hear Meredith Monk do Our Lady of Late, a concert for voice and wine glass. “A voice concert?” everyone asked me. “I thought you said she was a dancer?” Meredith Monk is a dancer, she is a choreographer, she sings, she makes music, she makes theatre—and then there’s something in between. It’s least important to put labels on it; most important to see it. She makes something like moving living tapestries, baroque embroideries threaded through with the histories, the imaginations, the gestures, the possibilities of her performers. Monk uses actors and places and sounds and objects as very few artists do, bringing each to bear with its own weight and richness on the whole of the work, spinning out the uniqueness of each person and thing, weaving together small

Excerpts from Sally Banes, “A Concert for Voice and Wine Glass,” Chicago Reader, February 2, 1974, 2 and 8. Copyright Sally Banes.

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special qualities and movements and stillnesses, glances and tasks and idiosyncrasies, the density and resonance of familiar things accumulating: this is how she transmutes simple realities in the gold of a sensepoetry that is underneath worlds and symbols. [. . .] Monk has made two record albums. Her musical style has been called reminiscent of Satie, or of Hebrew chants, or of muezzins. It’s simple, or seems simple—jew’s harps, kazoos, wine glasses; chords distilled, repeated, explored on the piano; her own voice making discoveries, gestures in sound, without words, circling, twisting, reaching. She evokes a simultaneity of mystery and familiarity, provoking and soothing and repetitive and surprising. The first album, distributed by Increase Records (931 N. Cienega Blvd., Los Angeles 90069) is Key: Invisible Theatre. The second is Our Lady of Late, to be released this month. So then: Sunday night’s performance. For a very long time there was nothing on stage but a small round oak table with a wine glass full of water on it and a chair behind it, all in a pool of yellow light, and expectancy. The lights dimmed and Monk walked into this still life, standing framed, magnetic, all in black, her hair pulled back tight into one thick long braid. We had time to absorb her, her presence and her relationship to these objects. She sat down, concentratedly arranged herself. Dipped her fingers into the wine glass and started to play. Her voice wove in and out of the wine glass note, her voice made crooning wine glass circles for a while. There was something comfortable, basic and soothing in the wine glass sound: constant, single, singular. Above it Monk’s voice began to explore, to break out of the circles to come back to the circles. She was starting to teach us, not with words but with sounds or syllables, a new language or a new world. After every section Monk dipped her fingers again and then began with the note again. Suddenly she picked up the glass and drank! The most natural and the most alien thing to do. Then back to stroking the rim, and this time a different note. And a different pace, a different realm of discoveries. At one point her voice sounded as if it had multiplied; once there was a whole dialogue in some unintelligible language, between a tiny chattering meek person and a huge authoritarian person; once she suddenly sounded miles distant. There were scales being extended, new primal words invented, more water sipped and new notes, momentum building and shifting, delicacy becoming bizarreness becoming familiarity. And through it all, Monk’s body and face shifting too, becoming stern and

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wistful and tranquil and troubled and gentle, looking old and young and ageless. She had taken us somewhere else, to some other galaxy. She brought us back, landing us softly, slowing down, unwinding. And then sat listening with us to the silence, her hands folded on the table.

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chapter 4

Altered States

“All right, so let’s say that what we have here is a ‘trip,’ a voluntary, unpredictable, absorbing experience, one which brings together parts of one’s self perhaps previously unknown to each other,” wrote Paul Williams, the editor of Crawdaddy! magazine, in the liner notes of the 1968 Columbia recording of Terry Riley’s In C.1 It was a potent metaphor: while working on In C, Riley was steeped in San Francisco’s psychedelic counterculture, and he repeatedly affirmed the crucial role that mushrooms, LSD, and peyote had on his early music and perceptual faculties.2 Indeed, imagining a world in which “all wars ended” and “all boundaries were dissolved”—as Riley wrote in a poem accompanying his mind-altering, follow-up album A Rainbow in Curved Air—requires either a heady dose of utopianism or a heavy dose of acid (or both). Riley was not alone in such musico-pharmacological experiments: during their time at the San Francisco Tape Music Center, Steve Reich and Pauline Oliveros both experimented with peyote; in New York, according to John Cale, La Monte Young dealt “pounds of marijuana.”3 Young put it plainly in a later interview: “Certain drugs can create spiritual states, and certain drugs can give strength, and certain drugs can give precision, and certain drugs can give an ability to hear intervals, and drugs have many different characteristics and psychological results that they can produce but they can only do this productively in the hands of somebody who is really a master of them.”4 69

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While drugs might open the doors of perception, they could also lead to a bad trip, or a trip to jail. (In 1964, a police raid led to the arrest of three members of the Theatre of Eternal Music.)5 For those seeking a less illicit path to enlightenment, one answer was “trance music.” Critic Robert Palmer found this “organized musical repetition” in the modal improvisations of pianist McCoy Tyner; in the “hypnotic effect” of Philip Glass’s Music in Similar Motion; and in the Africanist ostinatos of the Pyramids, a group that grew out of Cecil Taylor’s Black Music Ensemble.6 Minimalism could induce trance, ecstasy, even hallucination; no wonder Tom Johnson dubbed Reich, Riley, Young, and Glass the “New York Hypnotic School.”7 At a concert of synthesized drone music by Éliane Radigue, the critic had the eerie impression that “some of the sounds seem to ooze out of the side wall.” Other paths toward transcendence took place outside of traditional concert settings. Composer Philip Corner’s group Sounds out of Silent Spaces convened monthly to practice musical meditations at Experimental Intermedia; Annea Lockwood, Ruth Anderson, Julie Winter, and Emily Derr met privately to sing single sustained tones, pursuing music’s potential for healing; a number of composers, including Rhys Chatham, took to intensive chanting; Edward Gordon (aka Laraaji) played zither music, often busking in Washington Square Park, to achieve a “state of oneness with the Divine Presence”; and Pauline Oliveros formed the ♀ Ensemble to explore repetition, droning, and bodywork at her home near San Diego.8

terry riley’s liner notes for a rainbow in curved air (1969) And then all wars ended / Arms of every kind were outlawed and the masses gladly contributed them to giant foundries in which they were melted down and the metal poured back into the earth / The Pentagon was turned on its side and painted purple, yellow & green / All boundaries were dissolved / The slaughter of animals was forbidden / The whole of lower Manhattan became

Terry Riley, A Rainbow in Curved Air (Columbia, 1969). Copyright Terry Riley. Used by permission.

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a meadow in which unfortunates from the Bowery were allowed to live out their fantasies in the sunshine and were cured / People swam in the sparkling rivers under blue skies streaked only with incense pouring from the new factories / The energy from dismantled nuclear weapons provided free heat and light / World health was restored / An abundance of organic vegetables, fruits and grains was growing wild along the discarded highways / National flags were sewn together into brightly colored circus tents under which politicians were allowed to perform harmless theatrical games / The concept of work was forgotten

marcus boon interviews jon hassell on hashish at the dream house MB:  When and where did you study with Pran Nath? JH:  I’d just come from studying with Stockhausen for 2 years in Germany and I was new to this whole minimal idea. I was in Buffalo with Terry and played on In C . . . It must have been ’73, ’74 that I actually moved to New York, and started playing with La Monte—that’s when I came into this sphere, being around him and playing in the Dream House, listening to those overtones and intervals magically connecting, often on some hashish cocktail. MB:  Just from seeing a video of Pran Nath, I got a strong smoker’s vibe . . . JH:  Not him. The Indian thing is . . . bhang grows alongside the road there. When you’re studying and living in the forest, and it’s music music music all day, the first thing you touch when you wake up in the morning is the chillum. Those things you see in those classical Indian paintings . . . ladu, little balls of bhang and almond paste . . . To write a history of music without that concept of ecstasy, of intoxication, is to write a history of the world without noting that it didn’t take place in the glare of electric light.

Excerpt from Marcus Boon, interview with Jon Hassell, “There Was No Avant-Garde,” https://marcusboon.com/jon-hassell-there-was-no-avant-garde/; originally published in Hungry Ghost, January 2002. Copyright Marcus Boon 2022.

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MB:  And it’s a history of embodiment, of relationships with nature, connections with the divine through nature, through material processes. JH:  Right. MB:  But Pran Nath was not particularly a hashishin. JH:  Not really, that was more the Dream House. Doing those long sessions and tuning up those intervals. I’ll never forget that. MB:  One of the things that’s said about hashish is that it allows a micro-perception of intervals . . . JH:  I’d say microworlds rather than microintervals. La Monte talks about this . . . listening in the present tense. And also vertical listening. As opposed to listening to a line unfold in time, you’re presented with a timbre and you scan the timbre up and down vertically and listen to little areas.

robert palmer on the musical trend of trance ( new york times , 1975) An audience in New Delhi sits enraptured while a raga singer embellishes a seven-note mode with a vocabulary of slides and shakes prescribed by tradition. In the Karakoram mountains of Central Asia, a shaman performs a ritualized cycle alternately listening, with his ear against the membrane of a large drum, and singing prophetic stanzas. In Morocco, devotees of various religious brotherhoods pass into a trance state with the aid of repetitive drumming. In New York, listeners drift into a kind of revery with the Eastern-oriented sounds of composer/ performers as diverse as La Monte Young and Steve Reich. Westerners have traditionally preferred music with harmonic variety, melodic appeal, developmental interest. But trance music—an admittedly imprecise term for the many diverse approaches to organized musical repetition—has been gaining acceptance here and in Europe over the past few years. In June, Fabio Sargentini presented a “Festival of East-West Music” in Rome which united American practitioners (including Young, Philip Glass, and Terry Riley) with vocalist Pandit Pran Nath and other Indian artists. Deutsche Grammophon has pro-

Robert Palmer, “Trance Music—a Trend of the 1970s,” New York Times, January 12, 1975, 99. Reprinted with the permission of Augusta Palmer.

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duced a three-record boxed set of Steve Reich’s music. Jazz pianist McCoy Tyner is winning new popularity with his modal improvisations. In pop, black discotheque-oriented bands and European electronic groups such as Tangerine Dream are beginning to explore the possibilities of rhythmic and modal repetition which seek through the absolute control of limited musical means to induce relaxation, contemplation, euphoria, and other psychological states, rather than merely to provide soundtracks for chemically-induced ones. At its simplest, in the form of shamanist ritual drumming, trance music involves the rhythmic stimulation of motor and sensory areas of the brain. Drumbeats, which occupy a broad frequency spectrum, stimulate a relatively large portion of the pitch-sensitive basilar membrane in the inner ear and are transmitted simultaneously along associated neurons to the cerebral cortex. If these drumbeats are regularly spaced in time they can become a kind of pacemaker for the shaman, regulating his brain-wave rhythms and determining breathing patterns which produce a high level of carbon dioxide in the blood (an indicator of altered states of consciousness) and other biochemical changes. “Music in the Karakorams of Central Asia,” the latest addition to the Nonesuch Explorer Series, includes a relevant example of shamanist drumming. More complex drumming is found in Morocco, where trance music is usually polyrhythmic. The effects noted there—people in trance are liable to leap into the air, walk on hot coals, and sustain self-inflicted wounds which heal with remarkable rapidity—are more violent than those of shamanist ceremonies. Laboratory studies of rhythmic stimulation suggest that the accompanying rhythms, especially multiples of the main rhythm, heighten the average subject’s response. Regular swaying, jumping, dancing and spinning, all features of Moroccan “folk trance,” serve to reinforce the initial stimulation. The decibel level and insistence of the drumming doubtless inhibit the transmission of pain to the conscious brain. The musicians residing in the tiny village of Jajouka in northern Morocco are perhaps the best-known exponents of the polyrhythmic variety of trance music, having been written about by William Burroughs, Brion Gysin, and Timothy Leary and recorded by the late rock star Brian Jones. “The Master Musicians of Jajouka” presents an overview of their religious and dance music, both vocal and instrumental, without the artificial echo and phrasing which marred Jones’s recordings. In Moroccan trance music, a compromise is reached between the need for a regularly recurring rhythmic framework and the desire to

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avoid boredom. The exemplary musicianship of the Jajouka Masters, all of whom are descendants of court musicians, results in performances which are virtuosic as well as entrancing. The trance music of the G’naoua brotherhood, as featured on “Music of Morocco, the PanIslamic Tradition,” depends more on the precise layering of handclapping, stringed instruments, and vocal parts and less on the excellence of the individual players. Steve Reich’s “Drumming; Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices and Organ; Six Pianos” approximates the percussive complexity of the Moroccan music, though it is structured quite differently. “Drumming,” scored for tuned bongo drums, marimbas, glockenspiels, voices, whistling, and piccolo, builds up a mesmerizing chain of overlapping rhythmic phrases for 90 minutes. Phase relationships shift; beats and rests are substituted for one another; timbres change, while tonality remains constant. Philip Glass’s “Music in Similar Motion and Music in Fifths” employs organs and wind instruments and achieves an hypnotic effect by very gradually elaborating and developing unison rhythmic and melodic motifs. The most systematic and subtle variety of traditional trance music is undoubtedly that of India. Pandit Pran Nath, the Hindu vocalist who counts La Monte Young and Terry Riley among his disciples, achieves his generally calming effects with remarkably pure intonation and with modal rather than rhythmic repetition. His rigorously sequential alternation of the tones which make up specific ragas have the effect of a gentle sonic massage, while the overtones provided by his carefully tuned tamboura accompaniment covers a broad frequency spectrum. La Monte Young’s music sounds superficially similar, but the carefully controlled, slowly shifting harmonic relationships of his partially electronic, partially vocal and partially instrumental drone “accompaniment” are actually the focus of the proceedings; the composer’s singing is primarily decorative. For Young, “as interesting and exciting as drumming is, it’s difficult for it to deal with the spiritual truths one can experience when very profound pitch relations are executed perfectly in tune.” The repetition of sustained melodic and rhythmic patterns (ostinatos) and modal (as opposed to harmonic) improvisational structures became a part of the jazz vocabulary of John Coltrane. On “Sama Layuca” Coltrane’s former pianist McCoy Tyner creates a trance-like atmosphere

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with these devices and with the duple/triple rhythmic tension first developed in jazz by Coltrane’s drummer Elvin Jones. On “King of Kings” the Pyramids, a young group from Antioch College, combine the ostinato idea with African stringed and percussion instruments. The extemporaneous elaboration by jazz soloists on these LP’s prevents them from working as trance music per se, but their means and ends are clearly related to those of Young, Reich, Glass, and their many precursors in the Third World. The use of deliberate, organized rhythmic and modal repetition by composers working in a variety of genres suggests that this oldest non-chemical path to satori is becoming one of the most significant musical trends of the seventies.

tom johnson reviews éliane radigue’s psi 847 ( village voice , 1973) There is something very special about the music of Éliane Radigue, but after thinking about it for almost a week, I still can’t put my finger on what it is. Is it the intimacy? The way one feels that the music is speaking only to him regardless of how many other listeners may be sitting in the room? Is it the sheer efficiency with which it accomplishes so much with so little? Is it the enormous care and devotion which must have been required to make something so sensitive out of electronic sounds which most composers would consider drab and unpromising? Is it that Radigue sustains her minimal material for 80 minutes without ever repeating herself or becoming boring, and yet without ever leaving the restricted area within which she works? “Psi 847,” the piece presented at the Kitchen on March 19 and 20, was created on an Arp synthesizer. It is built out of a number of themes or motifs, but they are not motifs in the usual sense. One is simply a low fuzzy tone which goes on for a long time, hardly changing at all. One is a very high tone, so high that it is difficult to tell exactly what pitch it is, so it sounds different, depending on what else is going on. One changes color from time to time. One is a clear middle-range tone which fades in and out quite a bit, sometimes dominating the other motifs and sometimes hovering in the background. Later there are some more elaborate

Tom Johnson, “Oozing Out of the Wall,” Village Voice, March 29, 1973, 43. Courtesy of The Village Voice.

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figure 8. Éliane Radigue working in her studio in Paris, 1971. © Fondation A.R.M.A.N./Yves Arman.

motifs. There is a tone that wobbles quite a bit. There is a five-note descending melody. There is a tone that pulses every five seconds or so, something like a muffled department store bell. The texture is never very thick. Often only three or four motifs are working at once. But there is always much to listen to, since the motifs fade in and out in many combinations and interact in many ways. The focal point often shifts from one motif to another, sometimes giving the impression that the music is changing key. As a motif changes color, it may begin to blend with some other motif which previously sounded alien to it. As a new motif fades in, everything else may begin to sound quite different. Perhaps the most interesting thing about “Psi 847” is the way its motifs seem to come from different places. They were all produced by the same loudspeakers, and many of them seemed to come directly out of the loudspeakers. But some of the sounds seem to ooze out of the side wall, and others seem to emanate from specific points near the ceiling. I am told that this is actually true with any kind of music, and that the acoustical properties of a room will always affect different pitches in different ways. But one only becomes sensitive to this phenomenon in pieces like this, where tones are sustained for a long time.

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For me this piece represents the height of musical sensitivity, but perhaps I should temper that statement by admitting that it is a minority opinion. Most people would have been unimpressed by the modest sounds and uninterested in the tiny things that happen to them. I am told that supermarket products which have no red on their packages are usually passed by, and the music of Éliane Radigue will probably be overlooked for similar reasons. Strength and brilliance are certainly to be valued, but I am often more moved by simplicity and subtlety. Perhaps I was influenced by Morton Feldman a few years ago when he wryly mentioned that, since this is the Jet Age, everyone thinks that we ought to have Jet Age music to go with it. Things have simmered down a little since the multi-media craze of the late ’60s, but quite a bit of the music written today is still oriented toward speed, loudness, virtuosity, and maximum input. Éliane Radigue’s music is the antithesis of all that.

annea lockwood and julie winter describe their 1970s healing group Annea Lockwood:  The four of us [Lockwood, Winter, Emily Derr, and Ruth Anderson] were interested to see if sound—as a powerful, focused energy, and one which impacts the body, flows through the body—could actually help people. We were well aware of music therapy as a long-established discipline, but we were looking at something, for us, a little different.   So Ruth came up with the idea of us getting together on a regular basis, in Julie’s loft, and seeing if we could focus our voices strongly on the exact same pitch, eliminating overtones as much as possible—how close we could come to a sine tone with our voices, basically—and could we all converge on the same frequency? And, then, what could we do with that? It took us about a year and a half of getting together regularly to be able to focus our voices very finely, at which point our friends started saying, “What are you doing? What’s the point? What’s the idea?”   Then we would explain, and people who maybe had some minor condition from which they would really like to get some relief Douglas Kahn, Kerry O’Brien, and Pia van Gelder, interview with Annea Lockwood, July 22, 2021; O’Brien, interview with Julie Winter, August 3, 2021. Copyright Annea Lockwood / Copyright Julie Winter.

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would ask if they could come and sit with us. Our idea had been that we would form a circle with the person we were singing to in the middle and just sing to that person, singing our sense of that person, not necessarily our sense of what she needed or he needed— we weren’t so convinced of our powers—but singing to that person for him or her to use, for his or her body to use that energy as needed. Or as they could best use it. Julie Winter:  Annea and Ruth and a woman named Emily Derr, who was the first person I ever saw channel (and channeling is part of what I do), and I met as a group. We met in the FBI building, which was across the street from Hunter [College], and Hunter rented a couple of rooms from them. I had been doing sound and healing for a long time, just with the people with whom I worked. And Philip [Corner] and I did it in Sounds Out of Silent Spaces, which was a group we both started. And the four of us experimented with sound, specifically, in that context, with what the psychic Edgar Cayce had suggested, which was that sound could move objects. So we would sit in a circle in the FBI building and put something in the center and close our eyes and chant. And nothing ever moved. And one day we opened our eyes. There was a little matchbook in the center, and we looked at each other and said, “Did you move that?” No, none of us had moved it. Had it really moved? I don’t know. To this day I don’t know.   So, we all did healing work together.

charlie morrow on rhys chatham’s chanting (1974) Rhys Chatham: BLACK STAR PILGRIMAGE The Kitchen Midnight, Saturday, April 6, 1974 In a small room lighted by two lanterns Rhys Chatham sat on a pillow and chanted softly. It was a most beautiful and personal chanting in which he maintained a fundamental pitch on one vowel—aah—and produced a music from the 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th, and 11th partials. At one point, he

Charlie Morrow, “Living Music: Rhys Chatham,” SoHo Weekly News, April 11, 1974, 16. © Charlie Morrow.

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reached the strange and radiant 13th partial. Each time he breathed, he would approach the fundamental plus overtone by sliding up in a Tibetan style. Effortlessly this music continues for two hour long sets. I heard only the second which was very free and emotional. The earlier set Rhys described as having been very “conceptual” and far less relaxed. Personal chanting is done by a number of people in performance. It is quite distinct from the highly stylized chanting of established traditions in that it is more an outgrowth of the individual than a culture. Meredith Monk, Charlemagne Palestine and I are dramatic chanters. La Monte Young—chanting publicly long before any of us—has been concerned with intuneness, and personal mantras, a hypnotic music. Jackson MacLow, Jerome Rothenberg and other poets work more from language. Each of us has our own idea of precision. But singing overtones as Rhys does, is in a class by itself. The closest traditional model for this music is Tibetan. But he is close to his model only in the joy he radiates. The music is his own and part of his daily life. He chants every day for two hours. He tunes harpsichords—which has required learning to hear a vast number of partials, extending into the sixties. But beyond all of this, I find the content of the projected images of Rhys’ chanting to be of rare fineness. People chant for many reasons—it is a sacred action—but the pleasure and gentleness of this man’s chanting state are a hint of Buddha’s smile.

linda cousins interviews edward larry gordon (laraaji) on “celestial vibration” (1978) Believe me, his music sounds like it comes straight from Heaven. And appropriately enough, he even calls it “celestial vibration.” Edward Larry Gordon, former actor-comedian turned musician, plays an interesting instrument called a zither (or autoharp, as it’s known in the U.S.). Through electrifying it and employing various devices such as wooden hammers, guitar picks, phase shifters, chopsticks with rubber bands wound around them, he coaxes sounds from it that remind one of roaring oceans, chirping birds, evening breezes teasing treetops.

Linda Cousins, “Music’s Healing Force,” liner notes to Edward Larry Gordon, “Celestial Vibration” (SWN, 1978); originally published in The Black American. Courtesy of Laraaji.

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The zither, according to Ed Gordon, originated in Africa; and he defines it as an instrument of “many strings stretched over a resonator.” Since his own spiritual awakening has accelerated and expanded to higher levels, he has sought to use his music as a healing force in the universe and often plays from a meditative state of consciousness. He relates that he had to develop an artistic technique of rehearsing and performing while in a state of meditation without becoming distracted. “Playing this instrument out of a state of meditation allows my meditational state to be communicated,” he states, “so if I am in a state of oneness with the Divine Presence, which is always here—it’s just a fact of remembering it. I am remembering it very sharply, very clearly at the time I am playing the instrument, and the state I am in becomes communicated very naturally. In very surrendered states of meditation when the little ego or the mortal sense of self gives way to the Divine Eternal Presence, the Truth at that point or the mental state of the artist at that point is eternal perfection, and his vibration is communicated through the music.” “Music to me,” he continues, “is a representation of a mental state or a vibration of consciousness. The state of mind the musician is in at the time of executing the music is communicated to the field of awareness of the listener. Much of it, I think, is subliminal or subconscious. The listener isn’t aware that ‘so-and-so vibration is affecting me.’ They may be aware that ‘I am in a happy mood, I am in a sad mood, or I am in a nostalgic mood.’ All of these moods are communicated through the music, and they reflect the state of mind of the artist.” Expressing his views on the important influence of music on the human psyche, he says, “Music imparts a lot of sexual vibration. An unilluminated musician may think it’s all right and very natural for him or her to express constantly from the sexual vibration. This could be destructive if this vibration were allowed to dominate a culture, to dominate growing minds because the vibration once imparted to the subconscious mind becomes part of the identity of the listener, and the listener subconsciously tries to act out this vibration, with success. He would act out of a sexually dominated identity and, of course, would manifest as someone trying to find happiness in an imbalanced way, without giving attention to the spiritual side. The spiritual side is very important.” “I believe it’s natural for each and every consciousness to absorb its sense of identity from the most dominant stimulus or suggestion in its environment. And if a being isn’t involved in a conscious program of

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self-work, meditation, and self-study, he will unconsciously absorb his sense of identity from the forces around him; in many cases, from a strong music that is produced and distributed by, say, unillumined artists. These artists are not doing it viscously, but unknowingly. Yet I feel that it stands in the way of a culture or a people realizing total harmony and peace. An aware listener might balance their music intake with spiritual, peaceful music, music reflective of the Supreme Eternal Divinity.” “Music,” Ed Gordon affirms, “should suggest the vibration of God here and now. For the listener it would suggest the vibration of God right where the listener is. Pulling or coaxing or guiding the awareness to the God-level vibration causes the healing energy to become more dominant or more present within a listener, so that all healing effects or healing action takes place within the listener. The healing energy rises up within the listener as his mind becomes aligned to God vibration.” Healing, according to Ed, does not take place from mere exposure to music (or from healing vibrations emanating from another person), but from a person turning his mind’s eye away from the illusion of what appears to be the Truth of the omnipresence of God as eternal health. “No healing takes place,” he explains. “Consciousness of health becomes focused, and we realize that health has always been here. And to the degree that we know this eternal health, the eternal health manifests throughout our bodies. So a healing isn’t taking place; we are just causing the Reality to have more right-of-way in expressing through us.”

pauline oliveros, “on sonic meditation” (1976) The meaning of meditation is problematical in that it has accumulated many different associations and a broad range of diverse practices and techniques. It appears often in a religious context, for example Buddhism, Christianity, and Sufism. Its secular counterpart is usually called concentration. Although all meditation, secular and religious, is similar in that it employs attention, awareness, concentration, openness, and repetition, many contrasts among different systems arise: Christian meditation, or contemplation, is usually a dwelling upon specific ideas, such as one’s relationship to God, or the pursuit of an activity which is decided upon and directed intellectually. Certain Eastern practices are Excerpts from Pauline Oliveros, “On Sonic Meditation,” Painted Bride Quarterly 3, no. 1 (Winter 1976): 54–58. Reproduced courtesy of PoP and MoM Publications (Pauline Oliveros Publications and Ministry of Maåt). All rights reserved.

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figure 9. Pauline Oliveros’s Sonic Meditations at Joshua Tree, 1971. Photograph by Fred Lonidier.

the opposite, advocating dwelling on emptiness of mind (Nirodha in the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, “No Mind” in Zen Buddhism.) Some methods of meditation encourage mental imagery, others discourage all imagery, some promote the involvement of sense organs using visual, auditory, and somatic forms, others promote the abandonment of sensory modes. Further, there is action versus inaction, feeling versus indifference. In Taoism when action arises, it is spontaneous and natural, while in Confucianism, action is the result of ethics or intellect. I use the word meditation, rather than concentration, in a secular sense to mean steady attention and steady awareness, for continuous or cyclic periods of time. Any of the above practices or techniques may be employed when appropriate. While one’s attention is focused to a point on something specific, it is possible to remain aware of one’s surroundings, one’s body, movement of all kinds, and one’s mental activity; in other words to remain aware of inner and outer reality simultaneously. Attention is narrow, pointed, and selective. Awareness is broad, diffuse, and inclusive. Both have a tunable range: attention can be honed to a finer and finer point. Awareness can be expanded until it seems all-inclusive. Attention can intensify

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awareness. Awareness can support attention. There is attention to awareness; there is awareness of attention. Attention seems to be equated with mental activity and to be aroused by interest or desire. Awareness seems to be equated with the body’s sensory receptivity. It is activated, or present, during pleasure and pain. Either attention or awareness can interfere with the other depending on the intensity of interest or the intensity of stimulation. When either attention or awareness predominates or gets out of balance, the other tends to drift or become unconscious: For example, after practicing a difficult passage (or even an easy one) over and over again, with or without success in execution, the musician discovers in some part of the body a cramp which has developed from a faulty playing position. Awareness had been sacrificed for attention and became unconscious, or very low level, returning only with the urgency of the cramping pain. With conscious awareness, the cramp might have been avoided by adjusting the player’s relationship to the instrument without sacrificing attention, before a cramp could develop. In this case awareness would be supporting attention rather than producing a delayed interference reaction. If the passage was executed successfully, one might consider the cramp a small price to pay or it might not be associated with the activity. (It is also possible to sustain an inner muscular or visceral tension which is not noticeable or visible on the outside, so that the body appears to be in the correct relationship to the instrument.) If the passage was executed unsuccessfully, the faulty position disclosed by the cramp might be blamed and subsequently corrected. In the former case, some musicians who remain unaware for a long time, even years, often end by paying a high price for success. When such things as severe chronic pains in the back or other parts of the body appear without apparent reason, they may be the results of some small but constantly repeated strain. The symptoms often do not respond to medical treatment, probably because the source of the now chronic ailment is continually repeated as an unconscious habit in association with “correct” habits of playing music. It is therefore most difficult to correct in any way whatever. Besides the misery of such a situation some musicians are forced to give up playing or singing because of such ailments, but even worse, some never realize the relationship of such illness to inner tension, because the appearance of the playing position seems to be correct and the music may sound right. The opposite can be true: while awareness of body sensations remains present, attention can lapse or drift attracted by the larger phenomenon

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of a painful awareness. The musical passage may become automated and sound mechanical, parts or all of it may be interrupted or forgotten as attention is divided or diverted by awareness of the cramp or some other strong sensation. Attention then refocuses and intensifies awareness. The proper relationship of attention and awareness can be symbolized by a circle with a dot in the center.9 The dot represents attention and the circle awareness. In these respective positions both are centered in relation to each other. Awareness can expand without losing its balanced relationship with attention. Attention can be focused, as finely as possible, in any direction and can probe all aspects of awareness without losing its balanced relationship to awareness. My Sonic Meditations are “sonic” in that sound and hearing, both active and receptive, are the foci of attention and stimuli of awareness, the enhancement and development of aural sensation are among their goals. The synchronization of attention and awareness, that is, keeping them balanced and conscious, is necessary. Also, the synchronization of voluntary and involuntary mental or physical activity is explored. The ear is the primary receptor or instrument, sound, both inner and outer, real and imaginary, is the stimulus of Sonic Meditations. How and what does one hear? In order to answer this question, the mind must relax, as a muscle must relax, or the appropriate state of expectation must be present in body and mind in order to become receptive to both internal and external stimuli. a cup of tea Nan-In, a Japanese master during Meiji era (1868–1912) received a university professor who came to inquire about Zen. Nan-In served tea. He poured his visitor’s cup full, and then kept on pouring. The professor watched the overflow until he could no longer restrain himself. “It is overfull. No more will go in!” “Like this cup,” Nan-In said, “you are full of your own opinions and speculations. How can I show you Zen unless you first empty your cup?” (Zen Flesh-Zen Bones, Paul Reps, Tuttle)

As a composer I had to empty my cup: I became interested in dwelling on single pitches in my music at the end of the 1950’s. There is a very long held note in the cello part of my Variations for Sextet (1959–60). The note lasts approximately half a minute and it is solo. It emerges from a hard attack, together with trumpet, horn and clarinet, with a few low level, evanescent piano harmonics. It is very long in the context of the Variations and other music of its style, which deal with radical

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shifts in rhythm and timbre. The long cello tone is a very brief meditation, although I was not thinking of it that way at the time. It had at least two functions: 1) It represented a very slow contrasting tempo, within a multiplicity of changing tempi; 2) Its harmonic ambiguity increased as it stretched out in time, although the tone itself became an object of interest rather than where it was leading. It signaled my growing interest in timbral shapes and changes, the complementary opposite of chordal or harmonic changes. Drones of all kinds, such as motors, fluorescent lighting, freeway noise are ever present. The mantra of the electronic age is hum rather than Om. These constant soundings influence everyone, whether consciously or unconsciously. Some adverse effects can occur when the influence is unconsciously received: For example, a musician who unknowingly plays in tune with 60 hz. hum rather than B-natural 61.735 in an ensemble. Or an ensemble which does not realize the out-of tuneness caused by the discrepancy between standard musical tuning in reference to A440 and 60 hz. hum. I began to seek out drones of all kinds and to listen to them consciously, allowing myself to hear the myriad shifting, changing partials of a constant tone, or of broad and narrow band noise. My subsequent music, both electronic and instrumental reflected this interest. Whole pieces became single tonal centers or noise bands with characteristic timbral shaping. I was quite satisfied with this work, emotionally and intellectually, although I had apparently abandoned Western harmonic practice. —the knowledge of sound can give a person a magical instrument by which to wind and tune and control and help the life of another person to the best advantage. The ancient singers used to experience the effect of their spiritual practices upon themselves first. They used to sing one note for about half an hour and study the effect of that same note upon all the different centers of their body: what life current it produced, how it opened the intuitive faculties, how it created enthusiasm, how it gave added energy, how it soothed and how it healed. For them it was not a theory but an experience. (Sufi Inayat Khan, Music, Ashraf Press, Pakistan)

I continued to empty my cup and follow my secular way: My interest and fascination with long tones was centered in attention to the beauty of the subtle shifts in timbre and the ambiguity of an apparently static phenomenon. Why was a tone which went nowhere so seductive? My awareness was adrift. In 1969 I began to work with dancer, Al Chung Liang Huang, and with him I began the study of Tai Chi Chuan. The work with Huang in

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this Chinese form of meditation movement involved breath rhythm, synchronized with slow, circular motions of torso, arms and legs. I had been playing and singing with my accordion, slow lingering improvisations on a tonal center. I began to translate the breath rhythms and the slow natural motions of Tai Chi to my solo improvisations. I noticed that I began to feel better physically and mentally, I began to crave more retreat to the calming influence of these drone-like improvisations, from what seemed to be a nervous, frantic music world, full of hasty rehearsals, and constantly noodling performers with up-tight vibrations. By 1970, some other women had joined me to form The ♀ Ensemble, an improvisation group, both vocal and instrumental, devoted to unchanging tonal centers with emphasis on changing partials. After a long period of working together a profound change occurred: rather than manipulating one’s voice or instrument in a goal oriented way in order to produce certain effects, we began to allow changes to occur involuntarily, or without conscious effort, while sustaining a sound voluntarily. It is an entirely different mode; and like the professor for whom Nan-In poured continuous tea, opinions and speculations have no place in this activity. My first conscious recognition of this change resulted in the articulation of “Teach Yourself to Fly,” Sonic Meditation I.10 I say articulated rather than composed because the instructions were transmitted orally many times before being committed to paper. We could no longer call our activity improvisation. Teach Yourself to Fly Dedicated to Amelia Earhart Any number of persons sit in a circle facing the center. Illuminate the space with dim blue light. Begin by simply observing your own breathing. Always be an observer. Gradually allow your breathing to become audible. Then gradually introduce your voice. Allow your vocal cords to vibrate in any mode which occurs naturally. Allow the intensity of the vibrations to increase very slowly. Continue as long as possible, naturally, and until all others are quiet, always observing your own breath cycle. Variation: Translate voice to an instrument.

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chapter 5

Gurus and Teachers

Nineteen sixty-eight, declared Life Magazine, was the “Year of the Guru,” a tribute to the seismic impact of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who popularized Transcendental Meditation and served as spiritual advisor to the Beatles.1 While many countercultural seekers studied world religions and took pilgrimages to India and Tibet in the early 1960s, the latter half of the decade marked a period of cross-cultural exchange in the other direction, as spiritual guides and teachers moved from East to West. After the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act lifted restrictive limits on Asian immigration, a number of prominent and lesser-known gurus came to the United States for the first time, and quickly established schools and followings.2 Among them was the North Indian guru Shyam Bhatnagar, who soon had dozens of eager students, including La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela. Bhatnagar taught classes that focused on breathing exercises and meditation accompanied by drones.3 And he brought with him tapes of his own teacher, Pandit Pran Nath, singing in the Kirana gharana tradition.4 Moved by the recordings, Young and Zazeela helped bring Pran Nath to New York, where the guru lived in Young’s loft and taught myriad experimental musicians, including Young, Zazeela, Terry Riley, Catherine Christer Hennix, Yoshi Wada, Charlemagne Palestine, Don Cherry, Rhys Chatham, Henry Flynt, and Jon Hassell. (Though much has been made of Philip Glass’s studies with Nadia Boulanger, Pran Nath was to the minimalists what Boulanger was to the neoclassicists.) For 87

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Young, the intensive guru-disciple relationship served many functions, foremost preserving the “purity” of the Kirana musical style. Pran Nath’s stylistic tradition prized pitch and intonation over rhythm, and his teachings in drones and sustained tones offered a potent vehicle for minimalists to explore the complexities inherent in a single pitch or interval.5 In 1970, Alice Coltrane made her first pilgrimage to India, accompanied by her guru, Swami Satchidananda. Before her trip, she recorded Journey in Satchidananda, a far-out album depicting her anticipated travels and spiritual awakening; she recommended listeners envision themselves “floating in an ocean of Satchidananda’s love.”6 Some musicians, though, opted not to commit themselves so thoroughly to a single teacher or school of thought. Pauline Oliveros studied t’ai chi with Chungliang Al Huang and karate with Lester Ingber, seeking a practice from which one could “walk away without becoming a devotee.”7 Though a voracious reader of spiritual texts and a lifelong Buddhist, Philip Glass said he was “content to let other people light the incense” in performance; he rejected the idea that his spiritual studies left any audible traces on his music.8

la monte young on pandit pran nath ( village voice , 1970) Nadam Brahmhum. Sound is God. I am that sound that is God. This was the opening phrase of Pandit Pran Nath’s own composition in classical Yaman-Kalyan, the first raga that he sang in concert in New York City. How many times Pran Nath has repeated this idea to me since he first came to America in January—not only the abstraction of the Vedic idea that the universe began with vibration, which in itself is very clear, and related to concepts of modern physics, but a reality in his own everyday here-and-now life. I first started listening to recordings of his renditions of classical Indian ragas in 1967. Some of these tapes were made at an informal gathering in New Delhi by one of his disciples, Shyman Bhatnagar, a yogic therapist and director of Satyam Shivan Sundaram ashram in Princeton, New Jersey, who himself sponsored Pran Nath’s tour to America to teach private students and at the New School. I was imme-

La Monte Young, “Singing of Pran Nath: The Sound Is God,” Village Voice, April 30, 1970, 36, 38, and 40. Courtesy of The Village Voice.

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diately impressed with his intonation. I have never heard better intonation from any living musician. This incredible intonation and his remarkable sense of melody soon convinced me that his singing was the most beautiful I had ever heard. As a boy, he was singing by the age of six, but his family wanted him to complete schooling, and at 13 his mother told him if he was going to be a musician he would have to leave—now—without coat or any belongings—out into the world, and he left. For some time he wandered about listening to the performances of the various masters of that time. But finally he had the occasion to hear a rare concert performance by the late Ustad Abdul Waheed Khan Sahib. Waheed Khan Sahib was the acknowledged master of Kirana style during his time. He was not a man to go out into the world very often and compete with the other musicians. He lived a spiritual, reclusive life, singing at his master’s tomb nearby his home, and only occasionally going out into the world to give performances. He took very few disciples; one of them was Pran Nath, who became the most important because of his extreme devotion and natural talent. Although Kirana style has become the most influential and popular style in India today, only a handful of musicians can claim to have studied with Waheed Khan directly, and it is through Pran Nath that Kirana style in its purest form is preserved until the present time. Because of his disdain for the commercial world Ustad Waheed Khan never permitted any recordings of his singing. Kirana style dates back some 600 years to the time of Gopal Nayak. Gopal Nayak was from the south of India; when he came to the North he was converted to Islam by the great Sufi saint who performed some miracles which impressed him greatly. He was an absolutely beyondbelief singer. The story I heard was that he used to sing ragas of two or three pitches for 48 hours at a time. Gopal Nayak finally settled in Kirana village, and here this style of music was handed down from master to disciple over hundreds of years. Pran Nath studied with Khan Sahib in Kirana, and followed him wherever he went for nearly 20 years. For the first eight years he served him like a household servant. His devotion was such that he sensed whatever Khan Sahib wanted at any moment and brought it for him before he even asked. Finally Khan Sahib acknowledged this serious intent and took him as a disciple. It was not customary for the student to sing in the presence of his guru, in order not to disturb the master’s fine sensibility for pitches developed over a lifetime. Consequently Pran Nath would go at night into the nearby jungles and practice for eight or nine hours while his

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guru was asleep, returning while still dark to be ready to serve him when he awoke before sunrise. He has told me that some nights it was very cold in the jungle and he would wrap himself completely in his blanket, but after singing this way for several hours he would become warm and covered with sweat. At the age of 28 Pran Nath chose to become a naked singing saint, or naga, and so for five years he sat, clothed only in ashes, singing for God. He stayed with his guru until he died in 1950. But sometime before his death Khan Sahib requested that he give up the ascetic life and go back into the world, marry, give concerts, and sing on the radio for the people. This was very hard for Pran Nath to do as he had chosen the spiritual life by his own nature, but both he and his master must have realized that it was essential for the preservation of Kirana style that Pran Nath take it into the world. This is particularly true since Khan Sahib took so few disciples. At this point it is worth considering what the guru-disciple relationship has meant in the course of history in terms of preserving a style. Electronic reproduction devices such as tape recorders have only been with us for the past several decades. Systems of notation, such as were used in Europe, can preserve an abstraction of a musical form. But it requires some kind of memory process such as a tape recorder, computer, or human brain to preserve the actual details of a performance style. Pran Nath has told me how many thousands of times he would repeat a particular phrase as it was given to him by his guru, over and over until it became a part of him. He practiced only one raga, YamanKalyan, for eight years. And now he can demonstrate hundreds of ragas; in the 40 or so times I have heard him sing since he has been in New York, he has sung at least one new raga each evening. The problem in the past, before electronics and artificial memory systems, was to retain the purity of a style, to actually reproduce as nearly as possible what Gopal Nayak sang 600 years ago, for instance. It is so easy to forget or make mistakes that the emphasis was placed not on developing new techniques but on preserving the actual foundations of the system. Some portion of the material for classical Indian music has been handed down from ancient texts in a solfeggio type of system. This could have given us abstract musical structure of dead music on paper as we too often find in the European tradition, but because the guru taught the disciple every minute detail of performance, we have a music that is alive today, that moves even Western audiences to tears, to deep spiritual feeling, and other profound moods.

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It is believed that Krishna sang, and Shiva sang. All of the gods sang. Classical Indian music supposedly at some point came from this singing. If you start out with this feeling, that your gods gave you this music, you have every reason to want to preserve it. But as the centuries have passed and man has sung more to please audiences, to earn money, his ego has become more involved and he has changed the music. Far too few musicians in India today complete their discipleship. At some point they know they have learned enough to get by, to make money, to produce something that will entertain an audience. What a difference between entertainment and actually producing the deep moods portrayed by the great ragas. It is well known in India that Pran Nath has the complete blessings of his guru. His first major performance in Delhi was attended by most of the important musicians in India, including Ustad Bade Ghulam Ali Khan. He sang Raga Mian ki Mulhar, and after this performance he became very popular overnight, and has since sung regularly on All India Radio and the major music festivals all through India. For the last 10 years he has also taught advanced classes in Hindustani vocal music at Delhi University. Like his guru, Pran Nath has never had any interest in releasing a record, although Shyam allowed Douglas International to put out an LP of two of his tapes which have been recorded with bad microphones on a worse machine. I had always enjoyed this record very much but Pran Nath felt it misrepresented his singing, and now, having heard him sing live so many times, I can see why. He has recently expressed an interest in putting out a really well-recorded disc of his best singing to make up for the one he is unhappy with. He would not want me to compare him with other artists of his time, but I can only say that never have I been so deeply moved by Indian music. I have listened to many of the available recordings of the great singers and instrumentalists, but Pran Nath’s intonation, melodic imagination, and ability to sustain the mood has made the most profound impression and given me the most moving and musical experiences. Why is intonation so important? “In the tradition of modal music a fixed tonic is continued as a drone or frequently repeated, and a limited set of frequencies with intervallic relationships established in reference to the tonic is repeated in various melodic permutations throughout a performance in a particular mode. Generally a specific mood or psychological state is attributed to each of the modes. The place theory of pitch identification postulates that each time the same frequency is repeated it is received at the same fixed place on the basilar membrane and transmitted

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figure 10. Pandit Pran Nath, singing Raga Suha Kanada, accompanied by K. Paramjyoti, tabla, La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela, performing Pandit Pran Nath–style tamburas, 1982. Raga Concert at 6 Harrison Street Dream House, New York, NY. Photograph by John Cliett. © Pandit Pran Nath 1987. Courtesy of The Pandit Pran Nath Musical Composition Trust.

to the same fixed point in the cerebral cortex presumably by the same fiber or neuron of the auditory nerve. The volley theory of pitch perception assumes that a sequence of electrical impulses is sent traveling along specific neurons of the auditory nerve. For frequencies up to about 2000 Hz. only, these produce a more or less complete reproduction of the frequency of the vibratory motion of the basilar membrane in the case of a single sine wave and a more or less distorted reproduction of the complete waveform for more complex signals. It is presumed that this reproduction will be best for sounds at lower frequencies and less good for higher frequencies since an individual neutron cannot fire faster than 300 Hz. At lower frequencies a group of neurons working together would be able to supply several pulses per cycle whereas at higher frequencies they could only supply one every several cycles. The assumptions of place theory and volley theory suggest that when a specific set of harmonically related frequencies is continuous or repeated, as is often the case in my music and Indian music, it could more definitively produce (or simulate) a psychological state that may be reported by the listener since the set of harmonically related frequencies will continuously trigger a specific set of the auditory neurons which in turn will continuously perform the same

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operation of transmitting a periodic pattern of impulses to the corresponding set of fixed points in the cerebral cortex.” (I wrote this originally in “Notes on the Continuous Periodic Composite Sound Waveform Environment Realizations of ‘Map of 49’s Dream the Two Systems of Eleven Sets of Galactic Intervals Ornamental Lightyears Tracery,’ ” published in “Selected Writings” by La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela.) In order to produce and sustain the mood it is necessary to repeat each one of these pitches at exactly the same place each time it recurs. The more precisely in tune the better the structure of the raga is maintained. Kirana style has a very highly developed system of grace notes, or how to approach the tone, sometimes approaching it from another tone, sliding, but with a very clear outline of which tone you begin and end on, and sometimes which tones you pass through in the course of the slide. Thus no ornament at any time is superficial in any sense, but rather molded into the structure of the scale and the structure of the melodic sequences that are part of the raga. Pran Nath is always saying that in Kirana style the raga is created in between the tones. For instance, if you have two different ragas each of which has a somewhat different mood but both of them use the same tones, they will invariably have a different set of melodic progressions and approaches to the notes, and different tones of the raga will be more or less predominant. When I think back to his first public New York performance at the Universalist Church in March I was impressed with the fact that some 500 people who were hearing him for the first time didn’t even move for the first hour-and-a-half raga, and at intermission nobody went home; it was just as packed for the second raga. This is an example of his ability to create a mood through his intonation and his ability to sustain tones. Since that time he has been giving unpublicized performances on Monday evenings at the House of Musical Tradition on St. Mark’s Place, which have been attended by various music and art enthusiasts who have showed enough concern to follow his activities and find out where he is singing. Still nobody moves. People just sit transfixed for the entire time of his singing. He is a great master of alap singing. Alap is perhaps the oldest form of classical Indian music. It is essentially without tabla. Parts of alap singing are free and without rhythm, just sustained syllables or words from lines of verse repeated in various melismatic phrases. This is a very slow sustained style. It is the way classical Indian performances begin these days, but very few of them maintain this solemnity. Over the years the Western and Muslim influence have changed Indian classical music.

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There has been a tendency toward virtuosity for the sake of pleasing the public. In the early days one sang for god. Nowadays one performs for an audience, for an A&R man from a record company, for a potential sponsor, for a radio producer. So there’s an emphasis on fast singing, taans, tricks with the tabla, arguments with the tabla, or so-called discussions (Panditji calls it quarreling). When he does use a tabla it is in a very pure and simple way, as was demonstrated by the artistry of Faiyaz Khan at the Universalist Church, a really outstanding drummer who knows how to accompany a great artist without getting in the way and yet providing 100 per cent support. I recently played him a record of John Coltrane. How impressed he was with Coltrane’s playing! Saying, Ah, how much like my music that is, what soul he has. How sad he was when he heard that he had died only some time ago, still a young man. I also played him some Miles Davis. He liked that very much too. He was impressed with the simplicity, the directness of the statement, the “tunefulness” as he says it. He is a man with open ears for real true music. And now what? Panditji’s stay on the East Coast is only for a short period. His class on Ragas, Mantras, and Contentment at the New School for Social Research will be repeated for the summer session beginning in mid-June. He is also taking more advanced musicians as private students. And in the real right here-and-now, Pran Nath will give his second major New York performance on Friday, May 1, at 8.30 p.m. in the New School auditorium, 66 West 12th Street. Pran Nath has utmost faith in the ability of his music to convey its message to us here in America. He feels that his music is for the soul and if he performs it properly that there is true feeling which goes directly to the soul and cannot help but move the listener. When he is singing he is virtually in a state of samadhi. Not singing for someone, just singing. Sound is the God.

alice coltrane’s liner notes to journey in satchidananda (1971) Direct inspiration for Journey in Satchidananda comes from my meeting and association with someone who is near and dear to me.9 I am Alice Coltrane, liner notes to Journey in Satchidananda (Impulse!, 1971). Journey in Satchidananda by Alice Coltrane © 1970 (Renewed) JOWCOL MUSIC LLC. International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted by Permission of Hal Leonard LLC.

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figure 11. Alice Coltrane and Swami Satchindananda, 1972. Photograph by Philip Melnick 1972.

speaking of my own beloved spiritual preceptor, Swami Satchidananda. Swamiji is the first example I have seen in recent years of Universal Love or God in action. He expresses an impersonal love, which encompasses thousands of people. Anyone listening to this selection should try to envision himself floating on an ocean of Satchidananda’s love, which is literally carrying countless devotees across the vicissitudes and stormy blasts of life to the other shore. Satchidananda means knowledge, existence, bliss. Shiva is God in one of his myriad forms, as the third person of the Hindu Trinity, in his aspect as dissolver of creation. Loka means realm or abode. I try to stretch my mind thoughts over to Shiva-Loka, one of the highest points of the universe. Bombay will be the first stop on my five week stay in India beginning in December 1970. I will be visiting New Delhi, Reshikesh, Madras, and the country of Ceylon. Hence the title Stopover Bombay. I know that there remains to this very day something inexplicable and undefinable about John Coltrane. Something About John Coltrane is set on a d minor mode, and will not be unfamiliar to John’s followers. It is played beautifully.

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Pharoah’s playing on this album sounds transcendental, reflecting the ancient, sacred sound. I believe that his music is one of the strongest forces of its kind being heard in the world today. I feel that Cecil McBee’s offering here is highly stimulating and selective in its entirety, and that his technical capabilities have reached the point that allow his music to transcend the limitations of standardized forms of bass playing. Two uncommon instruments can be heard on this album. Tulsi’s tamboura, a four-stringed Indian drone instrument, is played with as high a degree of sensitivity as any I have heard from any instrumentalist native to the East. The oud, played by Vishnu, is basically a North African instrument, played all along the Mediterranean, and can be heard in music from places as diverse as Morocco, Persia, Turkey, and Egypt. On Isis and Osiris, I appreciate the contribution of Charlie Haden, the bassist who has been associated with Ornette Coleman for so many years. Vishnu’s oud playing is characterized by his sympathetic understanding of the music of North Africa. Rashied Ali here, as he does throughout the album, provides a continuous stream of pure sound energy. I would also like to compliment Majid on the characteristic coloristic flavors he adds to these performances. I hope that this album will be a form of meditation and a spiritual awakening for those who listen with their inner ear. Om Shanti.

chungliang al huang on pauline oliveros and the ♀ ensemble (1973) Several summers ago I had a chance to work with a group of musicians in La Jolla. Pauline Oliveros and some of her ♀ Ensemble had attended several of my t’ai chi workshops and noticed how their own group worked together in a similar way. Since then we have shared many seminars and concerts together, exploring the t’ai chi sound. We sit and breathe, and allow things to happen. Most of the time we begin simply, with our voices chanting om or whatever sound comes freely. We let the one-note sound come through, the one-note sound that is also a million sounds. The instruments we most often use, besides voice, are winds, Excerpts from Chungliang Al Huang, Embrace Tiger, Return to Mountain: The Essence of T’ai Chi (Moab, UT: Real People, 1973), 111–13. Copyright © 1973, 1987, 1997 by Chungliang Al Huang. Used by permission of Ten Speed Press, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Ebook reproduced with permission through PLSclear.

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strings, even an accordion—any instruments that are able to sustain notes. [. . .] Very often we think of music that has a recognizable melody or a clear rhythmical pattern. When you hear something relatively unmetered and without all that fluctuation, you can get bored easily. But if you really hear it and sing along with it and chant with it, and you become it and move with it, then the one-note sound becomes a million sounds. When totally involved, musicians can go on for hours with the same kind of sound without stopping, because they are inside the sound. Erik Satie has a very short piece that is supposed to be repeated three hundred times when it is performed. It was played in New York by several pianists who alternated and kept repeating the piece. I think they sold tickets for about eight dollars and the longer you stayed, the more refund you got back. The whole thing lasted about twelve hours. It’s a matter of involvement: if you really get involved, time is relative. What is a lifetime? What is an instant?

san diego magazine interviews pauline oliveros (1979) Oliveros fasts every Monday for health; sometimes only has juice for lunch. She is vice-president and treasurer for the Study of Awareness in Solana Beach, and has done research with the organization’s president, Dr. Lester Ingber, for seven years on the process of attention. She also has won a brown belt in Shotokan-style karate and just failed the test for black. She does karate and yoga for 45 minutes every morning, and was instrumental in bringing the Gyalwa Karmapa, head of the Kagyüpa lineage of Tibetan Buddhist teachers, to UCSD in March 1977, an indication of her interest in world cultures and expanded forms of awareness. San Diego Magazine:  Among your better known works locally are the 36 “Sonic Meditations.” What do you mean by meditations? Oliveros:  I began to work with long, slow feelings in sound and about 1970 I started calling it “Sonic Meditations.” At the time I was not connected to formal meditation. I just meant “to stay with something.” Eventually I became aware that there were other forms of Excerpts from Zenia Cleigh, “All Sounds Are Music,” San Diego Magazine, July 1979. Courtesy of San Diego Magazine, LLC.

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meditation as the gurus began to arrive in the West. My work has no conscious relationship to these other than that they were occurring, but I try to stay in meditation as much as possible. For me that means to stay in touch with what I’m hearing, both in my imagination and with the data that’s coming in. To just be aware of as much as possible. I don’t say I succeed, but that’s my intention.   In 1958, a significant event occurred which changed my perception and I’ve been doing a meditation ever since. I put a microphone in my window and recorded the environment and played it back. What I discovered was that I wasn’t really listening to what the recorder was. So I said to myself, “Listen to everything all the time.” And I’ve been trying to do that ever since. SDM:  How did the meditations come to you? Oliveros:  The Sonic Meditations came from an inner need. If you think about the ’60s for a while, the Vietnam War was on, Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were assassinated, the students were in the activist mood. A student here had burned himself to death in Revelle Plaza in protest. I felt a need to do work to help me cope with this atmosphere—a refuge. Also, I found it began to give me insight into human relationships, communicating. Not performing to be on display or be admired, which is a narrow form of communication, but to make sounds so you connect with someone else and share the energy. [. . .] SDM:  So your music wants to sharpen people’s awareness to a level of spiritual receptivity? Oliveros:  It wants to. I don’t want to make any claims. SDM:  The Hindu scriptures talk about God as being perceivable as the universal sound “Om,” an all pervasive energy field, and they chant “Om” and other mantras to raise their level of consciousness to where they can have an experience of God. You seem to be much more interested in the vibratory experience, shall we say, than in any dogmatization of what God is. Oliveros:  I want to create something that can be experienced and then you walk away without becoming a devotee. SDM:  What is God to you? Oliveros:  All of them. The primary spirit, the source from which all things come. I don’t want anything to sound as though I’m some

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kind of high priest who has a truth other people don’t have. That’s against my philosophy.

tricycle: the buddhist review interviews philip glass (1991) Tricycle:  As your Buddhist studies followed an interest in yoga, let’s start there. That puts us back in 1962, when even a yoga teacher was hard to come by. Philip Glass:  I found one in the Yellow Pages, under the Y’s. For the next three years I studied with Indian yoga teachers, including one who started me being a vegetarian. Tricycle:  And did yoga put you under some kind of Eastern umbrella that extended to Buddhism? Philip Glass:  I never heard anything about Buddhism through my yoga teachers. It was through John Cage that I knew anything at all, through his book Silence. And just a year or two before that, the first really good edition of the I Ching came out, which I knew about through an English painter who had joined the Native American Church and was a peyote eater. Throughout the late Fifties and early Sixties the painters were the most adventurous people in the arts, the ones most committed to searching out new ideas. So it’s not surprising that I would know of the I Ching through a painter. And then John Cage. I certainly did not learn about him at music school. He was not considered a serious musical influence at that time. Certainly not by the people at Julliard. Then in Silence there were all these references to Zen koans. But the big explosion in the culture happened in 1968 when the Beatles went to India to study with the Maharishi. They brought back Indian culture. Only after that did people like Ravi Shankar begin performing in large concert halls—and filling them. George Harrison made Ravi Shankar a household name. But when I started out, any kind of Eastern interest was still pretty marginal. Tricycle:  What were you reading?

Excerpts from Helen Tworkov and Robert Coe, “First Lesson, Best Lesson,” Tricycle (Winter 1991). Originally published as “First Lesson, Best Lesson” in Tricycle: The Buddhist Review 1 no. 2. tricycle.org.

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Philip Glass:  Well, there was an odd assortment of things like Marco Pallis’s Peaks and Lamas, and then the yoga books by Theos Bernard. But he also wrote about Tibet. Bernard had gone to Tibet in the late Thirties. But see, from reading Bernard and from reading Charles Waddell, I figured out that one of the gateways to Tibet was the Darjeeling district. It was still a thriving, culturally intact Tibetan community, not yet disrupted by the Tibetan refugees that came soon after. Another interesting person I read at that time was Arthur Avalon. He had another name: Sir John George Woodruffe. He wrote the Serpent Power and several other books. He concentrated on the yoga that developed in the Bengali parts of India, and that led me to Ramakrishna. But I didn’t get to India until 1965. Tricycle:  After working with Ravi Shankar in Paris? Philip Glass:  Yes. I had received a fellowship to study in Paris with Nadia Boulanger in 1964. For extra money, I took a job transcribing music for Ravi Shankar. He had been invited to Paris by Conrad Rook to write the score for the film Chappaqua. Tricycle:  Had you worked with Indian music before? Philip Glass:  I had never even heard Indian music before! Funny, isn’t it? Tricycle:  Yes. Because in another two years it was on everybody’s transistor radios. Philip Glass:  It seemed to have happened overnight. But in order to find a way of notating the music, I made my first on-the-spot analysis of how Indian music was put together. Tricycle:  How did you notate it? Philip Glass:  The trick, of course, was to take a medium that was based on a different principle of organization and to write it in a language developed for Western music. Western notation was developed for music that is organized along Western lines. Tricycle:  There has been criticism of the interpretation you made of Indian music at that time. And haven’t you yourself referred to your own music of the late Sixties as having grown from mistakes that you made about the structure of Indian music? Philip Glass:  I’m not sure it was a mistake. But it was a very narrow reading.

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Tricycle:  Wasn’t there a real misunderstanding of the structure? That the central technique of Indian music is additive? Philip Glass:  That’s what I thought it was. And that was a misapprehension. I thought I was listening to music that was built in an additive way, but it turned out it really wasn’t. It is built in a cyclic way. And that turned out to be very useful, because the misunderstanding, the use of an additive process, became, in fact, the way I began to write music. Tricycle:  Did you get to India through Ravi Shankar? Philip Glass:  No. Through Swami Satchidananda. I had met him in Paris when he was en route to New York. He had a yoga ashram in Sri Lanka, that is, in Ceylon, and he invited me to study there. This was in the fall of 1966. I was married to JoAnne Akalaitis then, and we went off to India overland, the classic route: through Turkey by train, through Iran and Afghanistan by bus, and into Pakistan through the Khyber Pass, and then into the Punjab. When I got to New Delhi there was a letter waiting for me from Swami Satchidananda: “Dear Student: You’ll be happy to know that I have had a tremendous reception in New York and have started a school here, so there is no reason to go to Ceylon. Please come back to New York. You can study with me here.” Well, I had no intention of returning before seeing India, and because of the Bernard books we ended up in Darjeeling, but with Kalimpong as our goal. Tricycle:  Were you deliberately in search of a teacher? Philip Glass:  I was interested in something more exotic than studying yoga in New York. I was ready for an experience in India in a way that, for example, Bernard had had. My question was whether the teachers who appeared in those books were still around; and more specifically, were the teachings that I had read about just book learning, or were they practiced? Tricycle:  By 1967 you were back in New York, fresh from India and doing beginning meditation practices; and your minimalist compositions of the years 1967, 1968, and 1969 to some extent evolved out of the work you did with Ravi Shankar. Yet you have denied a common assumption that this music was influenced by meditation practice, and you have also been quick to disclaim any association between your work and so-called meditation music.

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Philip Glass:  At the time, there were a lot of composers doing similar experiments with composition, and they hadn’t been to India. They didn’t have Buddhist teachers, and they hadn’t been studying yoga since 1961. Tricycle:  By around 1968, there were articles on the “new meditation music” that referred to you, Terry Riley, La Monte Young, and Steve Reich. Philip Glass:  I have always considered that a misconception. Tricycle:  Let’s clarify something: meditation music does not imply that meditation is the inspiration for the music, or that the music comes from the experience of meditation, but that the music itself promotes—or induces—a contemplative state of mind. A mind that is encouraged to find its own resting place rather than get jerked around by auditory emotive buttons. Philip Glass:  If you go to any of these float tanks or new-age spas, what’s the music that they play? They don’t play Terry or La Monte or me. They have “new-age music,” which doesn’t sound the same. The music that the critics thought was that music hadn’t even been written yet. It came later. Tricycle:  Was there no common source for the minimal music that was written in the late Sixties? Philip Glass:  What’s confusing here is that by 1968 North America was awash with ideas of a new culture, and the associations are inescapable. Tricycle:  Is it completely coincidental that at the same time as meditation practice enters North America in a big way, a movement in music appears with obvious parallels to meditation—music that, for example, denies habitual patterns of expectation, breaks the convention of beginnings and endings, eliminates crescendos, and dissolves the dualities of peaks and valleys? Philip Glass:  There are other sources. [. . .]10 Philip Glass:  In the late Sixties, any number of people were doing music based directly or indirectly on Indian influences. It was not uncommon to see Western musicians dressed in Indian clothes and lighting incense on stage. What I was doing was far, far away from that. I was quite content to let other people light the incense. Tricycle:  There are perhaps other ways of talking about your music and your own Buddhist meditation practice, but it’s tricky, because

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the newness of Buddhism in the United States fosters an irksome imperialistic tendency to co-opt ideas, people, or music, for that matter, as “Buddhist” when they are not really so. Yet in spite of this, there seem to be recognizable interconnections between your music and your studies in Buddhism. Philip Glass:  Certainly. But not in the music itself. The real impact of Buddhist practice affects how you live your life on a daily basis, not how you do your art. How you live day by day, moment by moment. The impact of Buddhism is not theoretical, as in how you paint or how you write a novel. That’s hardly as interesting as how you live on a daily basis, don’t you think? Aspects of Buddhist studies, such as the development of compassion and equanimity and mindfulness, are the practical aspects of daily life. Tricycle:  This is a big departure from the exoticism you pursued in India thirty years ago. Philip Glass:  You start out pursuing the exotic, and it brings you around to the most basic daily activities. Also, the music world encourages such an exhausting and compulsive way of living that it is important to balance your life against the demands of that kind of career. Tricycle:  It took a generation to discover that it’s about how you put your shoes on in the morning. Philip Glass:  But that’s what turns out to be the most interesting thing. That’s why I de-emphasize the impact on the actual music itself.

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chapter 6

Cultural Fusion

In January 1968, the composer Terry Jennings assembled an “All-Star Band” to perform at Steinway Hall. Earlier in the decade, Jennings had presented sparse, reductive compositions at La Monte Young and Yoko Ono’s loft series, but now he was leading modal, raga-like improvisations, with saxophones and tamburas, that garnered comparisons to the shehnai player Bismillah Khan and the late John Coltrane.1 A few years later, Alice Coltrane assembled her own All-Star Band—with Pharoah Sanders and Archie Shepp on sax, but also Tulsi on tambura—to perform John Coltrane’s Africa at Carnegie Hall, as part of a benefit for Swami Satchidananda’s International Yoga Institute. “My music isn’t jazz, not really,” she said, keen to avoid being pigeonholed.2 She instead sought something “universal.”3 Through the 1960s and early 1970s, American experimental musicians eagerly absorbed an assortment of global music traditions. John Cale, Tony Conrad, and La Monte Young pored over the Tableau Comparatif des Intervalles Musicaux—a catalogue of tuning systems, from ancient Greece to India—to hone their idiosyncratic approach to drones.4 While developing phasing, Steve Reich took inspiration from transcriptions of West African music by the missionary A. M. Jones.5 Scrutinizing academic treatises, or listening to newly available “world music” recordings, was often just a first step. For a few weeks in 1970, Reich studied with Ewe master drummer Gideon Alorworye in Accra, Ghana, before his trip was cut short by a bout of malaria. Back in New 104

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York, the composer grappled with fraught questions.6 Was cultural fusion possible, desirable, or ethical? Was it tribute, integration, or appropriation? The answer to these questions was the breakthrough work Drumming, which critic Tom Johnson heralded as “African and European elements so thoroughly fused—almost as if we really did live in one world.”7 But Reich soon came to feel that it was no longer appropriate to focus his musical energy on cultural practices that were not his own.8 Rather than drawing global sounds into their musical works, other experimentalists instead looked to cross-cultural collaboration. Trumpeter Don Cherry joined forces with the Brazilian percussionist Naná Vasconcelos and the South African pianist Abdullah Ibrahim (aka Dollar Brand) to create what one writer called “improvised music without categories.” Upon returning from study in India, Terry Riley had, according to one hyperbolic program note, “achieved what is perhaps the first true synthesis of Eastern and Western music.” From their movement’s outset, the minimalists had assimilated non-Western musical ideas, but through the 1970s, their approaches shifted as they carefully—and, occasionally, wholeheartedly—integrated global approaches.

carman moore on terry jennings and his all-star band ( village voice , 1968) Editors’ note: The All-Star Band, which performed “Improvisation in D,” included Terry Jennings (soprano saxophone), Terry Riley (soprano saxophone), John Cale (electric organ), Tony Conrad (violin), Shyam Bhatnagar (tambura), La Monte Young (tambura), Simone Forti (voice), and Marian Zazeela (voice). Rushing from concert to concert is no way to run a tight critical ship, but it allows me to say that soprano saxophonist Terry Jennings and his “allstar band” opened at Steinway Hall on January 12 what promises to be an interesting avant-garde series produced by Benjamin Patterson.9 I caught about a half hour of one piece that seemed like it was going to last the rest of the evening. I attended long enough, at any rate, to report that Mr. Jennings and company improvised over a tonic drone raga-style, that

Carman Moore, “Fragments,” Village Voice, January 18, 1968, 25 and 28. Courtesy of The Village Voice.

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is an improvisation of slow, kaleidoscopic, mono-dynamic growth, and that Mr. Jennings is a musician of sound tone, technique, and patient soul. Although the group’s sonic bag was more Oriental than anything else, the ghost of John Coltrane informed much of Mr. Jennings’s nimble ramblings. This music is not so exciting to me as Indian raga, and unless I were free to walk around every now and then, I feel I’d become bored. But the fragment of the evening which I attended was a time well spent.

angela dews profiles alice coltrane ( essence , 1971) The “Believers” packed New York City’s Town Hall one Sunday night last fall. They had come to pay tribute to the master, John Coltrane. Six hours of heavy music, with Alice Coltrane finishing the show, made the 1971 John Coltrane Memorial Concert a night to remember. Musically, she has grown, her new album Universal Consciousness attests to that; her command of instruments has grown also, she is playing the organ as well as the harp. At home, Alice Coltrane, the artist, becomes Alice Coltrane, the mother, turning her head to three laughing boys tumbling down the carpeted steps on their stomachs. The motion is fluid . . . it’s one thing. We are in the basement studio of her Dix Hills, Long Island home, where she does most of her recording. It is one of those cool, clear Saturdays—nice out in the country away from the city’s special hassles. She has kicked off her shoes and walks barefooted (her hair wild), from the harp to the piano and vibes, playing with John’s tapes and her own, while the boys—John, Jr., 7; Ravi, 6; and Orin, 4—run free. “I haven’t been traveling much to do gigs. I don’t want to be away from home all the time.” Home is a rambling, 12-room house with woods out back and an impressive high, white, wrought-iron gate in front. It’s about purples, reds, yellows, scattered rugs, low tables, and fireplaces inside. A new Jaguar is parked in the garage next to the station wagon. It’s been home for about seven years. “John was just beginning to enjoy it . . .”

Angela Dews, “Alice Coltrane,” Essence, December 1971, 42 and 62. Copyright © 1971 ESSENCE Communications Inc.

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John Coltrane, tenor saxophonist and leader of what critics called the “New Thing” in jazz of the ’60’s, died mid-flight in July 1967 of an inflamed liver. He’s been gone for over four years now and Alice is learning to live alone. Last winter she said, “I haven’t been making a lot of plans. I do a few benefits, and I have a lot to do with editing John’s unreleased materials, but I’m not going to break my back. I play when I want to . . . John worked hard for this.” But at the beginning of this year, she spent five weeks in India and Ceylon where she attended and was asked to open a convention of yogis and teachers meeting to talk about various schools of Eastern religious thought. She also spent some time in monasteries in the Himalayas. “The trip to the East gave me the spiritual motivation to come out more—to do more with my music. I also listened to a lot of beautiful sitar and vina music [Indian string instruments] and I’m going to use some of the chants I heard . . . some of the essence of the East.”10 She looks tired today and gets up to light more incense and grab one of the boys as he dashes coatless out of the door before she goes on. “Eastern music isn’t uncommon to our ears. A lot of it has been recorded in our time by John, Ornette [Ornette Coleman, alto saxophonist], and others. “All of my music is John. It’s John’s influence coming out on piano. I learned all I could in that basic [bebop] Detroit scene and it helped quite a bit, but I really didn’t get into anything until I came to New York.” (She started taking piano lessons at 7 at home on Detroit’s West Side). In New York she played with guitarist Kenny Burrell, tenor saxophonist Johnny Griffin, vibraphonist Terry Gibbs, and others; met and married John Coltrane in 1963. She joined his group in ’66 replacing McCoy Tyner. “Technical training is an aid to writing and composition but, it has nothing to do with creativity. John’s the best example, he started late and had no technical training. When I first joined the group I was struggling with the music. Because he was a master, he saw that I was playing with only a few octaves. He told me to play the whole piano, utilize the range so I wouldn’t be locked in. It freed me.” And Alice freed is a heavy spiritual thing from the beginning with John on Live at the Village Vanguard Again through her own Monastic Trio, Ptah, the el Daoud, and others, and on into her last Journey to Satchidananda. But she doesn’t think she will really be able to take his music much further right now. “I don’t have the time to dedicate to my music. I have all of my jobs and all of John’s to worry about . . . dinner, school, the

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whole scene. It’s up to Pharoah, Ornette, or Archie Shepp [tenor saxophonist] . . . or a newcomer. My greatest dream is to have one of my sons get into music . . . to take his father’s concepts into a new direction.” Meanwhile, the baby has fallen and cut his lip, been comforted and cared for, and is running again. She remains calm. “My music isn’t jazz, not really. It is closer to spiritual music. It’s universal and it’s freedom. I can appreciate almost any music if the artist is dedicated, like Ray Charles and Aretha Franklin for instance; some artists—I won’t mention any names—are trying to fuse concepts and it’s a let-down. They’re playing in a limited range probably because they know the extent of the money they can possibly make doing what they know and are trained for. I don’t really blame them, but a genius playing so far below his level of understanding is sad.” Upstairs in the living room, Alice politely answers questions. She sits on the edge of the couch, looking past the white piano and the tumbling, running boys and out of the window to the woods. “I like to be around grass and to see flowers.” Daughter Mickey, 11, from a previous marriage, calmly stops to pose for a picture, and is gone. Downstairs in the studio, Alice Coltrane raps—about John’s concepts of music and life and her own, and about some of the steps he was taking—“I remember one night when he called, very excited, to say he had found two new musicians. They were Pharoah Saunders and drummer Rashied Ali. They worked on a different sound and in the albums after A Love Supreme you can hear it.” In 1965, A Love Supreme brought ’Trane the Downbeat Readers’ Poll Awards as “Jazzman of the Year,” “Tenor Saxophonist of the Year,” “Record of the Year,” and the “Hall of Fame” designation. Then he changed his group, and his music began to call for a more complete commitment from his listeners. The critics predicted he would scare away the listeners. But ’Trane had to explore those more spiritual sounds. It was as if at first with his harddriving rhythm he was moving towards something and then began searching around in what he found. The tape from the “Gate” is on. Pharoah is soaring. Alice is on the harp. The equipment in the studio is “bad”—“John taught me to get the best”—and the cut is overpowering. She talks about how they played it once and it didn’t click and then how everybody got into it. “We took care of some business that night . . .” and that’s freedom. They are still communicating. Those projections are escape to, touching, Ohnedaruth,

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the mystic known as John Coltrane . . . but once again we’re talking. “Let me turn this off. It’s pretty and it pulls me in. This is important.” “It’s a spiritual thing . . . I guess you’d call it religious life. Life has to be spiritual some kind of way. John was a mystic. He had a strong effect on people and they still haven’t forgotten him. He used to wonder if people would get spiritual benefit from his music, whether they could transcend their bodies—their limitations. “My music is dedicated to God, and people feel the vibrations. An artist finds happiness through this. “John got me interested in yoga and the eastern religious concepts. It’s not centered in any one philosophy, but there are elements from Egypt, Japan, India. It’s universal, there’s even a little astrology. [She’s a Virgo.] The Western Church has failed, especially with young people. It was set up to serve needs it’s not meeting. Ask a Swami, Hindu monk, or someone else from the East about life after death and you’ll get answers that are real, about direct experience, about looking to God. It has helped me to go on.” Right now she’s under a five-year contract to ABC Impulse Records. She edits most of John’s tapes and predicts his work will be coming out for at least 25 years. “There are about 23 albums still unreleased, plus the re-issues and some are mine. He did them for me.” This brings a quiet smile to her face and she continues, remembering the things that have never been taped. “I have been with him and heard things no recording session can compare to.” And now Alice Coltrane says, “I’m free. John did this. I got an offer to go to Japan but I won’t go 10,000 miles on someone else’s terms. I’ve been taking orders, in some form, all of my life; being a woman I’ve always been subservient—servant, nurse, cook. The man is number one. He must assume the position of leadership or where is he? In this country, the Black man is not leading. The only hope is through enough money to pay his way to privacy, freedom, independence . . . I’m glad I’m not a man. My true expression is in my arts and my kids.”

steve reich, “a composer looks east” ( new york times , 1973) Earlier this summer I studied Balinese Gamelan with I Nyoman Sumandhi, a Balinese musician in residence at the American Society for Steve Reich, “A Composer Looks East,” New York Times, September 2, 1973, 95. Copyright Steve Reich.

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Eastern Arts Summer Program at the University of Washington, in Seattle. During the summer of 1970, I studied African drumming with Gideon Alorworye, a master drummer of the Ewe tribe in residence with the Ghana Dance Ensemble at the Institute of African Studies, in Accra. I studied Balinese and African music because I love them, and also because I believe that non-Western music is presently the single most important source of new ideas for Western composers and musicians. Although earlier generations of Western musicians listened to many non-Western musics, live or on recording, it is now becoming increasingly possible to actually learn how to play African, Balinese, Javanese, Indian, Korean and Japanese music, among others, directly from first-rate African, Balinese, Javanese, Indian, Korean or Japanese musicians right here in this country or abroad. A Western musician can thus begin to approach non-Western music as he would his own; he learns how to play it through study with a qualified teacher and in that process can also analyze the music he is playing in detail to understand how it is put together. During the process of performance and analysis he will find basically different systems of rhythmic structure, scale construction, instrumental technique and tuning. Knowledge of these different systems also sheds light on our own Western system, showing it to be one way among many. •

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Though it is now possible to study the performance of some nonWestern musics at several institutions in this country, among them Wesleyan University in Connecticut, the University of California at Los Angeles, American Society for Eastern Arts in San Francisco, York University in Toronto, California Institution of the Arts, and the Ali Akbar College of Music north of San Francisco, it would be highly desirable to have non-Western musical performance and theory taught at conservatories like Juilliard, Eastman, Oberlin, and others so students at these schools could get a more truly complete musical education. A very real interest in non-Western music can be seen now in many young composers, some young performers, and a few universities, where the interest in electronic music, so marked in the sixties, is gradually giving way to an interest in world music. Along with the obvious benefits of this interest, which include a strong belief in live performance, and the aural or rote teaching of music instead of the exclusive use of scores, there are also some problems. The most difficult of these is the problem of Western composers, like myself, absorbing non-Western music. What can a composer do with this knowledge?

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One possibility is to become an ethnomusicologist, using the talents of analysis that composers often have. This is work of the utmost value, producing masterpieces of scholarship like Colin McPhee’s “Music in Bali,” but it is not musical composition. Alternately, a composer can give up composing and devote himself to trying to become a performer of some non-Western music. This will take many years of study and may, even then, only lead to mediocre performing abilities when judged by African, Balinese, Indian, or whatever appropriate non-Western standards. (If the performance of non-Western music were available for musically gifted Western children and teen-agers to study, this would then undoubtedly lead to American and European-born virtuosos of non-Western music.) Lastly, one may continue composing, but with the knowledge of non-Western music one has studied, and this is the case for myself and most other composers in this situation. •

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The question then arises as to how, if at all, this knowledge of nonWestern music influences a composer. The least interesting form of influence, to my mind, is that of imitating the sound of some nonWestern music. This can be done by using non-Western instruments in one’s own music (sitars in the rock band), or by using one’s own instruments to sound like non-Western ones (singing “Indian style” melodies over electronic drones). This method is the simplest and most superficial way of dealing with non-Western music, since the general sound of these musics can be absorbed in a few minutes of listening without further study. Imitating the sound of non-Western music leads to “exotic music”; what used to be called “Chinoiserie.” Alternately, one can create a music with one’s own sound that is constructed in the light of one’s knowledge of non-Western structures. This is similar, in fact, to learning Western musical structures. The idea of canon or round, for instance, has influenced motets, fugues, and then, among others, the music of Anton Webern and my own phase pieces. The precise influence of this, or any structural idea, is quite subtle, and acts in unforeseen ways. One can study the rhythmic structure of non-Western music and let that study lead one where it will while continuing to use the instruments, scales, and any other sound one has grown up with. This brings about the interesting situation of the non-Western influence being there in the thinking, but not in the sound. This is a more genuine and interesting form of influence because while listening one is not necessarily aware of some non-Western music being

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imitated. Instead of imitation, the influence of non-Western musical structures on the thinking of a Western composer is likely to produce something genuinely new.

jan bruér’s liner notes to don cherry’s organic music society (1973) Around 1960, Don Cherry was one of the most discussed American jazz musicians. He played trumpet or cornet with members of the avantgarde, such as Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins and Albert Ayler. Since the mid-sixties he has mainly led his own groups, more often in Europe than in the U.S.A. very likely. He met the Swedish artist Moki Karlsson, and the two of them have lived mostly in Sweden in recent years at the old Tågarp School near Hastveda, in north Skåne. Don can no longer be considered only as a jazz musician. He plays improvised music without categories. Trumpet he uses sporadically, but just as cheerfully he plays a variety of flutes and percussion instruments from all parts of the world. He sings a good deal too. The music in this album differs from Don Cherry’s earlier records in that it gives a picture of his multifaceted musical work in Sweden over the past years, as musician, teacher and giver of inspiration. In their home near Hästveda, Don and Moki’s well known musical associates, friends, neighbors and, not least, children, gather to be close to each other and to play. It may be music of a meditative nature, such as can be heard in the North Brazilian Ceremonial Hymn. The piece was however recorded in Copenhagen, where Don was a frequent visitor during the summer of 1972, during the time he was playing with the South African pianist, Dollar Brand. The recording was made at 6 o’clock one July morning in a peaceful building sheltered in a garden on the outskirts of Copenhagen. Naná [Vasconcelos], a Brazilian folk musician, introduced this tuneful, wordless song, a simple theme which is repeated throughout. Variations appear in the dynamics and in the percussive effects. Naná is to be heard towards the middle and at the end of the piece playing the archaic berimbau (musical bow), a one-stringed instrument with a bow and arrow appearance, having a calabash as a resonator. Both grown ups and children take part in the little choir. Jan Bruér, liner notes to Don Cherry’s Organic Music Society; English translation by Keith Knox (Caprice Records, 1973). Copyright Jan Bruér. English translation copyright Keith Knox, courtesy of Tom Knox.

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Elixir is a kaleidoscope, a concentrate of African, Asiatic, American, yes all of the music of the world in Don Cherry’s own supreme vintage. It opens with Chinese ceramic flute, h’suan, and closes with Don singing to an Indian harmonium. Immediately following is a sarangi solo by Hans “Isak” Isgren, who studied this hard-to-handle instrument with the master, Ram Narayan. Indian music and philosophy signify a great deal for Don Cherry. This philosophic/religious interest in expressed in Relativity Suite. Don sings an improvisation over an unyielding bass figure from the African hunter’s harp, dousso n’gouri, played by Christer Bothén. Christer lived in villages in Mali for some time learning to play this remarkable 6-string ostinato instrument, which has a rattle attached. Bengt Berger studied percussion in India and in the first part of Relativity Suite he plays an elongated Indian drum, called mridangam. In the second part he plays log drums, which were made from Swedish birch. In the summer of 1971, Don played for a lengthy period in a large specially constructed tent, called a dome, as a contribution to the visionary exhibition “Utopia & Visions,” held in the garden at the back of the Museum of Modern Art in Stockholm. Moki had fitted out the Dome with her textiles and Don played together with his family, friends, professional and amateur musicians, and with visitors. Goran Freese was present with his tape machine for several days and from his rich tapings a connected excerpt from a long suite of melodies has been chosen. Don worked with a couple of themes on this occasion especially often, and these we can hear in the piece named after the exhibition, Utopia & Visions, which also includes the theme called Hope. Shortly before mid-summer 1971, Don spent some days as visiting teacher for a youth music camp, held at Bollinas County College (People’s High School). For a week, about 50 teenage musicians devoted themselves to classical European music, mainly for symphony orchestra. Then Don and the Turkish drummer Okay Temiz turned up and created bewilderment with teaching methods that differed from those of other instructors at the course. Don passed out stenciled music sheets with several short themes notated, without scrupulous attention given to dynamics and phrasing. He didn’t say much about how the musicians should play, but instead played piano and trumpet. Sometimes he sang. He got the teenagers to listen to each other and to themselves, without relying on the notations. He didn’t tell them when to change between themes but played instead. The intentionally uncertain beginning to Terry Riley’s piece is due to this, directly after Dollar Brand’s Bra Joe

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figure 12. Don Cherry and Terry Riley, 1970. Courtesy of Terry Riley.

from Kilimanjaro. It occurs again in the changeover between Riley’s two different themes. But when this youthful symphony orchestra really gets going, there is no uncertainty at all! It sounds rather as though the 50 teenagers enjoyed playing this music, which for most of them had been an unknown notion only a few days previously. Many were at first skeptical, both teachers and pupils, about Don’s paucity of words in his teaching technique. But eventually he more and more convinced them that this was not such a crazy method after all. He demonstrated a method of learning how to play notated music from the listening aspect of pitching. The final piece in the album, the Indian hued Rosa, is another example of Don’s teaching methods. On this occasion he was working with elementary school teachers for a course held in the summer of 1972 at Oskarshamn. An informal choir of the teachers is heard singing together with Don. Neither the technical standards nor the musical precision of this album are professionally perfect. Only the recordings from August 14th 1972 (Elixir—Relativity Suite) were made in a recording studio. The rest of the material consists of documentation recordings made on portable machines, some of them carried out under awkward acoustic conditions. But the records are happily able, nonetheless, to achieve

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what they set out to do—present a portrait of an exciting musical personality.

arnie passman on terry riley ( berkeley barb , 1974) After over three years, avant-garde electronics composer Terry Riley played the UC Art Museum for whose opening he had been booked. “I went to India instead,” said Terry, after his first Berkeley concert last Saturday. For those of you who don’t know, 38-year-old Terry is (according to the program notes) considered by many to be one of the most imaginative composers and skillful performing artists of our time. And “to have achieved what is perhaps the first true synthesis of Eastern and Western music, and to have marked out a unique direction for the music of the New Age.” “I wish I’d gone to see Esther Phillips instead,” said one arch music head of Terry’s two selection concert, in the vast Gallery B of the museum. “It could have been louder.” “I would have liked to have heard some accompaniment,” said another cognizant of his solo performance on a Yamaha Y-5-D manual organ. “A flute or a piccolo. Actually, a bass is what I kept wanting to hear.” She departed early in the second number. “It was boring,” said a potential reviewer, who left after Terry played his variations on “A Rainbow in Curved Air.” “I think he’s synthesizing the worst of East and West. I can’t help but feel that Pran Nath (North Indian classical singer) has had an adverse effect on him.” Well, it really didn’t swing, not that that’s necessarily what it was supposed to do. It was an enticing environment for the over 800 folks who showed up. A half-dozen grand Oriental rugs were spread across the floor of the hall, and I was told the middle one in the back row was the best spot to hear the music from. A deliciously light orange, handsomely designed carpet, it and the music didn’t get anyone that I could discern off. Probably even Solomon’s legendary green silk and gold, 60 mile square flying fleece wouldn’t have done it, if my consensus is real. Nonetheless, the two 45-minute pieces (“The Persian Surgery Dervishes” closed the show) did produce a mellowing effect for a large body Arnie Passman, “East & West Meet in Electro-Sound,” Berkeley Barb 19, no. 6 (February 22–28, 1974), 22; www.berkeleybarb.net.

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of the audience. However, they seem to be seriously disadvantaged by not being able to move about. For the higher you got in the cathedrallike space (as I did through the use of a magic word), the more essential and reverent Terry’s music became. Both works can run for as long or as short as Terry desires. Initially, I was quite taken by “Rainbow,” flashing: “That’s the way I write. That’s the only way I care to write, god damn it!” Improvise! Synthesize! What else? However, the piece became evertoo-quickly tedious. I can dig how the repetitiveness of the basic phrases allows Terry to be firm in the Now, as it were, reaching back from there to bring forward and into the future, ever so sparkingly (like light) the archetypal music of the past. For myself, and the folks I talked to, both pieces were about twice as long as the audience wanted and needed. “The Persian Surgery Dervishes” was begun as a four note treble phrase ten years ago. It too produces long sections of improvisation over an existing pattern. The classic approach. It was during this piece, that I quickly found dreadful, that I decided to reach the higher reaches of the room. To my great satisfaction, as it turned out. Initially, the piece brought visions of fairest Scotland or Ireland, a real bagpipe sound was being communicated. However, it soon took me to Morocco’s legendary Joujouka, the home of the Sufi court horn players who Brian Jones recorded a few years ago and with whom Ornette Coleman last year made an album to be released shortly. And, finally, that wonderful sound of high Andean pipes made itself felt. And as I looked down on the crowd, I knew some of those highs just weren’t available to them. And the highest high for me was looking down on Terry as light reflecting off the keys made it look as if he were playing strips of silver and molten mercury. Maybe he, in fact, was resting and centering the quicksilver in me. Terry said although these are his two main pieces, he decided to use the organ (with pre-recorded tape) because of the high, cathedral space in Gallery B. “A Rainbow in Curved Air” is available on a Columbia album, but “The Persian Surgery Dervishes,” recorded on the Shandar label in Paris in 1972, is not yet available in this country. “I also recorded ‘Happy Ending’ for Warner Brothers in Paris in ’72,” said Terry, who teaches at Mills College in Oakland. “It was the sound track for a French art film, ‘Les Yeux Femmes,’ directed by Joel Santori, which is playing in Paris now. I doubt it’ll ever be shown here.

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“I’ve also done the sound track for ‘The Life Span Code,’ which was directed by Sandy Whitelaw in Amsterdam. I’m going back to Rome in May to do some more sound track work.” Terry said, although he hasn’t gotten into music as therapy a great deal, sound has great potential. “They use ragas for healing in India,” he said. “Although Pran Nath says composing for a certain chakra may do the science of yoga more harm right now.” “Modal music, 5, 6, or 7 tones, depending on the composition of the interludes, can have a quite salutary effect. A lot of irrational frequencies, on the other hand, can do just the opposite.”

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chapter 7

Across the Arts

In an influential 1965 essay, critic Barbara Rose described the emergence of “minimal art,” located in such disparate forms as the glacially slow films of Andy Warhol, the quotidian choreography of Yvonne Rainer, the fluorescent-light sculptures of Dan Flavin, and the dream music of La Monte Young.1 This “new sensibility” emerged collectively, among shared spaces, resources, and friendships. Young dedicated his iconic Composition 1960 #10—“Draw a straight line and follow it”— to sculptor Robert Morris, who designed the painted gong that resonated with the drones of the Theatre of Eternal Music. Steve Reich’s first concerts in New York were held at the Park Place Gallery, alongside an exhibit of artworks that included Dean Fleming’s warping, wave-like panels, which served as backdrop for the composer’s Come Out and Four Pianos.2 At the invitation of avant-garde director Jonas Mekas, Philip Glass presented early pieces like Strung Out at the FilmMakers Cinematheque; Rainer, the pioneering dancer and choreographer, lent her voice to a few rehearsals of the ensemble.3 Composer Charlemagne Palestine and dancer Simone Forti staged their dramatic, theatrical improvisations at SoHo’s Sonnabend Gallery.4 Collaboration through multimedia, or “intermedia,” helped artists and audiences understand minimalism as an interdisciplinary phenomenon.5 The Whitney Museum’s landmark 1969 Anti-Illusion exhibition featured so-called “extended time pieces,” including Glass’s How Now, Michael Snow’s film ←→, and Bruce Nauman’s body-based art. During 118

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the show, artists Dan Graham and Richard Serra, filmmaker Michael Snow, and composer James Tenney performed Reich’s Pendulum Music, a sound sculpture in which swinging microphones are released above amplifiers to create a cascade of phasing feedback—the visual and sonic epitome of music as a gradual process.6 Though such collaborations could be as fleeting as a gallery run, some continued over several years, including Alvin Lucier’s work with the Viola Farber Dance Company and Reich’s partnership with dancer Laura Dean.7 Minimalist composers often themselves worked in multiple artforms. Yoshi Wada trained first as a sculptor, and his droning pipe horns were as much a visual spectacle as a musical one.8 Tony Conrad and Phill Niblock frequently integrated their own experimental films into their concerts.9 And Meredith Monk’s work fundamentally defied disciplinary boundaries; unsure how to categorize her, the Village Voice sent its music, dance, and theater critics to review Monk’s 1976 Quarry.10

robert morris, “blank form” (1960) From the subjective point of view there is no such thing as nothing—Blank Form shows this, as well as might any other situation of deprivation. So long as the form (in the broadest possible sense: situation) is not reduced beyond perception, so long as it perpetuates and upholds itself as being object in the subject’s field of perception, the subject reacts to it in many particular ways when I call it art. He reacts in other ways when I do not call it art. Art is primarily a situation in which one assumes an attitude of reacting to some of one’s awareness as art. Blank Form is still in the great tradition of artistic weakness—taste. That is to say, I prefer it—especially the content (as opposed to “antiform” for the attempt to contradict one’s taste). Blank form is like life, essentially empty, allowing plenty of room for disquisitions on its nature and mocking each in its turn.

This text was originally intended to be published in An Anthology of Chance Operations, but it was pulled by Morris from the manuscript before going to print. La Monte Young and Jackson Mac Low, An Anthology of Chance Operations (New York: Heiner Friedrich, 1970). “Blank Form” was first published in Barbara Haskell, Blam!: The Explosion of Pop, Minimalism, and Performance, 1958–1964 (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1984), 101. Robert Morris, Blank Form © 2022 The Estate of Robert Morris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Reproduced with permission of The Estate of Robert Morris.

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Blank form slowly waves a large gray flag and laughs about how close it got to the second law of thermodynamics. Some examples of Blank Form sculpture: 1. A column with perfectly smooth, rectangular surfaces, 2 feet by 2 feet by 8 feet, painted gray. 2. A wall, perfectly smooth and painted gray, measuring 2 feet by 8 feet by 8 feet. 3. A cabinet with simple construction, painted gray and measuring 1 foot by 2 feet by 6 feet—that is, a cabinet just large enough to enter.

yvonne rainer, “a quasi survey of some ‘minimalist’ tendencies in the quantitatively minimal dance activity midst the plethora, or an analysis of trio a ” (1966)

Objects

Dances eliminate or minimize

1. role of artist’s hand 2. hierarchical relationships of parts 3. texture 4. figure reference 5. illusionism 6. complexity and detail 7. monumentality

1. phrasing 2. development and climax 3. variation: rhythm, shape, dynamics 4. character 5. performance 6. variety: phases and the spatial field 7. the virtuosic feat and the fully extended body

substitute 1. factory fabrication 2. unitary forms, modules 3. uninterrupted surface 4. nonreferential forms 5. literalness 6. simplicity 7. human scale

1. energy equality and “found” movement 2. equality of parts, repetition 3. repetition or discrete events 4. neutral performance 5. task or tasklike activity 6. singular action, event, or tone 7. human scale

Excerpt from Yvonne Rainer, “A Quasi Survey of Some ‘Minimalist’ Tendencies in the Quantitatively Minimal Dance Activity Midst the Plethora, or an Analysis of Trio A,” in Yvonne Rainer: Work 1961–73 (Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1974), 63. This selection is a short excerpt from a much longer essay. Courtesy of Yvonne Rainer.

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Although the benefit to be derived from making a one-to-one relationship between aspects of so-called minimal sculpture and recent dancing is questionable, I have drawn up a chart that does exactly that. Those who need alternatives to subtle distinction-making will be elated, but nevertheless such a device may serve as a shortcut to ploughing through some of the things that have been happening in a specialized area of dancing and once stated can be ignored or culled from at will.

alfred frankenstein on “extended timers” at the whitney ( san francisco examiner , 1969) On the sidelines of the Whitney Museum’s “Anti-Illusionism” show which was discussed in these columns last week, there were four evenings of “extended time pieces,” two of them musical, one cinematographic, and one—well, you name it. “Extended time” is the phrase for the new esthetic of progress by minute variation. In works like Terry Riley’s recently recorded masterpiece, “In C,” the players seem at the start to be doing nothing but repeat the same short phrase, over and over and over again; gradually, however, one becomes aware of slight changes—harmonic, melodic, rhythmic—and the repetitiousness of the whole performance makes one acutely aware of the slightest deviation from the intently reiterated pattern as it occurs. Eventually, by very slow stages, the entire musical fabric is transformed; the hearer has gone from here to there, and he has participated in that progression with each and every one of his nerve endings. Repetition is supposed to have a soporific effect, but a good “extended time” composition is the least soporific music in the world. Just what this esthetic has to do with anti-illusionist art—sculptures of hay and molten lead, columns of air, and dishes of dog food placed before paintings—is not too easy to see. I suspect that the extended timers and the anti-illusionists are brought together more by personal friendship than any definable community of ideas. One of the group— Bruce Nauman—is both an extended timer and an anti-illusionist, but his performance suggested that he is not completely aware of what the extended-time idea really means. Alfred Frankenstein, “Extended Timers—and the Anti-Illusionists,” San Francisco Examiner, June 8, 1969, 30–31. From San Francisco Chronicle. © 1969. Hearst Newspapers. All rights reserved. Used under license.

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The one who understood it best of all among the Whitney performers was the composer Steve Reich, who introduced a new instrument of his own called the “phase shifting pulse gate.” This is an electronic device whereby repeated pulses can be imperceptibly shifted from unison (among as many as 12 different voices) to its opposite and back again. The “Pulse Music” whereby this instrument was demonstrated, employing electronic sound, built up to a climax of extraordinary grandeur and eloquence. For my money, it was not so successful in composing the pitches and pulses of the four log drums with which the evening began, if only because there is a point at which extended time begins to double back on itself, and the word for that is boredom. Reich’s “Violin Phase,” employing a live fiddler (Paul Zukofsky) versus three recorded tracks of himself had the same defect, or so it seemed to me. Reich’s “Pendulum Music” demonstrated how four swinging microphones can generate four fascinating, unearthly howls and produce interior voices in their clash. Philip Glass’s “How Now” and “Two Pages” was extended-time music of a more orthodox stamp, scored for electronic keyboard instruments and amplified saxophones. The loudspeaker sound of this music underlined the indebtedness of this whole school to recordings. Its repetitiousness recalled both Indian music and the endless “deedle-deedle” of the baroque composers, but their “terrace dynamics” were not employed. Everybody played all the time at the same level of loudness. New systems of composition are likely to manifest themselves in narrow, dogmatic ways at their start, and then broaden out. •

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The extended time esthetic was brilliantly displayed in a film by Michael Snow whose title was not a word but a horizontal, double-headed arrow. In this film, the camera moved back and forth between two sides of a room. Figures appeared and disappeared; people washed the windows and swept the floors; all the time the camera’s vision—and the spectator’s—kept shifting horizontally in a relentless, unchanging rhythm. And then the rhythm did change. It got faster and faster and the images of the room dissolved into abstract space and light. Snow also showed a film called “One Second in Montreal” which consisted entirely of smudgy, underexposed still shots of people’s houses in snowy weather and proved to be the bore of the century.

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Bruce Nauman’s extended time piece was neither musical nor cinematographic. Nauman and two female assistants stood in different corners of the room, rocked back and forth on their bare feet, and banged their backs up against the wall. This went on, without change or variation of any kind, for one solid hour. They hit themselves 30 times a minute, 1800 times in all. While this was going on, one could not help but admire the deadpan earnestness with which it was done. In retrospect, the mindless masochism of the performance seems altogether horrifying, and in view of the very considerable risk of physical damage to its participants, it seems irresponsible of the Whitney to have permitted it.

lizzie borden on charlemagne palestine’s body-as-instrument (1974) The work of Charlemagne Palestine involves the acoustical and emotional consequences of sound as a fluid and ever-changing interaction between performer, instrument, space, and listener. The essence of his music is the investigation of timbre—the subtleties of color produced by instruments such as the piano, the chimes, the human voice, and electronic sonorities. For Palestine, each instrument has a “golden sound,” less an objective reality than his term for the heightened sensitivity of a performer for the particularities of each instrument. The chameleonlike reciprocity between sound (timbre) and structure (rhythm) is demonstrated by one of his central pieces for the piano, 1 + 2 Fifths. A rhythm of two against three is played and seems at first to be purely rhythm. As the sustain pedal is pressed, the timbre begins to overcome the rhythm and finally predominates it until it has become a foreground sonority with an inert background rhythm. The fluidity of this relationship between sound and structure is the basis of Palestine’s music in both single works and entire concerts, none of which are ever performed exactly alike. Recent performances have begun with an electronic sonority of one interval of a fifth (C/G) reinforced twice, and ten minutes later another reinforced fifth one major third higher (E/B) realized on an electronic synthesizer. The speakers are placed differently for each concert. In a recent performance at Sonnabend Gallery, they were secreted in a closet, a stairwell, and in rooms closed to the audience, so that the sound was filtered by these containers. Excerpt from Lizzie Borden, “The New Dialectic,” Artforum (March 1974): 44–51. Copyright Lizzie Borden.

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The sonorities create a space of complex wave shapes with many overtones, of densities varying from place to place. Because there is a multitude of possible readings, the structural configuration of the sound can be apprehended by a listener only after a long period of time. The subsequent piano pieces, 1 + 2 + 3 Fifths for Piano, begin by reinforcing the fundamentals of a fifth in the electronic sonority. Though structured and varying in duration and intensity, they are very responsive to the energy of the audience—the performer sometimes loudly confronting the audience to quiet it down. The voice pieces, involved with “the different timbral mixtures available with the voice on one sustained tone,” are very emotional. They are plastic in response to the architecture of the room as Palestine moves through the space, walking, running, and banging against the walls and floor. The sound is perceived as advancing, receding, and circling in shifting orientation to the ear. The source of the drone seems primitive and archetypal—his body becomes the instrument with which to tap feelings of anguish and pain. When he returns to the piano after the vocal works to play Pentatonic Study (“five notes in an overlapping melodic style”) and Octave Study (“two notes an octave apart . . . set into motion”), the piano is lyrical and plaintive. He has created a psychological dialectic between kinds of feeling, between the instruments, and between the voices in each instrument. The “purity” of the sound varies with the context—after the intense vocal works, the piano loses its neutrality and becomes a dramatic agent as well. At the end of the performance, Palestine repeats the electronic sonority with an extra fifth (D/A), which spills in upon the audience in a denser configuration. In contrast to his solo performances, Palestine’s concerts with Simone Forti are theatrical and operatic. While he is primarily a musician in his own work, his personality predominates his work with Forti. Palestine’s movements, sounds, and props enter into a dialogue with her own selfpresentation. The psychological overtones are exteriorized and staged through actions either in sympathy or disjunction. While there is never any determined sequence to their work, the response to each situation is not improvisatory but a meshing of sensibilities which comes from understanding the internalized structures of each other’s work. While Palestine’s work with Forti is looser than his solo concerts, it shares the interest in the location and movement of sound, the creation of sonorities, and the search for a deep source of emotional interaction. These concerns are continued in a work that may take several years to complete, involving the subtleties of pitch in the piano and predicated

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figure 13. Yoshi Wada’s Earth Horns with Electronic Drone at the Kitchen, 1974. From left: Rhys Chatham, Barbara Stewart, Garrett List, Yoshi Wada, and Liz Phillips. Photograph by Seiji Kakizaki. Reprinted with the permission of the estate of Yoshi Wada; Yoshi Wada’s estate maintains all rights.

upon an essential characteristic of the instrument—that each note is composed of three strings never exactly in tune. Palestine will tune the piano himself, playing one of the three strings against the other two in order to generate minute beatings or flutters, concentrating on shades of sound that are not usually heard. In many ways, Palestine’s music operates at the threshold of audibility—he works toward the discovery of structures that will allow sound the primacy of its own being.

john rockwell on yoshi wada’s earth horns ( new york times , 1974) Yoshimasa Wada is a Japanese-born former sculptor who has lived in this country for the last seven years and who has devoted himself to sound for the last five.11 Recently he has concerned himself with

John Rockwell, “Wada Pipe Horns in Concert,” New York Times, January 20, 1974, 55. Courtesy of John Rockwell.

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ever-larger, homemade “pipe horns,” as he calls them, and last Sunday evening at the Kitchen, 59 Wooster Street, he presented the second of two concerts showing his latest work. There were four horns on hand, the longest (played by Mr. Wada) more than 20 feet long, the fattest 10 inches in interior diameter. Mr. Wada, Garrett List, Rhys Chatham and Barbara Stewart blew the horns more or less steadily for nearly two hours, producing deep, resonant sounds separated mostly at the intervals of the fifth and octave, although there was some appealing microtonal drifting, too. There was also an electronic setup under Liz Phillips’s direction that generated fixed synthesized tones triggered by what the live players did. The result was certainly one of the more coloristically attractive of the many recent instances of minimalist, steady-state sound that one hears these days, rather like an evening’s worth of the very beginning of Wagner’s “Rheingold.” The horns themselves are evocative in their Tibetan way, and the shifting balance between live imperfection and electronic eternality proved continually suggestive.

deborah jowitt on laura dean and steve reich’s drumming ( village voice , 1975) All last week, it seemed, I was commiserating with friends who had missed Laura Dean’s concert. And celebrating with those who had seen it. “Drumming”—performed by Dean and seven women dancers and by composer Steve Reich, eight other percussionists, two women singers, and a piccolo player—is Dean’s longest and most complex work to date; and she may not have finished it yet. Reich’s music is built upon one basic rhythmic pattern, but the varying pitches and timbres of the instruments, and the fact that the musicians’ individual patterns are often out of phase with each other can produce exceedingly complex textures. Yet, no matter how numbingly loud or how dense with sound the piece at times becomes, your ear is always struck by lightness: the small precise drums tuned to different pitches, the marimbas, the humming glockenspiels all have high voices. And the singers—exploding their soft “tuk,” “tuk” into microphones, making their lips, tongues, palates, voice boxes into percussion instruments— cause certain patterns to swim up out of the whole for a few moments. Deborah Jowitt, “Dancing in Step with the Angels,” Village Voice, April 21, 1975, 104. Courtesy of The Village Voice.

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I’ve tried to write about the music, because the dancing is so intricately linked to it. The pulse of the music is unwavering: the dancers’ feet rarely stop, and when they do, some other part of their bodies sustains the pulse in hiding. Long sustained tones are not apparent in Reich’s music. Dean’s choreography involves no poses or big slow gestures; it’s foot dancing—ingenious permutations of stamping, hopping, jumping, tapping, walking, shuffling. Marking time. Binding us together with a pulse as steady as a heartbeat. And the—I don’t know what to call it—compactness of the music finds a visual analogue in the squares, circles, parallel lines, wedges in which the dancers usually work. Each of the music’s four connected sections has a different timbre: first the drums, tuned to different pitches, play alone; then the marimbas and voices; then the glockenspiels and piccolo; finally everything sounds together in an overwhelming flood of tiny, accurate beats. Dean’s choreography responds to these changes of timbre. While the drums are pattering, the dancing is springy, robust almost. The marimbas give an illusion of stirring the sound—cyclical I guess you’d say; and the dancers create a smoothly spinning circle—Dean pivoting in the center, Grethe Holby and Diane Johnson defining a second and third concentric circle around her. A third woman, spinning more slowly, doubles one of the parts, while the rest of the women maintain a pulse with their feet around the perimeter. When the shrill, sweet glockenspiels begin, the women bank around big independent curves with minute, rapid, gliding steps. In this section, some of the movements seem smaller in scale. The last section accomplishes its changes more rapidly, and you see permutations of phrases you remember from other sections as well as many bright new ones. I’m glad I began to think about changes. In Reich’s music, changes happen gradually. Patterns repeat many, many times; when they grow and shrink they give you plenty of time to observe the process. Dean’s dancing, too, is repetitive, and it accumulates and disperses complexity in a steady manner. One of the nicest things about the dancing is that—despite the braininess, the carefully limited range within which it operates, the complex ways in which some dancers will phase a passage out of unison into canon while others take up a new theme, and so on—it looks so unabashedly human. Not neutrally human, not eye-flashingly Human, just . . . human, and happy. Partly, this is because the movement, for all its preciseness, is not constricted; no dancer attempts to control the impetus of the movement in order to show you an end-pose or to look exactly like

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figure 14. Laura Dean and Dance Company and Steve Reich and Musicians perform Drumming, 1975. © Johan Elbers 2023. Courtesy of Laura Dean Papers, American Dance Festival Archives.

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everyone else. Their arms swing easily when they do swing; their heads may turn from side to side or not turn; some women’s knees rebound in a very elastic way, others have a tauter action; often their shoulders lift or their ribcages rise and fall in response to the dancer’s pulse; when they spin, sometimes, their bodies arch and bend and make their arms swirl overhead. Everything they do looks free, even though we understand that it is difficult and strenuous and are awed by their achievement. An enraptured friend said sensibly that he wouldn’t call Dean a minimalist, as some have done, but rather a fundamentalist. I dislike labels, but I know what he means. It’s the difference between simplicity and belligerent austerity. Without being in any way effusive, her work radiates vitality. Sometimes, I don’t know why, I imagine myself a person from prehistory, trying to interpret what I see today. I wonder if I would know what to call those dances full of poses and big somber gestures of the whole body. But I would surely look at Laura Dean and say with joy and relief, “Yes, that is dancing.”

joan la barbara on alvin lucier’s “sound geographies” (1975) Alvin Lucier’s Still and Moving Lines in Families of Hyperbolas (1973– 74) is a piece based on the technical properties of sound and the circumstances of particular environments. By calculating the time factor involved in one oscillator-produced tone’s arrival at a particular point in space, Lucier creates a complicated geography of peaks and valleys delineated by the loudness and softness (and, in special places, the silence) of sound, lines or really curves in the shape of hyperbolas emanating from any two speakers. In order to manifest these sound shapes for an audience, Lucier uses performers, giving them each a particular task or function to fulfill. For the performances at the Kitchen (February 21 & 22, 59 Wooster St., 8:30pm) Lucier has chosen Joan La Barbara (voice), David Jolley, Dennis Lawless and Bill Purvis (french horns), the Viola Farber Dance Company and four unattended snare drums. Lucier chooses oscillator frequencies according to the instruments being used, matching the pitch to the range of the instrument which can most easily be manipulated. The piece begins with a single tone (approximately Joan La Barbara, “Alvin Lucier: Sound Geographies,” SoHo Weekly News, February 20, 1975, 26. Copyright Joan La Barbara.

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400 cycles) broadcast from four speakers arranged in a circle in the space. The singer’s task is to find the sound center (which may not be the physical center) of the space and then to work with the tone, improvising and creating “beats” (pulses which occur when closely related tones are produced in a contained environment) by moving slightly above or below the designated pitch. For the audience the sound is static until the singer begins to sing. The voice may or may not be audible, but the disturbance of the sound manifested by the occurrence of beats is the important factor. In other words, the sound of the voice is not as important as the singer’s ear and how closely the singer can come to the exact frequency of the oscillatorproduced pitch. The task for the french horn players is to spin the beats toward the lower frequency; that is, Lucier will give the horn players several pitches with which to work and the horn players, by producing ones above or below the given pitches, will spin sounds (beats or pulses) toward the speakers or towards themselves, according to which is lower. The sound always moves in the direction of the lower pitch. The Viola Farber Dance Company, a group of eight members, will then move through the valleys created by the oscillator pitches. Lucier can manipulate the sound geographies at will, and the dancers must change direction as he changes the “geography.” Lucier can create a channel or tunnel of sound so that if the dancer moves a few inches to the side he/she will encounter a wall of louder sound and know that he/ she has strayed from the designated course. For the final manifestation of the piece, Lucier places four snare drums about the space and then spins the sounds in a circular fashion so that the snare drums resonate as the sound passes through them. The result for the audience (based on performances we have done in Paris and Washington) is something like a riddle. One hears a steady tone at first (louder or softer depending on where one is seated in the space), then sees a performer moving slowly in the central space, finding a particular location from which she is comfortable and ready to react with the sound, then beats become audible, the singer working with one tone, then several, creating resultant tones in addition to beats. Horn players then spin sounds into various parts of the space, dancers walk through channels of silent space and finally snare drums react to the physical weight of sounds passing through them. The piece is fascinating for its exploration of the physical properties of sound as well as for the aural results. For those interested in recent

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history, Lucier’s brain wave piece, in which he hooked electrodes to his head and fed the result through oscillators and then through speakers, allowing the audience to “hear” the workings of the human mind, was the first of its kind. And his “I Am Sitting in a Room,” a tape piece in which a paragraph is repeatedly recorded in a particular space until the resonant frequencies of the room reinforce the pitches and speech irregulars become the rhythms, is a milestone. Alvin Lucier is an important American composer whose work should be experienced whenever possible.

amanda smith profiles meredith monk ( ms. magazine, 1977) Onstage alone, a small woman, costumed like an old crone, sits immobile on a stool atop a platform. She is dressed in white: a loose blouse, an apron, and leggings crisscrossed with rope. She wears a white wig, and even her face behind wire-rim glasses is a chalky white. A swatch of white muslin stretches from where she sits toward the audience. The woman sleeps, her head rises and falls with each soft breath. Awakening, she chants high-pitched nonsense syllables, removes her wig, and slowly lowers her voice. She performs a series of small, neat gestures, as if sewing, then descends onto the muslin path, shedding her glasses and wig and letting her own black hair fall to her shoulders. By the time she reaches the end of the cloth road, she is singing pitter-patter songs of childhood, her body transformed into a young girl’s. That’s the second act of the theater work “Education of the Girlchild,” and the woman is Meredith Monk. For more than a decade, she has been creating pieces (25 minutes to several hours in length) that are complex combinations—“integrations,” she calls them—of movement, sound, and visual images. Her simultaneous achievements in what are traditionally considered three separate specialties—dance, music, and theater—have earned her increasing critical and public acclaim. Monk, 34, is small, dark, and intense—an experimental artist whose work has a tough integrity to it; she refuses to emphasize any one aspect of her theatrical pieces. She has subtitled “Education of the Girlchild” an opera, for instance, because opera is the one Western form that implies the simultaneous use of music, movement, and theater. (Newspapers Amanda Smith, “. . . and Taking to the Streets,” Ms., December 1977, 46–48 and 97. Copyright estate of Amanda Smith. Used by permission.

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often have trouble deciding what kind of reviewer to send to her works. For her production of “Quarry”—an opera about World War II—New York’s Village Voice finally sent its dance, music, and theater critics, all of whom ended up praising the work.) She considers her 1966 piece, “16 Millimeter Earrings,” a breakthrough: she not only choreographed movement, but wrote the score and made a film for it as well. Deborah Jowitt, writing for the New York Times, described the moment in this piece, when Monk put her globe on her head and projected a color film on her face onto it, as “an alarming technological nightmare of alienation.”12 The first installment of the 1969 theater cantata called “Juice” took place in the great central spiral of the Guggenheim Museum, where the lights went up to reveal 85 white-clothed performers on the upper circular ramps, peering down at the audience below. Subsequent installments were presented in Barnard College’s Minor Latham Playhouse and in Monk’s own loft. For her 1969 opera epic, “Vessel,” with Joan of Arc as its central figure, the audience convened for the first part of the work in Monk’s Greenwich Village loft, was then taken by charter bus to a theater for the second section, and for the third, walked a block farther to see Monk as Joan skitter across a parking lot and disappear (to burn at the stake) behind a welder’s arc. Monk’s 1970 live movie, “Needle-brain Lloyd and the Systems Kid,” assembled 100 performers, a rowboat, motorcycles, riders on horseback, and a Victorian croquet match on the lawns of Connecticut College. With graphic designer / filmmaker / performer Ping Chong, she has created the travelogues “Paris” (1972), “Chacon” (1974), and “Venice / Milan” (1976). She also does solo and group albums: “Key” (available from Lovely Music Ltd., 463 West Street New York, New York 10014) and “Our Lady of Late” (available from New Arts Management, 47 West Ninth Street, New York, New York 10011). While no two Monkian theatrical presentations look alike or have the same subject matter, common threads run through each. They are all meticulously detailed and crafted. They do not contain plot and dialogue in the traditional sense, but are constructed through the slow, careful accumulation of incidents and visual images. They are journeys, either physical or spiritual, and they all deal with archetypes. Monk has explored a whole range of archetypal forms, mostly female and all deliberately deglamorized: the wise woman, the child who is often a seer, the scribe, the historian, the madwoman, the traveler, the warrior, the sorceress, the witch, the prophetess, the queen, the woman ruler.

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Although Monk’s works are not autobiographical, she does draw on her own heritage and a lifetime of training in music and dance. Monk’s grandfather was a singer in the court of Czar Nicholas II, her grandmother a concert pianist, her mother a radio singer who gave birth to her daughter in Lima, Peru, while on tour. Music became what Monk calls “my primary language.” She has developed her soprano voice into an instrument of unusual range and diversity. To Monk, “the voice is a powerful emotional instrument, a direct hookup to the emotions. It’s like the language of the spirit.” Her dance education began at age three with Dalcroze Eurythmics. She studied ballet in her teens and modern dance at Sarah Lawrence. (She still takes a ballet class almost daily and studies t’ai chi, as well as being coached in her singing.) Asked about the primary influences on her work, Monk cites an unlikely trinity: composer Béla Bartók, comedienne Imogene Coca, and especially Jean Cocteau. “Some of his films are visual poetry. That’s what I try to do—make a poetic form in visual and audio terms.” Monk is concerned with a theater which makes a human statement, expressed in intimate terms. “Vulnerability in a performer is a value to be cherished. The human being comes first—the process always involves the people—and the visual metaphors come after that.” Monk’s works, whether they are intimate loft performances of her music or large-scale theatrical pieces, are performed by a closely knit group called The House. Its members come from divergent backgrounds: mime, acting, music, dance, acrobatics, painting, theater, literature, graphics, political science, and chemistry. The House has been together for nine years, subsidized by performance proceeds, income from Monk’s teaching at New York University and elsewhere, and supplemental federal and state grants. Monk and The House perform in New York where they are based, and tour in the United States and abroad. “Creating is so scary it’s like hanging over a cliff,” she says. “But when I’m onstage, I feel in touch with an essential part of myself. It’s like sex at its best. It’s like meditation. It’s very present tense.”

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chapter 8

Ensembles

“There are people who play Bach magnificently, but there’s only one person in the world taking care of my music,” said Steve Reich in a 1970 interview. “If I don’t, who will?”1 Minimalism was the music of composer-performers, who led their own and played in each other’s bands. Much of this ensemble work was informal, echoing the spirit of jazz experimentalists like John Coltrane and Miles Davis rather than the classical traditions of chamber music.2 The pickup group that played the 1964 premiere of In C included Riley and Reich, but also Pauline Oliveros, electronic composer Morton Subotnick, and jazz saxophonist Sonny Lewis.3 In the early 1970s, though, several composers formed “repertory” ensembles: groups dedicated to the work of a single author, like Steve Reich and Musicians, the Philip Glass Ensemble, and Meredith Monk & Vocal Ensemble.4 These groups sometimes shared musicians—for a time, Joan La Barbara, Arthur Murphy, and Jon Gibson played in both Reich’s and Glass’s ensembles—but eventually, as they grew larger and tours became more frequent, the ensembles formed distinct identities and aesthetic stances.5 Reich’s group, for instance, foreclosed improvisation entirely, whereas Glass encouraged limited improvisation.6 “We all break the rules,” admitted saxophonist Dickie Landry. “Even Phil does.” Rarely was the musical score sacrosanct, if it existed at all; the members of these groups were empowered as collaborators, not just executants of the composer’s singular will.7 In Reich’s ensemble, his fellow 134

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musicians often offered criticism and feedback, and the vocalists contributed to the compositional process by suggesting “resulting patterns” in major works like Drumming.8 The Philip Glass Ensemble required players with tremendous stamina and endurance to perform Music in Twelve Parts, Glass’s three-hour magnum opus of the mid-1970s.9 Monk’s ensemble work culminated in the uncanny 1981 album Dolmen Music, in which the individual voices of each performer played a crucial role.10 Formed out of musical necessity, these groups still endure, a testament to the longevity of the work they have collectively created.

steve reich, “notes on the ensemble” (1973) Since late in 1966 I have been rehearsing and performing my music with my own ensemble. In 1963 I first decided that despite my limitations as a performer I had to play in all my compositions. It seemed clear that a healthy musical situation would only result when the functions of composer and performer were united. In San Francisco in 1963 I formed my first ensemble which was devoted to free, and sometimes controlled, improvisation. This quintet met at least once a week for about six months, but because we were improvising on nothing but spur of the moment reactions I felt there was not any musical growth except when I brought in what I called Pitch Charts, which gave all players the same notes to play at the same time, but with free rhythm. Even with these charts the musical growth was much too limited, and the group was disbanded. In the fall of 1965 I returned to New York, and by late in 1966 I had formed a group of three musicians; pianist Art Murphy, woodwind player Jon Gibson, and myself playing piano. This ensemble was able to perform Piano Phase for two pianos; Improvisations on a Watermelon for two pianos (later discarded); Reed Phase for soprano saxophone and tape (later discarded), and several tape pieces. This trio remained intact with occasional additions, notably that of composer/pianist James Tenney in 1967 to play a four piano version of Piano Phase and other pieces, until 1970 when the composition of Phase Patterns for four electric organs, and Four Organs for four electric organs and

Steve Reich, “Notes on the Ensemble,” in Writings about Music (Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1974), 45–48. Copyright Steve Reich.

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maracas created the need for a quintet adding pianist Steve Chambers and occasionally, composer/performer Phil Glass. In 1971, with the composition of Drumming, the ensemble underwent a significant expansion to twelve musicians and singers. At this time I sought out and found a number of fine percussionists, the most outstanding of whom, Russ Hartenberger and James Preiss, continue to play in the present ensemble. Also, and for the first time, I had to find singers who had the sense of time, intonation, and timbre necessary to blend in with the sound of the marimbas in Drumming. Joan La Barbara and Jay Clayton proved to be perfectly suited to this new vocal style. It was in 1971 that the name of the ensemble, Steve Reich and Musicians, was first adopted. I have thus become a composer with a repertory ensemble. Each new composition is added to the repertoire and our concerts present a selection of new and/or older works. The question often arises as to what contribution the performers make to the music. The answer is that they select the resulting patterns in all compositions that have resulting patterns, and that certain details of the music are worked out by members of the ensemble during rehearsals. Resulting patterns are melodic patterns that result from the combination of two or more identical instruments playing the same repeating melodic pattern one or more beats out of phase with each other. During the selection of resulting patterns to be sung in the second section of Drumming, Joan La Barbara, Jay Clayton, Judy Sherman and I all contributed various patterns we heard resulting from the combination of the three marimbas. These patterns were selected, and an order for singing them worked out, with the help of tape loops of the various marimba combinations played over and over again at my studio during rehearsals held throughout the summer of 1971. Similarly, in the resulting patterns for Six Pianos, Steve Chambers, James Preiss and I worked out the resulting patterns and the order in which to play them during rehearsals at the Baldwin Piano store during the fall and winter of 1972–73. During the summer of 1973 in Seattle I worked with different singers in the marimba section of Drumming who heard and sang very different resulting patterns from the singers in New York. When I returned to New York I showed the new resulting patterns to Jay Clayton and Joan La Barbara who decided to incorporate some of these patterns into their own version. The details of the music changed when the performers changed. Selecting resulting patterns is not improvising; it is actually filling in the details of the composition itself. It offers the performer the opportu-

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nity to listen to minute details and to sing or play the ones he or she finds most musical. There’s a certain idea that’s been in the air, particularly since the 1960s, and it’s been used by choreographers as well as composers and I think it is an extremely misleading idea. It is that the only pleasure a performer (be it musician or dancer) could get was to improvise, or in some way be free to express his or her momentary state of mind. If anybody gave them a fixed musical score or specific instructions to work with this was equated with political control and it meant the performer was going to be unhappy about it. John Cage has said that a composer is somebody who tells other people what to do, and that it is not a good social situation to do that. But if you know and work with musicians you will see that what gives them joy is playing music they love, or at least find musically interesting, and whether that music is improvised or completely worked out is really not the main issue. The main issue is what’s happening musically; is this beautiful, is this sending chills up and down my spine, or isn’t it? The musicians play in this ensemble, usually for periods of three to five years or more, because, presumably, they like playing the music, or at least because they find it of some musical interest. They do not make all their income from playing in this ensemble. Some are Doctoral candidates in the study of African, Indonesian and Indian music, some teach percussion, and all perform professionally in a variety of musical ensembles including orchestras, chamber groups, Medieval music ensembles, South Indian, African and Indonesian classical ensembles, free improvisation and jazz groups. It is precisely the sort of musician who starts with a strong Western classical background and then later gravitates towards these other types of music that I find ideally suited for this ensemble. The presence of musicians who play certain instruments or sing encourages me to write more music for those instruments or voices. The percussionists and singers I began working with in Drumming encouraged me to write more percussion and vocal music. Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices and Organ is one of the results. Since the keyboard music I write involves up and down movements of the hands exclusively, instead of conventional keyboard technique, percussionists are better suited to play pieces like Six Pianos than most pianists are. Most of the musicians in my ensemble are therefore percussionists who double on the keyboard. These musicians are also my first and most important critics. During early rehearsals when a first version of a new piece is being tried out, the reactions of the players will often tell me whether the new composition really works, or not. Not only direct verbal comments during or after

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rehearsal, but an appreciative laugh or an embarrassed averted glance may be enough to let me know I am on the right or wrong track. This was particularly the case in the early fall of 1972 when the reactions of James Preiss, Russell Hartenberger and Steve Chambers were enough to make me throw away several attempts at multiple piano pieces that preceded the finished version of Six Pianos. There is also the question of frequency of rehearsals. Most new pieces of about 20 minutes in length will be rehearsed once or twice a week for two or three months. Drumming, which lasts about an hour and twenty minutes took almost a year of weekly rehearsals. This amount of rehearsing allows for many small compositional changes while the work is in progress and at the same time builds a kind of ensemble solidity that makes playing together a joy.

meredith monk on dolmen music (1980) I have been working with the solo voice as an instrument for the last fourteen years. After classical voice training and experience as a folk and rock singer, I realized that I wanted to create vocal music that had the personal style and abstract (as well as emotional) qualities that come into play in the creation of a painting or a dance. My method began as one of trial and error: translating certain concepts, feelings, images and energies to my voice, seeing how they felt, how they sounded, and then refining them into a musical form. Over the years I have developed a vocabulary and a style designed to utilize as wide a range of vocal sound as possible. Four years ago I made an inevitable decision: to teach some of my techniques to other voices in an attempt to expand my writing—to see if these principles could be translated (transferred) to other singers and made into group forms. My main concerns in the group music have been to work with the unique quality of each voice and to play with the ensemble possibilities of unison, texture, counterpoint, weaving, etc. The amazing speed, flexibility and accuracy of Monica Salem’s voice; the lovely contrast of lightness and depth in Andrea Goodman’s; the rich, encompassing resonance of Julius Eastman’s (and also his extraordinary range); the strength and physicality of Paul Langland’s; the sweetness and clarity of Robert Een’s tenor; these are the particular qualities and colors that I have heard and worked with in Dolmen Meredith Monk, liner notes to Dolmen Music (ECM, 1981). Courtesy of ECM Records GmbH.

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figure 15. Meredith Monk’s Dolmen Music at New York City Center, 1981. From left: Paul Langland, Robert Een, Julius Eastman, Meredith Monk, Naaz Hosseini, and Andrea Goodman. Photograph by Johan Elbers. Courtesy of Meredith Monk/The House.

Music but each singer has many more. As I have found with my own voice, one sings differently at different times. Some years I was exploring a particular glottal sound, so I wrote and sang many songs with that in mind. Other years I was thinking about clarity of tone or extreme high or low range or fast changes in register, so the music emphasized these areas. The voice is a language: a world of continuing discoveries. I am grateful to the singers on this album for joining me at this time.

willoughby sharp interviews the philip glass ensemble (1974) Willoughby Sharp interviewed the members of the Phil Glass Ensemble during the week following their July 10th concert at Town Hall New York. Kurt Munkacsi WS:  What led up to your involvement with the Phil Glass Ensemble? KM:  I started playing bass guitar in a rock and roll band when I was seventeen, and two weeks after I got my guitar I took it apart. From there on any guitars or amplifiers I had I took apart to see how they worked. After three or four years of playing with various rock and roll bands here and there, kicking around, I opened a guitar repair shop to fix guitars and amplifiers. From my previous experience of taking them apart I had gotten pretty good at it. Willoughby Sharp, “The Phil Glass Ensemble: Music in Twelve Parts,” Avalanche 10 (December 1974): 39–43. Courtesy of Avalanche.

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WS:  Where was the shop? KM:  In New York City uptown on 48th Street. While I had the shop, I was customizing and modifying basses and amplifiers for all the big name rock and roll bands and studio musicians in Manhattan— Edgar Winter, Jefferson Airplane, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, The Who, Jimi Hendrix, Delaney and Bonnie, Eric Clapton. Any big name rock and roll band that came through the city, I would overhaul their guitars. At around the same time, I had run into La Monte Young because we both kept turtles . . . WS:  Turtles? KM:  Yeah, that’s how we met, it didn’t have anything to do with music.11 Then we were talking on the phone one day and he told me he had all these speakers and amplifiers, so I went down to his house. This was in 69–70, and I worked with him until 1971–72—and went to Europe with him once. So really I apprenticed with La Monte, and also with Terry Riley a little bit. That’s how I met Jon Gibson, and it was Jon Gibson who introduced me to Philip. When Philip and I met each other, it was instant love, and we’ve been working together ever since. At the same time, there was a recording studio in the building where I had my repair shop, and I started hanging out there, and after a while I got more interested in tape machines, recording consoles and speakers than I was in playing bass, so I became a recording engineer, learning as I went along. Eventually I went to school for a while, to fill the holes in my knowledge. WS:  Where did you go to school? KM:  At the Institute of Audio Research in New York. I was there for a total of two and a half years, off and on. It’s like an exclusive audio school and you just learn what you want to know. After that I worked in the John Lennon recording studio, Butterfly Productions where Phil recorded his first album. From there I went to Jeffry Lew to The Basement Recording Studio at 112 Greene Street. WS:  You designed the whole place, didn’t you? KM:  Yes, I was the design engineer, both architecturally and electronically for the whole place, and I also designed a lot of the equipment in it and had it built by various manufacturers. WS:  What was your general impression of the performance of Music in 12 Parts at Town Hall?

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KM:  I was very satisfied. I thought the whole band played very well. Everything worked like it was supposed to. We had a fairly big audience. I think it was very successful. WS:  How did you work with the audience? Did you have a feeling for the audience? KM:  Yeah. WS:  Could you describe what you actually did? KM:  What I did was just work on blending the instruments together, like an interface between the musicians and the audience. WS:  What do you mean? KM:  Well, my job is to take what the musicians are playing and mix it together in such a way that it sounds good to the people who are listening to it and also to the musicians. WS:  Does the band hear exactly what you’re mixing? KM:  Yes. They hear exactly what the audience is hearing. WS:  Do they ever indicate to you that the way it’s coming over isn’t the way they want it to be? KM:  Oh yes, all the time. Dickie, Philip and I have a whole set of eye signals, we can just look at each other. WS:  Too high, too low? KM:  Right. And more flute or less organ and so on. WS:  How many choices can you make? KM:  An infinite number. WS:  Do you have a keyboard? KM:  It’s a sort of keyboard. It has a whole lot of faders which are the volume controls for each instrument so I can just put my hands on it and sort of play it, as well as controls to modify the timbre of the individual instruments. WS:  So in a sense you’re playing along with the Ensemble? KM:  Yeah. It’s constantly changing all the time. It’s not a static thing. Also every hall is a different acoustic situation, which is very difficult. It’s never the same twice in a row. WS:  What kind of preparation do you have as far as testing the sound before the actual performance?

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KM:  Well, we try to get into the hall a couple of hours beforehand and play for a bit. At Town Hall, we started at three o’clock. WS:  Isn’t that a little scary? KM:  Not anymore. We’ve been doing it for so long now that . . . WS:  You’re up for anything? KM:  Yeah. Town Hall was a good space to play in compared to some of the other spaces we’ve been. Acoustically it was a nice space. The hall behaved well. WS:  During the performance, when you were modulating the sound level of the music, Part One and Part Two were louder and then Part Three was a little softer? KM:  Right, that’s correct. I felt that it was too loud and I turned it down a little. It was beginning to hurt my ears a little bit. WS:  Other people felt that too. KM:  Yeah, you can generally tell just by listening to it. If it gets annoying, you just turn it down. WS:  What kind of equipment, in terms of speakers and amplifiers, is used? Is that equipment that you’ve made or modified? KM:  It’s mostly modified equipment. The speakers are biamped. J. B. Lansing speakers in custom made speaker enclosures and OpAmp labs poweramps. WS:  How many? Is that important? KM:  Yeah. We use four of them for quad set up. We prefer to do live quadraphonic sound. We didn’t do that at Town Hall because the space wasn’t correct for it. But in the kind of spaces we usually play in, we’re in the center and the audience is around us and the speakers are in four corners of the room—it’s much better that way. WS:  Why is that? KM:  It makes the music sound more dispersed, somebody said it sounded nebulous. WS:  That’s a good description. KM:  Yeah, I like that. Phil and I talked about it several times and it’s much nicer when it’s not coming from any one definite source, when the whole space is being filled with sound, which is the whole idea behind the music to begin with.

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WS:  Is your work with the Phil Glass Ensemble a major part of what you do? KM:  Well, it’s fairly major. It varies depending on what we’re doing. Like right now, it’s a major part of my life because we’ve just been at Town Hall and the Kennedy Center, and then we’ll be going to Cologne in the summer and Berlin in the fall. WS:  Did you have a lot to do with the albums? KM:  Yes. We’re going to record Music in Twelve Parts in November. It’s going to be a six-record set. While we’re doing performances we’re always thinking about the records, about what has to go and where to overdub and how to arrange the transitions between records. WS:  Have things changed a lot since you’ve been working the Ensemble? KM:  Well, I’ve been doing it for about three years. The work is becoming more difficult but things are getting more satisfactory as we play more and get more money for gigs.

Richard Peck WS:  What instruments do you play in the Phil Glass Ensemble? RP:  B flat tenor saxophone, E flat alto saxophone. WS:  How long have you been playing them? RP:  Tenor, I’ve been playing for twelve years, and the alto for four. WS:  You’ve had an extensive musical background, can you say something about that? RP:  Well, I started on the clarinet in eighth grade and continued playing it in the high school band. And I was a sophomore in High School when I started playing the tenor with Blues bands. WS:  Where was that? RP:  Louisiana. I played all over the south. New Orleans, Lafayette, Lake Charles, Houston, Atlanta. WS:  What kind of a Blues band was it? RP:  A derivative of Otis Redding, James Brown, Top 40. And we played a few Cajun tunes. One of the groups I played with was called T. K. Hulin and the Lonely Nights. I played with them for two years.

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WS:  Can you say something about how you developed, like what kind of awareness you go through when you perfect the playing of an instrument? RP:  Well, the main thing to me was just the desire to play. And I was lucky enough to be able to play with and in close association with some very good musicians from my musical beginning. WS:  How did you come to start playing with the Phil Glass Ensemble? RP:  I was in Louisiana and the late Robert Prado had brought me a cassette of Changing Parts in June of 1971 and my interest in the new music was kindled. In August of 1971, I drove up to New York with Dickie Landry and Robert. We spent a few days in New York then we went to Nova Scotia. I met Phil, did a rehearsal and here I am! WS:  They had a gig there? RP:  There was a gig at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax. WS:  Did you know the music for this first gig? RP:  No. My first function was to play improvised long tones. WS:  What piece did you learn first? RP:  Part Four of Music in Twelve Parts. I played tenor saxophone. WS:  What is it about the saxophone sound that particularly interests you? RP:  The sound of the saxophone is very pliable and it’s got a wide range, it can be gutsy, it can be sweet and it has hard biting tones. WS:  What’s the difference between the two saxophones that you play? RP:  The alto is higher pitched than the tenor, and it blends a little better with the soprano saxophones on some of the parts, like on Part Two. It’s an easier horn to play considering that Philip’s music is such a strenuous physical task. WS:  You were saying before that it requires a lot of concentration? RP:  Yeah, and stamina. Especially since we’re performing the twelve parts. What I like about Philip’s music is that it’s a challenge, not only mentally and spiritually, it’s a challenge physically. I have to keep myself together to play it. WS:  There’s one part, the third or the fourth, where you have a chance to improvise. RP:  It’s Part Four, right.

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WS:  What do you try to do, when you play that, what kind of sounds do you try to create? RP:  Well, I listen to the keyboards, and I listen to the written parts. WS:  The written parts? RP:  You see, Jon and Dickie and myself are improvising while Joan, Bob and Phil are playing the written parts and I try to play something spontaneous but at the same time have an awareness of what they’re playing so what I play doesn’t detract from the overall sound. I could completely go free and play something that might have some bite to it but it wouldn’t be cohesive to the total sound, and what I think is the most important thing is the total overall sound. WS:  Are you doing pieces on your own which don’t have any connection with the Phil Glass Ensemble? RP:  I’m doing some writing and playing. WS:  Do you find there’s any conflict between that and playing in the Ensemble? RP:  None whatsoever. It’s all music and it’s all related. Bob Telson WS:  What musical instruments do you play in the Phil Glass Ensemble? BT:  I play electric organ. WS:  But I noticed in your studio you have a lot of other instruments. What instruments do you play? BT:  Well, keyboard is my main instrument. I started out on piano, played classical piano for quite a while. WS:  Where did you do that? BT:  I grew up in Brooklyn and I started studying music when I was about five or so. WS:  Did you know at that age that you were going to be a musician? BT:  No, I guess in my environment, to be a musician was sort of unheard of. To be a doctor or something like that was generally what people were thinking of doing. I just liked music, liked playing music as much as anything. When I was about thirteen, I decided that I wanted to play ball more than I wanted to play music, but at that time my high school got a big pipe organ and I found I could

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make so much noise on it that I started studying classical pipe organ and started playing rock and roll. WS:  Not on the organ? BT:  Oh, I was playing organ in rock groups and writing rock tunes and stuff in about ’65; when I was about 16 or so and it wasn’t until I went to college that I started getting back into written music. WS:  Where did you go to college? BT:  Harvard. And it was about then that I began to realize music is what I wanted to do with myself. WS:  Did you play music at Harvard? BT:  No, Harvard is the ultimate academic institution. All that you have is “Harmony 1,” “Harmony 2,” “Counterpoint,” “History of Music,” a taste of electronic music but almost no playing at all, no credit for playing at all and generally a department full of musicologists and people who did most of their music elsewhere as I did, outside of the department. WS:  You just recently joined the Phil Glass Ensemble, didn’t you? BT:  About a year and a half ago. WS:  How did that happen? BT:  Oh, I was working with a group called the Collected Works in New York City. It had Barbara Lloyd, Nancy Green, Mary Overlie, Cynthia Hedstrom dancing, and myself, Mark Whitecage, Michael Moss, John Shea and Lawrence Cook playing. It was an improvisational group and Nancy Green was the one who turned me on to Phil’s playing. WS:  You just went to a concert? BT:  They took me to a concert. I hated the first piece. It was Music in Fifths and it seemed very severe to me at the time and it was very loud. The next piece that I heard which was Part Five sounded like a New Orleans horn section to me and it sounded really beautiful. I was introduced to Phil and Phil said “Why don’t you come to rehearsal Tuesday” and I was performing the next Saturday so it was pretty much of a surprise to me. WS:  You do a lot of your own work? BT:  Yeah. WS:  Do you compose?

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BT:  Yeah. I’m mostly composing rock songs, with a strong rhythm blues orientation. And working right now, recording this month. WS:  How does working with the Phil Glass Ensemble affect your other work? BT:  It’s hard to say. A good friend of mine had a dream last week in which she wanted to come over and hear me play some of my songs but when she called me, I said to her “As long as I’m really concentrating on Phil’s music especially for this Town Hall performance, I can’t concentrate on my own music.” I don’t know if it’s true or not. Maybe it is, but playing in Phil’s group certainly gives me a feeling of craftsmanship and accomplishment. WS:  The challenge? BT:  Yeah, the music is challenging to play. WS:  Why, particularly? Endurance? BT:  Well, you’ve got to be crazy to play all those eighth notes over and over for four hours and so you learn to master a certain concentration, and. . . . WS:  State of mind you have to put yourself into before you can even play? BT:  State of mind and even more important, state of body. So that your body just relaxes and sort of flows with the music. WS:  Do you think that a good audience gets into it with their body? BT:  Some people do, you know that we played in Van Cortlandt Park last summer and there were a lot of Puerto Rican families out for the day just taking in the sun and here was this crazy group setting up in the middle of the park without any warning at all and they were doing the Mambo or the Pachanga or whatever. Got a little confusing sometimes when the parts would change. They were getting into it. They were a good audience. WS:  So potentially, you think that anyone has the possibility of getting into Phil’s music? You don’t have to come from a particular cultural background? BT:  I don’t think so. Some of my musician friends come down to hear the music and I always see them for the first twenty minutes or so sitting with their chin in their hand and their eyes sort of squinting as if to say “What’s going on?” (laughter) And then gradually their eyes seem either to go toward the ceiling or

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figure 16. Philip Glass Ensemble performs Music in Twelve Parts at the Idea Warehouse, February 1975. Photograph by Peter Moore. Peter Moore Photography Archive, Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections, Northwestern University Libraries. © Northwestern University. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY.

close and they seem to relax and get into it or else they come up afterwards and say it was very jive. Musicians seem to have a longer way to go towards being open to the music than non-musicians. WS:  They have more to unlearn, don’t they? BT:  Right. I think in some notes John Rockwell wrote for the New York Times, he quoted Phil as saying that, Music in Fifths was dedicated to Nadia Boulanger. Well, in fact, Music in Fifths is all parallel fifths. I studied with Boulanger too and spent months just being told, “No parallel fifths are allowed,” and I spent all the afternoons that I could have spent roaming around France trying to undo my perfect fifths, and Phil had gone and written a piece which was all perfect fifths. WS:  Paradoxically parallel fifths? BT:  Something like that. WS:  That’s far out.

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BT:  So there is a lot to unlearn. WS:  Do you think Phil has unlearned it or just gone beyond it? BT:  I dunno. He’s into his thing, you can sure say that. WS:  What were your impressions of the Town Hall concert? BT:  Oh it was fantastic! It was a joy to play and it added a whole other aspect to the music. There always was the endurance problem. You find that if you have to run 200 yards, you’re real tired at the end of 200 yards and it seems that you’ve run a long way. But if you run two miles, you know, you just keep going. After 200 yards it seems like nothing. So when we play a six-hour concert, at the end of an hour it seems like nothing. Whereas if we play an hour concert, I’m usually exhausted at the end of that. So it’s just added a whole other aspect to playing. Jon Gibson WS:  How did you first decide to be a musician? JG:  I don’t think I ever consciously “decided” to become a musician. I just sort of gravitated towards it over the years. I was always attracted to music and as a child I was in all the bands in grammar school and stuff like that, but I was going to be an architect or something. WS:  Where are you from? JG:  Southern California, El Monte is where I grew up. In high school I got very involved with jazz and started taking music more seriously, listening to everybody on records, radio, and at concerts and clubs. But before music I was more into visual art; drawing, painting, making mobiles, which is sort of an interesting thing since much of the time I find myself relating more to the art scene than the music scene. And I think it may go back to those times. WS:  You feel very comfortable in the art context? JG:  Mostly yes. In fact, I’ve been making drawings that come out of my work as a composer so that I’m still directly involved visually. WS:  Where did you go to college? JG:  San Francisco State. Majored in music. I was still very involved with jazz and played a lot with John Handy and other jazz players who were there at the time.

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WS:  What instrument were you playing then? JG:  Saxophone. WS:  So you stayed with sax? JG:  Yeah, I started with drums in fourth grade and then, I dunno, my parents gave me a saxophone and I just took it. (laughter) WS:  Stuck with it? JG:  Yeah. Then I played clarinet too because in college, saxophone was considered to be some kind of bastard instrument that you couldn’t major in. Also picked up on the flute somewhere along the way. I also got involved with some musicians and composers at the University of California at Davis and we formed a freeimprovisation group and recorded a couple of albums. WS:  What was the group’s name? JG:  The New Music Ensemble. That was a big step for me away from the jazz pop area of music and more into the avant-garde, underground world. We were playing pieces by Cage and Wolff and composers like that as well as our own compositions and improvisations. I was with this group for about four years and in the course of that time, this was ’61 to ’64, I met Steve Reich and Terry Riley and got very involved with those guys playing and hanging out with them. Had intensive relationships with both Steve and Terry for awhile and they had their effect on me. Worked with Steve at the San Francisco Mime Troupe on some events and Terry had just written “In C” and I was part of those first performances. It was a significant period musically for all of us. WS:  How did you first connect with Phil Glass? JG:  I came to New York around ’66 and Reich introduced me to Phil in ’67. WS:  At a concert? JG:  Well, I think I first met Phil while I was performing with Reich at the Park Place Gallery. Phil had just gotten back from India and Europe. He wrote a soprano saxophone piece for me which I performed at the Cinematheque, I think it was in ’68, May or so. The performers in that concert were Phil, me, Reich, and also Dorothy Pixley, the violinist. He had solo and duet pieces then. WS:  So you’ve been with Phil the longest?

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JG:  Yeah, I’d say so, although I went to the west coast for about eight months right after the Cinematheque concert. Rejoined him again when I returned to New York. WS:  How would you describe the difference of playing with Terry Riley and Phil? JG:  Phil is easier for me to work with. WS:  As a person? JG:  As a person, but also musically. Except for a few isolated ensemble pieces like “In C” and “Treading on the Trail” which as I recall is a terrific piece, Terry’s music evolved into a more improvisational, soloistic, and personalized style that I had difficulty relating to as a performer. On the other hand Phil’s music is written for a specific ensemble. There is no concept of solo. It is a group, collective effort and a very straightforward performing situation. The big nut for me with Phil’s music is stamina. Everything else is pretty much spelled out. This kind of performing situation with another composer allows me the freedom to deal with my own music on my own level at my own pace. Sometimes the group will get involved and give Phil a lot of feedback good and bad about a new piece or something, and this is healthy and natural, but the nice thing about it is we all have our own creative outlets outside of Phil’s group—and Phil is aware of this and very helpful and sympathetic. When we are playing well I find Phil’s music very satisfying, even though I may be playing only two or three notes over and over again for twenty minutes. Somehow, it provides a very basic experience for me. WS:  Did you find yourself making kind of a switch from preferring Terry’s music to Phil’s? JG:  I don’t think so. Their music is very different from each other, but as a listener I enjoy hearing both of them when the performance is good and I don’t enjoy hearing either of them when the performance is lousy. WS:  What were your impressions of the Town Hall concert? JG:  I thought it went really well. The energy of the group was superb throughout the whole evening. I was impressed. The time is now ripe for Phil to do all he can to develop a wider following because I think his music can handle it. Practically everywhere we go now we get a standing ovation. The music is together, the band is seasoned

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and mature, and we have wonderful management in Artservices, so everything is go, and as far as I’m concerned, now is the time. I think we could play anywhere in the world now with positive results. Town Hall was a good step in the right direction.

Joan La Barbara WS:  When did you first think of yourself as a musician? JLB:  My mother remembers my announcing that I was going to be a singer when I was 21/2. My grandfather taught me to play simple nursery songs on piano and then I started piano lessons when I was about five, studied for twelve years and also sang in church and school choirs. I had seven years of voice training starting at age 15. I guess I always considered myself a musician. When I went to Syracuse University, I wasn’t sure whether my major would be poetry or music but somewhere in the first year I decided on music. WS:  What instruments do you play, apart from piano and voice? JLB:  I learned some guitar when I was in high school at Abington, near Philadelphia because I was in a folk music group. WS:  Do you come from Philadelphia? JLB:  Yes. I finished up school at NYU. WS:  What was that like? JLB:  Miserable, because I was in the Music Ed department. I had been in performance at Syracuse and that was a lot more interesting. I got the teaching degree for my parents. WS:  What did you do when you got out of school? JLB:  Well, my last teacher was a woman from Juilliard, Marion Freschl. I was going to go to Boris Goldofsky’s opera workshop in West Virginia, but I decided that I was sick of the whole classical music scene, so I started to sing jazz. . . . WS:  Why? JLB:  Because the kind of personalities I was running into, being a voice person in classical music, were very strange; people went to concerts to criticize rather than to enjoy. I went into jazz because I found the attitude more positive. Later I went into rock. I had a group for a while called Tenth Street. We were in the jazz-rockhorn-band sort of thing. I was lead singer and also wrote tunes for

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the group. Let’s see, where did I go from there? Oh, I did a commercial for Michael Sahl . . . as a Japanese housewife. WS:  (laughs) For television? JLB:  No, for radio. Steve Reich asked Michael if he knew any singers who could alter the voice and imitate instruments so Michael suggested me and that’s actually how I got into the avant-garde scene. WS:  What did you do with Reich? JLB:  I worked with him for three years—on Drumming, where the voice part is basically imitating the sound of the marimba, and on Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices and Organ. And then I started working with Glass. WS:  How did that happen? JLB:  It’s kind of a complicated story. I introduced myself to Glass at the John Weber Gallery concert I was doing with Steve in May, 1973. We began working together that summer, doing three Parks concerts and one at Max’s Kansas City. I decided to stop playing with Phil for a while because there were two records of Steve’s music that I would be working on, and I guaranteed Steve I wouldn’t play with Phil until they were done. And then in February I quit Steve’s group and joined Phil’s. I’m happy with the change . . . WS:  How do you characterize the difference in terms of your participation? JLB:  I feel a whole lot more relaxed. Philip believes in all of his musicians’ capabilities, and in performance and rehearsal he lets us play the music . . . WS:  Isn’t there a lot of tension, though, in performing for six hours? JLB:  Not when you’re enjoying yourself. When you’re really involved and concentrating the music gives you energy. WS:  Were there any sections in which you could improvise? JLB:  In Part 4 there were four notes from which I could choose, sol, si, do, and re, that’s G, B, C and D, respectively. The solfege syllables are part of the sound Phil wants in the voice. WS:  I don’t understand. JLB:  The solfege syllables are the French names for the notes: DO RE MI FA SOL LA SI DO. And that’s what I sing, but it’s masked; Phil

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doesn’t want it really distinguishable. I also manipulate my sound by using different resonance areas according to the instruments I’m working with. For instance, I emphasize the forehead and nose regions when blending with soprano sax to capture the highs and brightness of that sound. One of the pieces I wrote this year has to do with choosing one pitch and placing it in as many different resonance areas as possible. It’s amazing how radically different sound placed in the mouth cavity is from sound focused near the third eye. WS:  How did you feel the concert went? JLB:  Very well. I was very happy at the end of it . . . and all through it. WS:  What’s this I hear you’re doing with the New Wilderness Preservation Band? JLB:  Charlie Morrow, Carole Weber and I got together and started improvising last June, Charlie and I chanting and doing vocal experiments and Carole playing flutes. After a few months Bruce Ditmas joined us on percussion, Harvie Swartz on bass and Rich Cook doing electronics and the group was formed. Sometimes we improvise on a concept and sometimes we’ll designate certain sounds, like a piece based on bells and humming, or bells and barking. Bells and barking is nice because it’s two ends of a spectrum. The bells are so ethereal and meditative, and the barking is the animal part of you. In Phil’s music because I’m dealing specifically with pitches, I’m totally controlling the sound. What I do in the New Wilderness band is emotion-based; I go to the emotion first and just let my feelings control the sound. Sometimes there’ll be a crack or a wail and I go with it. WS:  Do you feel this is more you than what you do with Phil’s ensemble? JLB:  No. They’re just totally different things. I’ve worked with other composers: Garrett List, Alvin Curran and Stanley Silverman; I write rock and avant-garde music and I also do some commercials— all voice, none of them visual. WS:  Do you see the commercials as part of your art, too? JLB:  Yes; it’s dealing with art in miniature. As a singer you sometimes have as little as six seconds to work with and you have to make what you’re doing as interesting as possible instantly.

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WS:  So everything you do in music is special and therefore a part of you. JLB:  Well, I think of everything I do as important. WS:  Do you feel disturbed that the music is over as soon as it’s heard? JLB:  No, because it’s the experience of it while it’s happening that’s very important. It’s that special feeling you take with you, whether you’re listening or playing. WS:  Is there anything more you’d like to say in thirty seconds? JLB:  (laughs) I’ve been doing music writing for the SoHo Weekly News. It started as a challenge to myself and I’m really enjoying it and getting a lot of positive response. I’m not a music critic, I’m a musician and I feel I have a different outlook to present. I don’t go to concerts to criticize, I go because I love music. By writing about what I experience I’m hoping to encourage people to go see and hear living art in its own time.

Dickie Landry WS:  When did you first think of yourself as a musician? DL:  It goes back to when I was five or six years old in Cecilia, Louisiana, and my brother was playing the saxophone, me picking up from what he was doing, and I figured that’s what I wanted to do, play the saxophone. We didn’t have radio or television but . . . oooh, don’t get wet! (Sprinklers are turned on to get them off the grass.) WS:  Help! Help! Help! (laughs) DL:  Well, I was saying I came to music through my brother playing the saxophone, my mother playing the harmonica, church music— 16th century Gregorian chant, and hearing a lot of music around, especially in black clubs. I could hear blues bass lines from a quarter of a mile away, it was very clear at night. There’s a lot of music down there, Cajun, blues bands . . . There’s so many pick-up bands, like the old guys, they change lives every weekend. They’re rice farmers and store managers and life insurance salesmen and medical technicians, bus drivers. WS:  They do it as a hobby. DL:  It’s not a hobby . . . I met this seventy-four-year-old guy, Ambrose Thibodeaux, and he says he just can’t give it up. So the

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music seems to be inbred down there. I recently read in the history of the state of Louisiana, in the paragraph on Cecilia, that there were once sixty-four fiddlers in that one small community of three hundred people. So there’s definitely a music scene there. WS:  How did you go on from there? DL:  I studied music in the public school system for eight years, then went on studying it in the university system, in the meantime playing professional engagements in dance bands, learning how to read music. I was in the tenth grade when I first played with a group. It was a Tenor or Society band with three saxophones and two trumpets which play for the high society functions. WS:  Did it have a name? DL:  Well, I’d rather leave it out. It’s actually Harry Greg and his Orchestra. My brother’s still playing with him. Then lots of jazz, then the r. and b. days came along after I got busted. So I went into playing the blues scene with several different bands. Met a lot of road people, played with Otis Redding a few times. B. B. King would come through. I played within a radius of 150 miles. All the bands that still play, like Wilson Pickett, Bobby “Blue” Bland, were through there at one time. WS:  Were those people influenced by Cajun music? DL:  No, that’s a whole different thing. It’s music from Georgia, Houston and Fort Worth Texas, a heavy black sound. WS:  Has that affected your music? DL:  Well, I can play it, I can use it. That’s one nice thing about having had all these experiences, I can do it if I want to, but sometimes I choose not to, especially in the concerts I’ve been giving this year I choose not to employ any of those . . . just try to come up with a pure improvisation. Of course, there are some influences that I’ll work through anyway, you know . . . WS:  How did you first come to play with Phil Glass? DL:  I met him in ’67. I’d come up to New York for the summer, he was curious and I was curious. He told me he was forming a group and asked me if I’d like to play and I said, “Sure.” I was coming back to New York in the fall of ’68. WS:  He’d never heard you play. DL:  No. And I hadn’t heard his music.

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WS:  (laughs) Didn’t need to, huh? Has working with the Phil Glass Ensemble helped your own work? DL:  Well, it’s helped me in keeping up physical stamina, it’s keeping me in shape. Some things you can learn from Phil’s music and some things you can’t . . . Er, that’s a hard one to answer. WS:  Isn’t it a difficult position to be in, given that you’re a musician in your own right and give solo concerts and also make videotapes. DL:  I don’t think it interferes with my music. You see, I’d been playing for sixteen or eighteen years before I even met Phil, so I already have my own identity and sound. No matter what kind of music I play, it won’t interfere with what I have in mind. I always thought it would and that I shouldn’t do it but I’m learning that it doesn’t matter. Music is an exercise and if you don’t do it often you begin to lose that edge a musician should have. WS:  How do you treat the improvisation section in Part Four? DL:  Well, I have to treat it how Phil wants it, you can improvise on a certain small range, of five or six notes. And they have to be whole notes but sometimes I’ll do more, I just can’t resist. WS:  So it’s a tight rein and sometimes you break it. DL:  Sure. We all break the rules. Even Phil does. WS:  What were your impressions of the Town Hall Concert? DL:  I liked it. I didn’t think we’d have trouble doing it. It’s just that there were two or three pieces where I thought we were really tired . . . This sounds like a football game. WS:  Do you think the record of Music in 12 Parts will be interesting to make? DL:  I think we’re in a better position to do that now than ever before. WS:  Members of the group are saying that your playing is better than it’s ever been before. DL:  Well, the others are playing better too. There seems to be a better attitude towards playing. We all go up and down. I’ve been busy this year . . . But if we play as many concerts as we have been we have to come up to standard otherwise it’s going to fall apart. WS:  You have your own solo album out, don’t you? DL:  I have two albums out and I’m planning to work on a third this summer . . . One album Solos is a double album and I did it with a

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group of people from Louisiana. Five of the people I’d known for at least fifteen years, and we’d been playing together off and on. There are some exciting moments on it. WS:  Do you want to do an album with just your own solos? DL:  I’m getting to that point, because my second album was with fewer people. My next one will probably be quadraphonic solo or solo saxophone or a combination. Then it’ll get back to a group situation. You get bored. . . .

Phil Glass WS:  Have you seen any reviews of the concert yet? PG:  A guy next to me in the subway left his Daily News behind and I saw the title of the review was “Six Hours of Torture.” I dunno, I kind of liked the review. That’s what I’d expect from the Daily News anyways. This guy didn’t even stay. It was a hard hat review. WS:  Most people did stay though. I was amazed. PG:  There were more people at the end. A lot came in after the intermission. Some people didn’t intend to come to the whole concert. They came for the latter half, for the new music. I mean, one of the reasons I did this concert was for the people including myself who wanted to hear the whole work to have the opportunity of doing so but I certainly don’t make it a requirement because I’ve been playing the music in bits and pieces for the last couple of years. WS:  You’re making an album of the whole work? PG:  Yeah, I think that’s going to be helpful. We’re using the basement studio at 112 Greene Street which is really a top notch place and Kurt is getting to be a wonderful engineer. Not only has his technical knowledge been developing but also his response to the music. I think he handled the sound very well at Town Hall. On this new board he has fingertip control of all the channels and I have to have someone doing that who knows the music and whom I can trust because I’m too busy playing. The mechanics of keeping the music together don’t leave that dimension of my attention free. Kurt knows how to respond to it and we all felt that. WS:  Are you starting to make a living entirely from your music now? A year ago you weren’t, were you.

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PG:  No, no, but I’m doing it almost entirely from performing now, although I got a NEA grant this year, and I do lectures too. We’re starting to work enough now. We’re going to Europe three times this year. It’s been a long haul but I’ve been able to do it without ever becoming a music teacher which I think has been a real accomplishment. I’ve been able to do it from the music I write, either talking about it, playing it or composing it. I’m doing it entirely from my work which is difficult because it’s not conventional music. The money that’s put aside for the development of new music isn’t given to people like me, as you know. WS:  How do you feel about playing to a larger audience? PG:  Well, the four or five hundred regular people downtown, with all the good will in the world, can’t support the group. We have to get a larger audience—in fact it’s already happening—and without my changing the music. I talked to Charlemagne Palestine about it and he felt that playing in Town Hall with the speakers in front of the stage almost objectified the music and he authentically appreciated that situation. As soon as you get into bigger audiences, you have to be in a concert hall and the old format has to go. WS:  How does that change the music? PG:  I don’t think it does change the music. It does change the social situation of listening. The concerts at Bleecker Street which really were my favorite concerts were a coming together of us and the audience in a very informal way. The musicians were sitting with their friends and at a certain point we got up and did the concert. It’s a way of eliminating that distance between the audience and the performer, and of course as we get into larger audiences it’s going to be more difficult to do that, isn’t it? WS:  Yeah. PG:  That’s definitely a loss. See, on the one hand I’m pleased that more people come and like the music, but on the other hand . . . WS:  It changes the situation to the point where that might be detrimental to the experience? PG:  Maybe so. I think we win something and we lose something. WS:  What do you think the direction of your music is going to be now that you’ve finalized this work? PG:  I’m starting a series of solo pieces.

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WS:  For yourself or for other musicians? PG:  For myself. WS:  Do you want to develop solos so you’ll be independent from the Ensemble? PG:  No, I think I need the range in my work. I’ve already considered the possibility that some of the solo musical pieces can be rescored for the group. But I’ve been writing for this group for seven years and I just need a change of scale. WS:  Does that reflect a change in your living environment? PG:  Oh, I’ve come to like having a separate living place from my studio. I have been living in apartments for about two years now. Of course I have kids, that makes a difference too . . . But anyway the piece I have in mind—I’m speculating now—is going to be an open-ended piece that I’ll add to and I may not even have to write it all consecutively. The idea comes from the work towards the end of Music in 12 Parts. What interests me about it is that I saw the ending of Part 12 was arbitrary. I could have continued the piece into another metamorphosis. I’m interested in a piece which begins and continues to grow organically, kind of forgetting its beginnings and always finding its reality in its present musical condition. So I’m not thinking of a piece that will have any ending at all. There would be specific contributions to it. I may date the parts of them, but I’m already thinking of it as a continuous musical piece which when I perform I’ll only be playing excerpts from. I’m starting to think of my music as several series. The first series was the instrumental pieces, the ensemble pieces, and then I did a series of vocal pieces, and this’ll be a third series, an extended solo piece. I’ve just gotten an organ that has foot pedals so I’ll have the possibility of having another line. WS:  What do you mean? PG:  Well, the pedals give me another voice, I’ll have my feet, my left hand and my right hand and the organ has a separate right hand and left hand manual. It also has “pre-sets” so I can set timbres ahead of time. WS:  Is this a new organ? PG:  Yeah. It’s a Yamaha. It’s a very very good organ. In fact, I think the instrument is stimulating me to write the piece. I’m very anxious to start working with it. The group is very much together now.

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We’re playing very well and we’re going to continue working together. I’m not abandoning the group at all. If anything, we’re really going to start working very regularly. We have five completely separate programs of music that cover the last five years. A lot of those pieces from ’68 and ’69 I don’t really want to play any more but starting with Music in Fifths there are pieces that we consider still live. They’re from ’69, ’70, ’71, ’72, ’73, ’74. We’ll be performing those pieces and I’ll probably write new pieces for the Ensemble too. I think of this new work as a branching out rather than a cutting off. I also want to do more vocal pieces and I want to use women’s voices, three or four or maybe a group of six. There are enough musically competent singers around. The main medium of my work has been the Ensemble up to now and it still will be a major part of it. There’s also the fact that Dickie’s and Jon’s work are opening up for them now and they are more inclined to devote themselves to their own musical development, as will Richard, Joan, and Bob. WS:  So rather than taking away from the group, this branching out may in fact strengthen it? PG:  I hope so. We have a very good relationship as a group as a whole and I find it very supportive. Of course, the focus of being together has been the Ensemble but it doesn’t always have to be that way. One of the reasons I’m interested in doing things on my own is that Jon and Dickie are developing so independently that it’s a way of everybody diversifying. Also I think that we’re bound together now for other reasons. One is that we’ll be able to make money together now. And that’s a very strong bond. Aside from that, there’s a lot of shared time and a lot of good time. I’ve always thought of my group as an association of very creative people who are adding to my work. I don’t think of them just as people I hire, though of course they are people I do hire—the interpersonal relationships are much more complex. Also we discuss my music and they make suggestions and so on. WS:  What basically do you think holds the group together? PG:  You mean before we began to make enough money to make it worthwhile? WS:  Yeah. PG:  I think an interest in the work and an interest in each other. And what we could do for each other. For example, the record company

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is helping to promote Dickie’s music and Jon’s music as well. That’s a very old fashioned way of looking at things but really, the people in the group really contribute very specific and individual things and I’ve been lucky in that way. It’s not just been luck either, it’s hard to keep a group together. WS:  Do you view the Town Hall Concert as a breakthrough point? PG:  From whose point of view? From the point of view of the public? I don’t think so. It was a significant concert from the point of view of the real world. By that I mean the so-called music establishment from which I’ve been generously excluded for years. But that’s okay. And by my being able to fill the hall and getting the kind of response I did. But that’s been happening gradually anyway. WS:  Do you think that Steve Reich, La Monte Young or Terry Riley have been more accepted by the music establishment? PG:  They’re having the same problems. Steve perhaps a little less because he’s tied in with Tilson-Thomas up in Boston and he has been, I would say, more willing to cultivate that directly. He’s made the choice to enter the music establishment more in that way. I’m not saying that’s affected his music. I think his music has its own integrity all the way through. We haven’t talked about it specifically, but I sense that he sees his place in the music world slightly differently. La Monte of course is more underground than ever. WS:  What do you feel about your place in the music world? PG:  The most flattering thing I could say is that I’m in an extremely marginal position. For most of the music world this music doesn’t exist and I don’t mean just my music. They’ve been very slow in accepting this line of work. At this point, it represents a rather large field of activity, too. In the Sixties it was really only four people and now there are dozens, maybe hundreds of people. I’m not saying there weren’t other people working but there were only four who were known. What’s happened is that I think it’s become more accepted in the sense that the phenomenon has become more general. But it’s still a slow process for me and it’s going to be years before I’m invited to play or even give a talk in a music school. And it may never happen.

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Part Two

In 1982, Time magazine described a musical trajectory that had become familiar in recent years. Back in the early 1970s, music critic Michael Walsh recounted, Steve Reich’s provocatively austere Four Organs had been performed at Carnegie Hall, and was greeted with boos, catcalls, and one listener apparently yelling, “I can’t stand it any longer!”1 But things had since changed: nine years after that infamous incident, the New York Philharmonic planned to open its subscription season with Reich’s Tehillim. “Minimalism, a joyous, exciting—and sometimes maddening—amalgam of influences as disparate as African drumming, the Balinese gamelan and new wave rock, has come uptown at last,” Walsh wrote. Walsh’s nearly-three-thousand-word feature continued on to document the evolution of minimalism from La Monte Young and Terry Riley through Reich and Philip Glass, and spotlighted the newcomer John Adams (sometimes dubbed the “fifth minimalist”). He situated minimalism as a remarkably popular movement of art music, one that decidedly renounced the “intellectualized composition climate” of a previous era; he provided a historical ancestry that went back to Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, Wagner’s Rheingold prelude, and Ravel’s Bolero. He noted that the music had captured the ears of rock musicians like David Byrne and Brian Eno. And he naturally highlighted minimalism’s many prestigious detractors, including composer Elliott Carter, whom Walsh quoted as saying, “About one minute of minimalism is a 163

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lot, because it is all the same. . . . One also hears constant repetition in the speeches of Hitler, and in advertising. It has its dangerous aspects.” Dangerous or not, Time made clear that minimalism was a big deal. The title of the article? “The Heart Is Back in the Game: Hypnotic and Infectious, Minimalism Is Emotional in Its Appeal.” Walsh’s article was not an outlier: in the early 1980s, major features in magazines like High Fidelity and newspapers like USA Today provided similar introductions to minimalism and its mainstream appeal.2 Six years after the twin successes of Glass’s Einstein on the Beach and Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians, it was time to tell the world: this wasn’t just obscure SoHo loft music anymore. In this period, many looked to minimalism as a savior from modernism, and a sign that contemporary classical music could, once again, be relevant to popular culture. Glass became the first living composer since Copland and Stravinsky to sign a contract with CBS Masterworks and began writing scores for major motion pictures; Adams’s large-scale orchestral works ascended the Billboard charts; Reich’s pulses crept into New Age circles and even club culture, as techno musicians sampled and tweaked his work.3 Even Riley, after a couple decades of improvising, returned to his first notated music since In C in collaborations with the Kronos Quartet.4 Though this path for minimalism—the narrative that Walsh and Time laid out—was showered with the most media attention, concert hall bookings, and record sales, it was only one facet of how the movement developed in the final years of the twentieth century. In the downtown New York that had been minimalism’s cradle, a new generation of composers adapted and rebelled against their forebears. Wielding ensembles of electric guitars, Glenn Branca and Rhys Chatham brought the snarl of No Wave together with the chugging repetition of the sixties; other, unclassifiable boundary-breakers like Arthur Russell and Julius Eastman moved fluidly between pop and avant-garde.5 Eastman carved out a resolutely antiestablishment identity, with improvisatory compositions rooted in his spirituality, his queerness, and his Blackness.6 (Aesthetically and thematically, Eastman’s music had little to do with John Adams’s neo-Romantic tone poems, but the two composers shared the realization that minimalism’s abstraction was inadequate to their expressive ambitions.) Figures like Ann Southam, Ingram Marshall, and Julia Wolfe discovered new compositional styles by integrating the harmonic and rhythmic patterns of the original minimalists with ideas from serialism,

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gamelan, and Motown. Many of these composers were labeled “postminimalist”; like their predecessors, few seized the label for themselves, but it adequately summarized the many forms that minimalism took after the mid-1970s. The idiom was always broader than what was being dubbed “minimalism” or “postminimalism” by critics and scholars. Musicians and listeners in the ambient, New Age, and disco scenes were engaging with similar approaches as those in the concert and experimental worlds. And then there were those who continued to be resolutely avantgarde, whose work could not be easily packaged into classical or pop categories. Through this period, Young performed The Well-Tuned Piano—immersive, multihour improvisations—and, with Zazeela, created a series of all-encompassing sound and light installations known as the Dream House.7 A new crop of experimentalists such as Maryanne Amacher and Ellen Fullman developed their own newfangled instruments, sonic environments, and tuning systems.8 The Reagan Revolution may have been an indirect boon for some minimalists—as a threatened National Endowment for the Arts advocated for artists to find a place for themselves in the marketplace, new corporate sponsors invested in more digestible avant-garde endeavors.9 The Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival, which put on major showcases of Reich and Glass, got sponsored by Philip Morris; Exxon helped fund Adams’s residency with the San Francisco Symphony, and his breakthrough Harmonielehre.10 Success and gentrification began to erode the communities of artists who had collaborated together downtown; as video artist Dimitri Devyatkin later put it, “SoHo itself had become a syndrome of artists pitching projects to foundation executives over expensive lunches.”11 Fewer could afford to start their own moving company or work as an erstwhile plumber, as Reich and Glass once had, to support their artistic efforts. Some expatriated. After more than a decade documenting minimalism at the Village Voice, Tom Johnson decamped permanently to Europe in 1983. In Paris, composer Charlemagne Palestine gave a phone interview in which he described himself “in exile,” and bitterly declared that “me and about six other people invented a whole form that nobody even knows we did.”12 By that point, minimalism had become a thoroughly international phenomenon. Major tours of Glass’s and Reich’s ensembles in the 1970s had introduced European modernists to Drumming and Music in Twelve Parts—some dismissed the performances as monotonous music

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of the assembly line, but others recognized them as fresh, if imperfect.13 Louis Andriessen and his Dutch colleagues decided minimalism was too bourgeois, but worth appropriating into a tough-edged, anticapitalist stew of musical styles. In Eastern Europe, “spiritual” or “holy” minimalists including Arvo Pärt and Henryk Górecki created ethereal, moving works—totally separate from American minimalism—that the record industry turned into a cash cow.14 Back in 1968, musicologist Ivan Martynov had smuggled a score for In C into the Soviet Union; though the composer Edison Denisov flushed it down a toilet in protest, Riley’s approach soon took hold in the Moscow underground.15 In Japan, Midori Takada performed music by Reich and Riley, and went on to study traditional Ghanaian music in order to create a new repetitive style as part of the kankyō ongaku (environmental music) scene.16 There were Belgian minimalists like Karl Goeyvarts, and Lithuanian minimalists like Bronius Kutavičius, and Serbian minimalists like Vladimir Tošić.17 And minimalism became a topic of scholarship. In 1980, Wim Mertens’s American Minimal Music—translated from Flemish into English in 1983—became the first book-length study of the musical phenomenon. Johnson’s anthology of his Voice writings appeared in 1989, Edward Strickland’s Minimalism: Origins in 1993, and K. Robert Schwartz’s Minimalists in 1996.18 Focusing primarily on the Big Four, these books advocated for minimalism as an idiom to which academics should pay close attention. And they made efforts to grapple with the widespread and continued critiques of minimalism, both from the classical music establishment (that it was too loud and repetitive) and from conservative thought-leaders (that it was too mindless and regressive). “Minimalism is history now,” the composer Michael Gordon told an interviewer in 1997; for the past decade, a freewheeling music festival he had cofounded called Bang on a Can presented young postminimalist composers alongside retrospectives of Glass, Reich, Meredith Monk, and other elders.19 Minimalism had become history, and a necessary pretext for all kinds of artistic projects. One couldn’t help but grapple with it, even if just to reject it. In the mainstream, it consolidated, narrowed, canonized; but at the margins, it continued to splinter, refract, and grow in new directions.

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chapter 9

1976

The year of the American bicentennial marked a turning point for musical minimalism. Two major works provided summations of a scene that had emerged over the past two decades, and pointed toward a new popularity, and stylistic transformation, for its two most prominent composers: Steve Reich and Philip Glass. Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians premiered at Town Hall that April; seven months later, Philip Glass’s Einstein on the Beach sold out a two-night stint at the Metropolitan Opera.1 Though these works defined the careers of their creators, they evolved from collaboration. Music for 18 Musicians grew from several years of workshopping in Reich’s ensemble, and Einstein brought the voice of director Robert Wilson and a large creative team to music that Glass had been creating with his group in the mid-1970s.2 Glass’s experimental years would seem to end with Einstein; soon he was writing grand works for major opera houses and even symphonies.3 Music for 18, as Reich put it in a program note, introduced more harmonic movement than any of his previous works; his post-1976 path continued in that vein, ceding his technological and process-based inquiries of the previous decade to more conventional scores.4 The pair had long been downtown New York personalities with cult followings, and quickly gained widespread acclaim—if still maintaining a divisive presence—in the musical mainstream. (They also split from each other as friends and collaborators, and did not perform on the same stage together for more than forty years.)5 167

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But this was not the only path for minimalism: earlier in 1976, the composer, artist, and mathematician Catherine Christer Hennix debuted The Electric Harpsichord in Stockholm. The strange, trembling music is worlds apart from Glass and Reich; as Henry Flynt writes, Hennix’s creation is perhaps something other than music, representing a new form of science, a hallucinatory environment of sound.6 The reception of The Electric Harpsichord, too, was the opposite of the famous minimalists: unlike the audiences and critics who publicly heralded Music for 18 and Einstein, Flynt’s ecstatic response to Hennix’s music was largely a private affair.7 Hennix’s work instead continued the project of the Theatre of Eternal Music, intertwining research in mathematical intonation and the influence of her discipleship with Pandit Pran Nath. She provides a crucial, alternative pathway for minimalism: as the world of the sixties counterculture faded, the avant-gardism of the movement’s early years endured, even as other voices embraced the concert and pop worlds.

tim page on the ecm release of music for 18 musicians (1978) Steve Reich’s “Music for 18 Musicians” is a very important work. Since its premiere at Town Hall in April 1976, “18 Musicians” has become a legend; concerts have sold out long in advance, and been attended by near ecstatic crowds, many who have seen the work every time it has been performed in the New York area. Until recently, there has been no recorded performance of the piece (although bootleg tapes have been highly prized party items for a year or two). Now, finally, there is a first rate recorded performance of “Music for 18 Musicians,” featuring Reich’s own ensemble, on ECM records. It is somehow fitting that such a diverse work should be recorded in a rock studio in Paris, by classical engineers from Germany, and finally released in the USA on a label that specializes in Jazz. For diversity is one of the most remarkable things about “Music for 18 Musicians.” Reich admits that modern jazz, African music, and Balinese Gamelan have influenced his work, along with the usual Western classical composers. For this reason, Reich’s work has a rhythmical

Tim Page, “Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians, Finally Gets a Good Treatment on Vinyl,” Columbia Spectator, November 2, 1976, 8–9. Courtesy of Tim Page.

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vitality usually associated with rock music or jazz. His music is very difficult to define. It appeals to wildly different tastes. WKCR-FM plays the record not only on its classical programs but also on its jazz show. And many rock musicians have admitted Reich’s effect on them, David Bowie calling his music “a tonetrack into the future.” Yet, possibly the most important thing about Reich’s music is the way he liberated the so-called “serious” music from the disastrous course it had taken. By the time Reich began performing, the Juilliard school and other conservatories had institutionalized a precious, ingrown, and overly cerebral form of composition that was widely accepted as The Way. Based on the bones of the Schonbergian theory, yet with none of the urgency and poetry of the Viennese master, this attempt to write music in a style that belonged (emotionally and intellectually) to people of a different time and geographic location rarely led to anything valid and usually produced works of stunning ugliness. Yet, until Reich and some of his fellow innovators successfully challenged the classical music “establishment” (to use a hackneyed but accurate phrase) perpetrators of this academic tripe (remember Charles Wuorinen?) were widely hailed as the “future” of modern music. Until Reich. When he came along, music escaped from all the dust and analysis and returned to life. As is the case of another innovator, John Cage, Reich has founded no school; his music is much too unique and personal for that. But he opened the doors and proved that many different ways of composition can exist now, rather than solely the method taught by the conservatories. Based on 11 shimmering, incandescent chords, “Music For 18 Musicians” is not only Reich’s masterpiece to date, but a towering work of art. Listening to it is an experience not unlike reading Pynchon or Proust, watching a Griffith film, or examining a Picasso canvas. “18 Musicians” has elements of jazz in it, because jazz, and rhythm in general, is very much a part of our time. But “18 Musicians” has none of that annoying “Hey–lookit me–I’m playing in 7/4” sort of self-consciousness that so often mars modern jazz. Reich’s work is rhythmically complex, but the complexity is always based on musical grounds, rather than sheer showiness. Likewise, “18 Musicians” is a very contemporary work, yet incorporates many traditional elements that a lesser artist would attempt to eschew for the sake of gratuitous “modernity.” It is difficult to avoid being metaphorical about “Music For 18 Musicians.” I could tell you that listening to the piece reminds me of lying on my back, on some perfect October afternoon, and watching the clouds

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merge and dissolve, all in an ideal, hypnotic process. I could tell you that “18 Musicians” reminds me of an aural kaleidoscope, or that there are times when “Music for 18 Musicians” seems to propel the subways, so perfectly does it catch their rhythm. But these are subjective responses, and every listener will be able to add his own to the list. The most perfect thing about the piece is its ability to inspire such excitement; only a very jaded ear can listen unmoved. One final metaphor. Imagine trying to impose a frame on a running river, enclosing it in a work of art, yet leaving its kinetic quality unsullied, leaving it flowing freely on all sides. It has been done. Steve Reich has framed the river.

steve reich’s program note for music for 18 musicians (1976) Music for 18 Musicians is approximately 55 minutes long. The first sketches were made for it in May 1974 and it was completed in March 1976. Although its steady pulse and rhythmic energy relate to many of my earlier works, its instrumentation, harmony and structure are new. As to instrumentation, Music for 18 Musicians is new in the number and distribution of instruments; violin, cello, 2 clarinets doubling bass clarinet, 4 women’s voices, 4 pianos, 3 marimbas, 2 xylophones and metallophone (vibraphone with no motor). All instruments are acoustical. The use of electronics is limited to microphones for the voices and some of the instruments. There is more harmonic movement in the first 5 minutes of Music for 18 Musicians than in any other complete work of mine to date. Though the movement from chord to chord is often just a re-voicing, inversion, or relative minor or major of a previous chord, usually staying within the key signature of three sharps at all times, nevertheless, within these limits harmonic movement plays a more important role in this piece than in any other I have written. Rhythmically there are two basically different kinds of time occurring simultaneously in Music for 18 Musicians. The first is that of a regular rhythmic pulse in the pianos and mallet instruments that continues throughout the piece. The second is the rhythm of the human breath in

Steve Reich, “Music for 18 Musicians,” program note, Town Hall, April 24, 1976. Courtesy of Steve Reich.

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the voices and wind instruments. The entire opening and closing sections plus part of all sections in between contain pulses by the voices and winds. They take a full breath and sing or play pulses of particular notes for as long as their breath will comfortably sustain them. The breath is the measure of the duration of their pulsing. This combination of one breath after another gradually washing up like waves against the constant rhythm of the pianos and mallet instruments is something I have not heard before and would like to investigate further. The structure of Music for 18 Musicians is based on a cycle of eleven chords played at the very beginning of the piece and repeated at the end. All the instruments and voices play or sing pulsing notes within each chord. Instruments like the strings which do not have to breathe nevertheless follow the rise and fall of the breath by following the breath patterns of the bass clarinet. Each chord is held for the duration of two breaths, and the next chord is gradually introduced, and so on, until all eleven are played and the ensemble returns to the first chord. This first pulsing chord is then maintained by two pianos and two marimbas. While this pulsing chord is held for about five minutes a small piece is constructed on it. When this piece is completed there is a sudden change to the second chord, and a second small piece or section is constructed. This means that each chord that might have taken fifteen or twenty seconds to play in the opening section is then stretched out as the basic pulsing melody for a five minute piece very much as a single note in a cantus firmus, or chant melody of a 12th century Organum by Perotin might be stretched out for several minutes as the harmonic center for a section of the Organum. The opening eleven chord cycle of Music for 18 Musicians is a kind of pulsing cantus for the entire piece. On each pulsing chord one or, on the third chord, two small pieces are built. These pieces or sections are basically either in the form of an arch (ABCDCBA), or in the form of a musical process, like that of substituting beats for rests, working itself out from beginning to end. Elements appearing in one section will appear in another but surrounded by different harmony and instrumentation. For instance the pulse in pianos and marimbas in sections 1 and 2 changes to marimbas and xylophones in section 3A, and to xylophones and maracas in sections 6 and 7. The low piano pulsing harmonics of section 3A reappear in section 6 supporting a different melody played by different instruments. The process of building up a canon, or phase relation, between two xylophones and two pianos which first occurs in section 2, occurs again in section 9 but building up to another overall pattern in a different

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harmonic context. The relationship between the different sections is thus best understood in terms of resemblances between members of a family. Certain characteristics will be shared, but others will be unique. One of the basic means of change or development in many sections of this piece is to be found in the rhythmic relationship of harmony to melody. Specifically, a melodic pattern may be repeated over and over again, but by introducing a two or four chord cadence underneath it, first beginning on one beat of the pattern, and then beginning on a different beat, a sense of changing accent in the melody will be heard. This play of changing harmonic rhythm against constant melodic pattern is one of the basic techniques of this piece, and one I have never used before. Its effect, by change of accent, is to vary that which is in fact unchanging. Changes from one section to the next, as well as changes within each section are cued by the metallophone (vibraphone with no motor) whose patterns are played once only to call for movements to the next bar much as in a Balinese Gamelan a drummer will audibly call for changes of pattern, or as the master drummer will call for changes of pattern in West African music. This is in contrast to the visual nods of the head used in earlier pieces of mine to call for changes and in contrast also to the general western practice of having a non performing conductor for large ensembles. Audible cues become part of the music and allow the musicians to keep listening.

john rockwell on einstein on the beach (village voice , 1976) Everything that emanated from his supremely great mind was as clear and beautiful as a good work of art. —Albert Einstein shortly before his death, on the physicist Hendrik A. Lorentz Everything is determined, the beginning as well as the end, by forces over which we have no control. It is determined for the insect as well as for the star. Human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper. —Einstein, 1929

Excerpts from David Sargent, “ ‘Einstein on the Beach’: The Met Will Dance to a Mysterious Tune,” Village Voice, November 22, 1976, 52–53 and 55. Courtesy of The Village Voice. Sargent was Rockwell’s pen name when writing for the Village Voice.

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1976   |   173 A great adventure in thought had at last come safe to shore. —Alfred North Whitehead, on the confirmation of Einstein’s general theory of relativity

The greatest scene is the simplest. The music begins with a stately, almost Arabic electric organ solo: single notes on a modal theme, with shimmering roulades of improvised ornamentation. On the stage, broadside to the audience, is an oversized bed; nothing else. Its cover is turned back as if ready to receive a dreamer. Two wires, dim but visible, are attached to the corners at the foot of the bed. The side nearest the audience glows strongly and evenly: fluorescent light. Slowly and steadily, pulled by the wires, the bed begins to rise, angling upward to the vertical. As it reaches an upright position, pivoting on its end, it is off center. Awkwardly it inches to mid-stage, directly under the spot where the wires and their pull are positioned. As the lift continues, the end finally swings free of the floor. The music changes to an eerie, wordless solo for soprano voice, over simple organ accompaniment. The bed, not hanging vertically after the swaying stops, glides slowly upward, the brilliance obliterating any murky detail in the darkness behind it. The vertical band of light shortens steadily, until finally it is cut off by the top of the proscenium arch, leaving only a ghostly glow. For the rest of my life I want to reflect on what light is. —Einstein after the publication of the general theory of relativity in 1916

Einstein on the Beach is a continuous, nearly five-hour “theatre piece with music” by Robert Wilson and Philip Glass. Wilson was primarily responsible for direction and decor; Glass wrote the music; both men worked together on the overall conception. Einstein was first performed in July at the Avignon Festival, and toured Europe in September and October. It will receive its American premiere with the same troupe at the Metropolitan Opera this Sunday night at 6:30, with a repeat performance the following Sunday. Although there has been talk of further performances in Brooklyn and a possible American tour, it looks now as if these will be the final Einstein performances anywhere; the piece is expensive, money is hard to raise, and the 35 people who have been working on it for nearly a year are tired. There is some hope of video or film documentation, but it will hardly be the same. Like Wilson’s earlier works, Einstein is a dream-play, only this time with music. There is no coherent narrative: There are some words, but

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figure 17. The final scene from the revival of Philip Glass’s Einstein on the Beach at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, 1984. © Jack Vartoogian/FrontRowPhotos.

even the apparently linear stories are so disoriented by the context that they become dreams themselves. More often the texts are disjointed, stream of consciousness. Instead of dialogue, the characters dance or chant numbers or solfege syllables (do-re-mi). They pose and gesture, purposefully acting out roles whose purpose seems, at first, impossibly private. They do this against elaborate painted drops, bathed in lighting so exactly composed that the effect is of a grand, glacially kinetic painting. The work is divided into nine scenes, none longer than half an hour, with five “knee-plays” (so named for their function as joints) flanking and separating them. The nine principal scenes can be grouped into three trios. There are three train scenes: the first scene has a train in the background; the fourth is at night with a train moving off into the distance; the seventh finds the shape of the disappearing train transformed into a building in which Einstein can be seen scribbling his equations. There are three trial scenes: the second, a complex courtroom sequence with a large bed in the foreground; the fifth, initially the same trial, but split in the middle, with the stage-left half becoming a prison, and the eighth, with the bed alone, which rises as already described. Finally, there are three space-machine scenes: in the third and the sixth, the two formally choreographed dances, the machine is suspended over the

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otherwise bare stage in the form of a clock; in the ninth and most lavish scene of all, we move inside the machine, full of flashing light panels, for a vision of nuclear explosion and science gone mad. The knee-plays all involve two women, Lucinda Childs and Sheryl Sutton. Their interchanges constitute a gloss on the main action, from abstracted counting and clerklike absorption, through intimations of flight, mystical technocracy, and torture, to a post-apocalyptic rebirth. On the page all of that must seem impossibly schematic. In performance, Einstein is full of teeming life. Each moment is a subtly layered network of detail, with one’s attention absorbed simultaneously and sequentially by the sound of music, Wilson’s extraordinary eye for colors (mostly grays, with sharp accents of red and recurrent fluorescent light), the intricate detail of each actor’s gestures, their positioning on the stage, the rightness of the props, and the veiled intimations of philosophical issues. [. . .] You see, my son, time changes here to space. —Wagner, Parsifal, 1882

Wilson has always called his works “operas,” even if the music was only very occasional. They were silent operas, in the sense of the Italian usage, as a blend of the arts. Now, with Glass’s music, Einstein is more an opera than any previous Wilson work. But it’s hardly an opera in the way that regular Metropolitan Opera subscribers—many of whom have reportedly bought tickets for November 21—are used to the term since there are no staged roles for conventionally trained solo singers. The Met is co-producing the two performances, partly out of a genuine belief in Einstein‘s value, no doubt, but also partly to fill the house on the dark Sunday nights and partly to enliven its staid image. One suspects that at least some people in the audience Sunday night will be extremely disconcerted. It will probably do them good. Opera as a living, ongoing art form is dead: New operas that are both intellectually respectable and decently popular simply are not forthcoming. Yet the idea of “opera” remains our principal repository for a supra-rational theatre of style and symbol. Both Wilson and Glass work in a manner that can easily be called Wagnerian. Wagner, of course, was the most visionary reformer in the whole, 400-year history of opera. He too developed a network of leitmotifs to reinforce the dramatic and musical unities of his works, and he too created vast, hypnotic theatrical landscapes. Wilson’s interlocking images can easily be

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conceived of leitmotivically. And Glass is quite capable of sitting down and sketching out the underlying formal ideas in his Einstein music; unlike the formal notations of so many 20th-century composers, they are ideas that actually contribute to a unifying listening experience. There are germinal themes that recur in simple or metamorphosed form, linking rhythmic ideas and an overall pattern. (It’s nowhere near so complex as Wagner, obviously, nor so intimately related to the minutiae of dramatic development. But out of temperamental conviction, both Wilson and Glass deal in simpler, more meditative ideas and emotions.) We’re all so different—you, Andy, and me. —Wilson to Glass, during a New York Einstein rehearsal The dance unfolded gradually, the spare rituallike gestures of the beginning eventually becoming manic and restless. She skittered and limped and bounced while making complicated darting hand signals. Her facial expression maintained that consuming determination, but character feeling changed with the speed of hallucinations intercepting one another. —Wendy Perron, on Lucinda Childs at a New York Einstein run-through this spring, in the SoHo Weekly News It’s not worth my time to do incidental music. —Glass, last week

Einstein on the Beach is a collaboration, and, as with any cooperative venture, there is always a difficulty in figuring out who did what. This might not seem important—the work is the work—but it is intensely important to the participants, and the problem for all of them but one is that Wilson’s reputation and contribution are so huge that he overshadows the others, including Glass. This is partly because it has been his preexisting organization, the Byrd Hoffman Foundation, that has organized the massive physical production and done the bulk of the fund raising. But even on a purely artistic level, his work is so compelling that even Glass is openly miffed at the way attention in Europe tended to focus on Wilson. Wilson himself is continually solicitous of Glass’s feelings and those of the others. But it doesn’t always help. The piece grew out of joint discussions between Wilson and Glass. But both men have always needed others to realize their ideas. In Glass’s case, it’s relatively straightforward: his musicians play his music. There is some room for performer choice, but generally this is notated music with the performance led strictly by Glass. Musicians associate themselves for a greater or lesser period of time with Glass’s ensemble, and though they

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may chafe at the time it takes from their own work if they are themselves composers, it is at least interesting, remunerative work, and they need labor under few delusions that they are “co-creating” the music. With Wilson, it’s a little more complicated, since he has always allowed his collaborators a good deal of creative freedom. Wilson picks people who will bring much of their own to the process. During rehearsal, he will roughly sketch the situation, sit back as the performers fill in the details, and then gently reject what he doesn’t want. The results always look recognizably like Wilson’s work, and hence bear his subtle, but crucial, imprint. Yet, they “belong” to the performers, and the question of credits in the program can be a tricky one. The main collaborator, aside from the two principals, is the “Andy” above, Andrew DeGroat, Wilson’s longtime choreographer. In his solo dancing, DeGroat is the master of rapid, virtuosic spinning, but the two formal sequences he provides in Einstein (the first two “space-machine” scenes) are full of patterned, crisscrossing lines, and sudden, contained leaps that not only echo the structure of Glass’s music, but suggest a metaphor for molecular movement. But DeGroat is hardly the only dancer in Einstein. Lucinda Childs has a solo career that goes back to the Judson Church days, and if any of the performers is the “star” of the 26-member cast it is she. The multiple demands of acting, singing, and dancing in Einstein have reinforced an already apparent tendency in Wilson’s work after [The Life and Times of Josef] Stalin to cut down from the seething communal confusions of his past [Stalin’s cast approached 150] and to work with smaller, more economically manageable groups of professionals. Many old Byrds were weeded out during the Einstein auditions, but that hardly means the Einstein cast lacks personality or even eccentricity, from the 77-year-old black actor, Samuel M. Johnson, whose moving final lines about the power of human love put the seal on the five-hour experience, to the 10-year-old Paul Mann, to a typically Wilsonian assortment of tall and short, round and skinny actors. Bob wants something impossible. We propose something he doesn’t like. What I haven’t figured out yet is how to find the third way that will be feasible and still fulfill his vision. —Beverly Emmons, lighting designer, during rehearsals at Avignon

Wilson owes much of his artistic strength to his unabashed naiveté, but that naiveté is not always obviously intentional or effective. Sometimes

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in conversation he will hint at a Brechtian aesthetic. For instance, the ascending bed was lifted at Avignon by wires and pulleys, the pulley attached to an ancient crank turned with sweating effort by two French stagehands. The bed pulsed upward rather than rising with mechanical smoothness, and its awkward inching toward center stage before it began its vertical rise broke the illusion of mystical levitation. Wilson said in Avignon that he wouldn’t use a hydraulic lift if he had one; he will have one at the Met, and it will be interesting to see whether he uses it. The Avignon performances were full of moments that could have been accomplished more smoothly and efficiently, and Wilson went out of his way to include some of the stagehands in two scenes, undercutting the magic of his illusions with the intrusion of the mechanisms necessary to create them. Yet the blend doesn’t seem entirely fluent. Wilson never quite convinces us that his technical naiveté is deliberate. Yet the intrusions do prevent one from falling into pure escapism. Perhaps the real question is whether escapism itself is progressive or reactionary. [. . .] It’s not to be done alone. It’s done for the public. You’re trying to relate and you’re trying to relate in a positive way. —Wilson, at the Avignon press conference

The Einstein audience so far has consisted of European sensation seekers, students, devoted avant-gardists, a few rich patrons, and a few political radicals. It’s easy to be dismissive about the trendiness of that following. But it’s also refreshing to see again a vanguard art work that generates excitement outside a tiny coterie. Wagner was trendy in his day too. Still, in this country, especially, Wilson and Glass have clearly not yet reached their potential audience. One wonders—quite apart from the sheer size of the stage and the house—whether the Met is the best place for the American performances. It will certainly add some snap to the Met’s image. But the true Einstein audience is likely to be found among people for whom the Met, and indeed the whole notion of opera, is anachronistic. So far American foundations, government agencies, and private patrons have not responded in sufficient numbers to enable widespread performances in this country. But that’s partly because Wilson and Glass haven’t reached enough young, inquisitive people to generate the excitement that would stimulate what available patronage there is.

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Glass has an arrangement with Virgin Records in England to distribute his music in Europe. The trouble is that Virgin, which is active in British progressive rock, hasn’t chosen to promote him very actively, and so far, no major American label has been willing to distribute the music here. Glass talks from time to time about giving concerts for progressive rock or jazz audiences, but he is clearly nervous about the prospect of artistic misunderstanding or compromise. Wilson so far conceives of broadening his audiences in terms of storming the traditional bastions of theatrical and operatic culture— Broadway and the Met. Yet he’s embittered about it, too. “Theatre in New York is very corrupt,” he complains. “Theatre like we do isn’t possible here.” What Einstein needs is an impresario of imagination and energy who believes in it and will spread it to its potential audience. Wagner’s works were disseminated through Europe late in the 19th century by a passionate, flamboyant impresario named Angelo Neumann, and Wilson and Glass need a Neumann now. There is a demonstrable hunger for a spectacular musical theatre of a sort heretofore unimagined by most theatergoers. The enthusiastic response accorded the almost invariably lame “theatrical” displays at rock concerts hints at that need. If people go wild for a few laser effects and the odd smoke bomb, some of them would surely seek out Einstein if they only knew it existed. It’s like two strangers reaching out in the darkness, with neither quite knowing the other is there.

henry flynt on catherine christer hennix’s the electric harpsichord Christer Hennix performed The Electric Harpsichord (hereafter EH) on March 23, 1976, as part of her program Brouwers Lattice at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm.8 At the time, all I knew about the event was the program notes she sent me, which seemed to return to the Fifties practice of justifying music by scientific references. That summer, she was in New York and temporarily stored a satchel of documentations in my apartment. For some reason, out of curiosity, I took EH out and played it. It took me completely by surprise. It came from a place I didn’t

Henry Flynt, “Christer Hennix, the Electric Harpsichord,” liner notes to The Electric Harpsichord ([Milan]: Die Schachtel, 2010). Courtesy of Henry Flynt.

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know existed; and I wouldn’t have expected it to be technically realizable. One felt as if one had tuned to a broadcast originating somewhere other than planet earth. Not that it was oddly clanky or screechy or incomprehensibly boring; “modern” composers had been writing that for decades. There was a luminous intelligence embodied in a tonal and justly tuned program. The frequency spectrum was dense, saturated, with twinkling attacks, humming bass, diffraction and pulsing—without any thematic organization. The tonality and timbre were delectable (with an edge of anxiety)—that’s why you could draw near it. Twinkling frequencies swept through the spectrum in waves, boiling through each other—shifting the phase. One apprehended a new kind of logic/ratio in the event. I wanted to call it a hallucinatory sound environment. To me the most wonderful moments were the beginning and end of the tape, which were created by the way the sound check was produced. The long fade-up of the hum which resolves into high twinkling attacks. And the end, when the hum drops away to uncover a sine tone; which is abruptly faded. Leaving an extraordinary charged silence. Later I learned more about how Christer had come to the integration of methods. Christer’s father was an amateur Arabic scholar. Christer’s mother, Margit Sundin-Hennix, was a woman of independent means and a jazz composer. Christer played drums in her brother’s jazz band, starting as a child, and as a teenager, met prominent New York jazz musicians visiting Stockholm. Christer joined the Electronic Music Studio of the Swedish Broadcasting Corporation in the late Sixties. “International style” composers such as Xenakis were her models. She had two compositions of note published—including Text/Sound Composition 5, one of the first published records of computer music. In 1969, at age 21, Christer met La Monte Young; and hearing Young’s constantly maintained sine-wave drone transformed her conception of music. Young played a tape of “The Well-Tuned Piano” for Christer. She soon began to assist Young, realizing one of Young’s “Drift Studies” for him in 1970. In July 1970, Young insistently invited Christer to come to St. Paul de Vence to hear Pandit Pran Nath, who was touring with Young and Terry Riley. Hearing Guruji’s tamburas transformed Christer’s conception of music once again. She went to Berkeley in 1971 and 1973 to study mathematical logic and pursue music. In May 1971, she became a disciple of Guruji’s in a ceremony in Terry Riley’s loft in San Francisco.

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Meanwhile, she continued to work in algorithmic music theory, announcing “infinitary compositions” as a genre inspired by Young. In 1973, she was a teaching assistant to Guruji at Mills College, and toured in California with Guruji and Terry. That same summer, she wrote a proposal for a course in algorithmic music theory (for computer realization), a course which never took place. In Brouwer’s Lattice, Christer speaks of computer synthesis as the ideal means of realizing the music, and she says it again in an interview in 1982 (when she was teaching mathematics and computer science at New Paltz). Christer’s work with computer music ended in the early Seventies because the funding was cut. All the same, Christer told me in a conversation in 1978 that she had concluded that the commercially manufactured synthesizers were inadequate. Their designers knew nothing about the musical goals (esthetics, sensibility). Nothing worthwhile could be done with them. So it was that Christer came to perform on musical instruments fed into electronic processors, supported by custom-made precision audio generators. It is hard to say whether one enjoys the recording more if one does not know how it was made or if one knows how it was made. Playback should be without excessive bass. The effects change with the listener’s spatial position. You hear dense twinkling frequencies, and bass tones—with the density of a hum; and waves sweep through the spectrum. (One less appreciative listener called it the smoke alarm philharmonic.) In fact, Christer used a tunable Yamaha keyboard with the harpsichord stop. The scale is an interpretation of the scale of raga Multani. (Christer had been given Daniélou’s Tableau comparatif des intervalles musicaux by La Monte and Marian, and consulted it when composing the scale.) Christer devotes the left hand to a broken open chord, and the right hand to melismas. The input is layered with a long delay using the two tape recorder method. Periodically, Christer drops out, and the tape system plays by delay. So there come to be a saturation of harpsichord attacks, and waves of frequencies boiling through the spectrum, turning the pulsation. The first live performance of EH was the last. I assume it would have been extraordinary to witness, to experience this mass of unearthly sound being driven by a keyboard player. In the late Seventies, when we were exchanging proposals for a new science, a number of ideas suggested themselves. One was of a science neither psychology nor physics which sought the (verifiable-by-inspection) law of what consciousness discerned or recognized in an involuted

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external process. Another was the idea of a process largely set in motion mechanically, wherein improvisational control was necessary to drive the process. (A mechanical process with nonautomatable control.) Another was to ingest a psychotropic drug and use the induced consciousness as a lens onto the drug’s physical structure. These projects had a common feature which traces back to the culture of tuning championed by La Monte Young. The thrust of modern technology was to transfer the human act to the machine, to eliminate the human in favor of the machine, to study phenomena contrived to be independent of how humans perceived them. In contrast, the culture of tuning which Young transmitted by example to his acolytes let conscious discernment of an external process define the phenomenon. The next step is to seek the laws of conscious discernment or recognition of the process. And the next step is to invent a system driven by improvisation monitored by conscious apperception of the process. If I had known what EH was, and if I had known that the first live performance would be the last, I would have gone to Stockholm to hear it. Later that year, Christer mailed me the catalogue for her second installation at Moderna Museet, Toposes & Adjoint’s. Looking at this document after hearing EH, I began to wonder if the algebraic epistemology therein was the ratio which had informed EH. I had the tape played on WBAI-FM in New York, October 17, 1977. Arriving in New York December 11, 1977, Christer seemed a person who took Establishment rank for granted, who was poised for increasing success. But it didn’t exactly play out that way. Christer became a mathematics professor at New Paltz. But her art did not really acquire a public, and the public never became involved in EH as I did. All the same, she played the tape at Experimental Intermedia in April 1978 (a stressful time for her personally because of her opening at Redbird Gallery the preceding New Year’s). To me, EH was something other than music. Christer and I had extensive exchanges assessing the genre as part of our proposals for a new science. It was a new genre, or chapter, in “psychology.”9 Called a hallucinatory sound environment or illuminatory sound environment, it is a taped synthesis of musical sounds, typically using modal scales and sensuously appealing timbres. Source programs come from musical instruments but envelopes may be disguised. The source programs are semi-regular but detail is improvised. The input is layered electronically, producing accidental concurrences and diffraction effects or phasing. The resulting aural events are elusive and saturate the spectrum.

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The listener’s attention is monopolized; the physical vibration is physically felt; the uniformity of texture produces a sense that time is suspended. This aural texture works, without any themes to recognize, to stimulate hallucination or logically anomalous perceptions. They call in turn for new logico-mathematical ratios. As an homage to Christer’s discovery, I produced two tape compositions in the genre. We presented our tapes at a concert at The Kitchen in New York in 1979. There was a catalogue in which I had a six-page essay on EH, and Christer supplied the text “17 Points on Intensional Logics for Intransitive Experiences.” As the one-page “Program Notes” which I prepared makes clear, I was intensely aware that we were defending a vision from the inimical, crushing weight of the prevailing sensibility. Somehow I insisted on retyping and editing Christer’s essay for the catalogue. That led to a separate dispute—because the first sentence seemed to me to have a category error. It said that the music gave you gratifying feelings of dignity.10 I objected that the phrasing disregarded the meaning of dignity as intrinsic worth; Christer wanted something outside to give you a gratifying impression of intrinsic worth. I changed the sentence; but Christer and a friend complained that an urgent meaning had been lost. When we edited the text again in the Nineties, we brought the sentence back close to the original. I mentioned EH in the prospectus for a new science in “The Crisis in Physics and the Question of a New Science” in 1978. I had EH in mind when I talked in personhood theory about inspiration beyond anything you ever expect to encounter. Encounter with something that solves a problem for you, that you would not have scripted; it has the advantage of you. I had EH in mind when I stated the problem of the new medium (a non-discursive medium) for the transmission of cultural values. Let me suggest the flavor of Christer’s explanations of the work. In a conversation this year, Christer equated the feeling of dignity with the feeling of enjoying the world’s respect; and went on to say that the sound was meant to create a “charged space” for the mind so the mind is charged in a conducive manner—the mind becomes open-ended in both temporal directions, so that consciousness glides without friction, and ideas link up effortlessly. In an unused draft from 1979, Christer wrote: Music is here considered as an extension of the language of inner representation in situations in which both spoken and written languages are impossible . . . The term music is here reserved for what I have called realizations of subjectively real environments in sound and light . . . It would be an

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understatement to say that music is just an extension of the language of inner representations because the music I have in mind also serves as an amplification of that language. For example, I consider the sound waves of this music to induce states of awareness which have a modulatory effect on perceptions and states of inner illuminations, to a degree that gives the concept ‘reality’ an extrapolated meaning in the presence of these sound waves. This extension of meaning can be accounted for by the concept of intensionality, a concept which functions as a selector for interpretations of semanticsintended events, and which receives a particularly critical excitation in the presence of my music. So does also the concept of intransitivity of the relationship between the self and the world.

We have the notices which the 1979 Kitchen concert received from critics, and they were hardly encouraging.11 I knew Tom Johnson, the key reviewer in New York, personally; he had recently moved around the corner from me and from the Kitchen.12 His mention of our concert came in a review of another event; he said that our music did not have its intended effect on him. In Stockholm, in March 1976, the audience had been enthusiastic about the concerts, but the curators discouraged Christer. Christer had wanted to follow Young’s precedent, maintaining the setup over a long stretch of time, performing periodically so that the realization was sampled by the audience. In the interview in Brouwer’s Lattice, Christer emphasized the battle for sponsorship of long performances. But it ended abruptly. After the 1976 installations Christer was blackballed in Sweden by the curators. The tape was never broadcast on Swedish radio. So the donated support which is the precondition for any cultural submission becoming publicly visible or being publicly sustained didn’t reach the necessary threshold for Christer (or for our joint efforts in this area). EH remained invisible. As a resource that accomplished, and intimated, unearthly imaginative modalities and technologies, EH drove me to an explosive reexamination—but the excitement remained my private affair. Today, unfortunately, Christer no longer has the tuning standards and scale computations. Only an approximate setup diagram can be reconstructed. The master tape was crushed in storage. This landmark of imagination and consciousness just barely survives. I should say something about Christer’s relation to the European scene. I have often expressed a dim view of the path European civilization took—from the beginning. As I have to keep repeating to defensive readers, I do not mean to compare Europe invidiously to the U.S.A. By

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“European,” I include the settler colonies and those parts of Asia which have embraced capitalism and modernism. EH escapes the European tradition’s course. As we see from the many references in Brouwer’s Lattice and Toposes & Adjoints, Christer wanted to join the cultural elite—but the cultural elite wasn’t having any part of it. I don’t classify EH as music. That label limits it far too much, since EH is like a model for an environment, without a beginning or end— since it concerns tuned texture rather than thematic articulation. Up through 1976, Christer had used the phrase “infinitary composition.” The nearest term for the point I want to make, in the culture we are trapped in, is “psychology.” EH certainly has a ratio—that aspect was a profound one in informing the piece—but it is not the ratio of European music (especially serious modern music). Somehow Christer absorbed modern audio techniques but managed to find a purpose for the devices totally disconnected from the precedents. The international style’s authority was swept away by Young’s drone and Guruji’s tamburas. Christer is one of a tiny number of European artists who escaped the tradition’s course, and did something unclassifiable and out of this world.

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chapter 10

The New Downtown

A new generation of musicians arose in downtown New York in the late 1970s who had close familiarity with Steve Reich’s and Philip Glass’s music, but also a deep understanding of the rock and pop worlds.1 Figures such as Rhys Chatham, Glenn Branca, Julius Eastman, and Arthur Russell intertwined composition and performance—they were, as John Cage and Eastman himself would describe, a new kind of troubadour. After chanting and droning earlier in the decade, Chatham enmeshed himself in the No Wave scene and, along with Glenn Branca, led ensembles of grueling electric guitars; Eastman and Russell worked on disco hits alongside iconoclastic compositions.2 They wrote manifestos about the bankruptcy of the downtown scene, and argued about its future at major showcases like the Kitchen’s New Music, New York—which became the roving festival New Music America, at which Cage infamously critiqued a hard-hitting Branca concert for representing a kind of musical fascism.3 Technology helped create the conditions for punk, pop, and the avantgarde to coexist: as Peter Gordon put it at New Music, New York, “If you go THUMP THUMP THUMP THUMP in a rock band all night til 4am making a living, and at 9am you go to school and work in the electronic music studio and go HMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM, eventually you go HMMMMMMMMMMMM when the THUMP THUMP THUMP THUMP is going on.” Just as Glass and Reich were becoming capital-C composers, and a new cohort of postminimalists 186

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began to use their techniques as a baseline for intricately notated compositions, these troubadours chose instead to seize the means of production for themselves—to become, as Eastman put it, the “total musician.” Cage, however, feared that there was something terrifying in the power and energy of that strength—a cult of personality in the making.

rhys chatham on “post ’60s traditionalism” ( ear magazine , 1978) All you composers out there reading this article in EAR Magazine at NYC had better wake up because the “downtown” music scene is going bankrupt! In the past 10 years or so we’ve had minimal music, meditation music, hypnotic music, phase music, down-home music and other exciting new forms. Exciting that is when they first came out. Most of the originators of these forms have transcended the initial idea of the style, ceasing to use it as a compositional crutch. However, in its wake have arisen a slew of people who think anyone capable of banging on some trinkets or producing oral cavity harmonics deserves to be called a composer. Well, this kind of thinking simply isn’t good enough anymore! When composers decide not to work in the university context because it’s too safe, too academic, too boring and fascistic, they decide to work on the outside. They do this so they can perform their work without a bunch of pedants breathing down their neck. Indeed, the pedants won’t even let outside composers play their music in their crumby concert halls! The beauty of working outside the boundaries of institutions and the established parameters of musical styles (i.e. rock, jazz, classical) lies in the composer being freely able to explore and question what music is. For example; what kind of music can a microprocessor produce? Does it make sense to tailor music to a specific architectural space or perhaps synthesize an imaginary space for the music to take place in? Can working with video be considered musical composition? How far can you strip down rock and roll before it’s not rock and roll? Your imagination is the limit on these questions which can be asked and the music these questions can lead to. What’s happening to us, though? Instead of thinking of new things to do, it seems as if a new tradition is being created. It’s SAFE to write Rhys Chatham, “Post ’60s Traditionalism,” EAR Magazine 4, no. 7 (November 1978): 15–16. Courtesy of Rhys Chatham.

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minimal music, process music, meditational/quasi-religious music in 1978! While it’s true that it is always possible to explore these above styles more thoroughly, it is also possible to further explore writing baroque music or serial composition. Is it new? Is it innovative? The great thing about the USA is that we have no culture to speak of, we’re not bound and chained by a tradition and an architecture which date back to 1400 A.D. We’re perfectly set up to look forward. It’s a commodity we should take advantage of! I urge all composers reading this article not to compose “safe” work. The downtown community of composers have created their own hierarchy and tradition which is fast becoming as despicable as the university set-up. Unless a composer stays within certain rather limited confines, one must risk being frowned upon by the musically bankrupt downtown traditionalists. I urge you to destroy this insidious tendency towards the establishment of a post ’60s tradition which says NO to the innovative searchings of the more creative. Refuse to cater to a structure which tells you that being safe and “making it” are more important than making music! What about you? What about your work? Are you settling into a comfortable complacency? It’s not too late to change! Concentrate instead on producing music filled with ideas, a music which to points the future!

peter gordon replies to RHYS chatham ( ear magazine , 1978) I’m encouraged by Mr. Chatham’s concern for a healthy downtown music making community. I have the uneasy suspicion though that the type of thinking evident in his essay is the same type of thinking which led us to the situation Mr. Chatham describes as bankrupt. What exactly is this “safety” found in ’60s traditionalism? The safety to be admitted to a small self-congratulatory circle of acquaintances; the safety found in lugging electronic equipment, bells and trinkets to unheated minimally furnished lofts; the safety in knowing that at least five or ten aficionados will endure the music without being biased against the duration, rate of change, timbral diversity, spiritual impetus, or quality of the wine. This “safety” does nothing to alleviate the pains of hunger and loneliness which follow musicians wherever they might find Peter Gordon, “Reply to Rhys Chatham,” EAR Magazine 4, no. 7 (November 1978): 16–17. Credit: Peter Gordon.

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momentary stylistic sanctuary. The “safety” merely allows the composer a brief moment to escape questions such as “is it music” and “but what do you do?” The quest for new territories of sound and consciousness led to the development of the styles of the last decade. It also allowed composers to avoid introspection beyond the superficial. Once articulated in a musical context, any gesture has a built-in set of implications and results. Often this is far beyond the composer’s initial expectations. As a composer, one has the license to create any situation or sonic identity. Does one also have the privilege to abandon a train of thought once the novelty or fashion has long gone by? Is the composer then acting as an agent provocateur, instigating situations that demand the faith of the audience while actually accepting none of the responsibility of passion? Or, is the composer a true revolutionary, working quietly yet determinedly to cause the very foundation of the culture to shiver and crumble, making room for a new, unknown future (or lack of future)? These are questions that every composer has to answer in solitude. We are only allowed to trust, or distrust, the integrity of vision. Some trains of thought are finite, others constantly provoking. Although it is in this writer’s view that the possibilities of set theory and serial procedures have been exhausted, we cannot afford to dismiss the work of any of our colleagues merely because they have chosen this particular path for their vision. We can neither afford to dismiss the minimalists, cyberneticists, neotonalists or rockers. It is all too obvious who defies the temptation of mass recognition (or prestigious elite recognition) and bravely pursues, often in vain, a steady yet tedious course attempting to shed new light on issues too quickly called passe. Social credibility and populist goals are just minor aspects of music making motivations. There is still room for composers who renounce social and economic materialism, who renounce the future, just as there is the desperate need for visionaries like Mr. Chatham.

julius eastman, “the composer as weakling” ( ear magazine , 1979) We must now start to analyze the poor relationship between composer and instrumentalist, and the puny state of the contemporary composer Julius Eastman, “The Composer as Weakling,” EAR Magazine 5 no. 1 (April/May 1979): 7. Courtesy of Gerry Eastman.

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in the classical music world. If we make a survey of classical music programming or look at the curriculum and attitudes in our conservatories, we would be led to believe that today’s instrumentalist lacks imagination, scholarship, a modicum of curiosity; or we would be led to believe that music was born in 1700, lived a full life until 1850 at which time music caught an incurable disease and finally died in 1900. If we look closely before 1750, we will notice that composer/instrumentalist were one and the same whether employed by the church, the aristocracy, or self-employed (Troubadors). At the beginning of the age of virtuosity, beginning with the life of Paganini, we see the splitting of the egg into two parts, one part instrumentalist, one composer. At this time we also notice the rise of the solo performer, the ever increasing size of the orchestra, the ascendance of the conductor, and the recedance of the composer from active participation in the musical life of his community, into the role of the unattended queen bee, constantly birthing music in his lonely room, awaiting the knock of an instrumentalist, conductor, or lastly, an older composer who has gained some measure of power. These descending angels would not only have to knock, but would also have to open the door, because the composer had become so weak from his isolated and torpid condition. Finally, the composer would be borne aloft on the back of one of the three descendants, into a life of ecstasy, fame, and fortune. This being the case, it is the composer’s task to reassert him/herself as an active part of the musical community, because it was the composer who must reestablish himself as a vital part of the musical life of his/her community. The composer is therefore enjoined to accomplish the following: she must establish himself as a major instrumentalist, he must not wait upon a descending being, and she must become an interpreter, not only of her own music and career, but also the music of her contemporaries, and give a fresh new view of the known and unknown classics. Today’s composer, because of his problematic historical inheritance, has become totally isolated and self-absorbed. Those composers who have gained some measure of success through isolation and self-absorption will find that outside of the loft door the state of the composer in general and their state in particular is still as ineffectual as ever. The composer must become the total musician; not only a composer. To be only a composer is not enough.

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peter zummo profiles arthur russell ( soho weekly news , 1977) The Flying Hearts is Arthur Russell—lead vocals, organ, and cello; Ernie Brooks—bass and lead vocals; David Van Tieghem—drums and vocals; and Larry Saltzman—guitar. They are an eclectic group (Russell plays with Mabou Mines, Van Tieghem with Steve Reich, and Brooks was one of the Modern Lovers) who are seeking, in a direct and obvious way, large scale commercial success. I spoke with Russell about the motivation for this group effort. “In general, commercial music has no scruples. It can do anything to be a success. This throws musicians back on their own haunches, causes them to reveal their morals.” Groups like the 1910 Fruit Gum Company, the Ohio Express, Tommy James and the Shondells, and most recently ABBA influence the Flying Hearts’ music. “As a kid I always hated this kind of music because it represented something that I thought was too common. It was like all the jocks in school in the small town that I grew up in. These were the very people who used to try to beat me up. So now I realize that all this time this music was going through my head that was really important to me. Now I listen to it with great amazement.” Finding himself in the milieu of “serious” music composers, Russell ponders the seriousness of his making bubble-gum music. “Music is a very personal thing. How you deal with your music is very closely linked up with how you deal with your life. If you misuse your capacities as a musician you’re missing your capacities as a human being and you’re taking humanity in the wrong direction. About two years ago I put on a concert of Cornelius Cardew’s music at the Kitchen. People thought he was trying to make music for the masses, but he explains that he was making his music for music school students. He also said that he was trying to get back to a state of mind he was in when he was 16 years old.” The Flying Hearts’ arrangements are concise; guitar solos, drum fills, and background vocals are as consciously placed as they would be for the production of a single. The fade, the extended groove, however, is absent. The songs end as neatly as they begin. Russell equates mindless disco grooving with people’s need to be put to sleep: “I would like to become more and more formal all the time, almost to a rigid degree,

Peter Zummo, “Concepts in Performance: Eclectic Bubble Gum,” SoHo Weekly News, March 17, 1977, 39. Courtesy of Peter Zummo.

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because it contrasts with the state of a lot of people’s lives. Most people are really spaced out. Something that’s formal in the right way, that comes from the right place, is very crystallized. If you’re making music in public, and you’re broadcasting it out to people I don’t see any reason to do it except for money, that is, to do it so that people will like it. In the serious music business, on the other hand, where music is obviously not going to be supported out of the pockets of the people who listen to it but has to be subsidized in some way, all kinds of values come in about how to judge it. Consequently people make a religion out of it, in a very pagan way.” While their music is refreshingly non-derivative, in a stylistic sense, the Flying Hearts’ affinity with bubble-gum music does manifest itself in ways that are clearly audible. But there is a more essential relationship which Russell describes as having to do with resonances. He is referring to the amplifying, enhancing effect of reflected sound, of sound added to itself. An example is the use of echo by The Beach Boys or by Phil Spector. “Resonance is a really beautiful thing and people always respond to it if it’s done in a way they can understand. In bubble-gum music the notion of pure sound is not a philosophy but rather a reality. In this respect, bubble-gum preceded the avant-garde. In the works of Philip Glass or La Monte Young, for example, which are clearly pop-influenced, pure sound became an issue of primary importance, while it had already been a byproduct of the commercial process in bubble-gum music.” While the avant-garde has tended to explore musical parameters other than melody, Russell sees a powerful force in its enormous popular appeal: “There’s a reason why melodies and lyrics in a conventional sense have gotten to be where they are. Words can be many things at once, like a mantra. Also, people can understand a phrase on a visceral level, and it would mean the same thing that they understand on a spiritual level.”

lee ranaldo on rhys chatham’s guitar trio On a Tuesday evening in June of 1979, drummer David Linton and I were riffling through the listings in the back pages of The Village Voice looking for something to do. We had just moved to New York City intent on unleashing our band The Flucts (formerly The Fluks) on the Originally published as “Epiphanies,” The Wire 200 (October 2000), 114; edited by Lee Ranaldo in August 2021. Courtesy of Lee Ranaldo.

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town. The Voice, along with the SoHo Weekly News and smaller publications like the East Village Eye and New York Rocker, had chronicled the uprising of the punk era. The following caught our eye: Meltdown at Max’s Kansas City. “Steve Reich meets The Ramones,” said the Voice Choice. It had been only months since one of the worst nuclear reactor accidents on record had occurred at Three Mile Island near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. It was big, scary news. “Meltdown featuring Rhys Chatham.” High noon in the nuclear era, and some band had called itself Meltdown! David and I had yet to meet Rhys or Glenn Branca or any of the other downtown musicians with whom we would soon become closely involved, and who would help define the musical climate of the post New-Wave explosion in New York. The music which would evolve, via bands like DNA (with Arto Lindsay and Ikue Mori), Teenage Jesus and the Jerks (with Lydia Lunch), Branca’s Theoretical Girls (with Jeffrey Lohn) and The Static (with Barbara Ess), Mars, Ut, Red Transistor (with Rudolph Grey), Rhys’ own Arsenal and countless others which came and went, would define the “No-Wave.” These noiseicians reduced “rock” to its most elemental state—a primitive beat and an emotion. Rhythm. Volume. There were no “indie labels” to speak of at the time, no real way for this music to pass beyond the shores of Manhattan, and therefore this music has never been given its proper due as the amazing, ground breaking stuff it was. Basically, if you weren’t there to experience it, you missed it. The bands spawned a group of musicians who desired to reach further and more seriously as composers, using rock music as their source material. At the time Rhys Chatham, Glenn Branca, Jeffrey Lohn and others were working directly alongside more “serious” composers like Reich and Philip Glass in creating a popular, minimalist art music, often employing complex textures or massive volume. The curtains opened and three men with electric guitars stood in a row across the stage. Behind them, center stage, a “drummer” stood erect with a lone high-hat cymbal. These were, we later discovered: on the left clean-cut guitarist David Rosenbloom, whose band Chinese Puzzle was part of the downtown art/rock scene. Next to him was Wharton Tiers manning the hi-hat. Wharton’s band was A Band with Paul McMahon, and he’d played in Theoretical Girls as well with the guy prowling the shadows on the right—army fatigue jacket collar upturned like a punk Elvis in rags, holding his guitar like a weapon: Glenn Branca.

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figure 18. A rehearsal of Rhys Chatham’s Guitar Trio in Tribeca, 1981. From left: Jules Baptiste, Rhys Chatham, Wharton Tiers, and Robert Longo. Photograph by Debbie DeStaffan. Courtesy of Rhys Chatham.

It was Rhys himself standing in the center. He had these weird Roger McGuinn–style granny glasses on his nose, leather vest, lips pursed, a determined look on his face, perhaps standing a little unsteadily. That is, until the music started. Rhys began strumming downstrokes on his low E string (we later found out it was a specific tuning of the guitars, not conventional EADGBE jive at all). Soon Glenn and David joined suit, one after the other, with Wharton beating out eighth notes on the hat. That was it for percussion—he was getting a lot out of opening and closing it for accent purpose . . . The sound grew as the guitars slowly introduced the other strings, one at a time, creating a more complex chord. No one ever touched the fretboard once; just this open ringing de-tuned tuning that built to an incredible din (indeed The Din was the name of one of Rhys’ later ensembles). Occasionally Rhys would give the others cues for changes in section or intensity, his whole torso nodding the last 4 counts, his mouth miming “one, two, three, four . . .” Something was going on inside the music that I couldn’t put my finger on. Although the players seemed to be simply downstroking with flat picks across the length of the strings, amazing things were happening in the sound field above our heads. Overtones danced all around the notes, getting more animated, turning into first gamelan orchestras, then later a choir of voices, and finally a complete maelstrom of crush-

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ing sonic complexity, ping ponging over the minimalist low notes of the rocking chord. Rhys was definitely more than a little high (“I was on Quaaludes and speed that night, yikes!” he later told me). As the music reached full tilt he started weaving into the crowd, down the long narrow center aisle between the rows of tables running up to the stage. Beer glasses were rattling from the decibels. Seating was sort of communal along the rows, and as Rhys walked he began swinging his guitar absentmindedly, hitting people in the head and knocking over drinks and stuff. People scrambled to get out of his way, but he seemed so absorbed in the music that he didn’t notice the commotion at all. He slowly made it back up to the stage and the musicians dropped strings one after another until they were all back on just the low note, gamelans subsiding but still dancing, and then it was back to just Rhys for a while, with that insistent rhythm on the low string. Then he let the last note ring. The crowd was stunned, and then broke into wild applause! A roomful of people was amazed at what they’d just heard! After the applause died down, Rhys announced with an exuberant slur in his voice that the band was going to perform “another number,” which was a bit of a surprise considering that they had essentially played one chord for a full half hour! Rhys began drumming on the low string once more, and the group proceeded to careen right back into the exact same thing again, for another half-hour! THE SAME EXACT THING! Fantastic! At this point some of the “less committed” in the audience ran for the exit! This time, though, a series of grainy black-and-white slides of ambiguous, film-noir-ish scenes were projected on a screen behind the band. A famous shot of Pennsylvania Station with the huge beams of sunlight beaming down, a Pacific Island beach with low flying (Japanese?) fighter planes. The brilliant whites in all the images had a transcendental vibe that seemed to connect them to each other. One at a time an image would appear, long slow fade-in then hold a long time then long slow fade-out. There were only about 5 slides over the half-hour, moving in glacial time. Turns out these were the work of fellow musician and upand-coming “art star” Robert Longo, and their use during the second “half” of the performance became an integral part of the piece. I had some sort of ecstatic experience there, listening to this strange music and watching these images. I say strange because on the one hand it was upbeat, rocking out and familiar. But it had this other quality to it as well; something else was going on there. This was “Art” too. The

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piece was Rhys Chatham’s Guitar Trio, and it was our entry into an amazing new world of music being created below 14th Street in lower Manhattan. I had never heard anything like it before, yet that night I felt it was something I’d been hearing in my head forever. Here it was, in front of me in the flesh, finally in real life. And it was beautiful.

beth anderson’s “report from the front” on the festival new music, new york (1979) Hommage a Rhys By David Feldman Draw a straight line and shit on it* *Like Rhys’ work, this piece combines a La Monte Young piece with the implication of Punk.4 [. . .] Saturday’s “Young Composers” panel of the music critics’ conference had Peter Gordon, Frankie Mann, Michael Byron, and Rhys Chatham up front.5 Rhys said that a loop of video with a composer lip-synching to a radio is music, and so is a silent video. Mr. [John] Rockwell said that you can call silent video “music,” but that music is sound (Editor’s note: according to me, music is the combination of sound and silence) and you can also call a cow “music.” Mr. [Tom] Johnson believes that video is performance and votes for a new category. Mr. Chatham said that everything was music and that Cage said, as a composer, you can do anything you want. Mr. Gordon added that a composer can even make a discipline of not making any music and call that music. Mr. Rockwell’s response was that of course you can do that, but everyone doesn’t have to agree with you. Someone made the point that a composer who doesn’t make any music is probably not living a very artistically-rich life. Peter Gordon said a wonderful thing when he explained why he combines his love of rock with his love of experimental music: If you go THUMP THUMP THUMP THUMP in a rock band all night til 4am making a living, and at 9am you go to school and work in the electronic music studio and go HMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM,

Anderson self-published her “Report From the Front” as a series of daily reviews of the New Music, New York festival; she described it as “guerilla criticism.” The full series of reports is available at reportfromthefront.wordpress.com. Courtesy of Beth Anderson.

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eventually you go HMMMMMMMMMMMM when the THUMP THUMP THUMP THUMP is going on. This is a desperately important point—composition is a result of the composers’ lives, experiences, methods of making a living, lifestyle, sexuality, politics, morals, education, class, plus all those other things people usually credit with influencing the creation of a composition (talent, soul, etc.). For Mr. Gordon, Mr. Lohn, Mr. Chatham, Ms. Laurie Anderson, Ms. Frankie Mann, etc., this fusion is not an unnatural event, but one that grew out of their lives. On the other hand, it has certainly been possible for people of the same age/education/class to create experimental music having nothing to do with rock—possibly with just one variable different. Frankie Mann said that being a composer has a lot to do with being a privileged white male and that men have ripped off and trivialized women and their music. She believes that women composers need separate studios to work in, to avoid being railroaded by male engineers. She predicts this separate-but-equal technical materialism will be a reality within 5–10 years. Michael Byron felt that the same people who are fantastically bright and have very complex belief and value systems, sometimes come out with “mindless music.” He also discussed young composers as being “inconstant” and open to change, while old composers are more able to become obsessed with one idea—so they are able to package it and sell it. (This is the point at which Mr. Rockwell’s wording arose. Mr. Sahl remembers the review as saying: “The only explanation for this work is that it is meretricious.” And he also says “When the state arts council heard that, we lost our funding.”—that’s Mr. Sahl talking—The definition of meretricious is: “of or relating to a prostitute”—and that’s the first definition, according to Webster’s Collegiate. I rest my case.) At the concert, Mr. Chatham’s Guitar Trio (with drums, and Robert Longo’s visuals) showed a continuing interest in overtones. We all understand now that The Kitchen is a place where there is a very good chance of hearing very loud music, and quite a few people had brought cotton for the occasion. Having heard this work previously without the cotton, this writer was impressed with the sound of the piece (if not the form, since it simply started, continued, and stopped) after this technical addition. This is not snide. This is self-defense and personal feeling. One audience member said: “The machine is there and we have to worship it, even if it kills us.” The reply was: “The machine is there but the brain left.” They loved it.

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wim mertens interviews john cage about glenn branca’s performance at new music america (1982) JC:  You know when I’m home I don’t listen to music because I spend so much time writing it.6 And I just listen to the sounds around me, like I’m listening to these sounds too, even though we’re talking. But when there’s one of these festivals, I go, as you may have noticed, I go religiously to every single concert. It’s my one opportunity to hear music [laughs].   And for the most part I enjoy everything. Last night, I didn’t really enjoy the Branca piece. It wasn’t because it was so loud, because I can put up with the loudness. But I was, I felt negatively about the—what seemed to me the political implications. I wouldn’t want to live in a society like that, in which someone would be requiring other people to do such an intense thing together.   I’ve been thinking more about it today but I really didn’t really like the experience, but as I think about it, I become more open to it. Not that I would embrace it, but at least I wouldn’t forbid it. Hm? But this shows how wide and how changed our notion of composition is.   Well, I have some difficulty with it. The Branca is an example of sheer determination, of one person to be followed by the others. Even if you couldn’t hear, you could see the situation, that is not a shepherd taking care of the sheep, but of a leader insisting that people agree with him, giving them no freedom whatsoever. The only breath of fresh air that comes is when the technology collapses. Hm? The amplifier broke. Hm? That was the one moment of freedom from the intention. Hm? But the moment that it was reinstated, the intention resumed. WM:  But what is the difference, I mean? You also have all these determined goals, even if you said it’s going to be a non-goal for me. Then it’s also a determination that you have thought before you wrote the piece. That you define your non-goal as goal also. JC:  No that’s a misuse of the language. If you say that a non-goal is a goal, then you’re using the language to defeat the language, to defeat the mind. If I can’t say non-goal and mean non-goal, hm? Instead of meaning goal again, then the language is of no use. Courtesy of Usura S.p.r.l.

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  I have a different attitude toward life than what he is expressing. It’s not the same, but we can both live. I don’t think, though, that the image of that power and intention and determination would make a society that I would want to continue living in.   But you like it, so I would like to hear more about what is good about it. Would you want to live in such a society? I can’t imagine wanting to live in such a society. It reminded . . . Say it was “good intentions” that he was expressing with vehemence and power, it would be like one of these strange religious organizations that we hear about. Wouldn’t it? It would resemble that, or if it was something political, it would resemble fascism. In neither case would I want to be part of it. I much prefer the thinking of Thoreau, of anarchy, of freedom from such intention. That’s how I feel. And I don’t think by any means, any conceivable means, that Branca is a step in front of anything. He may be popular at the moment, but popularity is nothing. Because what is popular now is not popular tomorrow. All of those things change. Nothing is more fickle than popularity. WM:  But then it’ll never become popular music, it seems? JC:  It won’t? But I thought that in the program it says that it is popular, that he is the star, and very successful. Didn’t you just say . . . WM:  He’s less successful than you are. JC:  I don’t know what that means. I don’t know how successful I am. What I’m doing now is trying to find the next piece I’m trying to write, and so far I haven’t succeeded [laughs]. The music which he played last night was not written. WM:  Yes. JC:  No one was reading anything. WM:  Yes, they had music stands, music stands with music. JC:  I didn’t see it. WM:  Everyone had a stand. It is written music. JC:  Really? WM:  Yes. JC:  I didn’t see any music. Really? I must ask some other people. I must say I didn’t see it. David Tudor’s music now has to have David Tudor with it, otherwise it doesn’t get played. And I think Branca’s

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music is the same way; it has to have Branca. Laurie Anderson has to have Laurie Anderson. My music is quite different; I don’t have to be present. WM:  There has been a time also in which composers said and wanted to stay as close as possible with their own music. JC:  Like the troubadours of the middle ages. Well that’s what these people are like; it’s a return to the middle ages but with the use of modern technology. In fact it’s the modern technology that makes it le moyen âge because they make circuits and so forth upon which they become habitually dependent. And if the circuits don’t function, the music collapses.   It’s very different from writing a music which can be used by a stranger, someone you don’t know. Or at least you cut the—what’s it called—the cord that connects us to the mother . . . WM:  In Flemish it’s called the “navelstreng.” JC:  Yes, at least to cut that [laughs]. There was a beautiful remark by Margaret Mead. Do you know her name? I knew her and she said that, now that we live longer than we did that there’s no reason why we should continue doing the same thing all the time—that we could change more than we thought was proper before. I always try to find something new. WM:  The idea of newness is . . . JC:  Interests me, yes, and if you want to say then that always wanting something new is the same thing all the time, then again you’re not using the language properly [laughs]. WM:  You are one step before me now. JC:  But weren’t you going to go there? WM:  I won’t tell you [laughs]. JC:  At least you opened the door toward that idea. I wouldn’t mind becoming open to them. And that’s why I say every now and then—can you tell me what it is that really interests you about . . . WM:  It has to do with non-communication. JC:  Just being? You mean being one thing? Making one sound? Or not saying anything, hm? But why the insistence? WM:  It’s like a scream. JC:  Is it in opposition to the environment? Is it a scream about something, or no?

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WM:  No, I don’t think so. JC:  It’s just a scream? WM:  Yeah. It’s hopeless. JC:  Hopeless? You mean because it’s an end in itself. WM:  Yes, it’s only about energies. It’s an accumulation of energies without content, without dialectics, and without communication, without feedback. It’s very libidinal. JC:  What does that mean? Full of desire? Well then it is dialectic because desire is for something other than itself. Is it erotic? WM:  I say yes. JC:  But not with regard to anything loved, just with regard to itself? WM:  Probably. JC:  Then it’s purely narcissistic. WM:  Yes. JC:  Then what use is it? WM:  It’s probably useless. JC:  Then how can you like it if it’s useless? Or how can you use it if it’s useless?   I find it then terrifying, but you don’t? My knees were weak last night after that experience. I had trouble standing, at the same time that I didn’t want to sit down. It’s like a reflection of the sunshine on the building or something, hm? Well, I mean, when the sun is very bright and hits your eyes by hitting a building at a particular angle, and you see a bright light coming toward you, something like that. WM:  You were talking about the difference between using power and intelligence in music. JC:  Yes and the relation to the 21st century, if we follow the example of Branca, I doubt whether we would have such a century, because no intelligence is suggested, only power and energy. We would more quickly, by those means, end ourselves even in the 20th century than get to the 21st. That’s the sort of thing we’re doing actually, if I say, by “we,” now, the nations. I think we need a calmer use of our faculties. One of the things I dislike most about European music is the presence of climaxes. And what I see in Branca, as in Wagner, is a sustained climax. Hm? It also suggests that what is not it is not climactic. That one of the principle state-

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ments for me in Zen Buddhism is “nichinichi kore kōnichi.” Every day is a beautiful day.   To be able to move one’s attention from one point to another without feeling that one had left something important behind is the feeling which I enjoy having and which I hope to give to others. So that each person can place his attention originally rather than in a compelled way or in a constrained way. So that each person is in charge of himself, hm?

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chapter 11

Instruments and Environments

Conceiving of music architecturally, Maryanne Amacher said in 1991, is “allowing sound to become structure-borne.” In staging her electronic work through carefully placed speakers in a room, she amplified its presence and effects: in her mind-bending music, the human ear itself becomes an instrument.1 Amacher and other composers, including Arnold Dreyblatt, Yoshi Wada, Phill Niblock, and Ellen Fullman, developed their own systems of intonation and their own instrumental setups through which to realize them.2 Each of these musicians was a tinkerer, experimenting for years with different configurations to find a precise syntax—realized through electronics or resonating wires or homemade bagpipes—for what they sought to accomplish.3 They did so largely outside of any academic infrastructure, working in lofts, galleries, and performance spaces like Experimental Intermedia.4 In concert, their newfangled instruments and scientific formulas faded behind the visceral force of the droning sounds they created; the composers all saw their music as fundamentally tactile, something deeply felt and deeply sensed.5 The discoveries they made about the relationship between mind, body, and ear still endure.

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ellen fullman on her long string instrument (1987) For the past several years I have been developing an installation, “The Long String Instrument.” In 1981, in St. Paul, Minnesota, I was stretching long lengths of string using various materials and tying them to metal containers. The containers acted as resonators and were amplified with contact microphones. I bowed the strings and put some water in the containers, moving them and listening to the resonance change. One day I brushed against one of these strings and it made a loud clear sound. I began stroking it lengthwise with my hands. I sensed that what I discovered had a lot of potential but I needed to learn what was happening scientifically to be able to control the sound produced. I was unable to find the kind of information I needed in Minnesota, although I’m sure it exists there. I saw evidence of there being more integration of art with technology in N.Y.C. and decided to move there. For about a year in New York I took false steps in relation to the project. I wanted a warm low sound and to be able to tune the strings. I tried using a better contact microphone and tried to modify the sound by electronic filtering. I was now using very large containers of water and setting up the strings on the roof of my building, the only place large enough. At this time, my friend Matthew Wolff built a kind of wooden sail that was meant to catch the sound. I amplified it, but it was not coupled directly to the strings and did not do much. One afternoon some people came over to look at it. Steve Cellum, an engineer, explained to me how the string was vibrating and suggested we attach it directly to the board. We drilled a hole, put the string through, tied it to a washer, then tightened it against the board. The string produces a very loud rich sound without amplification. Soon after, Phill Niblock let me use his loft for a month while he was away. I set up the project there and began building test resonator-boxes. At this time my friend Arnold Dreyblatt, a composer, brought his friend Bob Bielecki, an engineer, over to look at what I was doing. Steve was also there and we tried several experiments which greatly clarified the procedure I was to take. In a physics handbook they found a formula which was to become my method of tuning. We also discovered that by using brass wire, I could Ellen Fullman, “The History of the Long String Instrument,” in Echo: The Images of Sound (Eindhoven: Het Apollohuis, 1987), 30–33. Courtesy of Ellen Fullman, “with gratitude to Paul and Helene Panhuysen for presenting my work at Het Apollohuis, and producing my first LP, ‘The Long String Instrument.’ ”

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lower the frequency produced. It seemed that the next step was to build a large box resonator that would sustain the sound longer than only a board. My next studio space was the Terminal New York Show which was to begin a month later. I spent the intervening time reading about musical acoustics, planning the box, and gathering materials. In the show I had a very large area to work in and built a large plywood box. I suspended the strings from this in clusters of four, tuning the groupings to equally tempered chords. I spent this period listening to different combinations of tones and thinking about the musical possibilities. When the show was over my friends Matthew and Lori let me use their basement to work in. The strings ran through a doorway and into another room with the bass section extending down a long hallway. At this time I met David Weinstein, a composer, and we began a series of sessions in which David taught me about just intonation. Just intonation is any tuning system based on the naturally occurring intervals. Since the overtones are so clearly present in this instrument, a system using these pure relationships seemed more appropriate and more interesting. I tuned the instrument in various ways, listening to ancient systems and generating my own. I settled on a just 12 tone chromatic scale based on F. Rather than in chromatic sequence, the strings were laid out in a pattern where each string has a simple harmonic relationship to its adjacent strings. This was done so that while playing one string, others

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figure 20. Ellen Fullman playing her Long String Instrument, Other Minds Festival, 2002. © John Fago/Other Minds.

beside it could be touched also, adding a harmonic density. I added a second section of 12 strings in the same pattern of adjacencies but tuned in a perfect fifth relationship to the first section. David and I began playing long, sustained, slowly shifting tones. It was really random, as I didn’t know much about musical intervals. Later I began learning more, laying out charts in which I could see the mathematical relationships in chord structures. I realized that, since the overtone series is swept through in each string as it is played, then if two or more strings are played at once, complex, shifting chordal relationships occur. I began building chord sequences where the same tones are played out from the box and returning, listening to the shifting of each chord to new chords. Now I’m interested in dealing with time in a more precise way than delineation by footsteps. The project has become for me my personal music school. It leads me to read and study, as the information I seek gets put to use in very practical ways. The piece is like a microcosm of the history of music. The lessons I learn materialize in a very graphic form. There is the quality of its being a science project that displays principles of musical acoustics. I am an outsider to music, and it’s as if now I am seeing the inner workings, the gears, pulleys and bricks that build music and it’s my intention to affect the listener in this same way. Arnold, in rehearsing with me in Eindhoven, found himself becoming

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mesmerized by the sound, and would lose his place in the score. My interest in doing this work is in the experience of listening.

james fulkerson on phill niblock’s music (1982) For me, the film and music of Phill Niblock have always been remarkable for their clarity of intention, the quality of their realization and their performance, and their unrelenting insistence. I like A Trombone Piece, but Phill’s work for the contrabassoon and contrabass, once described as the sound of two Mack trucks mating, is on my list of pieces which I wished I had composed. The variety of sonic textures in Phill’s sound world are such that one feels as though he/she is inhabiting a three-dimensional sound sculpture—a sonic architecture. It comes at you from all sides. A Trombone Piece is built upon a single pitch, A, played over three octaves, and yet as a theater technician in New Zealand said, “You know it seems like you are just playing the same note over and over again, but you’re not. There are these rivers of sound which are quite high up—not the notes you are playing—which are fascinating.” This is not a repetitive music, is not hypnotic music, because Phill is continually breaking up the sound field. It’s impossible to become hypnotized by these rivers of sound. A Trombone Piece is built upon an acoustic phenomenon known as “beats” or sum and difference tones. The combination of two notes produces two additional pitches that are the sum of the frequencies of both notes and the difference between them. The summation tone is often not perceivable because the original sounds are too loud but the difference tones can be felt as perceptible pulse or beats. Ordinarily difference tones are eliminated in the act of “tuning up.” The deliberate production of these sum and difference tones is what creates the tactile quality in Phill’s music. A Trombone Piece is built upon three sets of “A” (pedal AA, low A, and “a” below middle C, plus three additional notes in each of these octaves), 12 pitches in all. In the lowest octave, each pitch is 2 cycles per second higher than the previous note; in the next octave, they are three cycles per second higher and in the highest octave, they are 4 cycles per James Fulkerson, excerpt from liner notes to Phill Niblock, Nothin’ to Look At: Just a Record (India Navigation, 1982). Courtesy of James Fulkerson.

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second higher. This raw material is recorded, then edited, removing any inexact pitches and the breathing spaces, and then mixed together to produce the beats or “micro-rhythms” which are a feature of Phill’s work. The resulting tape can be used as a piece by itself, a tape piece, or in conjunction with any number of trombonists. When they play with the tape, the trombonists are mobile within the performance space and play pitches which were used in constructing the tape—though these may appear in any orders the performers choose. Having explained the mechanics of the piece, the act of listening is really involved with the sensual experience of the sound sculpture itself.

yoshi wada’s liner notes to lament for the rise and fall of the elephantine crocodile (1982/2007) Notes on “Lament for the Rise and Fall of the Elephantine Crocodile,” October 2007 At the end of the ’60s, George Maciunas (Fluxus organizer and artist) introduced me to La Monte Young. I visited La Monte’s loft studio on Church Street and saw Dream House—his sound and light environment with Marian Zazeela which goes on 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. I was very impressed that it never sleeps. This was my entry into music and sound. I got to know “just intonation” tuning system and drone music. Pandit Pran Nath taught me singing, which was meditation with sound, improvisation and intonation. Around that time, I came across Harry Partch (composer and musical instrument builder). He inspired me to build my own musical instruments and compose for them. After all of these experiences, I realized that the most important element in music for me is not melody or rhythm, but sound by itself—pitch relationship, harmonic progression, and resonance. Around 1972, I was not satisfied using existing musical instruments for my compositions. One day I picked up a plumbing pipe and blew into it, which created an interesting sound. I began experimenting with Yoshi Wada, liner notes to Lament for the Rise and Fall of the Elephantine Crocodile (India Navigation, 1982; Omega Point, 2007); the version printed here was edited by Tashi Wada in August 2021. Reprinted with the permission of the estate of Yoshi Wada; Yoshi Wada’s estate maintains all rights.

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making musical instruments and composing for them. The sound was very simple like playing in the overtone series. In 1973, I came up with homemade musical instruments like oversized Tibetan and Alpine horns made out of pipes and plumbing fittings. I combined these instruments with synthesizer electronics in an improvisational composition Earth Horns with Electronic Drone (1974). This was an exciting event for me to tour and perform my own composition with musical instruments, and the success helped me continue to develop more thoughts on musical instruments and composition. From 1976 to 1978, I organized a small male choir, Singing in Unison, which focused on modal improvisation in the overtone series. This singing work was a stage in developing the singing for Lament for the Rise and Fall of the Elephantine Crocodile (1981). Around 1978, I went to see Scottish Game gathering in Connecticut. It was held outdoors on a grass field, and the bagpipe music competition went on all day with many kilted bagpipe players. I liked the atmosphere and the sound was magnificent. What I like about bagpipe music is the drone sound setup with main chanter. Especially on Highland pipes, the sound reaches far into the distance. Over 25 years later, when I listen to this recording, I remember exactly how it sounded that day in the space. The overtone singing, cane reed instrument tuning, and resonance of the “Dry Pool” created an interesting chemistry, and I feel it is still valid sounding today. Original liner notes for “Lament for the Rise and Fall of the Elephantine Crocodile,” 1982 Lament for the Rise and Fall of the Elephantine Crocodile is a vocal and instrumental work on which I started working in 1979. This recording is meant to be one continuous piece; side one: solo singing, and side two: the instrumental music of the bagpipe with singing. The piece itself is an experiment with reeds and improvisational singing within the modal structure. The instrument could be played solo or as a drone accompaniment for voice. I originally built the bagpipe instrument out of plumbing fittings and pipes pumped by a large air compressor. I called it An Adapted Bagpipe with Sympathy. Since that time, the original instrument has been altered and improved for the stability of the air source and accuracy of the tuning. The photograph shows the instruments used for this recording. The Elephantine Crocodile (right) and the Alligator (left) are both reed

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figure 21. Yoshi Wada’s Lament for the Rise and Fall of the Elephantine Crocodile, 1981. Photograph by Marilyn Bogerd. Reprinted with the permission of the estate of Yoshi Wada; Yoshi Wada’s estate maintains all rights.

instruments pumped by the air. The Alligator instrument plays precise pitch and enables me to tune the Elephantine Crocodile drone pipe pitch. When I began to work with these cane reed pipes, I realized that they could be tuned to produce intervals of extremely fine tolerance. One of the strong characteristics of these bagpipe drones is the clarity of harmonics and partials in the higher octaves. When these pipes are perfectly in tune, in unison or in different intervals, one can hear the high microtonal partials very clearly. In 1979, I came to the “Dry Pool” (an empty swimming pool in the basement of Media Study, Buffalo, NY) with An Adapted Bagpipe with Sympathy to do a concert. Although I normally do not like long reverberation added to my music, when I entered the pool I immediately liked the acoustics of the space, which had very long delay time. The pool gave rich resonance to the voice and bagpipe sound. Since that time, I became much more aware of the psychological effect of the acoustics of the room. Last November, I had a chance to come to the “Dry Pool” to do the recording. I stayed in the pool for preparation and slept there as well. It was very quiet. It gave me the feeling as though I were in an anechoic chamber. I started to hear all kinds of droning sounds and almost could not tell if I was hallucinating or not. When I began singing, it was with

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a very simple overtone series, then I gradually developed a series of intervals which I felt strong. My concern is with the timbre and tuning of the multiple chords which enable me to evolve my improvisational singing and the mode in progression.

eliot handelman interviews maryanne amacher (1991) EH:  When I hear your music, sounds are streaming out of my head. What’s going on? MA:  Our ears act as instruments in responding to music, sounding their own tones in addition to the music in the room, like another instrument joining the orchestra. Neuroanatomy responds and gives shape to the most subtle traces of acoustic information. We hear tones other than the given acoustic tones taking their shape inside our ears, as the membrane vibrates in response to the given acoustic tones. In music as we know it, such tone responses have been repressed. They have a subliminal existence, suppressed within the complex timbres of music. We’re not aware that they exist, or that we’re actually creating them as listeners. The experience of our own processing isn’t available to us. I want to release this music, bring it out of subliminal existence. I want to make a music that is directed past the processing and control of acoustic information, and that goes into the network of the nervous system, [in]to what we do with this information perceptually. EH:  Making my automatic perceptual processes available for my inspection, so to speak. MA:  Yes. I like to think of the listener responding to certain extremely sensitive resonant instruments within the anatomical structures of the inner ears. In effect, we “listen” to what our auditory system perceives, detecting extremely subtle changes in the form of the vibration pattern. We “hear” the coding response of an evolved sensitivity extracting information from details of the vibration pattern. That’s where subjective pitch originates.

Excerpt from full interview printed in Amy Cimini and Bill Dietz, eds., Maryanne Amacher: Selected Writings and Interviews (New York: Blank Forms, 2020), 281–84. © Blank Forms Editions, 2020.

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EH:  Are the auditory effects in your music precisely planned? If so, how do you plan them? MA:  In my most recent music, I’m concentrating on explorations of our perceptual responses to music—tones and melodic patterns taking shape inside our ears and neuroanatomy—interaural rhythms, colors and spatial imaging, a “virtual” sound world the listener creates in response to music. These virtual sounds and patterns originate in ears and neuroanatomy. I call them “ear-born sound” and “head-born sound.” In planning these effects, an important part is to distinguish, first of all, where the music is to originate. It might originate in acoustic space—out there in the room around us, as in a multi-speaker configuration, where you might have distant sound, sounds moving around the room in circles, spirals, squares, or other shapes. Or it might be in intense closeup, concrete, locatable. Or it might come from the stage in front of us, as is usually the case. And then we have the interaural space, and that’s here within us—that’s what I characterize by “head-born sound” and “earborn sound.” What excites me musically is the interplay of aural and interaural sonic imaging. The convergence of these perceptual dimensions is really the main idea—a multi-dimensional construct.   As yet I don’t know what to call it. For now I call it “psybertonal topology”—the mapping of interaural spatial imaging with acoustic spatial imaging. EH:  Is this mapping composer, consciously worked out? Do you say something like, “These tones are going to be in the room, and these others will be in the head?” MA:  Well, there’s little problem knowing which sounds are going to be present in the acoustic space. It’s more a question of what perceptual mode they trigger—where and how they will exist for the listener. How to create the aural imaging. This has to do with ways of hearing, really—how certain sounds will be perceived in the music. How we locate, sense and feel the music. Will certain sounds be locatable, or seem miles away, feel close, pulsate vertically above our heads, vibrate an elbow, suddenly appear in the space, dramatically disappear “without a sound”? As for the effects in the interaural space, a physicist might object: one can only produce these effects via tones in acoustic space, so attempts to affect ears and head will have side effects. This is perfectly right. However, there

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are many techniques in music for focusing attention on some things, and “masking” out others in the acoustic space. It’s a matter of intensifying and inhibiting certain effects in both aural and interaural space. EH:  Can you explain the techniques of enhancing the inner sound world? MA:  I establish distinct musical dimensions for interaural timbres and melodies in time and space, perceptually. This is the mapping— what I call a “perceptual geography.” My selection of acoustic intervals may be determined by choices made regarding the virtual tone colors, rhythms, and melodic shapes to be created in the music. The composer consciously or unconsciously “ghostwrites” the scenario. By the choice of intervals we prepare for the existence of specific responses that will be perceived along with the acoustic tones in the music, that will “sound” in the listener’s head and ears. I am doing this consciously; that is the difference. It is a matter of composing consciously for such effects, and discovering distinct dimensions in acoustic and interaural spaces. I recognize the virtual sound world to be as real as tones played by instruments. EH:  In your Music for Sound Joined Rooms, sound seems to become almost tactile. Why do I sense shapes in space? MA:  That work deals specifically with architecture: the music is staged architecturally. I mean that I don’t just use a combination of speakers, although Naut Humon and I gave a concert in Japan last summer, in Panasonic Hall, where there were 750 speakers, and we were able to make quite wonderful spatial configurations of sound. Staging music architecturally is quite different. It’s allowing sound to become structure-borne. Sound travels much faster through structure than through air, so a normal middle C is going to be about 4’4”. If that middle C is traveling through a structure it suddenly becomes 20’. The wavelength is so much larger that you can have quite a different energy, and the shapes take on a kind of presence which I’m not able to achieve with sound transmitted through the air. EH:  Is composing for the architecture of the ear and brain anything like composing for spatial architectures? MA:  These are quite different situations. I like to make shapes in the head and in the ears, and I also like to make them in the room. In

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these architecturally staged works, the idea is to create a world where architecture magnifies the expressive dimensions of music, diving down deep into the music in a way that is not as artificial as other ways of presenting music. The audience can walk into it as though they were walking into a cinematic closeup. Unlike a stage concert (where you just watch, you enter and become immersed in this closeup). And I also discovered, while doing this architecture, that, to my amazement, an ordinary phrase could create such a dramatic effect that you could almost animate this phrase as a sound character. So my next step was to adopt the sequel format of the TV mini-series, and I created a new form that I called the Mini Sound Series. I create an evolving context for these sound characters. They even have names, like “The Fright,” or “The Hardbeat Force.” I’m able to make intrigues, suspense, the whole story, in a serialized narrative form, which up to now has only been developed in TV and in comic books. What happens to “Wave #4” when it’s set up to meet “The Fright”? “Deep and Deepest Tone” disappears. Was it really shot down by “The Hardbeat Force”? When it reappears two weeks later, it’s supporting “The Coast,” who we know has fallen in love with “God’s Big Noise.” It’s serialized musical continuity, to be continued in consecutive episodes. EH:  It can sometimes take you days to set up a cinematic architecture, during which time you hardly sleep . . . What kinds of things are you doing when you set up one of these rooms? MA:  I’m learning the characteristics of the space. In Japan, recently, at Tokushima, where I presented Synaptic Island: a Psybertonal Topology, I was mixing sounds staged in two totally different rooms. One of the rooms was a curved stone passageway that was like an old Gothic castle, and it was a fantastic space acoustically, but there was a clear 10dB difference from the main space, where I was mixing. You can make spectacular acoustic effects with these different acoustics if the audience is listening for a time in one space and suddenly the sound begins making something in the other. The two may interact, or fuse, or be utterly separate, or melodies may drift between the two. Sometimes the sound is not locatable, sometimes above you, on top of your head, directly inside your ears, inside your head. I was really able to realize this idea of a psybertonal topology at Tokushima, having it develop in aural and interaural imaging that actually bypassed even the two physical

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spaces. And I discovered something there I’d never heard before. In the stone curved room, the enhancement shapes the interaural and melodic shapes and patterns we perceive in this interaural imaging—these were completely enhanced. It was like an actual image that you could almost see and touch. I’ve never known that to happen before. The space was enhancing something in the sound that further intensified the neural shaping that we give to these melodies, but it was like the perfect shape. So now, all I think about is an architecture that could really do this. That would be so extraordinary.   So when I’m setting up I have to learn how to make the kinds of shapes, the powers of music that I want to generate in that place. I mix during performance only in one place, so I have to know the rest of the space by heart. It involves a tremendous amount of time, walking, listening, going back to the mixing board, establishing levels and discovering what kind of world you want to make. In that sense you’re even composing, because you haven’t been in these spaces before. Do we perceive the sound in the room, in our head, a great distance away? Or do we experience these three dimensions at the same time? At Tokushima in these wonderful spaces it was even more possible to realize that. Or we perceive just enough to trigger patterns, melodies, created deep within our neural sensitivities, shaping some responses. Do we experience a sound dimension as though blocks away, or very near, moving beside us, outside and around one ear only? Do we feel melodies as they develop inside, within our ears, and we move our head, and we raise a hand to rub away a melody that’s circling our nose? Does the sound drift, or does it fall like rain, does it make such a clear shape in the air we seem to see it, in front of our eyes? There are so many ways. Do we continue to hear sound as our mind processes aftersound, or music perceived minutes ago? And that affects how structural changes in sound happen in music. EH:  Are memories a sound? MA:  It involves developing certain sound levels, melodic associations, and all of that which you control to create these effects of aftersound, just like we have afterimages.

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chapter 12

Ambient and New Age

In the liner notes to his 1978 album Music for Airports—originally envisioned to be played in the background in airport terminals— musician Brian Eno coined the phrase “ambient music.”1 Ambient has since become a massive cultural phenomenon, but in its early conception it was part of a broader family tree of minimalism: starting in his art school days, Eno closely followed the work of Steve Reich and La Monte Young, and he later released albums by British minimalists like John White and Gavin Bryars’s Machine Music on his label Obscure Records.2 Taking rock production aesthetics as another crucial point of departure, Eno conceived of a sound as texture, and music as landscape. He worked with musicians of similar mindsets, such as the multiinstrumentalist and mystic Laraaji and the composer-pianist Harold Budd. The idea of ambient spread around the globe, providing a framework for the pioneering work of Japanese composers such as Midori Takada and Hiroshi Yoshimura.3 And it shared a spacey, contemplative vibe with the mass-market phenomenon of New Age music, which had partial roots in the curatorial minds of the California radio DJs Stephen Hill and Anna Turner.4 With overlapping aesthetics and audiences, ambient and New Age were cosmic musics designed to heal, and to change the body.

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anthony korner interviews brian eno (1986) AK:  You’ve called your music “Ambient music” and at other times described it as “holographic” and “discreet”: How did the concept of Ambient music come into being? BE:  My thinking about Ambient music is traceable to one incident. I had an accident—I was hit by a taxi and I couldn’t move. I was in bed for a while recovering, and at the end of a visitor’s stay I said, “As you’re leaving can you put a record on for me.” My friend put on a record she’d just brought me of virtuoso harp music from the 18th century. My stereo was a bit rough at the time. Only one speaker was working, and the volume was down so low I could hardly hear the sound. It was raining outside and I thought, “How annoying, I can’t hear it.” But I couldn’t switch it off. I just had to wait till it played through. As I was lying there listening to the rain I could just hear the loudest moments, just single notes every so often, or little flurries of notes. I started to think that it sounded all right—it was really nice to listen to—and I wondered why no music like this existed. Why couldn’t we buy records that made this beautiful random mixture of things like the raindrops, with little flurries of things within it like icebergs? Listening, I had the sense of hearing the tip of something, and the knowledge that there was more beneath it. And I wanted my music to do this. It was immediately after this, in 1975, that I recorded Discreet Music, the first of my records conceived as Ambient music.   I had made a few pop records by that time. Pop makes a very specific demand on one’s listening attention, and I was beginning to notice that the way I was listening to music did not relate to the kind of music I was making then. Gradually, the other sound started to take over. I began to hear sound as the texture of an environment, to want a sense of a distant horizon that couldn’t be heard, and elements that were out of earshot. Quite often people tell me, “You’ve made a big move from being a pop musician. You don’t do anything like that anymore.” In a sense that’s true, but in another way what I’ve done focuses on what I believe to be the key

Excerpt from Anthony Korner, “Aurora Musicalis,” Artforum (Summer 1986): 76–77. Courtesy of Anthony Korner, publisher, Artform International Magazine.

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issue in pop music. I’ve left out the tunes, the chord patterns, the beats, and so on, in order to deal with texture—the one innovation that really characterizes this period of music.   Now, this tends to create a music that I would call “holographic.” One of the characteristics of a hologram is that when you shatter it every little piece still carries the information for the complete image, though the smaller the piece, the vaguer the definition. This is how my pieces seem to be—any part of them yields an image of the whole. AK:  You use landscape imagery to describe your music. Is this something you are consciously after when you are making the pieces? BE:  My feelings about landscape do have a lot to do with it. There is a point in making a piece where I suddenly get a sense of where I am—in landscape terms. I can begin to sense the geography, the light, and the climate. After that it usually flows quite easily. I was once very friendly with a painter, now dead, called Peter Schmidt. He was born around 1930. His painting had gone from being abstract and demanding in a certain way, to smaller, quieter work that was much more—mysterious isn’t quite the word; it’s that you didn’t feel that you were seeing the whole picture immediately, as if some part of the painting was concealed by other parts. Not only was he becoming a landscape painter, but worse than that he was becoming a watercolorist, which made him extremely unpopular in the avant-garde English art world of the mid ’70s. But I was interested in this direction because it was happening to me in music as well. I’d gone from making very loud, intricate, witty sorts of things, with anagrams and funny references to other pop records and little pop versions of Duchampian tricks and so on, into this music that had people in general saying, “Oh well, he’s gone soft.” I was really moving into a kind of landscape sensibility of music, the idea being that one is listening to a body of sound presented as happening in a particular type of space, a location of some sort. One of the characteristics of recorded music is that the composer is in a position to design not only new instruments but new locations for them. One does this by using reverberation, echo, and other such treatments as part of the composition and not as a cosmetic.   An aspect of this landscape concern is to do with the removal of personality from the picture. You know how different a landscape painting is when there is a figure in it. Even if the figure is small, it

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automatically becomes the focus—all questions of scale and depth are related to it. When I stopped writing songs I took the figure out of the landscape. Lately I’ve felt it beginning to return, but not in a familiar form. This is all a funny reversal because in the early 20th century painters were saying that they wanted their work to be like music, to have the freedom to be as abstract as music. Now what’s interesting to me is that music can actually be like painting— figurative, landscape.   Classical music works around a body of “refined” sounds— sounds that are separate from the sounds of the world, pure and musical. There is a sharp distinction between “music” and “noise,” just as there is a distinction between the musician and the audience. I like blurring those distinctions—I like to work with all the complex sounds on the way out to the horizon, to pure noise, like the hum of London. If you sit in Hyde Park just far enough away from the traffic so that you don’t perceive any of its specific details, you just hear the average of the whole thing. And it’s such a beautiful sound. For me that’s as good as going to a concert hall at night. What I have found myself doing, and continue to do, is making music that is not that separate. There are foreground events, like the bells in the Venice piece [Venice, 1985]; there are events that are not so close to the ear, there are ones that become misty and indistinct, and then occasionally comes a hint of something that is practically out of earshot. I like this idea of a field of sound that extends beyond our senses.   That’s one aspect of Ambient music, a point most writers don’t pick up on. Instead they focus on the paradigm of Muzak, or background music—which is relevant, but in a way that they don’t suspect. I’ve become progressively more interested in the elements one puts in the back of a pop record. When you produce a record, the conventional style is to have the drums and the bass really up close. Then you have one guitar and maybe the other one as a separate sound, or maybe there’s an echo of the first guitar. The sound is compiled as if it’s a screen, a cinema screen. Depth is suggested by putting on a bit of reverberation and a bit of this, that, and the other thing. It’s a cinematic kind of depth, a bit like a bas-relief. I used to listen to these formulaic records, and between the objects of sound in the foreground I would hear the background, and I’d wish those instruments would stop playing so that I could hear it better. So, in my late pop records and in my productions for

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other people, I started to put more and more focus on that background and I started sinking the instruments into it until they even began to be lost in what used to be called the background. Gradually the foreground was not really so important anymore. It was just one of the places you could be hearing. There wasn’t the hierarchy of attention that is usually associated with music. AK:  Where and how did you imagine your Ambient music would be listened to? BE:  Initially public places, but when you make a record you are making it for a living room. When I made Music for Airports, in 1978, my original idea was to make some music for the Cologne airport. I was sitting there very early one morning waiting for a plane, thinking what a fantastic waste of space the place was. Remembering my experience when I was recovering from the accident, I imagined that kind of music there. So I started to think about what would work. It was clear the music would need to be able to withstand interruption, because they’re always making PA announcements in airports. And it would have to be something that didn’t need to be loud, because you wouldn’t want to raise the noise level of the airport any further. If music is loud, people talk louder, and in turn you have to make the music louder. I realized I’d have to work in frequency ranges that didn’t conflict with conversation, so in one piece I put a lot of emphasis on a very low bass and in others on a very high treble that would not conflict with speech. The idea was to try to make music that fitted into the container of the functioning airport. The underlying idea was to try to suggest that there were new places to put music, new kinds of niches where music could belong.

stephen hill, “new age made simple” (1988) During the 1970s a new international musical movement began to emerge. Initially unfocused and multi-directional, it had never had a clear identity. In 1986 it reached critical mass commercially, and the record industry settled on a name—New Age music.

Stephen Hill, “New Age Made Simple,” Hearts of Space website, 1988, https://web .archive.org/web/19980128180207fw_/http://hos.com/simple.html. Courtesy of Stephen Hill, Hearts of Space, www.hos.com.

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In the early days, when New Age was just one of many references that were floating around to describe the nascent genre, listeners, reviewers, and even the musicians creating it were unclear about the meaning of the term, since a wide variety of contemporary, experimental, and traditional styles were swept together under the New Age umbrella. As a description of grass roots spiritual movements the term New Age has been around at least since the neo-spiritualist movements of the late 19th century. It is here that the genre found its original audience and probably its more recent reputation for intellectual flakiness. The idea that society is about to enter a New Age is a provocative vision that has energized the hearts and minds of progressive people for many generations. Aided by the astrological popularizers, we remember how quickly society accepted the idea of the “Age of Aquarius” in the Sixties. How and why music serves as an expression of this vision is the question here, but the connection is not all that obvious. To understand the role that this music plays in our culture, we really need to know something about the underlying psychological forces acting on both the musicians and the audience. In his book Through Music to the Self (Shambhala Publications, 1981) German composer Peter Michael Hamel writes of “a new auditory consciousness, capable of being applied to all today’s varieties of music—whether Classical, Pop, Jazz, Avant-Garde . . .” Because the contemporary listener now has the entire panorama of the world’s music available through recordings, the application of this new consciousness to the music coming down through the ages has reconnected us with certain psychic and emotional experiences which have not been dated by the passage of time, but remain relevant. The extraordinary popularity of pieces like the Pachelbel Canon in D is perhaps the best example of this, although entire musical genres such as the Gregorian chants of medieval Europe, as well as traditional Japanese, Balinese, and other types of “world music” have come to the surface and enjoy renewed attention, especially among New Age listeners. Certainly a new auditory consciousness would be expected to create new musical forms. Although the deepest roots of New Age music are planted in some of the very oldest forms of music, there are several aspects which deserve to be called “new.” In the categories which follow, I’ve attempted to create a perspective for understanding both the basic motivation and the psychological characteristics of most of the music which is presently being called New Age. The descriptions are in

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terms of the sound imagery, the content, and the overall experience of the music. I pause to acknowledge both the distaste for categories among many listeners as well as the inherent problems of categorizing music. Categories that are broad enough to include an entire era or dimension of musical style or meaning are often of little descriptive value; on the other hand, those which are too specific give no insight into the overall musical direction of which the particular piece is an example. The situation is further confused by the fact that categories may be organized by historical epochs (Baroque), by musical form (symphonic), by the means of production (electronic), etc. Please consider also that the categories here describe the pure form of each type of music. Many, perhaps a majority, of individual works will fall somewhere between two categories or share the characteristics of several. Still, in almost eight years of living with this framework and testing it against new material being released, I have found very few exceptions. Space and Travel Music: Celestial, Cosmic, & Terrestrial This New Age sub-category has the effect of outward psychological expansion. Celestial or cosmic music removes listeners from their ordinary acoustical surroundings by creating stereo sound images of vast, apparently dimensionless spatial environments. In a word—Spacey. Rhythmic or tonal movements animate the experience of flying, floating, cruising, gliding, or hovering within the auditory space. Terrestrial spacemusic employs natural outdoor ambiences—sounds of water, birds, insects, thunder, etc. In either case, the major effect of this music is to take the listener out of their body or at least out of their normal sound environment. In a related hardware development, the Walkman personal stereo phenomenon has created a visible new class of “Audio-Isolated” individuals who express their criticism of the environment by effectively removing themselves from it sonically, and by extension, psychologically. Innerspace, Meditative, and Transcendental This music promotes a psychological movement inward. It has been precisely described by Peter Michael Hamel as “a contemplative music . . . which is itself capable of being a vehicle, energy-form and magic force for spiritual self absorption, which works by virtue of its own

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inner laws, as soon as the listener learns how to open himself totally to it. It carries him away—to himself.” Transcendental innerspace music attempts to convey the listener inward and upward to higher planes of consciousness, and is often spoken of as “uplifting.” Continuous drones or slowly changing, endlessly repeated rhythmic structures (also popular in so-called Minimalist music, although the composers only talk about the technical characteristics of their work) as well as overall ascending or descending tonal movements are common characteristics of this subcategory. Cross-Cultural Fusions Cross-cultural fusions have been happening for centuries through the medium of travel, as musicians have moved around the planet. However, 20th century radio and recording technologies have stimulated an exponential acceleration of the process. The New Age music audience has been especially receptive to this trend, welcoming the opportunity to extend their psychological experience beyond western cultural paradigms and immerse themselves in the musical ideas and emotions of other worlds. Modified or derived forms are usually more popular than the ethnic originals, but this is not exclusive to the New Age field. From pop to classical, cross-cultural influences are an important aspect of virtually all areas of progressive contemporary music. New Age Religious and Gospel Though not as commercially successful as New Age instrumental music, this category includes any vocal music regardless of style, whose lyrics contain messages about spiritual beliefs or belief systems. The impulse to share or broadcast one’s belief system to others, be it religious, spiritual, or philosophical, appears to be very deeply ingrained in human nature, and New Age gospel in its purest form conveys the belief that we are entering a new era for humanity. This is an extension of the ancient use of music as a setting for the communication of important cultural myths. At its best, such music can create a context for dramatic internal experiences as the ideas expressed by the lyrics are amplified by the emotional power of the music. Religious and gospel music of all kinds, as well as New Age vocal music, continues this tradition— stimulating the full gamut of emotional intensities from lightly sentimental through cathartic to overwhelming.

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Listeners with an analytical bent will naturally ask, why should there be a contemporary resurgence of music directed toward relaxation, psychological expansion, inner experience, and statements about metaphysical and religious beliefs? Granting that questions like these cannot be given definitive answers, these observations may be helpful. Stress The constantly accelerating pace of urban life since the 1940s, driven by technological advances in communications and accompanied by increasing levels of daytime noise “pollution” and other distractions with an irritating effect on our sensibilities, has increased the need for a soothing, masking, slow-paced sonic ambience. Of course, “Easy Listening” and “Beautiful Music” FM stations as well as the infamous Muzak have been doing just this for years and have succeeded in captivating large audiences in the 50+ age group. Amazingly, as late as the ’70s, so-called Beautiful Music was the most successful syndicated radio format, and there were more stations broadcasting such music in the U.S. than rock or pop. But the programming of such stations and background services is based mainly on “sweetened” instrumental reworkings of popular music standards. This approach, which apparently satisfies many older people in their search for a comforting, mindless nostalgia, is generally alienating the middle age audience, who prefer the more intense and artistically significant original versions (the “Golden Oldies” radio formats of the early ’80s), and incomprehensible to the young, who have no tie to the original songs and whose biosystems have not yet succumbed to the effects of self-administered overstimulation. With pop and rock presumably serving the needs of most of the 13 to 28 year old audience, a gap existed in music programming for the more sensitive and sophisticated members of the 28 to 50 year age group which was not being addressed by any of the existing radio music formats. It is this age group in which stress-related diseases are most pervasive and problematic. More or less by default, a portion of the jazz and classical repertoire was called into service for these listeners, but what was really needed was a contemporary music which is physically soothing, yet not emotionally trivial or devoid of significant cultural meaning. This is the need that the quieter forms of New Age music are attempting to fill. That it should have existed in commercial broadcasting is remarkable, since this is the demographic bracket which is most desirable to advertisers.

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Personal Development Many aspects of today’s culture have played a role in supporting the use of music to influence awareness. Drugs, meditation practices, psychological approaches to inner work, and new religions have all contributed to the process. Individual taste in music is inherently related to, and may play a part in, psychological growth. When used for this purpose, music acts as a precise nonverbal language for conveying the experience of a virtually unlimited range of psychic and emotional states. Conscious involvement with challenging musical or sonic experiences can be a powerful method for accelerating personal development. Although the lowest quality New Age music has deservedly been criticized as “yuppie muzak,” the best of the genre invites substantial commitment and concentration from the listener, falling into the realms normally associated with “serious” listening. But as Peter Hamel points out, it is really not the same kind of listening that one applies to classical, jazz, ethnic, or other established types of music. The attention is both personal and “holistic”—an awareness of individual emotional response as well as the quality of the enveloping ambience being created. The music is experienced primarily as a continuum of spatial imagery and emotion, rather than as thematic musical relationships, compositional “ideas,” or performance values. Perhaps the current technically mediated cross-cultural and transtemporal melange of musical directions is one emerging form of the global language whose arrival has long been predicted by cultural visionaries. Composer Jon Hassell calls it Fourth World Music: classical by structure, popular by textural appeal, global minded.

dean suzuki & bob doerschuk interview harold budd (1986) In developing your own alternate voice as a composer, were you influenced by people like La Monte Young, Terry Riley, and the composers in the Fluxus group? Many of your early works, such as Lirio, Pauline Spring Piece, and Vitorio, particularly resemble Fluxus

Excerpt from Dean Suzuki and Bob Doerschuk, “The Abandoned Pianos of Harold Budd,” Keyboard 12, no. 2 (February 1986): 68–69 and 144. Courtesy of Keyboard/ FutureNet.

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pieces in that they consist of brief verbal directions for performers to carry out. I was a bit aware of that, but I was not ever a part of that scene. This is due, in part, to the fact that I came to being a composer and artist, especially the avant-garde variety, fairly late. I never grew up with a hard-core cadre of people who went on to become members of Fluxus or things like that. I arrived at my own conclusions independently. L.A., especially in the ’60s, was pretty closed. If you were doing something like I was, you were really alone. Is it important to you that your music appeal to a large audience? In a way I am reaching out for the mass audience, but it’s not planned that way. Whether anyone will own up to it or not, there is quite a bit of ego involved in making any kind of art. You are really putting yourself on display. You’re preening like a peacock, although it is not couched that way. Eventually I got tired of the conceit of the avantgarde in music. It really bored the poop out of me. I don’t mean to condemn what everyone else was doing. It’s just that I didn’t think it had any relationship to the way people actually felt about things. Certainly not the way I did anyway. I presume that when I’m on the track of something that’s really interesting to me, it will appeal to other people as well because they are eventually going to hear what I hear at the moment I write it or play it. In that sense I do think of other people out there listening, but I don’t have a formula. The composer Carl Stone has said that your music sets up a particular scenario in his mind, of hang gliding. Is it important to you that your music evoke reactions this vivid in listeners? Yes. Otherwise, I don’t think there is any point in listening to it, because there is very little to analyze. I’m sure that many pianists cannot stand my music because there’s nothing there that would interest them at all in terms of technique. So why listen to it? For the same reason that I wrote it, and that I listen to it as well. It is evocative. What role do your very poetic titles have in making your music so expressive? It doesn’t make any difference to me whether the title comes before or after [composing]. It is extraordinarily important to me that the title match the piece awfully well. It is not a real correlation, obviously, but it is one where the title should sound like the piece sounds in a curious way. It should be a marriage of two mediums, as tight as possible

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without being descriptive. Regarding Madrigal of the Rose Angel, clearly there is no such thing as a Rose Angel, and the piece certainly isn’t a set of madrigals. It is a series of names that evoke something which the music seems to complement. I’ve always had a great deal of fun with titles. Sometimes I’ve had titles before there were pieces for them. I still have titles for which there are no pieces at all. I like that very much. Can you describe your compositional process? Most of the time I work at the keyboard, but very often the keyboard is the second thing that comes to mind. The first thing is the more phantom-like thoughts or ideas that interest me, but they are quite unformed. It is really difficult to say. There is no mystery to it. I am making this seem like some esoteric, secret process that only the anointed can engage in, which isn’t what I meant at all. I can’t put my finger on exactly what it is. I really do work at it. Sometimes I can do it when there is a basketball game on that my kids are watching. At other times I have to get away or have them get away from me. Do you compose regularly? No. Very much in spurts. It’s all fait accompli anyway, because it comes about however I do it. All the pieces for the first album, The Pavilion of Dreams, were written long before there was any thought of there being a recording. Brian Eno? I barely knew who Roxy Music was. I didn’t really care. That was never in the cards. All I had was this obsession to write pieces. Once that was done, I had a body of work I could really feel good about and use to generate more. What I had done, in fact, was establish a style that I was comfortable with, that was synonymous with myself, but I wasn’t conscious of it at the time. You set up a musical language. That’s right. I had a vocabulary in which there was an infinite amount of material to draw upon. But if you analyze one of your scores, it wouldn’t reveal much in terms of traditional harmonic structure. No, it wouldn’t. It would reveal only that which is there. I presume that any educated musician would be able to do that. How, then, would you analyze your own work? I think that I have certain things that are my own cliches, and certain tendencies to do one thing as opposed to many, many other things.

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Analysis, in terms of what is actually making the sound and where the sound is placed, as opposed to the piece’s abstract structure, can be revealing. I have a real penchant for major seventh chords in a 4–2 inversion, sometimes without the fifth or third. It is almost never a complete chord. Something is always left out. The top voice, which is just doubling some other note, is often stretched up to a tenth because of its peculiar sound and the way it decorates that chord. In other words, it is a decoration to, rather than a part of, the chord. What advice would you give to listeners on how to best appreciate your music? The first criterion is to listen actively. Listen to the whole shot. Then, like everyone in a democratic society, you have the option to reject what you hear, accept it, or do something in between. That is totally beyond my control. My primary concern is that the music meet my fullest regard, that I believe in it from square one all the way through it. I can’t say that there’s any more—or even more importantly, less—to listen to than there would be in the work of the European masters. Certain elements that are present in the music of those European masters, such as dramatic contrasts in dynamics, variations on themes, and so on, are of negligible importance to yours. You’re absolutely correct, but that really has to do with the structures of the music. And note-to-note processes are certainly part of the European tradition. For example, the flatted 6th resolving downward to the perfect 5th. This is a major phenomenon in our tradition: [twelfth-century liturgical composer] Leonin, Monteverdi and [Western swing bandleader] Bob Wills all showed this tendency of tone against tone that is 1,200 years old. I totally agree with and celebrate these tendencies in everybody’s music, including my own. But in a piece of music like “Dark Star,” which is based largely on a static single chord or impression, what is there to listen for? How can you determine whether this particular sustaining chord is more artistically successful than someone else’s sustaining chord? That’s a very good question. The answer is simple. It has to work from square one. If it does, then it’s going to work for ten years hence. The idea of playing an A minor chord is certainly one thing, but if the progress of the piece is just not working out, there’s nothing in the world that I can do with it. It just has to ring my bell at the outset.

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paul bowler interviews midori takada on through the looking glass (2018) How does it feel to have your works appreciated by a modern audience so long after you first recorded them? I think it’s amazing that young people are listening to an album I made 34 years ago. It’s something I really appreciate. All these years later I now realize why I made it. In retrospect, the early ’80s seem like the beginning of a golden age for Japanese ambient and minimalist music with classics by you and by contemporaries such as Satoshi Ashikawa, Inoyama Land and Hiroshi Yoshimura released in a short space of time. Did you feel part of a movement or part of something special? I didn’t feel part of a mainstream movement. There were a few composers influenced by people like Steve Reich, Terry Riley and Brian Eno. It was a time of change though there were very few people involved and we all knew each other. I played vibraphone on Satoshi Ashikawa’s Still Way for example. But it wasn’t just a music scene, it was multi-media including fine arts, architecture, and minimal dance. You started off within the realms of western classical music. What were your reasons for switching to minimalism? I first realized I needed to find my own music when I had my debut concert with the Berlin Philharmonic. At that moment I realized “I can’t be here”: playing in an established concert hall felt wrong. I felt I wanted to be playing music on the street. Later I discovered Asian and African music. It was from such a rich and non-materialist culture. It’s music that denies the materialistic. You then studied with traditional African and Asian musicians such as Ghanaian kogyil (xylophone) player Kakraba Lobi, and Korean kayagum (zither) player Chi Soung-Ja. What did you learn from them and how did their teachings affect your music? I studied African music by myself at first, because there was no information in Japan about African music. I copied from field recordings on labels like Nonesuch and tried to write scores and rhythms,

Paul Bowler, “Through the Looking Glass with Ambient Pioneer Midori Takada,” Vinyl Factory, August 30, 2018, https://thevinylfactory.com/features/through-the-lookingglass-midori-takada-interview/. Courtesy of Vinyl Factory.

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and I would study the construction of rhythms. I then met Kakraba Lobi in Tokyo, and went to Ghana to play with him. I learned to play with him and learned his theories which gave me confidence about playing African rhythm. Not traditionally but using my own style using African constructions and theories and using Western not African instruments. How about Western figures? You’ve said that Steve Reich was a major influence. Were there any other key figures in shaping your sound? I often played Steve Reich’s music and got to play with Terry Riley in Tokyo though I was more influenced by Steve Reich, particularly his earliest work such as Clapping Music. I was more influenced by African construction though, which is much more complex than Steve Reich. Steve Reich learned rhythms from the Ghanaian Ewe Tribe and used them in minimalism. I wanted to learn the origins of the rhythms. There seems to be a transition from the primarily African rhythms of your work with Mkwaju Ensemble to a more distinctly Asian sensibility with Through The Looking Glass . . . Yes, Through The Looking Glass is primarily my own interpretation of Asian rhythms. The exception was on “Crossing,” where the rhythms were inspired by the sound of Japanese train crossings. Mkwaju Ensemble seems more dance-orientated to me. There are textures and beats that resemble techno . . . There were no techno influences. People sometimes make that mistake because of the involvement of Hideki Matsutake [prolific computer programmer known for his work with proto-techno outfit Logic System and Yellow Magic Orchestra]. Everything was either from African repetition or from minimalism. How the act of producing music changes your body—that’s what fascinates me. If you use a machine that process won’t happen so I don’t use any machines in my work. The only time I’ve ever used a machine was to record and pick up brain waves and muscle electricity through the synthesizer to make alpha waves. I’m fascinated by how to control your body, not only the outside but the inside as well. I used to do cybernetics, using brain waves and the body. I would use the recorder to pick up blood circulation and make it into sound. Sometimes I would even use a machine with a probe microphone that you would normally use to check the sound of a pregnant woman’s blood circulation and her unborn child’s heartbeat, rhythm and tempo. I used this machine to

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amplify my own heartbeat and blood circulation on stage with Masahiko Satoh playing piano during a live performance. He hated it! You’ve spoken of your desire to produce music without emotion. Do you feel that minimalism suits the Japanese sensibility? Well, minimalism was a term that started to be used in the 1960s for fine arts. Japanese tradition doesn’t deny emotion or frown upon emotion. Traditional musicians would put all their emotion into one sound. In that sense minimalism already existed in Japanese music. Through The Looking Glass is an incredibly evocative, almost dreamlike listening experience. Was that the effect you were hoping for? I certainly didn’t mean to create dreamlike music, maybe it was there subconsciously but that wasn’t what I was looking to achieve at the time. I wanted to make a perspective of sound. It was an analogue recording so I placed microphones in many different places. I tried to create a three dimensional music by controlling the distance of the microphone to create a perspective. As a result it ended up hypnotic or dreamlike as people say. You’ve had an incredibly diverse career. Has there been a constant theme or guiding principle? What keeps you exploring and searching? Like everyone I needed to work to provide. But there is definitely something that has kept me searching and continues to do so.

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chapter 13

Canons

By the late 1970s, minimalism had become a widely used term with a fairly clear definition, albeit one that was still questioned and contested.1 Critics like the Village Voice’s Tom Johnson and the New York Times’s John Rockwell had chronicled the experimental scenes out of which it had emerged, and reiterated the term enough that it caught on; scholars soon followed, providing expansive analyses of minimalism’s forms and content.2 In 1980, critic Tim Page and musician Mark Abbott coproduced a marathon festival of minimalist music on the Columbia radio station WKCR, providing a genealogy of the subgenre that spanned from Richard Wagner’s Rheingold prelude to Terry Riley’s In C. There were interviews with Steve Reich and Philip Glass, but the festival remained broad-minded, incorporating lesser-known figures like Julius Eastman and C. C. Hennix, introducing the vernacular voices of Brian Eno and the Velvet Underground, and even providing the likely radio premiere of Laurie Anderson’s “O Superman.”3 Only a year later, though, Page wrote a minimalist primer for High Fidelity that focused primarily on the “Big Four,” situating them as the next generation of classical masters, with an unexpected cachet among audiences.4 Similar features were published in Time magazine and Newsday, introducing a standardized definition of minimalism and newly canonized lineage of La Monte Young, Riley, Reich, and Glass (with room for John Adams as a successor). This conception of mini-

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malism had become so mainstream by the 1990s that it became necessary to introduce countercanons, as the guitarist Alan Licht did in a series of Top Ten lists that focused on underground and antiinstitutional musicians.5

tom johnson, “what is minimalism really about?” ( village voice , 1977) Just as I was getting ready to leave a loft concert, an inquisitive young man, perhaps 20 years old, approached me. Apparently someone had told him I was a critic, and he figured I might be able to understand the music he had just heard. “Why are so many people playing minimal music these days? What is it all about?” I thought for a moment about what I ought to say and settled for a brief generalization. “It has a lot to do with repetition.” It was not a complete answer, of course, but I thought I’d settle for it for the time being and see how he responded. Through a nearby window one could hear a truck passing by. At the other side of the room one of the musicians was talking to a friend who had come to the concert. In front of me, the young man was looking into my eyes, intent on the subject of minimalism and trying to work it all out. He talked a little about how he didn’t think repetition was very interesting and about how he didn’t think anyone could be seriously concerned with that, and decided to try me again. “So what is it really about?” I thought for a moment about what I ought to say this time, and settled for another generalization. “It has a lot to do with tiny variations.” It was not a complete answer, of course, but I thought I’d settle for it for the time being and see how he responded. Through the nearby window one could hear another truck passing by. At the other side of the room one of the musicians was disconnecting his electronic equipment. In front of me, the young man was staring at the floor, intent on the subject of minimalism and trying to work it all out. He talked a little about how he didn’t think tiny variations were very interesting and about how he didn’t think anyone could be seriously

Tom Johnson, “What Is Minimalism Really About?” Village Voice, June 13, 1977, 56. Courtesy of The Village Voice.

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concerned with that, and tried me again. “So what is it really about?” I thought for a moment about what I ought to say this time, and settled for another generalization. “It has something to do with hyper-clarity.” It was not a complete answer, of course, but I thought I’d settle for it for the time being and see how he responded. Through the nearby window one could hear a car passing by. At the other side of the room one of the musicians was beginning to pack his electronic equipment into cases. In front of me, the young man was staring at a loudspeaker, intent on the subject of minimalism and trying to work it all out. He talked a little about how he didn’t think hyper-clarity was very interesting and about how he didn’t think anyone could be seriously concerned with that, and tried me again. “So what is it really about?” I thought for a moment about what I ought to say to him this time, and settled for another generalization. “It has something to do with encouraging more subtle perceptions.” It was not a complete answer, of course, but I thought I’d settle for it for the time being and see how he responded. Through the nearby window one could hear a car passing by. At the other side of the room one of the musicians was packing his electronic equipment into cases. In front of me, the young man was staring at the floor, intent on the subject of minimalism and trying to work it all out. He talked a little about how he didn’t think encouraging more subtle perceptions was very interesting and about how he didn’t think anyone could be seriously concerned with that, and tried me again. “So what is it really about?” I thought for a moment about what I ought to say this time, and settled for another generalization. “It has something to do with making music less dramatic.” It was not a complete answer, of course, but I thought I’d settle for it for the time being and see how he responded. Through the nearby window one could hear another car passing by. At the other side of the room one of the musicians was packing his electronic equipment into cases. In front of me, the young man was looking me in the eye, intent on the subject of minimalism and trying to work it all out. He talked a little about how he didn’t think nondramatic qualities were very interesting and about how he didn’t think anyone could be seriously concerned with that, and tried me again. “So what is it

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really about?” I thought for a moment about what I ought to say this time, and settled for another generalization. “It stems partly from certain Asian and African attitudes.” It was not a complete answer, of course, but I thought I’d settle for it for the time being and see how he responded. Through the nearby window one could hear a group of teenagers talking and laughing. At the other side of the room one of the musicians was buckling straps around the cases that contained his electronic equipment. In front of me the young man was staring at a loudspeaker, intent on the subject of minimalism and trying to work it all out. He talked a little about how he didn’t see that Asian and African attitudes were very relevant and about how he didn’t think anyone could be seriously concerned about such things, and tried me again. “So what is it really about?” I thought for a moment about what I ought to say this time, and tried another approach. “Well, like any kind of music, it isn’t really about ideas, and it can’t really be explained in words. It can only be demonstrated. And even then, every demonstration is going to be a little different, and no one demonstration will ever be definitive.” It was not a complete answer, but it seemed to make more sense than the others. Through the nearby window one could hear another truck passing by. At the other side of the room one of the musicians was carrying his loaded electronic equipment toward the exit.

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tim page and mark abbott, “aspects of minimalism,” wkcr festival playlist (1980) 6

“Aspects of Minimalism 1980,” Tim Page Papers, Series III, Box 8, Archives and Special Collections, University of Connecticut Library. Courtesy of Tim Page.

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peter goodman, “minimalist music: is less more—or a bore?” ( newsday , 1984) The night is dark, the stars hidden by soft clouds. You stare and stare upward into nothingness. Low on the horizon reflected headlights flare dimly above the trees. The flashes continue, but there are no cars. Gradually, so slowly the shift is barely perceptible, the shine moves higher. The light spreads. Stars poke through the domed sky. Those are not clouds: They are the northern lights. Now the sky is pulsing with flashes, waves, strobes of light. They wash overhead in vague sheets. Those who look up quickly will see nothing. Only those who stare and concentrate and watch hard will see the beauty above. An hour has passed like 10 seconds. There is music that is like the northern lights: long, slowly changing sheets of sound built on strong rhythms, constant pulses, simple chords and tiny melodies out of which emerge, if you listen patiently, beautiful patterns and unsuspected visions. It is called “minimalism.” Its better-known composers—Philip Glass, Steve Reich, John Adams, La Monte Young, Terry Riley—are conservatory-trained and trace much of their descent from the Western traditions of Bach, Debussy and Schoenberg, as well as from African drumming, Indian ragas and the Balinese gamelan. Whatever its origins, this music may be the most broadly popular American “classical” or “concert” music since Aaron Copland and George Gershwin. It defies ordinary labels. Its audiences come from gentrified brownstones and suburban split-levels. They are New Wave and Old School. There are enough of them to sell out the Metropolitan Opera House and Radio City Music Hall. They buy enough records to put the composers on Billboard’s charts. The music of Philip Glass, for one, can be heard on “Sesame Street,” and he’s writing a piece for the torch-lighting ceremony at this summer’s Olympics in Los Angeles. If today marks the flowering of minimalism, it was during the midto-late 1960s that the music sprouted and took form in the lofts and galleries of that part of lower Manhattan called SoHo. In Manhattan, America’s music capital, the minimalists represented the “downtown” crowd as opposed to the established “uptown” world of Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall.

Peter Goodman, “Minimalist Music: Is Less More—or a Bore?,” Newsday, April 1, 1984. From Newsday. © 1984 Newsday. All rights reserved. Used under license.

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The signatures of minimal music are unchanged in its more than 20 years of evolution: repetition and simplicity. The harmonies are diatonic and tonal, as opposed to the heavily dissonant, atonal, highly complex music often considered the mainstream of 20th-century style. The rhythmic structure, which can become extraordinarily convoluted, is usually built up from unchanging, constantly pulsing eighth-note patterns. Rather than melody, there are short, repeated phrases interwoven and augmented in predictable ways. The music can be electronic, amplified and extremely loud, as in Glass’ five-hour opera score, “Einstein on the Beach,” or acoustic and very quiet, as in Adams’ orchestral work “Harmonium.” The best-known minimal works are quite long. Glass’ opera “Satyagraha” lasts four hours. The style has been called “pulse” or “modular” from the short cells out of which it is built. It’s been called “trance music,” in the belief that listening to it can put one into a trance. Detractors have other terms: “It sounds like the needle is stuck in a groove”; “It’s the static on a TV screen after the station has gone off the air.” Along with undenied popularity (two of Glass’ albums for CBS together sold more than 100,000 copies last year, an extraordinary number for “serious” music) come controversy and disagreement. The composers themselves dislike the term “minimalist.” “The label is not contributing,” Adams says. “I’ve never felt comfortable with it.” True minimalism was written in the late ’60s and early ’70s, they argue. Glass says he hasn’t written a minimal piece since 1974. Young remembers when audiences rioted over his work. Glass says he once punched a listener who started banging on his piano during a concert. Both Reich and Glass, in their attempts to support themselves outside the universities, drove cabs for a living—Reich in California during the early 1960s, Glass in New York until nearly 1980. In fact, Glass was back in his hack just a week after two sellout performances of his and Robert Wilson’s opera “Einstein on the Beach” at the Metropolitan Opera in 1976. In their relations with the world at large, the composers range in manner from Young, who refuses to allow journalists to photograph him and requires interviewers to sign contracts with him, to Adams, currently composer-in-residence at the San Francisco Symphony, whose ideas led to a nationwide contemporary-music program involving a half-dozen major orchestras including the New York Philharmonic.

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Other composers tend to dislike minimalism. “Lobotomized Bruckner,” says Leon Kirchner, the Walter Bigelow Rosen professor of music at Harvard University. “An aspect of a society-wide mental illness,” says Charles Wuorinen, co-artistic director of the Group for Contemporary Music. The minimalist composers themselves snipe at one another. “Most of these guys don’t even talk to each other,” Glass says. Reich recently threatened to sue CBS over program notes written for a Glass album. Program notes for the recording, a re-release of “Einstein on the Beach,” said that Reich played in Glass’ ensemble before forming his own. Reich said things were the other way around, and offered documents to prove it. The program notes were changed. “Steve and Phil, I personally feel their music is overly simplistic,” says Young, whose 1958 “Trio for Strings” is often mentioned as the first minimalist work and consists of nothing but long, held notes. •

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Although the minimalist composers have only begun receiving major recognition in the last few years, they have been working for decades. And though sometimes they are described as members of the younger generation of composers, all but Adams are well into middle age: Young, 49, is from Bern, Idaho; Reich, 48, is from Manhattan; Glass, 47, is from Baltimore; Riley, 48, is from Colfax, Calif. Adams, 37, is from Massachusetts. The best-known minimalists are Glass and Reich. Each has been able to fill such halls as Carnegie and the Brooklyn Academy of Music for concerts, each has a string of recordings and each has major new works on the horizon. Two new operas by Glass were premiered in March. One is “Akhnaten,” a work in Akkadian, Egyptian and Hebrew about the pharaoh who developed monotheism, produced in Stuttgart, West Germany. The second, produced in Rome, is a section of “CIVIL WarS,” a massive piece with a libretto by Robert Wilson. Three of Glass’ operatic works are scheduled for New York performances this year: “Akhnaten” at the New York City Opera, “CIVIL WarS” both in concert performance and at the Metropolitan Opera, and “Einstein on the Beach” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. It is unusual to have one major production of work by an American opera composer. Three in a year is unheard of. Glass is actually concerned that he will be overexposed in New York, and no major performances are scheduled in the city for next year.

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Reich’s major project at the moment is “The Desert Music,” scheduled for its world premiere in Cologne and then for a production at BAM in the fall. It will be his first work for large orchestra and chorus, a setting of poetry by William Carlos Williams. Both Reich and Glass are tremendously busy and supporting themselves on their music and performances alone, rather than through teaching, as is the case with many American composers. •

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Philip Glass started out the way most academic composers do: He went to school. He received a master’s degree in composition from Manhattan’s Juilliard School in 1962. He continued in the academic path for the next few years, recipient of two Ford Foundation grants and finally a Fulbright grant to study in France with Nadia Boulanger, who had taught American composers since Aaron Copland in 1921. In Europe, when Glass arrived, the dominant musical force was serialism, a harsh, dissonant, angular style derived from the themes and music of Arnold Schoenberg and his disciples. Pierre Boulez, who ran the Domaine Musicale concert series in Paris, was the most influential composer in the city. Glass did not like that style. “And what I did is, I met Ravi Shankar and, working with some of his film scores, I began to think about rhythmic structures,” Glass says. “I saw that there were other ways of organizing music that were extremely powerful ones, and I got involved in cyclic music and repetitive structures.” He traveled to India to study, and returned to Paris. By the time Glass got back to New York, in 1967, he was writing music that was beginning to be minimal. •

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Steve Reich also followed the academic route, first at Cornell, then at Juilliard and later at Mills College in California, where he studied with composers Darius Milhaud and Luciano Berio; he received a master’s from Mills in 1963. Reich, too, was writing music that he ultimately rejected. “My thesis piece at Mills College, my MA,” he says, “was a third-stream piece, for piano, bass, drums, trumpet and alto sax. And it stunk. It was full of 12-tone licks. It was arch and artificial and phony as the day is long, neither good 12-tone music nor good jazz.”

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In California he started working with taped sounds and electronic instruments. He played in the world premiere of Terry Riley’s “In C,” a seminal work for the minimalist movement. He was influenced by Riley, who in turn had been influenced by Young. Reich also became fascinated with African drumming, an interest which eventually, in 1970, took him to Ghana to study the music firsthand. He began experimenting with tape loops, pieces of taped sound turned back on themselves to repeat endlessly. Two important early works, “It’s Gonna Rain” and “Come Out,” took brief phrases and manipulated them until the sounds became something completely different and surprisingly musical. Reich also worked with phase relations, in which two or more instruments, playing the same pattern, start simultaneously but gradually move more and more out of step. This results in complex rhythms out of which strong patterns emerge and change almost imperceptibly. La Monte Young is often considered the granddaddy of the minimalists, even though they are all contemporaries. His influence is surprisingly broad—besides writing the first true minimal work, he also organized the first SoHo loft concerts, in Yoko Ono’s loft, trained some of the members of the Velvet Underground rock group, and originated the Fluxus jazz movement. Young was born in a tiny Mormon community in Idaho. His family moved to Los Angeles when he was a boy, and his first musical interests were in jazz: He started playing the saxophone at age 7. His musical education, although heavily jazz-oriented, also had room for the European tradition. Aside from playing with such men as trumpeter Don Cherry and drummer Billy Higgins, he also studied with pianist Leonard Stein, a disciple of Arnold Schoenberg after Schoenberg settled in California as a refugee from Hitler. But Young also became interested in Indian music, which was just becoming heard in the West in the mid-’50s, and he was fascinated with the idea of the unchanging tone, the drone. In 1958, Young wrote the “Trio for Strings,” a work so static that it takes many minutes just to play a few notes. Shortly afterward, Reich at Juilliard heard a tape of the work. “I thought it was trash,” he says. Young was also influenced by the chance music of John Cage and worked with some of Cage’s disciples in Europe. Out of that came such works as his butterfly piece: The performer releases a butterfly in a room; when the butterfly flies out of the room, the piece is over. But if that were all he had done, as Reich says, Young would just be a footnote to Cage. He has been deeply involved in exploring acoustics,

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harmonics, overtones and Indian singing. His main work, “The WellTuned Piano,” is a lengthy, semi-improvised solo performance on a Bösendorfer piano that he has painstakingly tuned to a pitch series based on an E flat seven octaves below the lowest E flat on an ordinary instrument. The work, in progress since 1964, takes from three to five hours to perform. Most performances recently (the last was in 1981) have been given in a 30-foot-high room in the Tribeca section of Manhattan, on the West Side below Canal Street. Young, Marian Zazeela, a visual artist who is Young’s wife, and Pandit Pran Nath, a raga singer who is their teacher, have studios there in the former New York Mercantile Exchange building, bought for them by the Dia Art Foundation, which supports them and several other artists. The performance room itself is the former tradings floor of the exchange, now carpeted and bathed in a rich, dim, reddish-purple light devised by Zazeela and called “The Magenta Lights.” Young himself is a paradoxical sort, a man whom Reich calls “a true, pedigreed American crank in the best sense of the word.” He refuses to let himself be photographed except by his own photographers; before being interviewed, he requires the interviewer to sign a two-page document about the conditions of the discussion, and has two tape recorders set up to record it. He wants, he says, to try to control how his work is presented to the world, and to control that work as well. “Even though I may have the charisma to be a personality, and even though I have created a movement here, and even though I have influenced generations of composers, I’m not interested in being a personality figure, promoting my image, my face.” Dressed from cap to trousers in an Indian suit of raw cotton, his graying beard and hair carefully knotted, Young sets out an array of pills on the table before him, uses a specially made hearing aid resembling a miniature Walkman, and takes deep gulps from a bottle of mineral water. Yet he is quite aware of the difficulties his uncompromising stand creates for his work, speaks frankly of how his unbending attitude has lost him recording opportunities in the past, and how the fact that he refuses to release his scores publicly has condemned his music to be more rumored about than heard. “There are certain works that I just won’t even give to other performers to do, such as ‘The Well-Tuned Piano,’ ” he says in a gentle, slightly nasal voice. “With the ‘Dream House’ group and ‘Well-Tuned

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Piano,’ probably when I die I’ll pass it on . . . but as long as I’m alive, I feel that I perform it enough, and we’re hoping to get a recording.” •

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If La Monte Young was the first to experiment with long-held tones and static compositions, Terry Riley was the first to write a widely influential minimal piece. Riley was studying and working in California during the early 1960s when Young and Reich were there. Although his musical style has since evolved much further in the direction of Mideastern song and improvisation, Riley’s “In C” is generally considered an important minimal work. Reich was one of the musicians in the world premiere, and “In C,” released on a since-deleted Columbia Masterworks album, was the first commercial recording of minimalist music. “The climate of the ’60s was so different from what it is today,” Riley says over the telephone from his home near Nevada City, Calif. “There was an emerging recognition of the inner consciousness, psychedelics, LSD. The classical music of the day was not very attractive to most young musicians . . . it was very morbid, dark and brooding. I was interested in a more uplifting, more ecstatic, more kinetic, high-energy music. I wanted to try to steer serious new music into a more meaningful and lively form. Young introduced the spirit of this to other composers; ‘In C’ was the work that kind of gave it a broad popularity,” he says. “Now I’ve grown into other forms.” •

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Of these composers, John Adams is the leading member of the second generation, though of course, he, too, dislikes being called a minimalist. “My music is a little too rich,” he says, “but the fact of the matter is, when you say ‘minimalism,’ people think of Reich, Glass, Riley, me.” Born in Worcester, Mass., Adams, like Glass and Reich, followed the academic route. He was graduated from Harvard, earning both bachelor’s (1969) and master’s (1971) degrees there, and his primary teacher was composer Leon Kirchner. While at Harvard, he played clarinet with the Boston Symphony. He also received two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Guggenheim fellowship. During the late ’70s, Adams worked with Reich for a while, and he candidly acknowledges Reich’s influence. Adams helped devise the San Francisco Symphony’s “New and Unusual Music” series and has directed it since its inception in 1980. That

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series led to a composers-in-residence program at seven orchestras nationwide; Adams is one of those composers, in San Francisco. He, more than the others, has relatively close ties to the musical establishment, although that did not prevent audiences at Avery Fisher Hall from booing a performance last summer of his “Grand Pianola Music” by the New York Philharmonic. Three of his major works are scheduled for release this year on major record labels: “Harmonium,” for chorus and orchestra, recorded by the San Francisco Symphony, on ECM; “Grand Pianola Music,” by flutistconductor Ransom Wilson and the Solisti New York, on Angel; and “Shaker Loops,” by the San Francisco Symphony, on Philips. “Minimalism,” Adams says, “is a helpful term for a certain movement, a housecleaning of procedure, practices and complexities.” The minimal movement, he says, is “very healthy. One problem of much of the 20th Century avant-garde is that it cut off the past, like you hate your parents.” The minimalist composers, he says, have a great awareness of the past, of tonality and consonance, of rhythm and structure, “but done in a new length—the length of time spent on a chord and the harmonies are new, but there is a resonance.” •

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There is no question that minimalism is popular among a fairly broad public. That does not mean it is popular among other composers. In fact, one doesn’t have to scratch too far to find highly regarded composers who dislike the movement intensely. Charles Wuorinen, a composer usually identified as a member of the American academic avant-garde, makes no secret of his distaste. The music is popular, he says, because “the materials it uses are very simple, very familiar sounding. That is the primary reason a lot of people who are not musically trained find it engaging.” Another reason, Wuorinen argues, is that the audience today is “almost completely illiterate musically.” “Comparing any modern audience with 19th- and 18th-Century audiences is completely impossible,” he says. “Audiences then were better educated. The upper class, which was the audience in those days, before the Congress of Vienna, were people for whom the ability to play an instrument and compose were an indispensable part of a general education.” Wuorinen considers minimalism’s popularity a manifestation of larger problems: a refusal to acknowledge any difference between art

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and entertainment (“Entertainment requires no effort from the receiver; art does”), and a refusal to acknowledge the existence of a hierarchy of values (“We don’t want to say it is more important to be a composer than a garbage collector”). “To write that a rock singer and an art singer are the same is really wrong,” Wuorinen says. “It is an aspect of a society-wide mental illness.” Composer Leon Kirchner, who was Adams’s teacher at Harvard, calls the minimalists “the entropy composers . . . the last stage of the universe, the white noise. After the TV goes off, the stuff that remains on the screen . . . Which is very poetic, I suppose.” He has a higher regard for Adams, who “has in his repertoire a rather commanding memory of past music and past harmony,” than for Reich or Glass. Composers such as Glass, Kirchner feels, “are essentially sublime titillators; they titillate the bourgeoisie. I don’t mean that disrespectfully; in a certain way, they are poets—at least they are dealing with society as it is today.” Although Kirchner considers minimalism “humanistically negative,” he admits he is attracted to it: “My ear does not reject it.” But when he went to a showing of “Koyaanisqatsi,” a film for which Glass wrote the score, Kirchner decided that there were similarities with the richly harmonized music of Anton Bruckner. “But unlike Bruckner,” Kirchner says, “it had no sense of the immense harmonic language; it sounded like lobotomized Bruckner. I don’t enjoy lobotomized; give me Bruckner.” (“Koyaanisqatsi” was named “best film score of 1983” by the Los Angeles Film Critics, and Glass’ opera “Satyagraha” was cited by the National Institute for Music Theater in February as an “outstanding new work in opera.”) Perhaps the most balanced response from a non-minimal composer comes from Jacob Druckman, currently composer-in-residence at the New York Philharmonic, where he conducted Adams’ “Grand Pianola Music” during last spring’s new-music festival. Describing the booing which greeted the work, Druckman describes it as “a smart-alecky piece, sort of épater la bourgeoisie [shock the middle class], playing a simple tune over and over with a big, pompous, pianistic style. I imagine it was the uptown crowd booing. “I think minimalism is a good movement,” Druckman says, “kind of a grassroots breakthrough. It may be a passing phase, as the early operas were. Reich and Phil and John may move away from it. But

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something has really turned around; there was a basic upheaval in the last 15 years or so.” Despite the surface simplicity of the minimal style, it is often quite complex for the performers and, ultimately, for the listeners. Reich’s “Tehillim,” a setting of Hebrew psalms, which the New York Philharmonic performed to open its 1982–83 season, was the hardest piece Zubin Mehta has ever led, the conductor says. “It was 275 pages,” Mehta says, “and every bar has a new [time] signature . . . The public loved it—it is exotic, and the public ate it up. We are coming back to some sort of simplicity. Maybe one needs it today.” Mehta is planning to perform “Tehillim” next season in Tel Aviv with the Israel Philharmonic, of which he is also music director. The work certainly made an impression, for during the recent interview he began whistling the opening theme. “I still remember it,” Mehta said. “Maybe this simple form will grow into something like a tree of life.” “Tree of life” or “end of the universe,” the minimal style has already had an effect on contemporary music. It certainly is a lot more fun—and more absorbing—to listen to than, say, the latest collection of bloops, beeps and bangs arranged around the retrograde inversion of some mathematically correct but aurally impenetrable tone-row. Right now in musical history, it is more important that audiences be eager to listen than that composers be pure.

alan licht, “minimal top ten” (1996) I know what you’re thinking: ECM records, new age, Eno ambients, NPR, Tangerine Dream.7 Well forget all that shit. Minimalism may have never had an ESP, BYG, or SST and was probably best appreciated in live contexts allowing for extended time durations, but there are a clutch of total indie releases from the last three decades that document the purest peaks of this misunderstood music better than its diluted major-label sign posts. If you like Borbetomagus, Blowhole, or Rudolph Grey, you should know about Ayler, Cecil, and Brotzmann, right? Well, if you like Krautrock, Stereolab, Metal Machine Music, Branca/ Chatham, Nico, or Spacemen 3, you should check this junk out. Unfortunately, these disks turn up even less frequently than free jazz rarities,

“Alan Licht’s Minimal Top Ten,” Halana, no. 1 (March 1996). Copyright Alan Licht.

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but CD reissues are happening, so stay tuned. Some easier to find stuff to give you a clue: Terry Riley: A Rainbow in Curved Air; In C (Columbia) La Monte Young: Second Dream of the High Tension Line Stepdown Transformer (Gramavision) Philip Glass: Music with Changing Parts (Point) Steve Reich: Early Works (Elektra/Nonesuch); Drumming (Elektra/ Nonesuch) Phill Niblock: Music by (Experimental Intermedia) Gavin Bryars: Jesus Blood Never Failed Me Yet; Sinking of the Titanic (Point) 1. Charlemagne Palestine—Four Manifestations on Six Elements—(Castelli-Sonnabend, 1974) As far as I’m concerned, THE ultimate obscure minimalist grail item. Palestine is by far the most eccentric, enigmatic, and forgotten of the original NYC minimalists. He was known primarily for his piece Strumming Music, in which his two fisted Bosendorfer Imperial Grand piano playing produced a virtual cloud of harmonics, as well as synthesizer and vocal works similarly preoccupied with overtones. He was an intensely physical performer on par with Iggy Pop who wore a cowboy hat, served the audience cognac, chainsmoked clove cigs, and kept a pile of stuffed animals near him at all times (Tom Johnson’s great Voice of New Music book has several accounts of his concerts). Towards the end of the 70s, he withdrew from the music scene, his concerts often consisting solely of insulting the audience, either as a whole, or, in at least one instance, on an individual basis until no one was left! Palestine reappeared briefly in the late 80s at a Bosendorfer festival and in Europe, but he has concentrated on sculpture for the last decade plus. Anyway, Castelli-Sonnabend (the gallery that handled Palestine’s art in the 70s—he was doing visual art and video then, too) issued this double LP in 1974 in a plain gatefold sleeve with a xerox of a Palestine drawing on the cover. It contains two sides of piano music and two of synthesizer work, and provides a fairly representative look at his work of the period. Strumming Music was issued on an equally obscure Shandar LP, and both Neutral and New Albion scheduled Palestine releases in the 80s, neither of which materialized. The good news is that the Dutch label Barooni is reissuing Four Manifestations on CD in August.

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Hopefully that and Palestine’s cover story in Sonic Youth’s fan club magazine, Sonic Death (with an excellent bio/essay from the CD and my own “interview” with Palestine) will generate some new interest in this sorely neglected and totally fascinating character. 2. Terry Riley—Reed Streams (Mass Arts, 1966) According to legend, only 1,000 of these were privately pressed, and then 500 were shipped immediately to Scandinavia! The first-ever minimal LP, this is perhaps the most unfindable item on the list—even Thurston [Moore] doesn’t own it. Fortunately, a friend of mine found it in a Bleeker St. tourist trap not long ago, so at least I got to hear it. Side One is Riley playing organ, kind of a preliminary sketch for his dizzying Keyboard Study No. 2 (on BYG). The flip, “Dorian Reeds,” outlines the echoing sax lines that would ultimately become “Poppy Nogood’s Phantom Band” [from Riley’s second Columbia LP, A Rainbow In Curved Air—ed.]. Riley originated the human tape-loop/incessant 2–3 note repetitive style here, to which jokers like Fripp, Glass, and Reich owe their collective livelihoods. Terry has a swank pad out in Mill Valley, though, so it’s not like he didn’t make the bux or anything, so that’s cool. Not his best album, but a great relic. Other Riley rarities include Happy Ending (French Warner Brothers) and Persian Surgery Dervishes (Shanti, now on CD), which often surpass his fine Columbia recordings. 3. La Monte Young—The Black Record (Edition X, West German, 1969); Bootleg (Italy, 1992) It’s a toss-up. The infamous Black Record was issued by Heiner Friedrich’s gallery in ’69 in a gorgeous black sleeve with Marian Zazeela symmetrical designs on it. La Monte and Marian sing against sine waves on one side and bow gongs on the other—both magnificent sounds. The bootleg LP surfaced for about half a minute in 1992. Taken from a German radio broadcast, it features tapes of the Theatre of Eternal Music with Tony Conrad, John Cale, and Angus MacLise, the 1964 version of The Well Tuned Piano, and a later group (featuring Lee Konitz) at a Metropolitan Museum of Art concert in 1973. No gatefold, disco sleeve with lame paste-on to shrink wrap. Often heralded as the father of minimalism, La Monte has actually delved further into Cage’s parapsychedelic notions of the nature and perception of sound than any other composer. As a listener, I’ve always found Young to be the great

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missing link between the Velvets, Coltrane ca. Impressions, and the later Riley/Glass/Reich crowd. These LPs, especially the boot, make this clear in a way that his (still worthwhile) Gramavision CDs don’t. Hopefully someday La Monte will release a definitive collection of his 60s/70s sounds—until then, this’ll have to do. 4. Steve Reich—Four Organs (Shandar, 1971) Steve Reich’s 1978 Music for 18 Musicians, along with Einstein on the Beach, put Minimalism on the map media/sales-wise, inadvertently paving the way for new age and other atrocities, but it changed my life when I first heard it as a teenager in the mid-’80s. It sounds schmaltzy now, but Reich’s earlier “phase” work (such as this LP) holds up quite well. With a beautiful gatefold sleeve featuring a highly appropriate still from Michael Snow’s film Wavelength, and two pretty raucous sounding organ pieces, this is my fave Reich album. I also recommend “Come Out” and “It’s Gonna Rain” in which tape loops go in and out of phase with each other, resulting in unpredictable sonic and rhythmic phenomena, and “Piano Phase” which transfers the technique to performance (especially the Group 180 version on Hungaroton). It’s worth noting that I partly joined Run ON because one of the songs on their demo tape reminded me of Steve Reich. 5. Phill Niblock—Nothin’ to Look at, Just a Record (India Navigation, 1979) Niblock’s power drones are best experienced live, preferably blasting in his NYC loft accompanied by his odd films of Third World laborers. This is a pretty cool LP though, with a plain white sleeve with the titles and his name on it (India Navigation released a slew of free jazz and minimal LPs in the late 70s, kind of a domestic Shandar). The two pieces feature trombones and sine waves but sound like fog horns played through a wall of Marshalls. Both are included on a Blast First double CD, A Young Person’s Guide to Phill Niblock, and are even more devastating on CD. 6. Henry Flynt—You Are My Everlovin’ (cassette, 1987) An early compatriot of Young’s (and even a one-night replacement for Cale in the Velvets) artist/philosopher Flynt is hardly a member of the

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new music “scene” (thank Christ). Taken from a 1981 Inroads concert and issued in ’87 in a cassette-only edition of 350, You Are My Everlovin’ finds Flynt playing an amplified violin against tapes of tambouras and beautifully delineates the similarities between Indian classical, “Heroin,” and Hillbilly music. Absolutely stunning, absolute obscure, most deserving of CD reissue.

7. Tony Conrad—Outside the Dream Syndicate (Caroline, 1974) Until it was reissued on CD a year or two back, this was truly a fabled LP. Thanks to the resurgence of interest in Krautrock, this classic collaboration between Faust and Conrad is available again. This is the one and only commercially released recording to approximate the sound of the original Theatre of Eternal Music in any way. Though it makes a few rockist concessions in the form of thudding bass and drums, Tony’s just-intonation violin playing really soars and, for me, defines the drone aesthetic. He remains the genre’s most underrated player and most underacknowledged pioneer. The follow-up CD, Slapping Pythagoras is as good if not better (Tony once complained to me of being mixed “like a hippie” on this album)—I wonder if Albini sent the Didjits a copy? Hope so. Maybe someday Tony’s blistering late 80s piece “Early Minimalism” will be released or his fabulous harmonium soundtrack to Piero Heliczer’s early 60s film The New Jerusalem.

8. Jon Gibson—Two Solo Pieces (Chatham Square, 1977) Even though I like Philip Glass’ early LPs, he doesn’t really need any more publicity, does he? But this LP, released in ’77 on his Chatham Square label, deserves a little more recognition. Gibson has been a saxist/vocalist with Glass for decades and has played with Young and others. The pipe organ piece here, “Cycles,” sustains one massive sonic texture for twenty minutes, one of the ultimate organ drones on record. I can’t say I remember the alto flute piece on side two as well. Gibson’s 1993 CD In Good Company features some otherwise unrecorded early Reich, Glass and Riley pieces and a Young cameo on an early Terry Jennings tune (one of Young’s cronies who never recorded commercially), but this is really the one to hunt down.

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9. Remko Scha—Machine Guitars (Kremlin, 1982) Scha is a Dutch composer who uses metal brushes, saws, ropes, and bars to “play” open strings on electric guitars “without human control or interference.” The results are kind of like a cross between Rhys Chatham, Palestine, even Glass (rhythm-wise). If you’re looking for a celebrity endorsement, one track was recorded by Mark Abbott of Sick Dick and the Volkwagens fame, this album was distributed by Neutral, and Thurston mentioned an upcoming Ecstatic Peace release. Incidentally, my own screwdriver-on-strings guitar piece “Betty Page” on Sink the Aging Process sounds a bit like Scha, although I’d never heard him until after I’d recorded it. 10. Terry Fox—Berlino (Het Apollohuis, 1983) Another visual artist/musician, I know little about Fox other than this LP. The first side features a series of repetitive sounds juxtaposed in a linear progression—quaint, I guess. The second side, “Rallentando,” with cellos and stretched piano wires is more like it, twenty minutes of sparkling harmonics and deep, winding drones. A real sleeper. 10a. Richard Youngs—Advent (No Fans, 1990) Richard has released a slew of albums on his own and with Simon Wickham-Smith in the last few years, but this is the homemade treasure that got the ball rolling. A three-part composition for piano, voice, and ultra-nasty oboe and electric guitar, this LP indicated signs of life in a genre long dormant in the Zorn-centric 80s “experimental” scene. It continues the tradition from Reed Streams on down with gusto.

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chapter 14

Backlash

Backlash has remained ever present in musical minimalism: retellings of a Carnegie Hall audience that heckled a performance of Steve Reich’s Four Organs in 1973 have become as familiar as the Rite of Spring riot is to histories of modernism.1 Concertgoers jumping on stage to try to stop Philip Glass from playing; denunciations by uptown academics; screeds in the neoconservative magazine New Criterion: these moments allowed minimalism to retain its countercultural cachet even as it became the mainstream of contemporary composition.2 An early wave of backlash came from audiences and writers perplexed by La Monte Young’s drones and Glass’s amplification, but in the 1980s backlash came from the acknowledgment that minimalism was a charting cultural phenomenon. In lengthy ripostes against the music, cultural critics like Ian MacDonald and Samuel Lipman—who described Reich and Glass as “no more than a pop music for intellectuals”—feared that the music’s repetition and popularity boded ill for a post-1960s society.3 But pushback also came from musicians who had tired of the canonization. The young composer Beth Anderson wrote pithy denunciations of Glass and Reich in her “Report from the Front,” a DIY zine assessing the New Music, New York festival.4 And Charlemagne Palestine, one of the early and more gonzo minimalists, railed against the music’s marketability and sell-out success in a raw, embittered interview from Paris, where he decamped after burning out of the SoHo scene.

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beth anderson on the first night of new music, new york at the kitchen (1979) After all these years, Mr. Reich is too fucking loud. Men hitting things. I remember hearing this piece in 1973 in a big church in Berkeley and it was voluptuous. His music needs a hall with high ceilings and rugs. Aside from the sound, the formality is reassuring—rather like having your parents stay together for your sake. Comforting, but bad for the stomach. But, it’s fun for the players—wearing black shirts and getting off beating skins. •

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“Sing only long tones. Contribute one of your own and then tune to someone else’s.” Ms. [Pauline] Oliveros disappeared and waves of pitches appeared. Power tripping by the audience. Everyone wants everyone else to sing their pitch. It sounds like an Orff-sound-alike-at-the-movies, just before the wife goes insane. It really is gorgeous. She wears red—looks red—has amulet and Indian overlay—looks comfortable without shoes. She is pulling the sound out of us and we get off. It’s like the Episcopal church where everyone sings almost everything—participation—but better, since it’s not possible to be out of tune. For this one, there is great admiration. •

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Mr. Glass got a haircut. He, with Mr. Reich, believes in the great spirit of amplitude—but he reminds me of Bach. Organists through the centuries. Electric organ with beautiful pedals—played with boots at a slant. That constant five-finger technique, lots of notes flashing by— genuine harmonic and timbral alternations (to be “changes” he’d have to stop going round and round and round). The bass movement cannot make up for the fact that the longer he does this to me, the louder it seems. He and Mr. Reich resemble each other more than they know. If this is church, why has God sent this music to me, and if it’s pop music, why can’t I have a drink? •

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Excerpt from “Reviews for the Critics: June 8 at The Kitchen.” Courtesy of Beth Anderson.

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“Hey, Hey, Hey” to Ms. [Meredith] Monk with the flower in her hair. The piano repeats sounding like rhythm back-up for a folk-rock band, but the singing over top is like nothing except Monk. The second song (doo-who-yin) becomes echoes of “dyin” and seems to be what to sing if you’re an ancient french laundry woman kvetching about work on an expressive day. Then, she gets going and just takes me away and whatever she’s doing is so strong, so tough, so real, so herself—it makes people cry. It’s theatre in sound. She did two slow ones and a fast number and did every kind of singing in the top of the spectrum. •

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The concert presented: the loud, the beautiful, the very loud, the amazing, and the agonizing. Mr. [Robert] Ashley, a truly wonderful composer on every other occasion, is the representative for the last category. Tonight he is like all the rest of the boys—too fucking loud. The saving grace is that it’s an old piece and it uses the wretched volume to endeavor to say something. Looking at his pained expression as he screams, I know how he feels. It may be important, but it sure is painful. Why does everyone like this freaked out violence number? With the planets lining up at seventeen degrees, we can hope for the end of the world and the rebirth of acoustic life.

ian macdonald on minimalism ( the face , 1987) There it goes again. And again. And again. The most obvious thing about Minimalism, apart from the fact that it’s getting quite chic to own some, is that it repeats itself a lot—rather like Andy Warhol’s Monroe/ soup-can/Coke-bottle icons. Blink-blink-blink, it goes (or fiddly-iddlyiddly, if it’s by the movement’s commercial main man Philip Glass). And, boy, does it go—on and on and on like some tireless Italian robofactory humming inhumanly through the night. Of course, Minimalism isn’t entirely mechanical, its composers being eager to explain that, though it sounds repetitive, their music is actually subtly irregular when you peer closer—and hence the fascination (or, as

Ian MacDonald, “What Is the Use of Minimalism,” The Face 38 (March 1987). Courtesy of the estate of Ian MacDonald.

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they would say, the “interest”). However, it’s a safe bet that most of the audiences for Minimalism enjoy it chiefly as noise: a vibrating, pulsating, hurtling vortex of pure physical sound. That this happens to be produced by a high rate of short-term repetition within a slow rate of overall change is too manifest to the average listener to seem worth talking about. She or he isn’t concerned with causes but effects, which, luckily enough, is fine by the Minimalists, all of whom are high-IQ intellectuals keen to be thought of as regular guys. Not that they don’t regard themselves as serious artists—they do-dodo. The recent success story of Minimalism is all the more remarkable for the fact that less than a decade ago it was the exclusive preserve of the cerebral avant-garde and confined to audiences of dozens in New York lofts. Now it’s accompanying the torch ceremony at the Olympics and making the charts. Schoenberg should be so lucky. So here, at last, we have bonafide Pop Art—not concepts nicked from serious artists by opportunist entertainers, but serious artists discovering themselves to be viable within the commercial mainstream. Quel paradox. What can this betoken and is it good for us? That it’s good for the Minimalists goes without saying. No longer restricted to cannibalised tape-decks, cheap electric organs and bongos, they now dispose of symphony orchestras, compose film-scores, and stage grand operas. Classical critics, until a few years ago smilingly confident that the words “Minimalism” and “charlatanism” were interchangeable, have gone all quiet and provisional. Some are clearly waiting to see if it all blows over and Big Bands come back. Others are casting themselves in masochistic ecstasy at the feet of those they formerly reviled, hailing them as latter-day prophets bringing visions of childlike purity and simplicity from their years of meditation in the musical desert. By their Compact Discs, ye shall know them. Uncoincidentally, the desert happens to be a key image in Minimalist symbology. In Philip Glass’s score for Godfrey Reggio’s film Koyaanisqatsi, it symbolizes stillness, nature, and the spiritual values lost by our machine civilization, with which it stands contrasted. In Steve Reich’s cantata The Desert Music (Nonesuch 989-101), played in the 1985 Proms to an ovation, it signifies something more ambiguous: a place of mirage and hallucination where monumental silence threatens the mind and sinister weapons are forged in the restless depths of the earth. These two views of the desert—as a redemptive limbo of healing simplicity and as a maddening sensory-deprivation chamber—reflect

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Minimalism back at itself. In the rippling heat-haze of critical uncertainty radiating around this very peculiar music, these twin ideas, like two towering buttes at either end of a mazy canyon, provide a vital means of orientating ourselves when we get lost. Which we will, you see, since losing yourself is what Minimalism is all about. Currently around 23 years old, Minimalism first came pulsing out of the California haze in the slippery shape of Terry Riley’s celebrated In C of 1964. It has since passed through three stages of growth, being a concept until c. 1968, staying in development between then and c. 1978, and thereafter becoming a property (i.e. major record company action). Currently in the throes of a career-decision, it may soon need to make its move or fail to achieve the full Yuppie status it is clearly heading for. (In purely marketing terms, Minimalism is New Age music for people who live so fast that, when they relax, they don’t so much slow down as glide for a couple of hours.) There are, in effect, only three Minimalist composers, all of them American and all 50 years old: Riley, from San Francisco; Glass, born in Baltimore and raised in New York; and Reich, about equally East and West coast with his centre of gravity in the Mojave Desert. There are other participants—British composer Michael Nyman (The Draughtsman’s Contract, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat) and fellow ex-residents of Eno’s Obscure label like John White and Gavin Bryars; plus the second generation American Minimalist John Adams, born in New England and now living in San Francisco. But basically Minimalism is Riley, Reich, and Glass’s game, all else being derivation and variation. Geography and a single technical device determine each member of this triumvirate. Californian Riley is mellow and improvises with tapedelay; New Yorker Glass is austere and into additive process; hybrid Reich is austerely mellow and likes phase-shifting. The root of Minimalism being repetition, their music is nonetheless unanimously flat, streamlined, kaleidoscopic, and benignly impersonal. Now and then resembling a Calder mobile and occasionally something smooth and tubular from the Bauhaus, it’s an art of speed, sheen, and surface ideally suited to the depthless present-time disposition of modern living. In every possible way, Minimalism is very NOW. You’ll be relieved to hear that there’s no room in this piece for further elucidation of the Minimalist techniques listed above. Wim Merten’s book American Minimal Music (Kahn & Averill, 1983) takes care of all this and there are copious explanations of their every dot and squiggle by the Minimalists themselves in their exhaustingly conscientious

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sleeve-notes. All that really needs to be said in a general way about the technical side of Minimalism is that, considering the childish simplicity of its material, it is astonishing how much its composers can find to discuss at the level of concept (though the need to do so is nothing more surprising than an understandable compulsion to justify themselves). John Cage’s theory of art as “purposeless play” is not far behind the immediate facade of Minimalism and listeners confronted with, say, the early drum-and-xylophone compositions of Reich will be struck by their resemblance to the sort of tinkling cacophony music-teachers require from classes of very tiny infants. Of course, these are grown men with diplomas and their banging and tinkling is far more complicated than anything a congregation of tots could aspire to—but the procedures used differ only in degree. Minimalists want to awaken the child in us and the simplicity of their methods is not accidental. Of course, for adults to be genuinely simple without being boring or silly is extremely difficult and the great handicap of Minimalism is its abiding sense of false naivety, of big boys and girls capering about in t-shirts, dungarees, and plimsoles, “being themselves” (known in the world of ballet as the Twyla Tharp Syndrome). Since San Francisco is, among other things, the false naivety capital of the world, it’s no surprise that Minimalism began pulsing and tinkling there, or that the pulse’n’tinkle strain of contemporary Minimalism (now only one of several types of Minimalist sound) is the recognized water-mark of the movement’s SF wing. As it left its “concept” stage and passed into “development,” Minimalism began to shed some of these associations. Reich and Glass, more highly trained and less spontaneous than Riley, could see that they were onto something and wanted to experiment with it for its own sake. Riley, one of the original San Francisco hippies, took the mellow line and opted for purposeless play. After initial crossover success with In C (shortly to be reissued on CBS) and A Rainbow In Curved Air, he dropped out of the competitive arena to make the sort of records he and his friends liked. In international terms, he has never been seen again. Meanwhile, Reich and Glass pushed their techniques into new areas, notably electric ones, and by 1970 were producing violently rebarbative walls of sound reminiscent of John Cale’s organ freak-out on Sister Ray. (Cale had been involved in the American avant-garde from the start of the Sixties, playing with Riley and in La Monte Young’s Theatre of Eternal Music. He and Riley recorded Church of Anthrax together in 1970.) Remnants of this period can be found in Glass’s Music in

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12 Parts (Caroline CA 2010) and North Star (Virgin OVED 151), and in Reich’s Four Organs/Phase Patterns now deleted. Only those looking to get a screaming migraine need apply. Soon after this, both men hit on the styles with which they have stuck ever since. Reich found euphony and a dreamlike sonority influenced by Miles Davis’s In a Silent Way, producing Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices, and Organ (once available in a boxed set with the epic Drumming, but now issued separately with Six Pianos on Deutsche Grammophone 3335 463). Glass met the even more dreamlike theatre-director Robert Wilson and with him created the four-hour “opera” Einstein on the Beach (CBS M4 38875) which became the unlikeliest international hit of 1976. From this point on, it’s been mainly a question of getting the sound right. Glass, who actually enjoys sitting in recording studios, has brought multi-tracking procedures to opera with Satyagraha (CBS 13M 39672) and moved cautiously into what, in New York, is called ArtRock with Songs From Liquid Days (CBS FM 39564). Reich, less flexible, has concentrated on developing his colors by using larger and richer ensembles, as in his Variations for Winds, Strings, and Keyboards (Philips 412-214), performed by the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra. The gap between the concept and the record of it is closing, the techniques are now polished to a deep shine, and year by year Minimalism becomes more blandly perfect than ever. But does it MEAN anything? Until some way into its “development” period, its composers would have been proud to reply “certainly not.” According to the younger Glass, Minimalism was to be listened to as “a pure sound-event, an art without dramatic structure.” Standing only for itself, it expressed nothing and to look for content beyond form was to miss the point. What was important, said Glass, was “the immediate physiological effect on the listener”—pure body music. In fact, the same can still be said of quite recent Minimalist releases, such as Glass’s 1982 album Glassworks (CBS 73640) or Reich’s latest, Sextet (Nonesuch 979-138). However, times and job-opportunities change and the fastidious Minimalists, who but a decade ago wouldn’t have been seen dead sporting anything so passé as significance, are now penning scores for films— even films with “dramatic structure” like Paul Schrader’s Mishima (Nonesuch EKT 23)—and setting texts, actual words from dictionaries. Glass has shrewdly attempted to skirt the embarrassment of openly saying anything by hiding in Sanskrit (Satyagraha), Ancient Egyptian (his

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1984 opera Akhnaten), and Gibberish (Einstein on the Beach), whilst Reich has opted for Hebrew (Tehillim, 1981) and the faceless free-verse of William Carlos Williams (The Desert Music). But there’s no escaping it. Those damned “word” things will mean something, however purposelessly you play with them. Minimalism, which started life as respectably mindless as its forebears in philosophy and psychology, Positivism and Behaviourism, has become veritably vulgar with substance. And the tricky bit is that the more, qualitatively speaking, you say—Glass and Reich are talking pacifism, no casual topic—the more a dogmatically frugal expressive medium seems inadequate in conjunction with it. Pulse’n’tinkle rather pales in the context of a nuclear Judgement Day (The Desert Music). A quarter-of-an-hour’s reiteration of musical commonplaces, however beetle-browed with brotherly concern, can never capture the baleful intensity of racial persecution (Satyagraha, Act II, Scene 1). You can’t transcend the mind and apprehend matters of principle at the same time, see the world as a child and as an adult simultaneously. Unless you’re some kind of saint living in some kind of utopia. Minimalism may dress better than it once did, but it’s an old Hippie at heart. Wim Mertens has pointed out that its mystic timelessness and formal egalitarianism (no one element being more important than another) imply a utopian state in which all is One and history at an end—very much the vision touted in the Sixties by such luminaries as Ginsberg, Leary, and The Fugs. According to Hippie philosophy of the period, the main obstacle to the realisation of this utopia is the sense of a separate self. LSD was seen as the revolutionary agent by which this separate self could be dissolved, thereby erasing all differences and plunging humanity into a new world of pure, peaceful sensation. Minimalism, an offshoot of this hedonistic line, was designed to work in a similar way. Surrender your separateness, go with the flow, listen “aimlessly,” said the Minimalists, and you’ll stop hearing repetition and start hearing The Big OM. (La Monte Young: “Get into the sound: The sound is God, I am the sound that is God.”) In 1987, the jargon is more circumspectly cybernetic, but the message is the same: if you want to use this music, you must surrender your “self” to it—i.e. your sense of evaluative separateness, your carping expectations, your obsessive memory—and wander in the streaming semiquavers like a wonder-struck child. If this sounds suspiciously like a rather flowery preview of Rajneesh or Primal Therapy, it’s no coincidence. Much of the Human Potential

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movement in post-Freudian psychology derives from the same Sixties vortex as Minimalism, and the two schools have many elements in common (e.g., bias to present-time, distrust of the intellect and consequent sanctification of feelings, a tendency to avoid difference and conflict by denying their existence, and so on). Not that modern Minimalism is some kind of Trojan Horse, wheeled into our city of mad materialists by Hippie subversives disguised in braces and loafers. No-one’s out to get you with this music. Unfortunately, however, that doesn’t mean you won’t get got. Something happens to people who listen to too much Minimalism. They begin to smile fatuously, display a genially indiscriminate omnitolerance (known to contemporary psychiatry as “the Castella mood”), and put their feet up on your furniture. Some start wearing dungarees and playing with frisbees. At night, the Minimalee’s mind is gridlocked with blink-blinks and fiddle-iddles, his sleep shallow with the hi-fi equivalent of the “bleeping sickness” suffered by compulsive enthusiasts of Space Invaders. Soon it becomes inescapably obvious to even the dullest observer: Minimalees are overgrown kids. This may not seem so catastrophic—after all, our society has been declining steadily towards infantilism ever since The Bomb went off, and there are more immediate threats to civilized values than Minimalist music. Andrew Lloyd Webber, for instance. And, who knows, perhaps being overgrown kids is safer than being underground adults? You pays your money and you takes your pill (or your weekend course in Instant Karma). If Minimalism is the musical edition of LSD, neither Glass nor Reich seems to be aware of it. (Playing the stuff requires such fiendish concentration that they’re probably immune to its effects—although Glass’s music has been showing distinct signs of acid grandiosity for some years.) Though both are intelligent men—Reich holds a philosophy degree—they are musicians first, thinkers some way afterwards. Neither felt comfortable with the Oriental mysticism of Riley and Young, or the libidinal anarchy implicit in the work of Cage and the Fluxus movement, the figures immediately behind Minimalism’s inauguration in the early Sixties. Less interested in the hypnotic aspects of sound than in the sensations to be had from the aural equivalents of “strobing” and Op Art, they are dispassionate technicians throwing switches in perception for the hell of it. Once accused of composing “trance music,” Reich indignantly replied that, on the contrary, he wanted his audience wide awake, aware of details they’d never normally notice.

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The false naivety is typical. Repetition, an established hypnotic technique, is used to induce or maintain trance in religious ceremonies all over the world, the Ghanaian drumming and Balinese gamelan which Minimalism draws on for technical inspiration being specific musical examples of this. Not for nothing has psychology found that repetitive music causes regression. But this merely brings us full-circle back to Riley and his mentors Cage and Young, with their Zen-like formulae for transcending struggle through selflessness—or, for that matter, to the Christian ideal of self-sacrifice and Matthew 18:3. Can Minimalism claim any religious significance? To judge from the pious tone of much of Satyagraha (or of Open the Kingdom from Songs from Liquid Days), Philip Glass at least feels that it can, even if he wouldn’t actually say so. John Adams, too, speaks of the epiphanal effects obtainable from simple key-changes after long periods of mono-tonality. And it’d be silly to deny the possibility of Minimalist music provoking personal revelations or even out-of-thebody experiences, since such things may arise from almost any stimulus if the mind is geared for it. Nevertheless, the spiritual validity of weird perceptions induced by listening to Minimalism is unlikely to be very much greater than similar ones brought on by dropping acid or sticking your fingers in your ears. In the first place, the techniques used in African, Indian, and Indonesian trance music have been worked on for centuries, whereas those of Minimalism are artificial and arbitrary. One of the latter’s pet strategies is “self-generating form,” partially-interlocking figures that automatically create new shapes between themselves as the composition rattles along. (Instant, auto-inflatable music—pour it on score-paper and watch it expand.) Such random methods are hardly comparable with those of the venerable ethnic traditions they imitate. Indeed the very instantaneity of Minimalism tends to disqualify it as religious music, suggesting instead a further parallel with “quick cure” premises of the secular Human Potential cults. Secondly, effects made by sudden interruptions in monotony go no deeper as revelations than a match struck without warning in a darkened room, and claiming otherwise suggests that the Minimalists are, understandably, becoming victims of their own sensory-deprivation experiment. With noses passed against the window-pane of simplistic technique, they’re bound to find the slightest ripple in the glass or passing raindrop an overwhelming experience. As for whether the “serene power and all-encompassing sense of peace” allegedly infusing Glass’s

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epic Satyagraha is actually boredom viewed through rose-tinted guruspecs, this may depend on how seriously you take the opera’s pacifist message. Designer Enlightenment is presumably as much in the mind of the beholder as the real thing. However, the big giveaway about the true nature of Minimalism’s affinity for self-effacement lies in its political aspect. By design nonindividual and pro-collective, this music, whether it likes it or not, is perfectly styled to grace some hi-tech totalitarian state of the near future. The obsession with order, purity of technique, cleanliness of line and execution; the mass production standardization and hypnotic relentlessness; the anti-intellectualism and triumph-of-the-will physiological bias (not to mention the heroic athleticism required to play it); that overbearing monolithic quality—it’s all there. Glass, in particular, with his gradually intensified pressure on the listener’s resistance and the ersatz ecstasy of his cybernaut choruses, is clearly the Albert Speer of contemporary music (or perhaps its Leni Riefenstahl, since there’s no question of his views being other than politically aesthetic). That something like Act III of The Photographer (Epic EPC 25480) would be perfect for some robotic night-rally is amply confirmed by its composer’s anthemic stadium-music for the Los Angeles Olympics. Phil, you’ve got the gig. The Organization wants you. Of course, this is not at all what the Minimalists intended. If any political programme can be attributed to them, it must be the kind of post-industrial rural pacifism invoked by Terry Riley on the sleeve of A Rainbow in Curved Air. But utopianism is notoriously susceptible to the perversions of unanimity, and it is to the utopian ideas of the replaceability of the artist (B. F. Skinner) or that We Are All Artists (Fluxus: the post-Marcuse Left) that Minimalism owes its inevitably corporate character. Let’s be frank: this is leveled music of a sort that almost anyone with the basic skills—or even a moderately intelligent computer—could compose. The truth is that Minimalism is the passionless, sexless, and emotionally blank soundtrack of the Machine Age, its utopian selflessness no more than an expression of human passivity in the face of massproduction and The Bomb. A kind of organized underachievement, its characteristic pulse-rhythm is an artificial substitute for the energy of conviction and its “effects” due not to any effort from artist or audience, but to a negative process of deliberate self-denial. As a music without focus or hierarchy, it’s also without goal or struggle, as inert as the pre-planned corporate life-style for which it is the

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perfect accompaniment. From Hippie to Yuppie, Minimalism is a dripfeed pseudo-art for cultural bottle-babies. Naturally it doesn’t look that way to the Minimalists, who are nothing if not wholesomely sincere. Even at his most pedantically palindromic, Steve Reich’s elfin joy still wafts its fragile way through the whirring fly-wheels. Philip Glass’s Satyagraha, though desperately boring, is never less than nobly conceived and contains several flashes of actual inspiration. But they, like so many other modern artists, are in the grip of a cultural hallucination brought on by the mechanized times in which we live. The best thing he’s done, Glass’s soundtrack for Koyaanisqatsi contains moments of genuine anger, awe, and dread—but the reason it fits Reggio’s images so well is that its modular structure derives from dreams of the very mass-production processes the film is attacking. Glass’s music is a symptom of the society Reggio deplores, not a description of it. One of the Minimalists, however, seems to have realized his situation and started to break out of it. John Adams’ early work—Shaker Loops (Philips 412-214), Harmonium (ECM 12777), and Grand Pianola Music (EMI 270-291)—are oddly composite affairs, setting ur-Minimalist elements of conflict and rapid change within great sticky wodges of urMinimalist bathos and false naivety. (One of these, Harmonium, goes so far as to address the subject of death, which, in the evasively timeless context of Minimalism is tantamount to apostasy—or at the very least to informing a five-year-old that there is no Santa Claus.) Finally, in 1984, Adams let out a blood-curdling yodel and hammered down his cell-door in a fit of creative apoplexy entitled Harmonielehre (Nonesuch 979-115), forty minutes of explosive angst and headlong Stravinskyian energy scored for full orchestra. The false naivety is still there (he calls his finale Meister Eckhardt and Quackie, believe it or not) and the inspiration is, to put it mildly, “eclectic”—but Harmonielehre is Minimalism’s first sign of real life, exuding passion and making the sexless Glass (with his geriatric, ascetic, and hermaphroditic heroes) look conspicuously impotent by comparison. If adulthood consists in acceptance of such things as struggle, conflict, imperfection, time, and death, then Minimalism must be something else—a form of childishness, of regression. Positive claims for its “selflessness” seem impossible to justify. Whether any of it can honestly be recommended is hard to say. A use for it, guaranteed free of deleterious side-effects, is difficult to imagine— but then nothing in this world is foolproof. Harmonielehre, or at least

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its first side, is self-recommending, far and away the best thing the genre has produced. Reich’s Music for a Large Ensemble (ECM 1168), coupled with Octet and Violin Phase, is the perfect record for anyone wishing to gauge his worth at one hearing. (Ransom Wilson’s version of Octet—here called Eight Lines and coupled with Adams’ Grand Pianola Music—is fascinating proof that this music only works at one tempo and that anything even slightly slower sounds constipated.) Best Glass buy is Koyaanisqatsi, temporarily deleted but due for reissue on Island later this year. The insatiably curious will find an idiosyncratic pre-echo of Minimalism in Harry Partch’s own “desert music,” Barstow/Daphne of the Dunes (CBS MS 7207) and a splendidly demented parallel to it in Conlon Nancarrow’s Studies for Player Piano (ARCH 1768), both available only in the import browsers. Currently stocked alongside them are such Riley obscurities as Descending Moonshine Dervishes (Kuckuck 047) and Songs for the Ten Voices of the Two Prophets (Kuckuck 067). Drive carefully.

charlemagne palestine, interviewed by alan licht (1989) “You want to know what I’m doing now?5 That’s an interesting story. You want to know why I stopped? Well I stopped because at a certain point around ’77–’78 I had been living and being with all the people who had started what you would call minimalism, Tony [Conrad], and La Monte [Young] and Terry [Riley] and Phil [Glass] and Steve [Reich]— then I was part of that whole group and around ’77 I became very . . . negative. I began to do things unconsciously that I didn’t understand, and they were very sabatogistic and I didn’t know what I was doing. I was pissing everybody off, I was breaking my bridges. I was hostile to people, I was doing performances and insulting people there—I was doing whatever I could to destroy whatever world I had created ten years before, without knowing, really, why. Then my life began to change and I still wasn’t sure why, but the world I had become a part of, let’s say I was one of the big five of, well there was not a word minimalism before a certain point, but work that just sort of happened

Alan Licht, “Interview with Charlemagne Palestine 9/17/89,” Sonic Death, no. 7 (1996). Copyright Alan Licht.

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had begun to become very hot. And when it became hot I started unconsciously to become very difficult, and I began to become inaccessible and I began to become really an asshole, without knowing why, truly, I didn’t know why. My brother died in 1975: I was invited by Merce Cunningham to one of their pieces by [John] Cage around ’75 and I insulted the entire—I began to become really hostile. But later I began to realize why. And the reason why, I think, is that I really felt that that world, call it minimalism or whatever, whatever that work was about that it had come out of a very spontaneous, unplanned, potentially sacred place, and at that moment, ’76 or ’77, it began to become very marketed, very marketable, and became something I even to this day cannot accept, something very vomititious. And so more and more I began to vomit in public without knowing what I was doing. So if you ask me now what I’ve been doing for the last ten years, I then was involved with a woman who was half Filipino, half Native American, who was devoted to a South Indian dancer named Balasaraswati, who is the greatest Indian dancer of our century—but I was involved with a woman who was also confused by what does it mean to be Asian, to be pure, and it was a relationship that ended in a great disaster. So again I’d have to say that all the messages that the gods—I’m very omenic, I ask the gods every day what do you think I should do? And every day the gods began to tell me “A$$HOLE A$$HOLE there’s nothing to do, there’s only the big bad world and the ancient world and there’s nothing in between.” And so, for the last ten years I did nothing, and now I’m trying to do something, I’m trying to. But I don’t know why, and again, I’m very omenic, and so I’m taking this interview omenically. I throw back to you . . . If someone like me, someone like Tony, someone like La Monte, someone like Terry, and someone like Philip, like us, invented a form that now everybody does what are we supposed to do now? I mean those who took credit for it, they did it, now they’re on the cover of every magazine, they’re these creatures of the media. (laughs) If you were working for the gods, and the gods had decided to make a long distance phone call to talk to me to ask me ‘What am I doing?’ . . . If Vishnu was calling and saying ‘hey this is a telephone call from the Vishnu magazine and we want to know what Krishna’s doing these days,’ what is Krishna supposed to say? Because Krishna loves to play the flute, Krishna loves to fool around with the girls, Krishna loves to be involved with the sacred tasks, but Krishna doesn’t like the whole milieu that Vishnu created. So Krishna asks Vishnu what the fuck is Krishna supposed to do? And if Krishna is forced to play by the rules that Vishnu

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has made, then Krishna don’t wanna play no more. So the real story here is that somebody who really believed in sound, who really believed in the magic of sacred things, who really believed in all these things all these years ago and then got put by the way-side by all this media crap, what do you want me to feel? Now I’m in Paris, I’m even in exile—I was born in Brooklyn, and I don’t even wanna be there—nobody even knows anything we did, there are thousands of people in all these music companies who do all this booshi wooshi wicki dicki meditative music, that don’t even know we exist. I mean what the fuck you want me to feel? Here I am in Paris, I was born in Brooklyn, me and about six other people invented a whole form that nobody even knows we did, what does Vishnu want Krishna to feel? Because Krishna just wants to disappear. If it’s just a lot of booshi wooshi meditative sheeki schmeeki veggi weggi wicki dicki music, if that’s what Vishnu wants—God bless Vishnu—but I’m gone. I’M GONE. Tell Vishnu I’m gone, Krishna’s gone. Why is Vishnu asking this Jewish guy from Poughkeepsie to call me up at midnight in Paris unless Vishnu wants a new deal? And the new deal is we gotta say what was happening, what is happening, was this just aspirin? Were we just making aspirin? Was all of it just about making sonoric aspirin so people could just feel better, or is anybody out there just listening or caring? Because if it’s just about aspirin, good for you, but I’m GONE, I’M OUT, I’M FINISHED, I AM . . . I AM . . . ZIP, I AM ZIP. So (laughs) in that spirit I just say to you, to my (laughs), is there a public? Who is this public? Who are you? All you spiritual, incredibly, students of the gurus, burus, durus, zurus. We created a form and all you did was, like, smell your incense and dress up, and you never know what was going on, and now you’re calling me up saying ‘hey, what are you doing now?’ Krishna’s asking Vishnu, hey asshole, what . . . (laughs), what were you up to, what do you want, because Krishna’s tired of playing this stupid game, and I don’t want a thousand imitators in my way—if I have to compete with a thousand people, I disappear, Krishna is asking Vishnu to get down and say what he ever meant to do and why all this all of a sudden all these assholes are making a lot of money now and Vishnu is not asking Krishna anything except one day out of the blue a Jewish guy from Poughkeepsie calls him up for an interview. Krishna saying FUCK YOU. . . .” (hangs up)

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chapter 15

Politics, Identity, and Expression

By the late 1970s minimalism, for some composers, had become inadequate as a musical language. It was insufficiently political, or insufficiently expressive, or both. A cohort of Dutch composers heard the work of Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and Philip Glass as fresh and intriguing, but, swayed by the fervent socialism that had swept across Europe after 1968, feared that American minimalism was too aesthetically minded and not sufficiently critical.1 Their most prominent member, Louis Andriessen, mixed minimalist ideas with jazz and Stravinskyesque bustle to create toughened, granitic scores for ensembles that subverted the conventional working conditions of classical music. In the states, Julius Eastman embraced another politicized minimalism, one that foregrounded his outsider identity amid a hostile world.2 The dissonance and repetition of his music became a vehicle for a kind of militancy, with compositions whose titles deployed racial epithets and became a source of controversy at a concert he gave at Northwestern University in 1980.3 From a very different vantage point, in the early 1980s the composer John Adams began to utilize minimalist techniques for overtly self-expressive, neo-Romantic ends in large-scale orchestral pieces like Harmonium and Harmonielehre.4 And Reich, in the wake of Music for 18 Musicians, sought a new compositional language that could reflect his identity. Rediscovering Judaism, studying Hebrew, and learning cantillation formed the basis for an engagement with his roots that led to works like Tehillim and 268

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Different Trains.5 “At the age of 37, I had an intuition that maybe what I was looking for as a practice I could find in my own backyard,” the composer said in 1980. “But I would have to pull up the crab-grass, stick in the shovel, turn over the earth, and maybe somewhere I’d find something that was still alive and growing.”6

rudy koopmans interviews louis andriessen, reinbert de leeuw, and misha mengelberg “on the occasion of a concert tour by phil glass” (1976) Louis Andriessen gave the first performance of his composition De Volharding (Perseverance) on 12 May 1972, at an Inclusive Concert in Amsterdam, a music marathon that lasted until the small hours of the morning.7 The work, which employed formal procedures related to those of minimal music, also lent its name to the socialistic collective of musicians that performed it. In the mid-sixties Misha Mengelberg wrote a piano piece in memory of Hans van Zweden that is marked by minimal motifs and shifts and by a continuous pulse. The piece is related in form to the classic American train blues played by boogie-woogie pianists. Reinbert de Leeuw’s repertoire includes Reich’s Piano Phase, but he by no means confines himself to this kind of music. The reactions of the composer-musicians were gathered in individual talks, which are rearranged here systematically rather than chronologically. The first piece is Mengelberg’s analysis of how Duke Ellington’s drummer Sonny Greer ends the Jubilee Stomp. The last piece is Louis Andriessen’s comments on the remarks of the others. Mengelberg:  With a short last beat you have to do something—pinch it. One hand plays the beat and the other pinches it off. Of course you shouldn’t pinch before you play the beat. You have to be aware that you just heard a beat. In a big hall you have to pinch a moment later than in a small one, because in a big hall it takes a little longer for the back rows to realize that they’ve heard a beat. What it adds up to is that a short last beat takes a lot of precision.

Excerpt from Rudy Koopmans, “On Music and Politics: Activism of Five Dutch Composers,” Key Notes 4 (1976): 34–36. Copyright Stichting Donemus Beheer.

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  Now for the long last beat. That is much more difficult. Because how do you know what’s long? I mean, what’s the difference between an average long short last beat and a short long last beat? You can’t begin to answer that question unless you know, for instance, how long the whole piece lasts. If the piece lasts an hour, then the long last beat can take half an hour. But Jubilee Stomp is barely three minutes long. The last beat doesn’t take longer than one or at the most one-and-a-half seconds. But it’s a long last beat. Except that the beat is pinched at the end. So actually it’s a long short last beat. Practically unknown. And why? Because the long short last beat is so difficult. The longer you wait before you pinch, the bigger the chance that you’ll muff it. It’s as simple as that. Don’t forget, we’re talking only about the last beat in thirties music. Then they hit the cymbals before pinching. But you can always delay the pinch. Q:  So that’s the sign of the master—the moment of pinching? Mengelberg:  Yes, exactly. Q:  But what can you do with a long last beat? Mengelberg:  You can wait. Wait until the right moment, until everyone knows that it’s not a short last beat anymore. Q:  So long last beats in the thirties were also pinched, only it took longer? Mengelberg:  Yes, it took longer, as I said, which means that there’s a bigger chance of bungling it. The music of Reich and others like him, that’s long music; even if it doesn’t last as long as a Mahler number; it’s still pretty long. Even a minute of that music is long. And when it lasts for an hour you go through a gamut of emotions, which are sometimes even specified in the score, and you think, “this is really taking a little too long.” The same material is always being repeated or reapproached from a slightly different angle. It doesn’t take long before you know the material itself. Duration is related to the nature of the material, but even more to the assumed emotional state of the listener. They say sometimes that the listeners help create the music. At least that’s what Reich said, in this very room. He was talking about a piece by La Monte Young which consisted entirely of beating a gong. The audience in Darmstadt wasn’t used to it. They got restless and started walking around. And that’s how the audience is supposed to have helped create the music.

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Q:  The listener as co-composer, wasn’t that more characteristic of Fluxus than of minimal music? Mengelberg:  As I told you yesterday, I invented that kind of music too. In fact I am the inventor of it. But it isn’t impossible for the same thing to be invented at about the same time by different people working completely independently of each other. Nor is it impossible that the rest of them were just imitating me—no, that piece by La Monte Young was earlier. I heard it in Darmstadt, and my piece In Memory of Hans van Zweden came a little later.   I recall that I was full of criticism of La Monte Young. The way I see it, either you make something or you don’t. Whether or not the audience makes part of it too is purely theoretical. That’s not my concern. What the audience does is for itself to decide. What I wanted was the following nagging thought. Hans van Zweden was well-loved. Now he’s dead. Why did he do that? Such a pity. Think of all he could have . . . you see what I mean? Nagging, pestering. Dead is dead, you can complain about it all you like. The composition paralleled that nagging. But that’s a complete different story from the one about the audience making its own compositions. Q:  The way Reich and cohorts nag is a lot more abstract than that. It has more to do with the arrangement of time and so forth than with personal relations and the like. Mengelberg:  Those reflections about abstractions like the arrangement of time are a lot of nonsense. What do I care about that? It reminds me of history lessons at primary school—epochs, periodization. Pretty old-fashioned stuff. What they say about it is less interesting than what they do. They turn out a kind of wallpaper. Great music for a pop radio station. It saves you the trouble of putting together a top-ten, top-twenty, tip-parade and all the rest. If you don’t listen really closely, there’s no difference between the music Reich makes and what you hear on the radio. You can turn it on in the morning and turn it off in the evening. It stimulates production: “music while you work.” De Leeuw:  Let me set a few things straight. That relation between minimal music and Fluxus is a misunderstanding. It’s all because of La Monte Young. Reich and Glass had nothing to do with it, and Riley only partially. The contrary strain in Fluxus is completely

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missing in the Glass crowd. What strikes you is that it’s all so purely esthetic. Despite the links claimed for it with mindexpansion, it’s all purely musical invention. In that sense it has its limitations. It belongs in the art galleries. Those repetitions and little shifts produce a fascinating effect of disorientation on your sense of time, but it all takes place in the realm of esthetics. That fascinates me: music that lasts for three minutes and makes them seem like twenty. What kind of information do you get? When we played Reich I had some astounding experiences. But I expected all along that Misha Mengelberg would be rather scornful of it. Louis Andriessen’s piece De Volharding sounds altogether different from the music of Reich et al., although he used similar techniques. But the difference in sound is not the most significant one.   There’s a much more total, more absolute difference—the difference between an art gallery and the popular Amsterdam Carr Theatre. Louis Andriessen isn’t interested in writing music for the people who go to art galleries, whose world is that of modern art.   He knows that he has to answer for where the music is made, for whom, how and why. Louis, along with Misha and Willem Breuker, reacts to a situation and against a situation. That was true of Fluxus too. But minimal music has almost nothing to do with Fluxus.   Reich and the others are mainly interested in sound development and that kind of thing. I know that it’s very limited, but it holds a tremendous fascination for me. Performing it is a hell of a job, and therefore a kick. I absolutely disagree with the theory that it’s an authoritarian brand of music. I have never felt like a slave when I played anything, with the possible exception of some twentiethcentury serial music. As the gap between composers and performers widened, composers increased the directions in their scores. The demands keep getting heavier. When we started working on Reich’s Piano Phase I was filled with despair. But when it began to work out it was an insane experience. We played seven notes for hours on end and went right on the next day. You’re not forced to bring up that kind of concentration, you find it in yourself. It’s so sensitive and subtle that the smallest difference at the start can have a decisive effect on the final result. It’s fascinating how the process is related to the outcome of the process, the head to the physical attributes—relations and experiences like that were entirely new to me. You can call it an expansion of experience. But I have the

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greatest reservations about all those stories of drugs and consciousness-expansion. We had a very precise, musical experience. The Americans—and you had it as early as Cage—have an approach to music that is different from that of Europeans. They’re influenced by oriental attitudes towards music. A piece of music is never a compact unit of emotional development. There’s a constant search for objective structures. Louis Andriessen and Misha Mengelberg are always striving to get away from the European tradition. But for those American composers that’s no problem. And please note that Misha Mengelberg is wrong when he says that minimal music would go over well on a pop station. Louis Andriessen:  My own thinking on the subject is a bit more subtle than Misha Mengelberg’s, though I must admit that a man like Glass radiates a Ramses Shaffy-like luxuriousness that I don’t care for—but which I somehow like at the same time. There’s a lot of unsuccessful music that I quite like. For instance, I think Michel LeGrand is very good, and the Swingle Singers. The sound of a glossy women’s magazine. But it does prick the pretensions of the avant-garde. There’s a fundamental difference between that and the sound of De Volharding (the piece and the group). And I’m not even talking about working relationships, how the musicians relate to each other, matters of production, who you play for and where. Things like that never enter the head of an American. In a way, they’re 19th-century esthetes of the material. You can see it in their over-indulgence in electronics.   Speaking of affinity—at the moment I’m interested in getting to the heart of one subject. De Volharding, Workers’ Union, and in fact all my compositions deal with a limited subject which is turned completely inside out. Workers’ Union doesn’t sound like any American’s kind of minimal music, but it is related in the sense that it turns a single subject radically inside out. The sound, though, is very chromatic, while they work with modal diatonics. Parallel to that dissecting of one idea is my current interest in unison playing. The piece I’m working on now, De Staat (The State), is almost entirely in unison, with a lot of rhythmic “unison” as well. Everyone plays loud and together, as if a large door were slowly falling on you. The scoring matches it, with four trumpets, for instance, four French horns and four trombones. Four women recite passages from Plato’s [Republic], where he talks about the place of music in

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the ideal society.8 He had pretty weird ideas. Some instruments would be abolished, and certain scales. I’ve also written another piece. One morning I woke up and heard music coming from next door. I heard a sound that I couldn’t place at first. Then I realized what it was: the son was practicing the recorder and Ma was playing along on the piano in unison. So I wrote that piece for piano and recorder—fortunately there aren’t many refinements to worry about with a recorder. The State is richly shaded, but in a very different way from Berio’s Sinfonia. That work also has a lot of unison passages, but they’re drawn very subtly. I prefer using a fine pencil for a fine line and another pencil for another kind of line. I don’t mess around with minor details.   Dutch compositions, you see, all tend towards jazz a little—they’re physical, they’re harder. The bridging of the gap between composer and performer is something you have in jazz, you have it with all of us, and in minimal music too. That’s an important point. That’s the way it should be and the way it always used to be, until at a certain moment in history you got those ridiculous giant symphony orchestras, put together like factories. You still have them, and they swallow a lot more than 90% of all the money that goes into music (subsidies, admission receipts, music training, and so on): they swallow an enormous potential of good musicians as well. It’s time we did something about it. Don’t misunderstand me: I’m all for symphony orchestras; they’re a major cultural amenity and they should be cherished. But for Holland one or two of them is quite enough.

renate strauss profiles julius eastman ( buffalo evening news , 1976) Julius Eastman is a composer, Grammy Award–nominated singer-actor, a fine pianist and a musician who easily relates to classical music, avantgarde or jazz. This amazingly versatile artist, who has a diploma in composition from the Curtis Institute and studied piano with Mieczyslaw Horszowski, is also a skillful choreographer and a film maker—with four films already completed and shown at film festivals around here.

Renate Strauss, “Julius Eastman: Will the Real One Stand Up?,” Buffalo Evening News, July 17, 1976. Courtesy of The Buffalo News.

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Eastman joined the UB Creative Associates in ’69, taught theory and composition at the university and zoomed into prominence as a multifaceted talent in prestigious music centers here and abroad. “I did a lot of things between 1970–75,” he recalled. “Zubin Mehta invited me to sing ‘Essay’ (by Hans Werner Henze) with his orchestras in Los Angeles and Tel Aviv. “I premiered Henze’s ‘El Cimarron’ in Pittsburgh. Lukas Foss had me conduct one of my pieces, ‘Seven Trumpets,’ on his Marathon Series with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. “My music has been performed all over Europe by the Creative Associates and the S.E.M. Ensemble often with me at the keyboard. They are playing my pieces on European radio stations all the time. And,” he said, “I have a suitcase full of reviews.” His portrayal of the mad King George III in Peter Maxwell Davies’ music-theatre piece “Eight Songs for a Mad King” created waves of excitement both here and in New York. He repeated the role with the New York Philharmonic under Pierre Boulez on the Prospective Encounters Series, and made a recording of the piece in London with composer Davies. •

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All that momentum came to a crashing diminuendo a while ago, as though Eastman had suddenly turned his back on success. “It was very simple,” said Eastman, who is dividing his time now between his jazz ensemble and filling out forms for grants so that he can continue writing and playing his music. “I did not think the Creative Associates were very creative any more. I had no power to plan programs and none of the stuff that I suggested was taken up. “So the only thing I really did was to come up with these hit shows once in a while—‘The Mad King,’ the de Pablo piece, so on and so forth—I was a kind of talented freak who occasionally injected some kind of vitality into the programming,” he said laughing. “It just didn’t work anymore. I am not blaming anybody,” concluded the slender, tallish Eastman. Dissatisfied with his teaching as well—“The stuff I was doing at the university was not very creative”—Eastman felt his time was up. “When you see that your time is up, then your time is up. If you go on just for the money, and I mean I liked the money, you know that can’t work.” Obviously going through a drastic revision of his inner life, discarding worn-out ideas and tired cliches, Eastman is clearly groping.

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Whatever the nature of his introspective probings, they don’t sound self-righteous or self-pitying. His Weltanschauung does not include such sentiments. Seeing man’s journey through life rather like a bizarre adventure punctuated with inspired lunacy, Eastman has nevertheless not given up the search for fresh and honest feelings no matter how irreverent. “What I am trying to achieve is to be what I am to the fullest—Black to the fullest, a musician to the fullest, a homosexual to the fullest. “It is important that I learn how to be, by that I mean accept everything about me.” Homosexuals, he feels, have caused all their own problems because they are afraid to admit what they are. “What amazes me is how few artists of all people are willing to admit their homosexuality,” he said and added: “I have discovered that most artists are uptight on that subject, afraid to reveal themselves, and afraid to admit to the world who they are. “People fear punishment,” he continued. “There is always somebody who is trying to crush you. I refuse to think about that, I refuse to be afraid of my comrades, of being castigated, thrown out or thought of badly.” •

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This search for identity Eastman feels is helping him enormously to locate his heritage as a composer. “Our whole Western thought is a kind of futuristic thinking. When I look back, that was the thought I was into,” he admitted. “I was writing symphonies, sonatas—I was working for the future. “I am not writing for some kind of futuristic thing anymore, for lifeafter-death,” he declared. “I don’t give a hoot about the future, posterity or anything else along those lines. “You know, I think that is a step in the right direction—hopefully backwards (cascades of laughter).” His intense involvement in jazz at the moment is a revelation to Eastman. “I really enjoy playing with my group. What happens now, instead of getting up every morning composing, I get up and practice the piano, improvise—it’s jazz, that’s the difference.” “I have always tried to incorporate all these syncopations, but not until now have I come to the essence of that music. “Jazz is so exciting,” Eastman pointed out, “because it allows for instant expressions of feelings; it has immediacy and it also has style.

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figure 24. Petr Kotik and Julius Eastman performing at the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo, 1974. © Christine Rusiniak, 1974.

“When I am playing this music,” he confessed, “I feel as if I am trying to see myself—it’s like diving into the earth, that’s what it feels like.” Whereas playing Beethoven, Schubert or Bach was so very different for him. “The principal thing is to come close to these composers’ thoughts—thoughts and essences that have already been accepted and well established. “I just want to break through all this to arrive at pure thought,” he said. After a long pause he added: “So I came to jazz because I feel it comes closer than classical music to being pure, instantaneous thought.” His group—the Space Perspective—has performed at the AlbrightKnox Art Gallery, on WBFO radio and at clubs around town. Basically, however, Eastman is living on hope—hope that he’ll get a grant, and many more engagements for his group. He admits it’s life in transition, and that he often feels like a wandering soul. What provides him with the glue to hang together while he is planning and waiting is that he knows what he wants—his strong inner focus. “The arts are so vital to me,” he said finally, “playing the piano, singing or composing helps me to get closer to myself.

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“It’s through art that I can search for the self and keep in touch with my resources and the real me.”

julius eastman introduces his concert at northwestern university (1980) Editors’ note: Please note that this text includes Eastman’s use of a racial epithet. I want to say a few words about the music.9 Number one is, there are three pieces on the program. The first is called Evil Nigger, and the second is called Gay Guerrilla, and the third is called Crazy Nigger. Now these are three pieces that can be played by any number of instruments. The reason I have them for pianos here is because for practical reason: one can play this piece therefore with just four people, and then four pianos. But if melody instruments were playing, probably a good number would be somewhere in the area of maybe ten instruments, ten to eighteen instruments, usually of the same family, so therefore another version could be for, let’s say, eighteen stringed instruments. These particular pieces, formally, are an attempt to what I call make “organic music.” That is to say, the third part of any part—the third measure or the third section, the third part—has to contain all of the information of the first two parts and then go on from there. So therefore, unlike Romantic music or Classical music—where you have actually different sections and you have these sections which, for instance, are in great contrast to the first section or to some other section in the piece—these pieces, they’re not exactly perfect yet, they’re not perfect, but there is an attempt to make every section contain all of the information of the previous sections, or else taking out information at a gradual and logical rate. Now, there was a little problem with the titles of the pieces. There were some students and one faculty member who felt that the titles were somehow derogatory in some manner, being that the word “nigger” is in it. These particular titles, the reason I use them is because—in fact, I use, there’s a whole series of these pieces, and they’re called, they can be called a “nigger” series. Now the reason I use that particular word is

Transcribed from the archival recording released as part of Unjust Malaise, New World Records, 2005.

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because for me it has a, is what I call, a “basicness” about it. That is to say that I feel that—and, in any case, the first niggers were of course field niggers, and upon that is really the basis of what I call the American economic system. Without field niggers, you wouldn’t really have such a great and grand economy that we have. So that is what I call the first and great nigger, field niggers. And what I mean by niggers is that thing which is fundamental, that person or thing that obtains to a basicness, a fundamentalness, and eschews that thing which is superficial or, what can we say, elegant. So that a nigger for me is that kind of thing which is, attains himself or herself to the ground of anything, you see. And that’s what I mean by nigger. So there are many niggers, there are many kinds of niggers. There might be—there are, of course, ninetynine names of Allah, but then there are fifty-two niggers. And so therefore . . . we are playing two of these niggers. Now the reason I use Gay Guerrilla, G-U-E-R-R-I-L-L-A, that one, is because these names—let me put a little subsystem here—these names, either I glorify them or they glorify me. And in the case of “guerrilla,” that glorifies “gay,” that is to say there aren’t many gay guerrillas, I don’t feel that gaydom has, does have that strength, so therefore I use that word in the hopes that they will, you see. I feel, at this point I don’t feel that gay guerrillas can really match with Afghani guerrillas or PLO guerrillas, but let us hope in the future that they might, you see. That’s why I use that word “guerrilla.” It means: a guerrilla is someone who is, in any case, sacrificing his life for a point of view. And, you know, if there is a cause, and if it is a great cause, those who belong to that cause will sacrifice their blood, because without blood there is no cause. So therefore that is the reason that I use “gay guerrilla,” in hopes that I might be one, if called upon to be one.

k. robert schwarz profiles john adams (1985) Detractors of minimalism have long ridiculed its simplicity, its repetitiveness, its lack of direction, its crosscurrents with popular and world musics. Such critics have seen little enough merit in the music of Steve Reich and Philip Glass, let alone acknowledged the possibility that minimalism might mature as decades pass. Now a fascinating spectre has K. Robert Schwarz, “Young American Composers—John Adams,” Music and Musicians 33 (March 1985): 10–11. K. Robert Schwarz Papers, Queens College Special Collections and Archives (Queens, New York).

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appeared on the American musical scene: that of the “second-generation minimalists,” typically ten to twenty years younger than Glass or Reich, who have inherited the legacy of the older composers’ music. The younger figures, far from being slavish imitators, have turned the minimalist heritage into something far more personal. They have made a deliberate effort to explore the aesthetic’s expressive, emotional potential—something the first generation generally eschewed—and in the process have taken minimalism in surprising new directions. One of the finest of these “second-generation minimalists” is John Adams. Born in 1947 in Massachusetts, and raised in New England, Adams was a prodigiously talented clarinetist in his youth. He continued to “concertize” widely, both as soloist and orchestral player, during his Harvard years. Adams studied with Leon Kirchner and Roger Sessions at Harvard, and received his Master’s degree in 1971. As a graduation present, his parents unwittingly gave him a copy of John Cage’s Silence, a provocative collection of lectures and essays. Suddenly Adams felt that his entire academic training in composition had been called into question. “I found the seductiveness of Cage’s reasoning irresistible,” he recalls. Instead of pursuing the expected Harvard doctorate, Adams moved to California, joining the faculty of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music in 1972. Soon his musical tastes changed dramatically. First he became enamoured of the egalitarian ideals of Cornelius Cardew and his Scratch Orchestra. American Standard (1973), written for an unspecified ensemble of 12–15 players, betrays not only the Cardew influence, but also in retrospect indicates a predilection for minimalism. Then Adams explored the realm of electronic music, designing and building his own synthesizer. After a three-year immersion in electronics, he suddenly experienced a “diatonic conversion,” repudiating atonality once and for all. “Electronics made me realize the resonant power of consonance,” he says. “There’s such a lack of resonance in atonal music, with all the upper partials clashing against each other.” Soon, though, another influence became primary—that of Steve Reich. Adams had heard Drumming already in 1974, and directed a performance of Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices and Organ in 1977. Though he disliked the music’s more simplistic elements, he was immensely attracted to its sonority. “Minimalism can really be a bore— you get those Great Prairies of non-event,” he states. “My work is frequently compared to the music of Steve Reich, but the similarities are only on the surface. Mine is more emotional, and experiences much

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more change, some of it even rather violent. Steve’s music is a little too pure, too formally reserved for me. What I love about his work, though, is the sound—a very scintillating, glistening, sexy sound . . . I’m trying to embrace the tragic aspects of life in my work,” he adds. “That’s something that minimalism has not really succeeded in doing yet.” But Adams believes that Reich’s aesthetic is malleable enough for something wholly individual to be created from it, just as Schoenberg’s idiom was transformed by Berg and Webern. Adams’ first pieces to indicate the Reich influence were Phrygian Gates for solo piano (1977–78) and Shaker Loops for string septet (1978). Phrygian Gates is constructed in seven different sections, each exploring a different tonal area—A, E, B, F-sharp, C-sharp, A-flat, E-flat. Within each of the seven sections, the material is presented first in the Lydian mode, then in the Phrygian. Adams perceives the Lydian mode as “light and sensual,” the Phrygian as “volatile, unstable, heroic,” and the resulting work constantly shifts between these two widely divergent musical effects. Shaker Loops derives its name from the 18th Century American fundamentalist religious movement, whose members were nicknamed “Shakers” due to the trembling induced by their spiritual ecstasy. As for the “loops,” these relate to the modular manner in which the score is sometimes notated. Each player is given a characteristic melodic cell, written with repeat marks. These modules, however, are of different lengths; when all seven lines are heard together, “the result is a constantly shifting play among the parts.” Shaker Loops’ four sections each explore different aspects of string technique. The first movement is devoted to “shaking”; in this case, a written-out tremolo. Part two consists of ethereal harmonics and slow glissandi “heard floating within an almost motionless pool of stationary sound.” The third section gives two solo cellos ecstatic, long-breathed melodic lines, while the other strings “shake.” The final movement transforms the shaking into a transparent, crystalline texture, recalling the static harmonics of the second section. What is so remarkable about Phrygian Gates and Shaker Loops is that they are hardly minimal at all. Only the rhythmic consistency (mostly a pulsing stream of quavers or semi-quavers), the lack of a melodic profile, and the clarity of process are remotely minimal. But the meticulous expressive markings; the complex, chromatic harmonic vocabulary; the strong contrasts both within and between movements; and the purposefully directionalized motion, driving to powerful climaxes, go far beyond the minimalist creed. Obviously here was a composer who was attracted

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to minimalism’s surface elements, but whose emotional requirements burst the bounds of the aesthetic’s deliberate austerity. In the years following Shaker Loops, Adams became involved with the San Francisco Symphony and their Dutch-born music director, Edo de Waart. In 1978, Adams was appointed new music advisor to the Symphony, receiving the position of composer-in-residence in 1982. In 1980, Adams founded the orchestra’s contemporary music series, entitled “New and Unusual Music,” which has since become immensely popular with Bay Area audiences. Soon Adams attempted an orchestral composition. Common Tones in Simple Time (1979) has been described by the composer as a “pastoral with pulse,” an apt summation of this gentle, understated tone poem. Focusing on ravishing orchestral sonorities rather than melodic profile or climactic bombast, Common Tones revels in an almost Mendelssohnian delicacy. In retrospect, its coloristic fecundity can be seen as a study for Harmonium, while its inclusion of two pianos within the orchestral texture is a harbinger of Grand Pianola Music. Harmonium (1980–81), a three-movement work for chorus and large orchestra set to texts of John Donne and Emily Dickinson, has proved to be Adams’ masterpiece. Donne’s “Negative Love,” the first movement, begins hesitantly and almost inaudibly with repetitions of a single note and syllable, growing slowly and inexorably to massive choral declamation and grand orchestral climaxes. Dickinson’s “Because I Could Not Stop For Death,” the second movement, is darker and more sombre, favouring a simple, understated setting that returns us to the almost motionless world of Shaker Loops’ second movement. A hair-raising, frenzied orchestral crescendo serves as a transition to the third movement, Dickinson’s “Wild Nights.” Built around obsessively reiterated arpeggiated triads, this bridge passage rumbles in the lowest strings before exploding in volume, tempo, and orchestral texture. “Wild Nights” possesses a manic, boyish enthusiasm, its powerful choral writing, exuberant orchestration, and sudden harmonic juxtapositions building to fff climaxes before dying away in an atmosphere of quiet, reflective beauty. Harmonium reveals much about Adams’ growth as a composer. Most obviously, its melodic writing—longspun, sinuous, surprisingly varied—has matured immensely. Yet Harmonium also demonstrates certain peculiarities of Adams’ harmonic language. Within individual sections, Harmonium’s harmonic vocabulary may appear diatonic, though the roots oscillate vaguely, constantly undermining the stability of the triads. But the relationship between sections is highly chromatic

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and accomplished by mere juxtaposition, without a hint of modulation. Overall, therefore, Adams’ language is a chromatic post-Romantic one, but he dwells on each step in the harmonic process for so long that individual sections begin to seem reassuringly diatonic. What is most remarkable about Harmonium is its almost Romantic sensibility. Adams dislikes the notion of a new Romanticism, preferring to label his work “post-modern” if a term is insisted upon. But he admits: “I am a very emotional composer, one who experiences music on a very physical level. My music is erotic and Dionysian, and I never try to obscure those feelings when I compose.” Harmonium’s directionalized power, sweeping to almost theatrical culminations, its lushly chromatic musical language, and its unabashed emotional appeal certainly seem Romantic. For want of a better description, Adams’ mature work may be seen as the unlikely hybrid of minimalism and Romanticism—a combination as rich in promise as it is in conflict. Grand Pianola Music (1981–2), scored for a chamber orchestra of winds, brass, percussion, four wordless sopranos, and two pianos, was Adams’ next composition. His admirers were expecting another work on the exalted level of Harmonium, and many were shocked by Pianola’s irreverent, parodistic content. Pianola attempts to unite the diverse elements that have always been lurking in Adams’ psyche. Prime among these is turn-of-the-century American marching band music, which Pianola evokes in its boisterous brasses and its use of bass drum instead of timpani. Add to this a touch of Gospel, grandiosely arpeggiated Beethovenian piano writing, and the sort of uninhibited hyperemotional content already evident in Harmonium, and one can see why Pianola has always been embroiled in controversy. In truth, Pianola’s first two movements are rather delicate and understated. The first movement only hints at the brassy exuberance of later sections, preferring to explore more fragile orchestral colours, while the second is quiet and nostalgic, its poignant oboe solo reveling in an almost Coplandesque simplicity. It is the third movement, humorously titled “On the Dominant Divide,” that is the most rambunctious. Here Adams introduces “The Tune,” a vulgar creation whose obsessive tonic/ dominant oscillations deliberately recall the worst banalities of popular music. Adams uses The Tune to build grandiose orchestral climaxes, replete with snarling brass and massive piano arpeggios. Despite The Tune’s parodistic content, ultimately one suspects that Adams is sincere, as if its perversely diatonic heroics mirror his own wideeyed enthusiasm in rediscovering the potency of tonality. Or perhaps the

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joke is on us, for Adams’ wit, in music as in life, tends toward the cheeky and irreverent. Whatever the case, Pianola’s finale, concentrating so exclusively on resolution, makes a proper counterfoil to its first two movements, which featured chromatic evasion and juxtaposition. Adams is now hard at work on a 40-minute orchestral piece whimsically titled Harmonielehre, after Schoenberg’s treatise on tonal harmony. Here he intends to explore an even richer, more chromatic vocabulary than was evident in Harmonium. “I am using a sort of postTristan harmonic language, but in my typically attenuated, prolonged way,” he says. Harmonielehre is bound to add another piece to the musical puzzle that is John Adams—a composer who has fused minimalist rigour, Romantic expressivity, the accessibility of popular music, and his own unpredictable wit into a mélange that is among the most riveting in new American music.

steve reich’s program note for different trains (1988) Different Trains, for String Quartet and pre-recorded performance tape, begins a new way of composing that has its roots in my early tape pieces It’s Gonna Rain (1965) and Come Out (1966). The basic idea is that carefully chosen speech recordings generate the musical materials for musical instruments. The idea for the piece came from my childhood. When I was one year old my parents separated. My mother moved to Los Angeles and my father stayed in New York. Since they arranged divided custody, I travelled back and forth by train frequently between New York and Los Angeles from 1939 to 1942 accompanied by my governess. While the trips were exciting and romantic at the time I now look back and think that, if I had been in Europe during this period, as a Jew I would have had to ride very different trains. With this in mind I wanted to make a piece that would accurately reflect the whole situation. In order to prepare the tape I did the following: 1. Record my governess Virginia, then in her seventies, reminiscing about our train trips together. 2. Record a retired Pullman porter, Lawrence Davis, then in his eighties, who used to ride lines between New York and Los Angeles, reminiscing about his life. Steve Reich, program note for Different Trains, 1988. Courtesy of Steve Reich.

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3. Collect recordings of Holocaust survivors Rachella, Paul and Rachel, all about my age and then living in America—speaking of their experiences. 4. Collect recorded American and European train sounds of the ’30s and ’40s. In order to combine the taped speech with the string instruments I selected small speech samples that are more or less clearly pitched and then notated them as accurately as possible in musical notation. The strings then literally imitate that speech melody. The speech samples as well as the train sounds were transferred to tape with the use of sampling keyboards and a computer. Three separate string quartets are also added to the pre-recorded tape and the final live quartet part is added in performance. Different Trains is in three movements (played without pause), although that term is stretched here since tempos change frequently in each movement. They are: 1.  America—Before the war 2.  Europe—During the war 3.  After the war The piece thus presents both a documentary and a musical reality and begins a new musical direction. It is a direction that I expect will lead to a new kind of documentary music video theatre in the not too distant future.

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chapter 16

Postminimalists

Like its predecessor, “postminimalism” first emerged as a term in the visual arts, coined by the critic Robert Pincus-Witten in 1971.1 Soon it floated over to music—sometimes hyphenated as post-minimalism— and was widely deployed by composer and Village Voice critic Kyle Gann to identify a new stream of compositional thought in the 1980s and 1990s.2 It is possible to think of “postminimalism” as encompassing nearly all activity influenced by minimalist music after the turning point of 1976. But a narrower conception, shaped by Gann’s theorizing, might be more fruitful: those composers who picked up the pulses and tonal harmonies of Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and Philip Glass and deployed them in written compositions that often subverted minimalist expectations.3 At their Bang on a Can festivals, the postminimalists David Lang, Julia Wolfe, and Michael Gordon brought the dissonance of academic serialism into dialogue with rock and pop.4 But unlike contemporaries such as Glenn Branca and Julius Eastman, composers like Gordon and Elodie Lauten consciously abandoned playing in bands or writing songs to focus on notated composition. Others, from Ingram Marshall and Ann Southam to Alexandre Rabinovitch-Barakovsky, Sergei Zagny, and Nikolai Korndorf, understood 1960s minimalism as forming a distinct musical style, which they took as a backdrop for new compositional developments.5

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kyle gann, “enough of nothing: postminimalism” ( village voice , 1991) There is a widespread misperception among critics, and presumably among music lovers in general, that postminimalism aspires to the condition of classical music—and fails. You could date the movement, and the misunderstanding, to 1979, the year of William Duckworth’s Time Curve Preludes: that was the first major work that sounded minimalist but refused to satisfy minimalist expectations. Since then, postminimalism has become the lingua franca of under-50 composers across the continent, including even a few in noise-happy New York. And yet, the music still gets, not bad press exactly, but condescending and misdirected reviews, reflecting disappointed conditions that no postminimalist ever wanted to fulfill. The history of musical discourse is littered with “art nova” treatises, and it’s time for another. First, what postminimalism (PM below) is not. It isn’t watered-down minimalism, Steve Reich minus the rigor. Its connection to minimalism, which barely justifies hanging onto an unfortunate term for now, is its tendency toward diatonic tonality (common to lots of musics) and its inheritance of numerical, often additive, rhythmic structures from Reich’s and Glass’s early works. Nor is it, as EAR “Stuck-in-the-’60s” magazine would have it, a reactionary movement. There’s the rub: PM contains enough conventional scales and harmonies that classical critics hear it as ineptly imitating sonata form. And it’s found so little use for noise and discontinuity, discarded elements of the ’60s avant-garde, that the free jazz and art-rock crowds don’t grasp its central experimentalist impulse, which has to do with form rather than materials. PM may be the first avant-garde movement blasted by its opponents for a supposed conservatism. Nor is PM one of those collectively anonymous movements (like, say, ’70s 12-tone music) easily described by outward characteristics. PM can be political, as in the additively reconstructed worker songs of Peter Gena’s Mother Jones and McKinley. It can use noise, like Arthur Jarvinen’s spray-can-hissing Egyptian Two-Step; it can be sharply dissonant, as in Michael Gordon’s Thou Shalt!/Thou Shalt Not!; and it can use bizarre instrumental techniques, like Stephen Scott’s bowed piano

Kyle Gann, “Enough of Nothing: Postminimalism,” Village Voice, April 30, 1991, 82. Courtesy of The Village Voice.

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music. For some composers, notably Peter Garland, it’s closer in spirit to American ultramodernism of the ’30s than to the Euro-contaminated ’60s. PM’s unity comes from the problems it attacks, not from the solutions found or the way it strikes the ear. So, what is it? If you heard the March 20 Merkin Hall concert of Philadelphia’s Relache ensemble, either live or on WNYC 10 days later, you got an overview, for at least four of the five works were prime suspects. Relache is postminimalism’s unofficial specialist ensemble. Oh, they’ve dabbled in jazz and improv, they have good 12-tone chops, and I’m sure they’d rather not be pigeonholed. (“Music Without Boundaries” is their recent hip slogan.) But their woodwind-heavy sound and silken ensemble technique are a postminimalist’s wet dream, and PM is the music they’ve shown most affection for; their new, first CD on Mode contains luscious examples by Paul Epstein and Thomas Albert. And what they made clear was that postminimalism—though hardly a style John Cage would have envisioned—is the language Cage called for in Silence, a new language freed from dialectical antithesis, and founded on rhythm rather than pitch. “There is not enough of nothing in it,” complained Cage about 12-tone music, and that applied to any pitch-based music’s inability to theoretically integrate silence. The phrase came to mind during Om Shanti by Seattle composer Janice Giteck: here was a work in which some of the movements bounced jazz-syncopated lines in vibrant, Lou Harrison–like gamelan textures, and in which violin and cello vied in a passionate duo. Yet it was also a piece that soprano Barbara Noska (in thrilling voice, singing the style she does perfectly) could bring to a halt by chanting “Om santih santih santih santih santih” over and over and over. Time stopped, time started again, without the jolt you’d feel if your needle got stuck in a Brahms symphony. All the resources of earlier music—jazz rhythms, Hebrew modes, European chamber music gestures, even the big M’s repetitions—coexisted in a fluid medium in which no element created expectations that conflicted with the others. This was the synthesis collage music has pointed to for 35 years. You heard how pervasively PM switches the roles of rhythm and harmony in Lois V. Vierk’s Timberline, commissioned for this concert (we’ll return to this analysis after a word from our sponsor) by Taittinger champagne. In classical music, harmony shaped the piece through tension and release, while rhythm played a supporting role. But Vierk (composer of the Attack Cat Polka) wrapped her form in harmonies of Sibelian gloom that repeated again and again, and it was the rhythm

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that changed to shape the piece. When, as here, PM uses conventional harmonies, it excises their karma, their tendency to resolve in predictable directions. Too, PM generally avoids melody as such, since melodies impose formal contrasts antithetical to PM’s continuous-textualevolution methodology; but Vierk threw in a pretty filigree of 32ndnotes in the piano to distract those not used to listening on a formal level. Good idea. Vierk’s music seethes with glissandos, but in Timberline she took them out of the foreground and buried them in the bass for a striking effect. Mary Ellen Childs’s Carte Blanche, the other Taittinger commission, also grew from glissandos, and from a repeated sigh of closely spaced pitches. From here the texture expanded through the accretion of repeated motives, not in a mechanical way but at varying rhythmic intervals. The phasing that began in Reich’s Piano Phase has passed into PM as a basic technique, no longer to create perceptual illusions, but to give the style a flexible rhythmic-level structure. Austere and riddled with dissonances, Carte Blanche wasn’t as charming as Parterre, the other Childs opus Relache has played (and recorded on the Minnesota Composers Forum label), but its shape was clearer and more compelling. Tina Davidson’s music hasn’t always showed postminimal tendencies, and harmonic tension played a larger part in her Blue Dawn (The Promised Fruit) than it did elsewhere. But the piece took its time building from reiterated Ds in several octaves up to A and beyond, and its continuous evolution of a texture to climax and back was a PM touch. As in Vierk’s piece, the intricately constructed rhythms were articulated by harmony, and the latter expanded in dissonance so smoothly that they made Blue Dawn the best Davidson piece I’d heard yet. The work whose PM roots were dubious was Eleanor Hovda’s Ariadnemusic, even though its shape was similar to that of the Childs and Davidson pieces. Hovda’s music seems more related to an earlier, continuum aesthetic derived from the ’60s Polish school, a style whose most characteristic gesture is to float in and out of audibility like tentative breathing. Ariadnemusic’s bowed cymbals, expressive flute solos (by Laurel Wyckoff), and sotto voce violin trills merged in haunting timbres, but the similarities to PM seemed coincidental. The works by Vierk, Childs, Davidson, and Hovda, you noticed, all opened with long crescendos drawn from repeated licks—if that doesn’t indicate a new style has congealed, what would? If PM exhibits a cliché, it’s the tent-shaped, single-climax piece, the form organized around an

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epiphany toward which everything builds and from which it recedes. Cage wanted to rid music of climaxes because they implied hierarchy, one part of a piece being more important than another. More cogent from a critical standpoint, climaxes are tricky, and PM, with its medieval-level harmonic technology, hasn’t yet revved up the technique to clinch them. Climaxes resolve dissonance, and in the West we haven’t cultivated rhythmic dissonance to the point that we can create convincing climaxes unsupported by harmony (or at least volume). That may be PM’s PR problem: the climax is integral to music’s entertainment side, something concert-hall audiences may never relinquish without grumbling. There’s a type of listener for whom a climaxless piece is inherently “unemotional” (think of all the people who’ve never caught on to Satie’s Socrate), and I suspect lots of classical critics, weaned on the Romantics, fall into that category. The climax of Childs’s Carte Blanche depended on pitch in a manner strikingly reminiscent of the first movement of Bartók’s Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta: a high point reached via slow, upward expansion of the pitch range (with celesta patterns, no less), quickly evaporating into a few final, sliding gestures taken from the opening. Still, Childs’s most overall successful pieces came four days later at an Experimental Intermedia concert, and the best ones eschewed climax altogether. For example: Click, a fiendishly complex game of patty-cake played with three sets of claves, and A Chording To, which echoed chords between live and taped accordion (Guy Klucevsek) at varying rhythms with the naturalness of breathing. Vierk’s music has always been ambiguous with respect to climax; her pieces typically metamorphose between a quiescent texture and a frenetic one, with the frenetic end conveniently placed last, so that the “climax” is really just the endpoint of a process. It’s a cool solution to the problem of climax without a tonal framework, and how she infects that design seems to be the main point of each piece. Timberline took a more circuitous path than her other works, and she ventured a step further by widening her harmonic vocabulary in the final minutes to increase the crescendo’s emotional force. But the Relache concert’s only piece that truly transported me was Giteck’s Om Shanti, because it skipped the formal problem and achieved sensuous passion without straining after cathartic moments; it had “enough of nothing” in it. (For a similarly gorgeous example of Giteck’s artistry, listen to her cabala-inspired Breathing Songs From a Turning Sky recorded on Mode.) The other works I admired less for their ultimate

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effect than for the insightful attacks they waged on well-defined problems. PM is a style still under construction, though it’s racked up a greater number of smashing successes in its first 12 years than many movements have in a similar period. If the ’60s taught us a lesson, it was that avantgardeness depends not on what materials music uses, how shocking it sounds to suburbanites, or even on its attitude toward society, but on the direction of its dialogue with history, and on whether what it tries to achieve has been done before. In that respect, Giteck, Vierk, Childs, Davidson, Hovda, and Relache are leading into new territory.

libby van cleve interviews michael gordon on his 1983 composition thou shalt!/thou shalt not! (1997) Gordon:  But, yes, it was just a coming together. It clearly was not pretty, minimal music. I never wanted to write pretty, minimal music. The sound of the piece and the sound of the group was something that was coming from rock and roll. I always liked that sound. I always wanted that type of sound. Thou Shalt!/Thou Shalt Not! was the first time it started coming together. That’s the first piece where I could go: “Oh, well, this piece doesn’t sound like other people’s music.” “This music sounds like my music.” Van Cleve:  A lot of people think that this is funny. Do you think it’s funny? Gordon:  No, I don’t think it’s funny. I thought of it as a very serious and stark minimalistic battle. I always thought of it as a battle. Van Cleve:  Tell me about the title. Gordon:  Well, the title is reflective of all the different feelings I had about everything at the time. I was being pulled in a hundred different directions. Am I a serious musician or am I a rock musician? Is it high art or low art? That’s not a question that people necessarily ask today because that battle has already happened in people’s minds. And if it hasn’t happened, then you’re just not with it.

Michael Gordon, interview with Libby Van Cleve, August 29, 1997, Yale Oral History of American Music: Major Figures in American Music, 185 j–m; excerpt edited by Gordon, August 2021. Courtesy of Michael Gordon and Yale Oral History of American Music.

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Van Cleve:  Which battle? Gordon:  Well, Minimalism is history now. Amplifying instruments is something that is becoming more and more commonplace. And using an electric guitar, writing for an electric guitar in a chamber ensemble setting is something that is also becoming commonplace. So no one is going: “Well, there’s an electric guitar and it’s amplified, so it’s not really serious music” or “It’s minimal or postminimal or industrial or whatever, so it’s not really something we can take seriously.” From 1983, which is really when I started being a composer with that piece, for about ten years most people are looking at my music and going: “Well, this really isn’t serious music,” or “This is pop music,” or this is whatever.   Of course that’s ridiculous because it’s not pop music and I’m not a pop composer. I don’t want to classify myself, but that’s something I think is very hard to say in 1997 with any real credence. Certainly there are still people walking around saying that minimalism is not serious music, but I think that that’s already history.

libby van cleve interviews david lang (1997) Van Cleve:  I was going to ask you generally about Minimalism. When did you come into contact with these ideas, and what effect do you think it has on your writing? Lang:  I wrote these kind of California, hippie, spacey things when I was in high-school and college. I wrote a piece my freshman year in college that was an eight hour piece that could only be performed overnight. I wrote things like that—really spacey, California things. Then I saw the Philip Glass Ensemble play. It must have been 1975, and I had gotten one of their records. This music was really simple and really irritating, and I really liked it. I thought, “Oh, this is an interesting thought.” I didn’t try to pay attention to how to get that into my music because I was writing this other spacey stuff. My first introduction was kind of Philip Glass pre–Einstein on the Beach,

David Lang, interview with Libby Van Cleve, April 29, 1997, Yale Oral History of American Music: Major Figures in American Music, 185 j–m. Courtesy of David Lang and Yale Oral History of American Music.

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and I just loved the fact that it was really obnoxious. Then I heard Four Organs of Steve Reich, and I thought, “Oh, this piece is really obnoxious.” I just liked the idea that these pieces were really easy to understand. They were really simple. They were really clear, but even though they were really clear they were also really harsh. There was something about them that was really not easy-listening.   I remember being very disappointed in their music as it went on, as it became more listenable. I remember when I heard Glass’s record Northstar, which I guess came out in the late ’70s. It was just like a pop crossover record for him. I was really angry when I heard Music for 18 Musicians by Steve Reich, even though I know it’s a great piece. I was really angry because it was really nice to listen to. I started thinking, “Is the point of this music to make music that’s engaging and difficult and interesting, but present it in a way to make it possible to listen to it and think about it? Or is the point of this music to massage you and make you feel good about being alive?” I think by that time I had already sort of recalibrated myself to think that interesting things in music happened when music was ugly, or when music was difficult or when music was challenging.   I think actually, surprisingly enough, one of the things we started talking about before Bang on a Can started was we made a list of all the pieces that we wanted to hear live, that we figured we would never hear again if we didn’t play them. Onto that list went the early Philip Glass, and the early Steve Reich. We felt that nobody would ever do these pieces because they’re really hard to listen to, and Philip Glass now has a tremendous amount invested in having a really happy audience, and a broad audience and an audience that crosses over from other disciplines. They’re not interested in those harsh experiences. Maybe I’m a masochist, but I really like those harsh experiences. I like the fact that here’s an ugly sound, you know—listen to it. Editors’ note: In 2021, David Lang wished to add, in response to our printing this excerpt, the following: It is so funny to read this interview now—64-year-old me reading an interview with 40-year-old me, in which I try to remember the feelings of 18-yearold me. I was, of course, an idiot then for thinking that Philip Glass and Steve Reich had done something terrible by making their music sound more attractive, and thereby broadening their bases of listeners and admirers and

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performers. But what I think is still interesting in that quote is that no one knew in 1975 what direction this new music was heading or should be heading, or where these young, courageous composers would end up, or should end up—not me, not the music business, and not the composers themselves. It was an exciting moment to be thinking about music.6

julia wolfe’s program note for lick (1994) The last piece I wrote, a work for six pianos, cracked something open, broke further away from the western classical tradition. That body energy of pop music came into my music and it’s still here and definitely in Lick. I’m totally excited about it. Motown, funk, rock. This is the music I grew up on—listening, dancing to it. Lick has a lot of meanings and the piece has to do with all the meanings you can think of. It’s saucy and it has an edge. It’s impatient; although it stays with things for a long time, it hammers at them. I took a fragment, a lick, and magnified it. And the beat is split up by all the players, so it becomes fragmented, a fragmented energy. The piece is about attacks, but it has a more sensual side. I really thought about the Bang on a Can All-Stars when I wrote it because I wanted to see them lock in with this intense energy.

elodie lauten, “composer’s notes” (2009) I was working at the 49th Parallel gallery in SoHo, a Canadian outpost run by diplomats. I got my own apartment on the Lower East Side, a sixth floor walk-up. As soon as I moved there, I was robbed of my stereo and the ring my grandmother gave me, but my keyboard was spared because it was at the rehearsal space. This robbery prompted me to get a real piano, something that couldn’t be taken away. I got an upright for $300. It took four guys to get it up the stairs. That was reassuring. It was there to stay. I had a cute black and white cat, Julius, and he was doing a great job with the waterbugs and mice. I was set. I had finally settled in New York. It had taken about seven years. That’s when I evolved from songwriter to composer. Suddenly with the piano and a new synth my father got me with the earnings from “Do Julia Wolfe, “Lick,” in “Bang on a Can All-Stars,” August 4, 1994, Tanglewood Music Center Yearbook, 1994, https://archive.org/stream/tanglewoodmusicc1994bost#page /n443/ mode/2up, 444; revised by Wolfe in September 2021. Courtesy of Julia Wolfe. Elodie Lauten, “Composer’s Notes,” Piano Works Revisited (Unseen Worlds, 2009). Courtesy of Unseen Worlds.

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the Dog,” a song we co-wrote and was stolen by some British band, I had ideas. The new album integrated three elements in an original way: the piano rhythms in a repetitive but improvisational style which was later to be called post-minimalist, the analog synth sequences as a bass texture, and sound loops of various environments, water, cars in the rain, pinball machines, even some television soundtracks. It was entirely instrumental, no vocals at all. The result, Piano Works, was recorded quickly and efficiently around Christmas 1982. I had another disc all recorded and ready to go, but I decided to shelf the other project and go for this one. There were no more bands. I was going solo. My life was in order. I jogged in the morning, all the way to the East River, went to work at the gallery, and returned home to practice. I attended meditation sessions every week. All my earnings went to producing and releasing recordings. I sewed my own clothes to save money. But the releases on my Cat Collectors label were rewarding. In the spring of ’83 I was able to release Piano Works. I cropped the cover photo by Mike Morse so it would only show my arm. For a long time I was self-conscious about showing my face on a record unless it was somewhat hidden or remote. I was trying to say: I am only the medium through which the music is made. What I look like is not important. Don’t look at me like an object. Just listen. The final product had some misprints. I didn’t throw out the misprinted albums though. I used them and gave them out free at my performances. It is amazing how many things can go wrong when you have something manufactured. Receiving the test pressing is very exciting. I remember having things redone that didn’t sound right on the test pressing. I sent off the disc to John Schaefer of WNYC who liked it and aired it frequently. People told me “Hey, I heard your music on the radio!” I played at Dance Theater Workshop and that was a different kind of venue for me—a place to play where people actually sat down and listened to the music. What a nice change from the club scene. Variations on the Orange Cycle Variations on the Orange Cycle is about the experience of time. It translates brain activity into music in real time, music inherent to the unfolding of time, mirroring a conscious experience of space-time. The starting point is the 24 hour cycle (daily rotation of the earth = G frequency according to Hans Cousto) with its succession of phases of activity,

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leisure, transport, rest. The succession of moments is comparable to variations on a theme, except that in the Orange Cycle, the traditional parameters of theme and variations are altered. The theme and variation are in a subjective to objective partnership. The four variations or phases refer to subjective modes of experience that occur at any point. The theme exists not as a melody but as a most basic musical interval, F over G fundamental. In terms of melodic development, the Variations are an example of Universal Mode Improvisation. The four phases are different treatments of the G fundamental: modal (phases 1 and 4), chromatic (phase 2) and polytonal (phase 3). In the chromatic mode, dynamic textures are superimposed to the fundamental in a bitonal framework. The polytonal mode explodes the textures into free form while holding the fundamental. This piece was composed in 1991 in New York. I recorded it in one take at Cedar Sound on a Steinway B (recording on this CD). Later, in 1995, to prepare for the New York premiere at Merkin Hall by pianist Lois Svard, I used a computer midi input to score the piece and revised it. The recording was subsequently released on the Lovely Music CD Other Places. Musically, I belong to a generation who, having heard enough rock music, experienced both free jazz and minimalism as fresh, exciting reference points. Minimalism was my springboard. What I liked about minimalist music is that it induces a kind of a trance, but eventually the trance state induced by the repetition makes you forget the music. I wanted to stay with the flow and not go beyond it, so there had to be more stimuli in the music, variations of rhythm, of accents, of notes. This is what I did in the Piano Works: working out texture out of a minimalist pattern and stretching it. Between these two inspirations: minimalism with its trance-like quality and free jazz with its explosive quality, my music eventually developed in its own direction, in what I now call UMI—Universal Mode Improvisation—a free style evolving from a basic modal scale into bi-tonality, polytonality or atonality, usually with an underlying fundamental or even without, like the carpet has been pulled from under and everything is up in the air. I use semi-repetitive patterns which are constantly modified. The mind is semi-repetitive, it goes around in circles for a while; there is some randomness; some unexpected leaps. A thought wanders away and connects with something unrelated—my music mirrors mental activity. In free jazz, what comes out of the unbridled collective improvisation can be frustration, anger, ecstasy. Everything comes out without censorship, but instead of raw, disturbing emotions, I would rather

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transmit a peaceful state, a heightened consciousness, something uplifting, a way of connecting with the boundless mind.

kalvos & damian interview ann southam (1998) Kalvos:  You say you did electronic work and you loved that. But most of your recent work is not electronic. What happened? Did you move back? Ann Southam:  Yes I did. Just at the point where I started to do a lot of electroacoustic music, I had bought a very beautiful grand piano (which then just sat in my living room), which I never looked at or played. At one point, I noticed that it was there and thought I’d like to start playing it. Also, at the same time I was starting to be aware of the minimalist movement. I heard A Rainbow in Curved Air which I absolutely loved, and other things by Terry Riley. I heard music by Steve Reich, and I truly loved it and still do. It’s certainly a very, very different way of working from messing around with electroacoustic sound. So I’ve been exploring that in recent years. [. . .] K:  You talk about the massive physicality of Ives and the Concord Sonata, and then we have Rivers, with the bells in it—a very delicate piece. This is a different kind of physicality. How did this piece come about? What’s it about? AS:  It’s a minimalist piece, a process piece—in this case very slow. The repeating pattern in the right hand really is just two notes, back and forth, alternating, and around it is being woven a twelve-tone row. It’s the same twelve-tone row I’ve been using for the past twenty years. I’ve got this piece of paper which I keep getting out with this old row on it which I keep trying to rework, put to some use, beat some sort of tonal sense into it! So the process is to spin out the row one note at a time, adding a new note until the whole row is present. The two notes in the repeating right-hand figure give a kind of tonal center around which the twelve-tone row works. I like the intervals that are set up between the note of the row and the tonal center. I like the emotional quality of those changing intervals.

Excerpts from “If Only I Could Sing: Ann Southam in Conversation with Kalvos & Damian,” Musicworks 71 (Summer 1998): 21 and 27–28. Courtesy of Kalvos & Damian’s New Music Bazaar.

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Sometimes they suggest sort of a diatonic context, and you expect that it’s going to go in a certain direction—and it doesn’t. It all falls apart and goes off somewhere else. This can be frustrating and you work to rationalize it. I like the changing emotional quality in these intervals that are set up as the piece goes along. K:  I was thinking that the bell-like description was very effective, not only because of the repeated notes, but because we hear a carillon. The harmonic content is so rich that the atonality of the bells is very much present, even though they are diatonic. Here is something that’s atonal on its arch that gives it a tonal fundament. AS:  There’s a slightly clangorous effect. There’s a set of these pieces, and when I originally wrote them, I was calling everything I wrote Rivers because I couldn’t think of anything else. And then this didn’t seem to be suitable when it got around to be recorded, so then I thought maybe Bells because it reminded me a little bit of bells. The name is uncertain, but Bells seems to work for now. [After listening to Glass Houses] K:  Talk about minimalist influence! AS:  Steve Reich. K:  But you don’t notate every note here. In some ways you jump back to In C, which was modular. AS:  I thought that was an ingenious way of devising a piece. Part of the way the piece works is a result of the way it’s written. As you try to solve the problem of how to write something down, you’re producing a new form or a new kind of music. I like that. In C is a kind of game, and I think it works wonderfully well. I love that piece. K:  So Glass Houses has that pulse, pushes ahead, and is tonal. AS:  That’s right, and it’s only written out on two pages. K:  What are you writing now? AS:  I’m working on a piece for Eve Egoyan. Again it’s the same old twelve-tone row. Damian:  Can you hum it? AS:  If I could hum, I could. I’m working it yet another way—a process again of spinning the row out note by note so that the phrases get longer and longer. I’m also exploring long periods of waiting. I really like what happens to the player, what happens to

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the listener when there’s nothing happening. What are you going to do with that time? How do you remember what you’ve just listened to? What else comes to bear on this time when nothing is happening? I do like the business of waiting. I’m exploring how you might set up periods of waiting in which nothing happens. Things are definitely happening. It’s just having to keep still and having to wait. That’s very hard to do. Patience—this is a whole lesson in patience.

john adams on the music of ingram marshall (1984) As a composer, I have to acknowledge a personal debt to the music of Ingram Marshall. His output has not been great and its almost universally introspective nature most likely will insure against its ever gaining a wide popularity. Slow and laborious in its gestation, Marshall’s music does not spring full grown effortlessly into the world. Rather these musical forms are molded and perfected over periods of years, through numerous visions and revisions in the course of countless performances. It is a music of almost painful intimacy and as such is not for the casual listener. Its essence is deep and brooding, and although its generously layered surfaces are often painted with a rich, almost opiated luxuriance, the message is, never the less, always spiritual, one might even say religious, in content. Taken together, both Fog Tropes and Gradual Requiem constitute a kind of huge, sprawling Gothic fantasia that slows down the passage of time to something suggesting the rhythm of oceanic tides or the motion of celestial bodies. The elegiac mode which governs both pieces is a thread which runs throughout all of Marshall’s music, its implied theme being the antithesis of the human voice against the vast, becalmed presence of the natural world: Vox clamantis in deserto. There is a tragic affect to it, but it is always a restrained, attenuated one. What gives a large work like Gradual Requiem its distinct sense of unity is its underlying feeling of pulse: the whole work rests on a slow, undulating sequential flow like a solitary beacon of light moving in slow periodic motion across a nocturnal sky.

Liner notes to Ingram Marshall, Fog Tropes—Gradual Requiem—Gambuh I, New Albion (NA002), 1988. Courtesy of Foster Reed.

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It is also an overtly emotional music and by its very nature stands in direct contradiction to the cool, uncommitted posture of Modernism. Marshall’s expressivity, however, is not of the calculated, researched Neo-Romantic variety. Although his harmonic language and “orchestration” at times evoke the darker, more diffused episodes we may have encountered in Moussorgski, Bruckner or in the Fourth Symphony of Sibelius, Marshall’s composing palette is more diverse and promiscuous. Making advantageous use of the possibilities of elaborate electronic mixing, he has brought about a convergence of pre-recorded sounds (ranging from fog horns to Corsican folk-religious singing), the “pure” tones of the synthesizer, and the immediacy of live instruments (the brass choir in Fog Tropes, the piano, mandolin, Balinese flute and falsetto voices in Gradual Requiem), a convergence that creates musical structures full of dream-like vistas, each with its own special mood and texture. These sections, heard together, establish what one French reviewer referred to as un climat. Fortunately, because this music is so very personal and unique, it cuts across stylistic boundaries, avoiding facile placement in a “school” or “style.” Neither Neo-Romantic nor Minimal, neither “text-sound” nor collage, it remains apart: a direct and unalloyed artistic statement firmly grounded in its composer’s personal vision.

elena dubinets interviews alexandre rabinovitch-barakovsky (2010) ED:  Why did you get fascinated by minimalism?7 ARB:  Around 1969 I got lucky: I managed to hear Terry Riley’s In C at Alexei Lubimov’s. At the same time, my music has little in common with music by Terry Riley.   The point of departure in my work is the principle of repetition. It is interesting that contemporary anthropology is inclined to see rhythm and ritual as basic units in the evolution of human conscience. The notion of ritual after all is an integral part of the condition of repetitiveness. A ritual is based on the repetition of certain gestures and actions, imbued with symbolic meaning. It is

Excerpt from Alexandre Rabinovitch-Barakovsky, interview with Elena Dubinets, June 2010, unpublished. Courtesy of Elena Dubinets.

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through rhythm that human energy is expressed, creating further conditions for the linear evolutionary path. By contrast, ritual is related to circularity—the movement that occurs in a circle— something characteristic of the oriental mysticism.   I understand repetitiveness in my music from the point of view of its archetypical nature, and I structure it using sacral numerological symbolism as a base. ED:  Your numerology has not been transformed into serialism, it is something entirely different. ARB:  Serialism is a communist phenomenon, when everyone is equal and there are no hierarchies in existence. I, on the other hand, use sacral numbers in the repetition of structures. It has nothing to do with materialism. Structuring is necessary, of course, but that is my kitchen. I am interested exclusively in semantic phenomena and ways to get rid of neuroses that haunt all of us. It is just like in alchemy: There exists prima material—a notion of the chaos and the original illness. The alchemical process, consisting of a series of stages, may result in a gradual cleansing from the chaotic elements and delivery from the illness—a breakthrough into the spiritual.   The fact is, schematically the evolution of the European musical language can be divided into two main periods. The “Prima Pratica” is rooted in Christianity, which had the status of a state ideology. Despite the variety of musical styles used by composers in the 12th to 16th centuries whose names we know, the emotional objectivity principle prevailed: the emotional placidness, serenity and quietude were a reflection of the extramusical conceptions of “music of the spheres,” the “harmony of the universe,” at the center of which was the Earth. At the time, rationality (the brain’s left hemisphere) reigned supreme in art and music served ideology.   The publication of Copernicus’ ideas in 1543 literally traumatized his contemporaries. The Earth turned out to be a province. That was of course a severe blow. There followed a subjective, personal expressiveness, with a vast spectrum of emotions-affects. Monteverdi defined this new aesthetics as the “Seconda Pratica” and, throughout the 17th–20th centuries, a whole musical mythology based on the tonality principle was born (with a major-minor, joy-suffering polarity). In Mahler or Rachmaninov there is already such turmoil in the expression of extreme emotions that it becomes

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slightly “unhealthy.” In the ensuing expressionism, one senses only anguish and despair.   I am very much at home with this tendency of oriental mysticism to see the world with the “eyes of the heart.” And yet, emotions are no longer directly expressed; they are explored and analyzed within the context of therapy in which the patient establishes a dialogue with oneself and becomes one’s own psychoanalyst. This creates a type of cognitive and intelligible emotions thanks to the use of arithmosophy (the analyst’s role being played by the numbers). ED:  How is your minimalism expressed in terms of its form? ARB:  There arises a new hierarchy of elemental components in a musical language. I do not wish to divulge all the secret recipes of my kitchen because an illusion of mystery may disappear. But, of course, I am very interested in the problems of interaction between the past and the present. (The future is for Wagner and for prophets.) I like the philosopher Benjamin’s definition of this interaction, which sounds something along the lines of: the present fertilizes the past (that’s already remarkable!)—and resurrects the meaning that the past contains in itself but that is forgotten and pushed into the subconscious. It is difficult to add anything to this.

elena dubinets interviews sergei zagny (2020) Zagny chose to use minimalistic techniques for his Sonata (1990), and I asked him how he arrived at the idea of using this style. He said: SZ:  At the beginning of the 1970s I first heard Arvo Pärt’s Tintinnabuli: multiple pieces from this cycle were played during a 2-hour lecture at the Moscow Conservatory Training School (“Merzlyakovka”); next time I managed to hear this music only a few years later. I was stricken by the incredible power of this music as well as by the fact that simple A minor might be so different. This music radically influenced my musical consciousness and predetermined many things in my work for years ahead. A little later I read about the American minimalism of the 1960s. I read about it, that is. There was no chance to listen to this music at that time, the scores weren’t available either, but the music somehow got shaped in my imaginaExcerpt from Sergei Zagny, email interview with Elena Dubinets, August 2020, unpublished. Courtesy of Elena Dubinets.

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tion and started strongly influencing me in this imaginary way. ED:  Why is this style so important for you? What do you see as its essence? SZ:  Thanks to Pärt and to the imaginary minimalism I was eager to return to the “beginnings,” to the “elements” of music—to the tones, intervals, triads, scales, and to the elemental types of development including the simplest repetitions and sequences. It was not related to the desire to simplify music. Approximately at the same time I read an article that became very important for me: about order and chaos. I was especially impressed by a description of the following experiment. There is a gutter, and the water is flowing via it. The water includes certain colored particles that allow us to observe how the stream behaves, how it whirls, and other things. It’s possible to change the angle of gutter’s slope, and the speed of the flow changes accordingly. It turned out that under a certain slope angle the flow is rather organized, some static designs appear, and it’s possible to predict with large probability where a certain particle will appear with time. If the gutter angle is gradually increased, turbulence starts and gradually increases, the movement becomes less predictable in details and more chaotic. But if the gutter angle is increased even further, counter to the expectations the chaos recedes rather than increases: it gets gradually substituted by a new order, and a new static design is formed. I realized that this was exactly what I had to try in music.   In the physical world such processes are very difficult, but strong patterns show themselves without any randomness. Even earlier I began to believe that there is no arbitrariness in music either, if it’s a “real” music. Works by Bach or Beethoven grow like live organisms, naturally and in full compliance with some objective laws. Such laws are too complex and we are unable to comprehend them. But they can realize themselves through the intuition of a musician when such intuition is unmistakable. In the past, a musician (and an artist in general) with absolute intuition was called a “genius.” Now this word is out of fashion, but the essence hasn’t changed.   So, in the “world of elementary particles” that I discovered I became interested by “order and chaos.” I tried to imagine the music that would be similar to if not a live organism then a live phenomena, where sounds live and where regular processes become turbulent and vice versa according to their own laws. Here, the

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experience of Pärt and the minimalists came in very handy. Because the exact repeats and sequences are the order; any inexactitudes while repeating are turbulences, and absence of the repeats is chaos. The performance becomes very important—different fluctuations that take place in the performance itself. Often, the music text looks much simpler than what should sound in real life.   Have I found similar processes in minimalist music? Virtually not. The famous “gradual processes” that have been attributed to the 1960 minimalism ended up being too primitive and mechanistic to correspond with what I was interested in (in my imagination “minimalism” was more complicated and rich than what it was in real life). Have I found similar processes in music by other composers? Yes! Most often in the music of Samuel Scheidt who is barely known now: in his Tabulatura nova and, primarily, in Fantasia super: Ut. Re. Mi. Fa. Sol. La. It’s such fantastic music! It’s a miracle for me why it hasn’t been appreciated. Tabulatura is an absolute masterpiece. For me, it stands in one row with Well-Tempered Clavier, with Beethoven’s sonatas, with everything greatest that has ever been created by people. ED:  How is minimalism connected with other styles that you use? SZ:  Minimalism for me is not a style but, rather, a type of writing. It is elements—repetitions, sequences, simple linear processes and similar things. How the minimalism intersects and interacts with other types of writing is always a question of a particular situation. It can happen in different ways. ED:  Which works in this style do you consider your most important compositions? SZ:  In 1990 the Sonata was finished; in 1991—Pieces Nos. 1–3 (though they had been started earlier) and Pieces Nos. 4, 4a. In these works there are many repetitions of different types both exact and variated. If minimalism is repetitiveness, then these works are very minimalistic. There are also small works. They are not “main,” but I like many of them very much. ED:  What is the difference between Russian and American minimalism, in your opinion? SZ:  I don’t know anything about it. I don’t know what is Russian or American minimalism. Perhaps it’s possible to talk about the “1960 American minimalism,” but it’s not possible to talk about the

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“American minimalism in general.” Besides, in our time the composer’s nationality has nothing to do with what kind of music he writes and what his influences are, in my opinion. ED:  Why did minimalism gain traction in Russia? SZ:  But symphonic music also got traction, as well as jazz to a certain degree. Everything that has ever appeared can later get traction elsewhere, if the climate is right.

elena dubinets interviews nikolai korndorf (2000) NK:  I don’t think a composer has to talk about belonging to this or that compositional school—it’s clearer when you step back. It bothered me when, say, Svetlana Savenko described me as a “hard-core minimalist.” I grant that this is true. But it happened involuntarily, although the minimalist ideas, certainly, were congenial to me. John Adams’ approach isn’t congenial, although a few of Reich’s early ideas are, connected to the creation of “drive”—the driving force of the major mode. But ostinato, in the ways in which they use it, doesn’t occur in any of my works. Granted that in “Da!!” the second half moves throughout in a slow tempo, but only one of my pieces, “Con sordino,” has repeated mechanical patterns (and they are obscured at that; they move not by sixteenth notes but by dotted halves). Nevertheless, for me minimalism was a breath of fresh air. Not so much a breath, but a kind of fresh breeze. It isn’t so much its “mindlessness,” but rather the potential pantheistic-religious images, which are made possible through these minimalistic processes. Before minimalism, the complete rejection of functional harmony ruled the day. That is, the over-use of functional harmony prevented many composers from working with tonality—and from writing music in the major mode. But it turns out that you can avoid such triviality if you use only a single chord.   My Third Symphony was composed in 1989—this was the most important work I had written to that point. The conceptual plan of the symphony is as follows: the first and second movements are the same, although written in different ways: one is in slow tempo, the Excerpt from Nikolai Korndorf, interview with Elena Dubinets, summer 2000, unpublished. Courtesy of Elena Dubinets.

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other in fast. It is a dynamic wave which, in principle, should produce a certain ecstatic state—for me, you know, music is a way to act upon the listener. The first two movements are two such waves, entirely crescendo, which don’t lead anywhere. The first time there is, in fact, no climax and everything ends on an unstable chord. The first attempt failed. The first cadenza by the piano, a slow psalm-chorale, appears as a sort of intermedio between the movements.   The second movement is laid out in the same way, but in a fast tempo. As in the first movement, every group of instruments has its own specific material and plays only that, gradually joining forces in the larger sonority. At the end of the second movement everything breaks off again and an ecstatic cadenza by the piano emerges—the pianist pounds the keys with his fists and elbows, playing only seconds and clusters. And then something new begins, a male chorus. There are several sections in the third movement, and the last wave, with children’s chorus, leads to an intermediate climax in D-flat major. And at that point there is an element of theater when the pianist, who assumes the role of a soloist, answers the orchestra. After this is how the approach to the main climax of the entire symphony begins. All the instruments, with their own material, gradually join in. Finally, what one hears in the symphony is the voice of mankind.   And after this work I understood that I couldn’t go any further along this path. And had to search for and work in a new manner.

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chapter 17

Spiritual Minimalism

When Manfred Eicher, the founder and producer of the experimental jazz label ECM, heard Arvo Pärt’s Tabula Rasa on his car radio in the early 1980s, he immediately pulled over; he later compared his first encounter with the music to “a meteorite falling from the sky.”1 Such epiphanies were common in this period. After musician Paul Jamrozy stumbled upon a vinyl album of Henry Górecki’s Third Symphony, he began playing it as the opener for his cultish industrial band Test Dept in London. When Nonesuch executive Robert Hurwitz heard the same symphony for the first time, he decided it needed a new recording on his label, with soprano Dawn Upshaw.2 As the Cold War ended, Westerners began to discover music from behind the Iron Curtain, including the so-called “spiritual” or “mystical” or even “holy” minimalists. While the early minimalists had rooted their work in a countercultural spirituality—Pandit Pran Nath taught his disciples that “sound is god”—the holy minimalists of the 1980s and 1990s crafted austere, slow-moving music that was imbued with a sense of religious profundity.3 Unlike their American counterparts, though, these composers were unknown to one another until the record industry brought them together: ECM and Nonesuch seized on their executives’ epiphanies, releasing albums of music by Pärt, Gorecki, and others, which were marketed with a hip asceticism and sold millions of copies.4

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john rockwell on mystical minimalism ( new york times , 1993) The astonishing success of the Elektra Nonesuch recording of Henryk Mikolaj Górecki’s Third Symphony has thrust that diffident, rather puzzled Polish composer into the limelight. The recording has been No. 1 for most of this year on the British and American classical sales charts, and for a time it was No. 6 on the British pop chart as well, outselling every sort of teen idol. Mr. Górecki’s “Symphony of Sorrowful Songs,” as it is subtitled, consists of an hour’s worth of slow movements with soprano solo—hardly a likely candidate for the pop charts. Yet the affecting emotions of the words and their singing, and the shining affirmation of Mr. Górecki’s instrumental writing, have won mass approval, even as they alienated those composers for whom commercial success is a sign of capitulation. But Mr. Górecki (pronounced go-RET-skee) is hardly alone in being a composer who both writes serious music and wins genuine enthusiasm from wide audiences. For a half-century, the public, not always fairly or accurately, came to equate musical seriousness with a lack of popularity. Now, that same public is welcoming a group of Eastern European composers who can be gathered under the rubric “mystical Minimalists.” These men and women create pure and soaring soundworlds, using materials based on folk music or hymns and building them to solemn grandeur, often through simple repetitive means. They traffic in the reductionist methods of such Americans as Steve Reich and Philip Glass, if hardly in their bustling urban energy and amplitude. Their very individuality makes them resistant to any notion of a school in the organized sense of, say, Les Six between the world wars. But their sense of alienation from mainstream 20th-century modernism, their mutual respect and similarities of style make it easy to group them. The composers include Sofia Gubaidulina of Russia, Giya Kancheli of Georgia and the late Andrzej Panufnik of Poland (though he was long a resident of Britain). Other than Mr. Górecki, the most prominent by far is the Estonian Arvo Pärt (pronounced PAIRT), who is the beneficiary of his own kind of cult sales success on ECM, a record label almost as hip as Nonesuch. His music offers an overt spirituality akin to Mr. Górecki’s folkish faith—above all his “Passio,” or “St. John Passion,” a John Rockwell, “In East Europe: Minimalism Meets Mysticism,” New York Times, July 4, 1993, 136–37. From The New York Times. © 1993 The New York Times Company. All rights reserved. Used under license.

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chantlike, ethereally pure setting of the Passion of Christ that has won enormous attention in concert and on records. Interviewed recently in their home cities—Mr. Górecki in a hotel cafe in the grim industrial city of Katowice, near Auschwitz; Mr. Pärt in his leafy suburban home in southern Berlin, where he has lived for 12 years—the two composers revealed differences in attitude and outlook that are easy to enumerate, for all their underlying kinship. Musically, Mr. Pärt has become an ever more austere formalist, purifying his materials into a rigorous yet childlike adoration of God. Mr. Górecki is more stylistically fluid, ranging from a brilliant, even harsh idiom that recalls the late Olivier Messiaen to the songful, flowing, folk-flavored meditations that made his Third Symphony (composed 17 years ago) so popular. The two are also of the same generation. (Mr. Górecki is 59, Mr. Pärt 57.) Both dealt in harsher forms of modernism in their youth; both began to evolve toward their current styles two decades ago, and both feel a certain nostalgia for the lonely purity of their lives as outsiders under Communism. Mr. Górecki, who retains an almost peasantlike personal simplicity, remains rooted in his native soil and in the folk music of the nearby Tatra Mountains, on the border of the Slovak Republic. Mr. Pärt, who has the gentle authority of an academic, seems serenely content to be cosmopolitan, albeit intensely spiritual. When asked if there were traces of Estonian folk music in his scores, Mr. Pärt replied: “I don’t know of any. Spiritual matters have no borders. When borders begin, music becomes more and more empty.” He is equally guarded about commenting on the religious elements in his music: “For Bach, every piece that he wrote was praise of God, but I’m not worthy to say that.” The folk tradition remains paramount for Mr. Górecki, but it’s as much a connection to an entire culture as a strictly musical influence. “In every piece of mine, there is something of the Tatra Mountains,” he said. “I need them like a fish needs water, like a man needs air. The folk music is still alive, right up to today. It’s not just in my ear, it’s in my blood. And it’s not just the music, but the crafts, the buildings, the paintings, the glassworks, the clothing. Every day I’m not in Chochołów”—his favorite Tatra village—“is a lost day.” Mr. Górecki has had three years’ worth of lost days, since he has been unable to rent the house he had regularly occupied in Chochołów. When it was pointed out that his Third Symphony royalties might allow him to buy a better house, he looked forlorn, muttered about rising real

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estate prices and then reconfirmed his ties to gray, grimy Katowice, the heart of Poland’s polluted Silesia district. “I have to stay here,” he said. “I had a thousand opportunities to move to Paris, Italy, Germany. But I always said, if everybody moved out of Poland, what would remain? And I always asked myself whether my music would sound the same without these trees, clouds, houses. “So I taught at the conservatory, although my son now is my only student, and my wife teaches piano. When you’re young, you can move. Now there are medical reasons to stay. Every year you get older, and every year you rely more on other people.” Both composers managed to lead functional lives under Communism, even if their quirkiness made them unsuitable as approved Soviet spokesmen. Neither was an active dissident, and both were allowed to travel for professional reasons. Mr. Pärt worked for the state radio in Estonia and wrote film music; Mr. Górecki’s conservatory teaching kept food on the table. Although Mr. Pärt eventually emigrated and both men are better off than they were, they express affection for the simpler lives of their youths. “Life was hard, but I’m thankful,” Mr. Pärt said. “One had always to be awake then. Perhaps in some sense the development of my music was influenced by politics, but I don’t dwell on this at all.” Mr. Górecki regrets what he sees as the moral failings of post-Communist Poland. “It makes me unbelievably sad,” he said. “I always thought that when we were really free, we’d work for each other, that life would be better. But now, people just want to get money quickly, without work. They don’t care how or with whom, they just want money. One has to work.” The composers seem bemused by their present popularity and attribute their success as much to their publishers and record labels in the West as to their own efforts. They are especially puzzled by their appeal to those previously unfamiliar with contemporary classical music, and they welcome that popularity with the guarded caution one might expect from such solitary men. “Naturally, it’s a wonder for me, what’s happening,” said Mr. Górecki, who had come straight from a rock-style group interview with the European pop-music press in Brussels. “Imagine—a contemporary piece with such an appeal! Perhaps people need this. In Brussels, I kept thinking this wasn’t happening to me but to another man. For me, it’s fantastic for an old man to have such understanding in foreign lands.” Mr. Pärt is suspicious of the “cultish” aspects of American Minimalism and New Age music. But he doesn’t feel that ECM, which is some-

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times castigated as a New Age label, has affected his image adversely. “I do my work, and I don’t know what the reaction to it is; it’s not my problem,” he said with his customary detachment. But then he praised the American Minimalists for their “effort to bring things back to earth” from the convoluted and “artificial” state they had attained under high musical modernism. Mr. Górecki’s Third Symphony has been dismissed as simplistic by some modernists, a charge that hurts him. “I admire Boulez,” he said, recalling his close ties to Pierre Boulez and other Western European modernists in his youth. “But now he is unbelievably angry about my music. “I feel close to the musicians who champion my work. People ask me if I know who bought my Third Symphony—cleaning ladies, window washers. But if these people need such music, then why not? If people whistle Schubert, does that make him smaller?” Both men, Mr. Górecki in his cocoon of Polish folk art, Mr. Pärt in his increasingly interior world of the spirit, seem much too set in their ways to capitulate to any sudden popularity, much less to alter their styles to court such popularity. Mr. Pärt hopes that his music has become purer, but he sees creativity as a constant struggle. “I feel distanced from my early work,” he said. “It’s as if it’s by another person. I don’t own a computer, but there is a computer in my mind and heart. I don’t call my music computer music, but it is strict music. One could call it formal music, very exact. “I’m in search of what has meaning for me. Sometimes I’m nearer, sometimes farther away. Sometimes it’s like clean air, and one can see far, but sometimes it’s cloudy. It’s a living process.”

jamie mccarthy interviews arvo pärt (1986) JM:  Which composers do you consider to have influenced your early works?5 AP:  Very few. JM:  For example, Perpetuum Mobile is dedicated to Luigi Nono. AP:  Yes, that was a spontaneous reaction to a visit he made to Estonia. It was the first meeting that we had ever had with a

Jamie McCarthy, “An Interview with Arvo Pärt,” Musical Times 130, no. 1753 (March 1989): 130–33. Courtesy of Jamie McCarthy and Arvo Pärt.

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major contemporary composer from the West. That was an important experience for us. JM:  What contemporary Western music had you heard in Estonia? AP:  We had heard some works by Boulez and Webern and some by Nono—that’s about all. JM:  You hadn’t heard any music by Cage, for example? AP:  No. JM:  The articles by Susan Bradshaw and Alan Levy gave me the impression that the Second Symphony was reputed to employ Cageian techniques. AP:  Well, one may say that, but I had not heard of Cage; or perhaps someone had said that he messed around with the insides of the piano or simply sat at the keyboard without playing anything. JM:  But you had no knowledge of the music? AP:  No, it’s never performed in the Soviet Union. Perhaps some people manage to play some of it now—unofficially. JM:  Do you think that your music written in the ’60s was particularly influenced by Western composers? AP:  Yes, it was influenced by such things as twelve-tone, serial and aleatoric music; all that came to us from the West. Perhaps someone had also done it in Russia but we didn’t know about it. For example, when I was studying we had two books of exercises by Eimert and Krenek and that was all, apart from a few odd examples or illegal cassettes. But one doesn’t need to know that much—if someone says that there’s a country where the people dance on only one leg and you’ve never seen it, then you can try it yourself if you want: you might do it better than the people who did it in the first place!   When something new arises in the world, then the idea seems to occur everywhere almost simultaneously. One can never say how such things arise in different places at the same time; one shouldn’t think of things in isolation. Everything in the world is linked; when you see one thing, then you can also understand many others. So it’s very possible that I was influenced by Cage, but it didn’t come from his music, but from things that were, perhaps, completely unknown to me. I may have heard a word, or seen a face or a picture, or something by someone connected with Cage.

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  When people are hungry they are sensitive to every hint of food. It’s the same with ideas, particularly at that time in the Soviet Union. The hunger for information was so great that at times it was enough to hear just one or two chords and a whole new world was opened up. JM:  It must be very different living in the West, since there are not the same sort of restrictions on information. AP:  People here are very sleepy; they are satiated with so many things—everything is available to them. JM:  How do you feel about people who still compose with serial techniques? AP:  I don’t think about them at all; I’m not interested in such things at the moment. I don’t think there’s any sense in concerning oneself with them when one is involved in something different. JM:  Do you now feel that all serial or aleatory music has no soul in it? AP:  It does have spirit, but within limits; it gravitates in a particular direction. It’s one color—perhaps not even a color, just greyness. Its workings are very limited, and if someone concerns themselves with this area and needs nothing else, then obviously that’s enough for them; one can write some things like that. One must know what is behind a movement—what it holds within it. It’s one picture, one spectrum—one thing. JM:  When you talk about your “tintinnabula” works, [“tintinnabula” referring to Pärt’s style since the mid ’70s, combining scalic and triadic textures and bell-like sonorities] you talk of an intuitive approach to composition. For example, on the Universal Edition publicity leaflet you talk of “linking the head to the heart . . .” AP:  Yes. For example, if I’m not content—with myself or something I’ve done—I can’t explain what I’m feeling. I don’t have the words to do so. Yet if I simply lift up my hands like this, then you understand because I’ve shown you with my hands, even though I can’t find the words to say it. My body makes a movement and you can’t say what it says in words—it’s a different language. That is also how I want to write music, and at that time I wanted to learn how—I couldn’t express what I had to say in any other way. I only knew that my head distorted things and so I felt I needed to write quickly when a line came, since it came from somewhere within, or from other channels; not from the head. Otherwise it can be all heady, simply mathematical and computerized—one has no real

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connection with it. Of course it’s a bad thing when people can no longer work out nine-times-seven in their head and need to consult their pocket calculator, but that’s something altogether different. The ability to do such things without a calculator shows that we can also understand and create other things. Unfortunately our heads are just like a small machine which simply sits fast while we remain fairly blind and narrow. I wanted to free myself from that. JM:  But these works are based on well thought-out principles. For example, Cantus is based almost entirely on a system. AP:  That’s the problem. For example, when someone drinks a lot of wine without a limit, then they don’t feel too good—they’re completely drunk. When one does that all one’s life then it’s a bad thing, but when one simply drinks an occasional glass of wine then it’s fine. It’s the same with systems—they shouldn’t be too complex. It’s better when they’re under control.   Everyone who writes serial music thinks that the more complex the structure, the stronger and better it is. But that’s not right: it’s the other way around. Why is Webern’s music so highly regarded by contemporary composers? Because it’s so simple; disciplined and rigorous, but simple. (That isn’t to say that there aren’t also very complex things in his music.) Unfortunately, however, composers often think that because they think a lot they have something to say. They don’t realise that they have almost nothing to say. Underneath all this complexity there is only a lack of wisdom and no truth. The truth is very simple; earnest people understand that to be so. Those who are not in earnest, or who are utterly mistaken, don’t understand it and they translate their mistakes into their music. JM:  So in your music the structures are not important in themselves— they are simply a means of expressing something. The sound is the most important thing. AP:  Yes. You asked me which serialist composers I was interested in: in fact they don’t interest me at all. What does interest me is how they will all come out of this situation. It is only an episode in a person’s life. This children’s game will soon come to an end. JM:  Do you think that there are any similarities in technique or approach that run through both your early and more recent works? AP:  One can only see such things with time . . . It’s like taking a blood test of my music from today or ten or twenty years ago: it

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is the blood of the same human being but there could be great differences. JM:  Some people have referred to your music as minimal. How do you feel about that? AP:  I don’t know. Am I really a minimalist? It’s not something that concerns me. JM:  How do you feel that your Russian Orthodox religion has influenced your music? AP:  Religion influences everything. Not just music, but everything. JM:  When one reads about your “tintinnabula” works, one frequently comes across mention of the word silence in reference to both the music itself and in a more abstract way. Do you feel that when one writes music from a starting point of silence and one feels that silence is enough, that one will only be moved to write when one has something of importance to give? AP:  Yes. One must find and therefore think and contemplate whether one should say something or not. Or, moreover, whether one has something to say. And how do I do that? The most important things that happen between people—for example, two people who are very close to each other—are not stated, are not even that possible to express. One doesn’t need to say anything and shouldn’t say anything. Yet these things are very important. There is a sort of barrier, and when someone feels this barrier and the strength of such things I believe they must pause often. These persons mean a great deal. They follow on from what has been said before, or are a preparation for what is to come. Or remaining silent can simply be like taking a breath, or the beating of the heart. I think we must concern ourselves far more with pauses and reflection, and evoke this reflection and this condition of stability for the people for whom we create our art. JM:  When you studied early music, which aspects of this music interested you most? AP:  I had an intuitive feeling that this music was very good, but I had no access to it as it was not included in our education. Therefore it was not so much a case of simply studying or reading. One had to go a very roundabout way in order to find out about other areas of music. In the main, in order to understand this music one needs to appreciate the religious aspect. One must go deeply into the music

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and then you can begin to have some conception of it. I studied the music of those composers that were available to me: Gregorian chant, the Notre Dame school, then Machaut, Franco-Flemish music, Obrecht, Ockeghem and Josquin. Mainly before Palestrina, but then I also studied Victoria later. JM:  Were you influenced by the spirit of the music, or were there also technical aspects that interested you? AP:  Naturally there were also technical details that interested me, but that is not enough. It is a fault in the study of music that everyone works to learn Palestrina’s style (for example) and yet they don’t know what relevance that has to us today. It’s a stumbling block for many people; it was for me in music school. But later I studied for myself and found different approaches to the music. It means very little to say that I was affected by the spirit of the music, however; it was that side of it that interested me far more than the sort of things one discovers when one is taught about the mechanics of polyphony. JM:  When you first began to compose in the “tintinnabula” style, how did the public react? AP:  They received the music well, but nevertheless they thought I was a little “cracked.” JM:  Did you find that the public for contemporary music reacted better or worse to the music than people who listen to other types of music; early music, for example? AP:  I don’t really know, because no one had been able to get to know early music in the Soviet Union. I didn’t really notice such a great difference in public reaction. For some it was a shock. Some were at a loss, since a lot of people had fought and paid dearly to be able to compose serially and found my actions difficult to understand. It was a misunderstanding for a lot of people, especially for critics and older professors, who had felt for a long time that there was something to be gained from this contemporary movement, and I was saying that all that was of no worth; they no longer had a point of reference. But my aim was to find a point of reference within myself—not from what others said, or what Krenek or Webern or Boulez says. I am myself and I must know for myself what is right and who is right. That’s the problem: one cannot believe everything that is written in the newspapers, and it’s the same with contemporary music.

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JM:  When you first gave the scores for the new style works to musicians to play, did they find it difficult to interpret such seemingly simple scores? AP:  It’s difficult because they sometimes look fairly uninteresting— every musician sees only their own part and don’t know what the others are doing, and they’re not very keen to go any further into the music. They think: “Well, I can easily play these four notes and that’s all I’m sitting here for.” But when they play together then there’s a different reaction. It’s even better in a concert situation, since they all think: “Well, O.K., this is a fiasco, but let’s salvage what we can of the situation.” Then they just play what’s written, but seriously, and they hear for the first time that there actually is something to the music. JM:  In the “tintinnabuli” works you use well-formulated principles of construction. Do you feel that there is any contradiction between these principles and your intuitive approach to music? AP:  I don’t see it as a contradiction, since everything in the world is numerically arranged in one way or another. There are definite rules everywhere—it has to be so. But my principle is that they must not be the most important part of the music. They must be simple— they fall away and are only a skeleton. Life arises from other things. When things are simple and clear, then they are also clean. They are empty; there is room for everything. It is more important than these principles of construction.   If one plays one or two notes beautifully in an austere and clean combination, then that’s good—we have two good things . . .   Everything that is readable with the eyes is still not everything. One never knows what music lies behind those notes. That’s always how it is. Then suddenly an interpreter comes along, who plays something out of this empty space in such a way that you feel within yourself that this is really no longer your music. In fact it isn’t my music. The music is simply a bridge between us, and what the interpreter does is very beautiful. JM:  Are there any contemporary composers whose work you find interesting or whose attitudes you find sympathetic to your own? AP:  I admire nearly all works by other composers (there are exceptions of course, works which I find totally uninteresting—political works for example), but I listen to very little music and I seldom go

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to a concert in order to hear music by a particular composer. It’s difficult to talk of a sympathy in relation to the work of other composers, since my work comes from a slightly unusual area and has not been influenced by the same things as Western composers. But such things are better seen with the perspective of time. I am always interested by people who are in search of purity. This need can occur in different ways, but when it exists it marks a living spirit. Unfortunately most of the time it is petrified. If people simply hear the word “God” they become sad; but what is sad is when it has that effect. But wonders are forever occurring and people who think like that today will feel differently tomorrow.   It is said that God suffers men to live only as long as it is important for them to come to know the truth. It is also said that when someone dies, whether they be young or old, that moment has been chosen as the best time to die. Therefore the last moments before death are very precious—very important—for at that time things can happen which have not come about during a whole lifetime.

paul jamrozy on henryk górecki’s symphony no. 3 ( the wire , 2014) In the late spring of 1982 I made my second visit to Poland with my father and two younger brothers. On arrival in Warsaw station we attempted to avoid the clusters of drunks staggering around with glazed expressions, clutching broken and chipped beer mugs. The smell of boiled-to-death cabbage and offal in the buffet was gut wrenching and we quickly negotiated a tram ride to the Stare Miasto (old town). As I meandered along the cobbled streets I stumbled into the doorway of an old music shop. Inside, a few academic types browsed the racks of dusty vinyl in the hushed silence. I delved deep to get beyond a host of lurid illustrative abstractions, all suffering from a ’60s hangover and offering no clues as to what music lay inside, beyond the bountiful sleeves depicting stark social realism, Red Army choirs and partisans, deeper through the Warsaw resistance fighters and ghetto inhabitants . . . It suddenly emerged; a mesmeric gradient of black and white tones shimmered on the vinyl cover in a dot matrix graphic of density and shade, dancing on the retina. I recalled Bridget Riley’s playfully geometPaul Jamrozy, “The Inner Sleeve: Henryk Górecki’s Symphony No. 3 (Symphony of Sorrowful Songs),” The Wire 361, March 2014. Courtesy of Paul Jamrozy and The Wire.

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ric and vertiginous Op(tical) Art works, the power in the minimalist simplicity. The sleeve belonged to Henryk Mikolaj Górecki’s third symphony, or Symphony Of Sorrowful Songs. I scanned the sleeve notes. “Górecki does not seek inspiration in the romantic tradition . . . but goes much further back, back to the very source of music when, before becoming an art, it was already a ritual and the most natural, original form of human expression.” I grabbed two copies and eagerly paid the 65 zlotys per disc. The beginning of the piece built so quietly it was almost inaudible under the noise and hiss of the poor vinyl pressing; as it climbed mesmerically into a piece based on graffiti scratched on a cell wall by a young female prisoner of the Gestapo, its beauty and emotional impact left me devastated. The soprano voice of Stefania Woytowicz soared, relating the story of a mother lamenting over the body of her dead son. Górecki himself was a son of Śląsk (Silesia), from the huge industrial conurbation of Katowice, as was my own father, born in Wesoła, a satellite village centered on the Lenin Kop (Colliery). Like those whose suffering the symphony laments, my father, a mere boy of 14, was also taken from his family by the Nazis. Fortunately he survived, working initially as a forced farm laborer, and then sent to clear the bomb debris as the allies carpet-bombed German industrial cities. So it goes. The linear streams of dots on the sleeve resembled a geological crosssection of a coal seam. The image signified the depths of human resilience, calloused hands and wrinkled brows, while the music spoke of both suffering and transcendence in its harmony and dissonance. The soaring spiritual overtones were shafts of light, stoking the burning embers that were bound to the earth, submerged in the industry of totalitarianism. From Wesoła we drove 24.4 km south to Oświęcim/Auschwitz, from where it was alleged the smell of burning bodies even reached the village when the southerly wind blew. We witnessed for ourselves the shoes, suitcases, spectacles, massed high, the remnants of the Final Solution. We stood solemnly in the stillness of the gas chamber and Krematorium I. Such visions became embedded in industrial music through Throbbing Gristle’s conception of the Nazis’ Final Solution as an industrial process, the death factory. The iconic snapshot of Genesis P-Orridge under the gateway to the concentration camp certainly reinforced this connection. The use of this imagery coalescing with a barrage of electronic noise provided a timely jolt to the benign remnants of punk. I stood on the same spot searching for meaning in a dark place;

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ultimately this emerged into a constructive creative enquiry within the Test Dept collective, set amid the post-industrial debris of London. But the TG paradigm and influence lived on, with many lazily adopting their references without the intelligent interrogation. Once submerged, some found it difficult to escape this creative bunker. Soon afterwards, Górecki was introduced into the Test Dept set as an atmospheric opener before launching a metallic onslaught. At the start of each performance, a barrage of lights, film and sound included taped excerpts from Symphony No. 3. The contrast triggered a sensory meltdown in the audience. Musicologist Luke B. Howard wrote in a 2003 article in Polish Music Journal: “Segments of the British public were being exposed to the symphony through a most unusual and unexpected source: the concerts given from 1983–86 by the English group Test Department.” And so it came to pass that the Symphony Of Sorrowful Songs’s first airing on British soil was courtesy of a lost son of Śląsk’s return to his homeland. (I later recorded my father talking about his experiences and laid it over a cut-up version of the Górecki piece, for Resonance FM.) All a very long way from its over-exposure on Classic FM.

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chapter 18

Popular Culture

For champions of musical minimalism, one of the key reasons for the movement’s enduring importance is its effect on a broader cultural landscape outside of classical and experimental music. In Tim Page’s adulatory 1978 review of Music for 18 Musicians, he quotes David Bowie as describing the composer’s work as “a tonetrack into the future”; many writers have reiterated stories of how Bowie and Brian Eno listened to Philip Glass’s and Steve Reich’s music when they were working on their landmark Low and Heroes records.1 But minimalism’s connections to popular culture were not just limited to such cross-genre exchanges. In his revisionist study Repeating Ourselves, musicologist Robert Fink draws cogent connections between disco and minimalism, comparing Music for 18 with Giorgio Moroder and Donna Summer’s extended dance mix of “Love to Love You Baby.”2 As Glass himself once put it, “When I first heard Donna Summer, I just laughed. I said, ‘That’s exactly what we’re doing!’ ” Indeed, many qualities of disco resonate deeply with minimalism: its ethos as “environmental music,” its focus on the body, its surrender to rhythm and the beat.3 Through the 1990s, attention to minimalism’s pop culture cachet only grew. Following Glass’s work on the cult classic Koyaanisqatsi, the composer’s film scores, and their imitators, saturated the mainstream; Variety wrote that “minimalist music is being heard all through the cineplexes of America.”4 Glass wrote symphonies inspired by Bowie and Eno, making explicit the web of citational connections that flowed 321

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between the musicians. A wave of techno and electronic artists paid tribute to Reich and Glass in their work, and Nonesuch returned the favor with the 1999 album Reich Remixed, inviting producers and DJs to make their own versions of Piano Phase and Drumming.5 Due to such framings, problematic myths continue to crop up, as when Reich is heralded as the proto-Kraftwerk or even the forerunner of hiphop. Scholar Timothy Rutherford-Johnson has critiqued such inflated rhetoric as an “influence engine,” one that supplies avant-garde credibility to pop while awarding contemporary composition with continued relevance.6

stephen holden on disco ( high fidelity , 1979) Disco has presented the biggest challenge to the media through which we receive music since the birth of rock & roll. Although conventional wisdom assumes that the high fidelity revolution is winding down, the profound effects of disco technology on the very form and substance of pop suggest otherwise. Being the ultimate environmental music (inside a club, music is the environment), disco dramatizes the fact that all pop is environmental—a designed background music for the home, the car, the street, etc. Disco began as a rebel style, a populist upsurge against the complacency of radio, led by a visionary new breed of media freak, the disco deejay/producer. Until its rise, mass-market pop had adapted itself totally to the needs of radio, which demanded short-form songs with subliminally appealing hooks—an aural style basically similar to the medium’s sales pitches and appropriate for the three basic types of audio: home high fidelity, car-radio medium fidelity, and low-fidelity portable transistor. The continuous wraparound sound and viscerally programmed structure of club music answered a need for deeper musical involvement than home audio and radio formats could provide. But it was only after the phenomenal record sales of in-disco hits forced the issue that radio jumped on the bandwagon. Disco’s appeal being visceral rather than subliminal, the music could only have evolved within its own special club environment, presided over by the rebel leaders. There, it could be continuous and amplified Stephen Holden, “Disco: The Medium Is the Message,” High Fidelity 28, no. 8 (August 1979), 105. Courtesy of Stephen Holden.

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on a level impractical as well as impermissible anywhere else. With its emphasis on a pile-driving sexual rhythm, disco gave the beat unprecedented supremacy. The pop song, like most other Western European musical structures, was a rough (and in radio’s case, a shortened) parody of the sexual act, but it still retained its traditional linear form. Disco’s elongated chant dispensed with melodic line in favor of a hookbreak structure whose aim was to suspend the dancer in a vertical, timeless pulse embellished with sound effects. The result was a very literal, in-depth sexual parody, not a superficial one. The very essence of disco is surrender to rhythm and, indirectly, to a thoroughly technological environment. The techno-world evoked by Donna Summer and her producers, Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte, is a sexual amusement park in which the synthesizer is an erotic toy and the sexual ideal a mechanically quantifiable orgasm. ABBA’s formally cherry pop/disco recalls the benign regimentation of a perfect grade school. And Chic’s producers, Bernard Edwards and Nile Rodgers, are the ultimate examples of disco producers as environmental designers. They sketch a luxurious home setting by hanging aural decor behind the voices; what matters above all is ambience. As disco has become corporate and radio discofied, the conflicting demands of clubs and radio have necessitated compromises, and the music has had to be altered to serve both mediums. Clubs are provided with lengthened disco mixes of pop songs, while radio requires shortened, four-minute edits of in-disco hits. The effect of disco radio on the rebel music has been to defuse the rebellion by making it more hookoriented, high-ended, and accessible, freezing out the more experimental electronic manifestations of Eurodisco that swept the market three years ago. But notwithstanding these accommodations, disco has still deeply affected pop radio’s sound and style. For the first time in the history of radio, the steady pulse is more important than the hook. Even on portable transistors, the sound suggests the heartbeat of modern urban life. These developments all signal pop’s move away from linear, scripted forms toward aurally, electronically received imprints of a preprogrammed, packaged, transmedia sound no longer tied to acoustical models. This is space age pop—the aural equivalent of TV. What Marshall McLuhan once said about TV now applies as much to the interdependent technologies of radio, records, and disco: “The medium is the message.”

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kenny berkowitz on minimalism’s impact on techno ( option , 1997) Philip Glass is crouched on his living room floor, staring at a television three feet away and suffering through Orbital’s music video for “The Box.” The first five notes—dah-dah-dah-dah-dumm—are obviously inspired by Glass, just like the visuals, which borrow heavily from the Glass-scored film Koyaanisqatsi. After 30 seconds, Glass is losing interest, shifting his feet, turning away from the set. “It’s really not very edgy, is it?” It’s a cold, gray summer day, with rain pouring down in sheets, and I’m in Glass’s East Village apartment, delivering a message from Orbital’s Paul Hartnoll. “I wouldn’t know what to say, just thanks very much,” Hartnoll asked me to relate in a sincere, meaningful whisper. “It must be nice for him, to know he’s influencing people who are making music now, do you know what I mean? Like if I was 30 years older, and someone who’s 29 said I’d been influencing them for the past 10 years. Well, I’d be very pleased, I think.” Glass doesn’t look pleased at all. After Orbital, he listens to a little bit of the Orb, then μ-Ziq, and then Underworld—all musicians who claim him as an influence. But a listening session that started off a few minutes ago with an optimistic “Impress me!” has turned into disappointment. “I hear Glass-like music all the time,” he says. “I don’t care if it sounds like me—what I want to hear is something exciting.” At age 60, he’s a household name: a question on Jeopardy, a cartoon in The Daily News, a cameo on The Simpsons. He’s constantly working on high-profile projects, including an upcoming collaboration with Mick Jagger, a score for Martin Scorsese’s Kundun and a new opera with Robert Wilson. He’s as famous as a living composer can get and still be filed under “classical.” With 35 CDs behind him and a full calendar ahead, Glass still performs 60 to 80 concerts a year, to an average of a thousand people a night—including at least one concert every year in London, which has always welcomed him, even when New York hasn’t. Thirty years ago, Glass was driving a cab, working as a plumber and composing music in his spare time. On a good night, he’d perform to Kenny Berkowitz, “Minimal Impact,” Option 77 (November–December 1997): 50–55. Article published with permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Article produced by ProQuest LLC as part of ProQuest® Arts Premium Collection. www.proquest.com.

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25 people, and in a typical review, he’d see his music called “artistically limited” and “merely trivial.” At the time, Glass, along with Steve Reich, Terry Riley and La Monte Young, were called minimalists; and though they all hated the label, it stuck. All four were academically trained composers rebelling against the academy. All four were interested in jazz, in drones, in repetition, in Eastern music. All four were interested in creating something new. By 1970, critics had begun to notice, calling one Reich concert “purely musical.” But minimalism was still a downtown phenomenon, barely breaking into the uptown world of museums and concert halls. In 1973, all that changed when the Boston Symphony Orchestra brought Reich’s thundering, monotonous “Four Organs” to a subscription audience at Carnegie Hall, hoping something would happen. It did: the audience booed so loudly the musicians couldn’t hear each other, and one woman rushed up the aisle, beat her head against the stage and screamed, “Stop, stop, I confess!” The minimalists had arrived. “The situation was really a set-up,” says Reich, whose music has been collected in a new 10-CD box set, Works 1965–1995 (Nonesuch). “Basically, you had a lot of blue-haired ladies coming down to see a Boston Symphony Orchestra concert, the rest of the program being Mozart and Liszt. When they heard ‘Four Organs,’ with one dominant 11th chord on four screaming Farfisa mini-compact organs for 20-odd minutes—obviously, it’s going to raise some hackles. But that’s not why we’re talking now. Because a lot of people did like it. That’s why it’s still around.” At an amusement park just outside Buffalo this summer, Orbital’s headlining Lollapalooza set begins with a duet of rapid-fire keyboard arpeggios (à la Glass) set slightly out of phase (à la Reich). Like 14-yearold Lindsay Britton, who calls this Lollapalooza “the best birthday present I ever had,” the crowd is mostly in their teens, waving their arms to the music, just excited to be at a real concert. They’re far too young to notice the references, but Orbital’s Paul Hartnoll hears Glass in his own music, “in bits and pieces, definitely”; he hears Reich too, but on “a subtler level, in that sort of counter-rhythm.” As a headliner, Hartnoll isn’t surprised to see that he’s appealing to 14-year-olds, but he hasn’t gotten used to thinking of his band as mainstream, hearing his songs played on the airplane, or in his hotel room “every time you turn the telly on.” Hartnoll has been around long enough to feel old, and to hear the music changing underneath his feet.

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At first he didn’t like hardcore techno, which to him just sounded like breakbeats and fast, squeaky voices; over time, he’s seen it evolve into forms like drum’n‘bass, toured with techno’s Mike Paradinas, and started to enjoy it. But for Paradinas, who’s recorded a couple dozen singles and CDs under the aliases μ-Ziq, Diesel M, Jake Slazenger, Kid Spatula and Tusken Raiders, it didn’t take any time at all to come around to minimalism. “The first time I heard Philip Glass was in 1987,” says the London-based musician. “I was playing in a rock band, it was over a P.A. in the hall. It was ‘Music In Twelve Parts, Part One.’ And I thought, what the fuck is this? It’s brilliant, and it hasn’t changed for 12 minutes.” At 24, Paradinas (who prefers Glass’s older organ work to his more recent orchestral pieces) is too young to remember much before the ’80s—but he’s significantly older than the teenagers who are just starting to record, people who “haven’t even heard of Philip Glass, I can tell you that.” Paradinas is a big fan of Reich, too, whose influence is there in the shifting time signatures of his “Burnt Sienna.” And at 38, Underworld’s Rick Smith has been playing piano longer than Paradinas has been alive. He’s older than Hartnoll; now, with only a fraction of Orbital’s success and with a family to support, he’s just grateful he can pay his bills. Smith’s still recovering from a disastrous 1989, when an earlier version of Underworld lost its manager, its record company and any possibility of paying back its £80,000 debt. So when he got the chance to turn a 1990 Underworld track into a tampon commercial, he was more than happy to do it. “The marriage of art and commerce is what keeps me jumping,” says Smith. “I’m being brutally honest here: you have to marry the two. I’m a working musician—that’s the word, working. You have to put food in your mouth. The first Underworld record, we sold 500 copies from the back of a car. And I never imagined we’d sell as many as we did.” Nowadays they’re selling many thousands more, and since the soundtrack to Trainspotting included the group’s “Born Slippy,” they’re being courted by any number of American labels. But financial pressures are always there, and to relieve them, Smith listens to Reich’s pulsating Music for 18 Musicians. “It’s like a safe place for me,” says Smith. “I put that record on when I’m under a lot of strain, which is often, and it makes me believe in something again. It has an almost deadly calm to it. It’s simple in the end result, and complex in the foundations—and I think that’s the template for brilliance. Blimey, I can’t tell you how much it’s influenced me.”

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Smith sifts through a pile of scores until he finds Reich’s 1973 work “Six Pianos,” a piece that he’s given up practicing. He doesn’t care whether or not anyone else hears the influence of Reich’s technique on Underworld. “The beauty goes way beyond the technique,” says Smith. “I am not Steve Reich, I’m not interested in being Steve Reich. I’m interested in the inspiration it gives me—I could never hope to compose music as beautiful as that in my lifetime.” Steve Reich—who, like Glass, turned 60 this year—has never heard Underworld’s music. He’s never gone to a dance club, or had much interest in going. “Obviously not,” he says, “or I would have done it.” Whatever minimalism once stood for—aggressively simple arrangements unfolding over a strong, mechanical pulse—has long since evolved into something completely different. In the States, minimalism has influenced a new generation of classical composers to become the dominant voice in serious composition. But in Europe, minimalism skirted past the classical establishment, and headed straight for the pop world. In Germany in the 1970s, it found a home with avant-rock artists Can, proto-industrialists Kraftwerk, synth pioneers Tangerine Dream and producer Giorgio Moroder, who figured out how to combine those elements into disco—all of which would later have some impact on the varied manifestations of ’90s electronic dance music. “There was a very explicit, very close connection between the early disco music and musicians like myself and Tangerine Dream,” adds Glass. “When I first heard Donna Summer, I just laughed. I said, ‘That’s exactly what we’re doing!’ How could you miss it? And maybe it’s a comment on the power of the ideas that we turned up in this revolution. We came up with a few good ideas, techniques. It’s like a tool—can you imagine the first guy to have a shovel? Before he can turn around, there are shovels all over the place. That’s what we were doing in the ’60s, we were inventing tools. And they turned out to be very handy.” Minimalism also came to London, where it landed on its most direct and influential conduit to ambient and techno music, Brian Eno. Eno wasn’t a musician, but an art student who knew how to manipulate audio tape. After hearing Steve Reich’s 1965 out-of-phase tape piece, “It’s Gonna Rain,” in the late ’60s, he went back to his studio to try to duplicate Reich’s experiment and ultimately came up with a closed system that improved on the original design. Reich’s piece made a huge impression on Eno, creating “one of the great formative musical experiences of my life”—along with the first time he heard Philip Glass.

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“It was a very small room, with concrete walls, so it was really bloody loud,” says Eno, remembering Glass’s 1969 concert at London’s Royal College of Art. “It was a dense, strong sound, and that really impressed me, the physicality of that sound. There was no attempt to draw your attention by standard musical devices. It was just, here is the sound. Live in it.” Talking from his current residence in St. Petersburg, Russia, with the midnight sun shining outside his window, Eno pauses for a drink of water, jiggling the cubes in his glass. “A lot of people left that show,” he says, “but it really bowled me over. I thought, Oh God, this is it! This is the future of rock music!” At his cramped country home in Vermont, Reich speaks in a rush of words, sharp, insistent, impatient. He has a reputation for being difficult; he doesn’t want to talk about the past. He wants to talk about the present, in which he’s using samplers to manipulate the oral histories of technological disasters in “Hindenburg” and “Bikini.” But for Reich, who hasn’t had the same degree of commercial success as Glass, there’s always something left to prove. “It’s boring for somebody to do the same thing over and over again,” he says. “My hope as a composer is to make music that is just going to sweep you away into some kind of very positive, ecstatic state.” That could also stand as a perfect description of the goals of the early rave scene. After growing up on a diet of Eno (“I was in awe of him”) and Kraftwerk, the Orb’s Alex Paterson came up with a strain of beat-driven ambient music, creating “A Huge Ever Growing Pulsating Brain That Rules From the Center of the Ultraworld” out of ocean waves, church bells and jet planes—all held together with the throbbing keyboard arpeggios of Philip Glass and gradually shifting rhythms of Steve Reich. “I remember seeing Koyaanisqatsi six times in one evening,” says Paterson, who was 23 when the 1983 movie was released. The film, neither fiction nor documentary, contrasts the rapid pace of modern life (via time-lapse photography) with the static grandeur of nature. Lacking dialog entirely, its imagery is driven solely by Glass’s monumental score. “I couldn’t put it down, had to watch it again and again and again,” says Paterson. “All my mates went out to play. They thought I was quite mad. And I just stayed inside and watched it. And watched it, and watched it, and watched it, and watched it, and watched it.” Paterson is in New York for a quick gig at the dance club Carbon. It’s unfortunately the kind of night where everything goes wrong, with lighting troubles, a crowd complaining about ticket prices and the pro-

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moter ranting, “I produced Madonna! I produced Madonna!” Recovering in his hotel room the next day, Paterson sounds tired. After seven albums, he’s seen a whole generation of musicians come along after him. And just the day before, the Village Voice described the Orb as “an up and coming band that’s already on its way down.” “I’ve seriously thought about packing it in this year. If you want to say we’re on our way down—I mean, we’ve been going for nine years now,” says Paterson. “To me, just to be around nine years, to be making a good, honest set of albums, I couldn’t ask for a better life. We may have committed a little plagiarism here and there—but we haven’t copied anyone too drastically.” His influences are as clear in 1991’s breakthrough “Little Fluffy Clouds”—a piece that Reich recognizes as his own “Electronic Counterpoint”—as they are in 1997’s “Ubiquity,” which Paterson calls “a rip-off, in a sense.” There’s the bubbling, pulsating keyboard (Glass); the polyrhythms of drum and metronome (Reich); the steadily shifting synth textures (Eno). At 37, Paterson has been playing long enough to hear himself imitated by younger musicians, with prettier melodies and funkier beats creeping into electronica as the music shifts from underground democracy to big business. “Way back in the ’80s, we didn’t expect anybody to know about us,” says Paterson. “Basically, we were creating an atmosphere where people who could dance would come to our gigs. Now we’re getting more people who aren’t dancing—that’s called success. I never set out to make loads of money out of this business. I set out to have a really good time, and I’m having a really good time. Really, we were just out for a bit of fun. And now it’s become corporate fun.” Philip Glass listens to Underworld long enough to observe, “It’s a little less commercial than the other one, isn’t it?” In a moment, he’s making his way upstairs to his studio to look for “Icct Hedral,” the song he remixed with Aphex Twin, which is what he wants to play for me. Aphex Twin (Richard D. James) calls himself “a non-musician playing music. I’m a fucking twat, mucking around on my computers.” Although he’s worked with Glass, and is currently remixing Reich’s 1971 recording of “Drumming,” 1972’s “Clapping Music” and “Music for 18 Musicians” (for a proposed album of Reich remixes by techno artists), James doesn’t notice being influenced by any of them. Growing up in Cornwall, his music of choice was the easy listening of lounge music and even Muzak (it still is). Since moving to London, he’s listened to Eno, Glass and Reich, but the connection he feels is more philosophical than musical.

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He laughs at the idea that either Glass or Reich could be called a minimalist. James is used to performing completely alone onstage, with just “one motherfucker lap-top computer.” He wasn’t surprised that Glass agreed to work with him (“I thought he ought to”) though he felt a little nervous talking to the elder statesman of minimalism (“I get nervous talking to anyone,” he confesses). James admits he learned a lot from the collaboration. “I didn’t know anything about recording real instruments,” he says. But mostly, he’s surprised that a tune he wrote in 25 minutes took Glass four days to remix. Coming back into the living room, Glass waves the Aphex Twin CD in his hand, slips it into the player, and adjusts the volume until the room starts to vibrate. The speakers are tiny, three little four-inch squares, but the sound is massive, monstrous. “It’s nice, isn’t it?” he says, shouting above the music. Eyes closed, he conducts the CD, nodding his head, waving his hands. He taps his toes, strokes his chin, hums the melody. “Listen here,” he says, as the flute makes its entrance, and then the strings, building into a deafening crescendo. “Now, that’s an interesting piece,” he says when it’s all over. “Powerful, eh?” In another minute, he’s looking sad again, genuinely disappointed that he liked it so much more than anything I’d played for him. We could keep going, but it’s getting late. A telephone call means that his dinner appointment is waiting. Before I go, I pass on the rest of my messages. Eno sends his regards, while μ-Ziq’s Mike Paradinas has an inevitable question for the master: “Do you want to work with me?”

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Part Three

In August 2007, the New York Times published a guide to minimalist music, partly in honor of Philip Glass’s seventieth birthday, with recording recommendations by six of their classical critics.1 Editor James R. Oestreich noted that minimalism was a controversial term—one rejected by many composers—but that the music was deeply influential and important. “None of this is likely to settle disputes about what, if anything, the various composers have in common, for the music is wildly varied,” he concluded. “But it should at least lay out some of the terms of the argument, in addition to providing good listening.” Several of the critics selected works that had become widely regarded as canonic: Steve Reich’s Different Trains, John Adams’s Harmonium, Philip Glass’s Satyagraha, Terry Riley’s In C. Of the twenty-four albums endorsed, all but four centered on music by Reich, Glass, and Adams; the only composer recommended who was not a white man was, oddly, Count Basie. (Critic Bernard Holland called him “master of the art of leaving out.”) The contemporary-music blogosphere erupted in response. Composer and critic Kyle Gann, formerly of the Village Voice, opened a post with the word “Ouch,” and continued: “What, no Well-Tuned Piano? No Charlemagne Palestine Strumming Music, or Schlongo!!!daLUVdrone? No Eliane Radigue Adnos, or Trilogie de la Mort? No Tom Johnson An Hour for Piano? No Phill Niblock Hurdy Hurry, or Five More String Quartets? No Tony Conrad Early Minimalism? I imagined that these people had large CD collections. Next week, the Times food critics list 331

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their favorite ice cream flavors: Strawberry, Chocolate, and Vanilla! What else is there?”2 His blog’s comments section continued the fiery argument over what was, and wasn’t, minimalism. Other composers responded on their own blogs, proposing canons and countercanons; the radio station WNYC even hosted a debate between Gann and Times critic Steve Smith.3 The furor died down in a couple weeks, consigned to digital oblivion like many other online disputes of the early twenty-first century. Did musical minimalism ever actually have a clear, agreed-upon definition? By overlooking La Monte Young—in part because, at the time, his work was not commercially available—and elevating Adams (along with Basie, John Cage, and Poul Ruders), the Times provided a framing seemingly at odds with the one that had been mostly settled for decades. But it was a moment for reevaluation: mainstream orchestras like the Los Angeles Philharmonic, which hosted popular Minimalist Jukebox festivals, were paying new attention; a young generation of musicians was reviving undersung early minimalists, and creating new work that could be called post-postminimalist; and a wave of scholarly consideration culminated in the creation of the Society for Minimalist Music, which has met for biennial conferences in Europe and the United States.4 Institutions like Carnegie Hall welcomed Glass and Reich as composersin-residence. Nearly every year seemed to mark a major birthday celebration for one of the Big Four (or Five, since Adams has become one of the most-performed living American composers): Riley and Young at eighty in 2015, Reich at eighty in 2016, Glass at eighty in 2017, Adams at seventy in 2020. The long tail of the Internet offered a new home for minimalism’s many forms, whether in vinyl reissues of Midori Takada and C. C. Hennix, bootlegs of Young’s music circulating on YouTube, or livestreams of Niblock’s annual Winter Solstice concert.5 Alternative histories and genealogies emerged: scholars revisited the origin moments of the 1960s, reconsidered the role of minimalism in popular culture, and shepherded a revival of interest in Julius Eastman’s work.6 But the Big Four continue to shape the landscape, and equally so outside the world of classical music: in the early 2000s, indie rock mavens like Sufjan Stevens and Dirty Projectors’ David Longstreth waxed poetic about Reich and Glass in interviews, and drew their pulses into baroque songs.7 After striking up a friendship with Radiohead guitarist and composer Jonny Greenwood, Reich briefly attempted to write a new piece for the acclaimed band to play (it became the work 2 × 5,

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written instead for the Bang on a Can All-Stars); he later created Radio Rewrite, a gloss on two of their songs. Fertile exchanges across genre boundaries define festivals like New York’s Ecstatic Music and Cincinnati’s MusicNOW; at Knoxville’s Big Ears, a staple of the rhizomatic experimental music world, young and old minimalists are regular highlights.8 Pulses crop up in pop songs by Taylor Swift and Carly Rae Jepsen; Beyoncé and Tyler, the Creator participate (as critic David Toop argues) in an uncompromising tradition of Black minimalism. The most popular ambient minimalism today might be the streaming microgenre of “lofi hip hop/study beats.”9 Spotify’s official “minimalism” playlist—which has more than 130,000 “likes”—includes standard fare by Glass and Arvo Pärt, but also the music of Lubomyr Melnyk, Sarah Kirkland Snider, and JeanMichel Blais. It is illustrated with a picture of a milky-white orb against a white-and-purple gradient. Such imagery aligns with how minimalism is now viewed in the popular imagination: not the colorful series of Donald Judd or the concrete hunks of Richard Serra but instead the emptiness of a “tastefully curated” Airbnb, or an apartment that has been KonMari decluttered, or a thin laptop without a disc drive. In 2015, thirty-three years after its landmark feature on minimalist music, Time magazine published a profile of two self-branded “Minimalists” who participate in a growing trend of “getting rid of most material possessions in their lives” in order “to focus on what’s important: friends, hobbies, travel, experiences.”10 This lifestyle’s “longing for less,” art critic Kyle Chayka has written, represents a superficial kind of self-help, geared toward cultural elites, that equates one’s possessions with one’s identity—seemingly far from the countercultural art movement of the 1960s.11 But minimalism has always been many things, and its vanguardists have existed side by side with consumerist impulses. (“Was all of it just about making sonoric aspirin so people could just feel better?” Charlemagne Palestine asked, back in 1989.)12 In this final section, minimalism is addressed in its many twenty-firstcentury forms: its newly revised and constantly contested histories; its strange offshoots, like the radical Wandelweiser collective; and its many present-day practitioners, who continue to engage with drones, repetition, pulses, and slowness. The Big Four do not have much of a presence in the following pages; not because their recent work is not vital—it is—but in order to make room for other voices. What does minimalism mean, and what does it offer, in era of climate emergency and democracy-in-decline? (In November 2016, less than

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two months after President Obama placed a National Medal of Arts around the neck of Glass, the BBC dug up a tangent in one of Donald Trump’s books in which the presidential candidate wrote that Steve Reich was a “great example as an innovator.”)13 The metaphysics of minimalism—its countercultural spirituality; its focus on attuning oneself to environments of sound; the boundaries it can dissolve between composer, performer, and listener—will always offer some utopian promise, even in our dystopian age. We can look to these paradoxical musics to bliss out or to stay alert, as aspirin or as transformation: for a salve, or for an uprising. Perhaps Éliane Radigue puts it best, reflecting on a long life in music that she dreamed into existence: “May it lead to yet others. Further adventures, explorations of this infinite mystery of the transmutation of noise into sound, of sound into music and, as with all true questions, to receive in response only a few ‘hows,’ never a ‘why,’ thus leaving endless freedom to trace one’s path, to find one’s voice. Pulsations, breaths, beatings . . .”

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chapter 19

Histories

The originary myths of minimalism continue to be revisited. When the label Table of the Elements released Day of Niagara, a bootleg recording of the Theatre of Eternal Music, in 2000, it drew new attention to the rifts between the group’s original members.1 Other minimalist moments served as formative experiences for a new generation of composers: Nico Muhly discovering Philip Glass’s Music in Twelve Parts as a teenager and weaving its cellular processes into his own musical fabric, or Jace Clayton crafting an evening-length tribute to Julius Eastman, helping ignite the composer’s recent, complicated revival.2 In engaging with these histories, musicians and writers trouble and revise them, presenting new ways to perceive minimalism’s past—ones for which this book has attempted to account. And still other histories need to be envisioned from scratch: in a formidable 2018 essay, David Toop attempted to reconcile the absence of Black music and thought in minimalism’s genealogy, critiquing the movement’s narrowness and opening up new vistas for understanding.

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arnold dreyblatt, “an open letter to la monte young and tony conrad” (2000) Numerous journalists, musicians and composers have been asking me to give an opinion on the continuing controversy between La Monte Young and Tony Conrad.3 The unexpected release of Day of Niagara seems only to make a response more pertinent. My reluctance until now is in great part due to my utmost respect for the work of both parties: both of whom has influenced my musical and visual work in countless ways, regardless of how our paths have later diverged. In the early seventies I was a student at a Media Center in Buffalo, New York where Tony now teaches. My early work in “flicker video” at that time led me directly to Tony Conrad’s earlier film experiments in periodic visual structures. In 1974, I became interested in the translation of these structures into sound, and began studies with La Monte in New York. After an intensive year at his loft on Church Street, the atmosphere proved to be too claustrophobic for my tastes, and though I continued on for another year or so as La Monte’s first tape archivist, it was clear that I had to stake out my own path. At that time, I came to be especially interested in the ensemble which immediately follows La Monte’s change from saxophone to voice. I found this period to be revolutionary conceptually, and as well exceptionally rich in terms of sonority and timbre. Earlier incarnations of the group had been publicly known and labeled as the Theater of Eternal Music and later as Dream Music. My interest in Conrad’s work led me to look more closely at his input to this ensemble, and I had the impression that the mathematical and acoustic rationalization of harmonic relationships first appears along with his membership in this group. La Monte, whose interest in stasis and sustained pitches was already well established, tended to apply the notational language of European classical music, either in his famous “Trio for Strings” (1958), or in his interest in that famous “blues seventh” that Tony now recognized as the natural 7th harmonic. Furthermore, the infinitely rich timbre of the bowed strings, with the voices mixed “inside” was never again to be equaled. From witnesses who had been present at those performances, I understood the great impression that this ensemble had made.

Arnold Dreyblatt, “An Open Letter to La Monte Young and Tony Conrad,” 2000, www .dreyblatt.net/articles-and-interviews. Courtesy of Arnold Dreyblatt.

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The later influence of Pandit Pran Nath on La Monte’s aesthetic resulted in a mix which focused somewhat on vocal embellishment, developing gradually from the absolute “horizontal” structure investigated years earlier. The revival of concentration on the Well-Tuned Piano, however beautiful, further moved the center of attention in other directions of which I am not here to judge. Convinced that the tapes of this legendary period might be inaccessible for many years to come, sometime in 1976, at the age of 23, I selected a random tape from the archive (Day of Niagara) and made a copy, purely for my own use and without any inkling what historical value this tape would one day have. In the mid 1990s, after not hearing that tape for over twenty years, I passed on a copy to younger colleagues, whose only exposure to a related music had until then been through the few releases by Tony Conrad. Back in the mid ’70s I had attempted to confront Tony with my estimation of that period, and found that he was steadfastly loyal to his former colleague, whatever feelings he might have held privately at the time. During the following decade, Tony’s patience must have run out, and he joined with John Cale in requesting full co-composer status, which has probably made any accommodations on La Monte’s part that much more difficult. During our sporadic contact in the ’80s and ’90s Tony and I informally planned an extensive conversation on these and other subjects which unfortunately never took place. It was by chance that I recently learned about the impending release of Day of Niagara by thumbing through a copy of The Wire in a German train station, which I recognized as having been derived from a copy of “that tape,” which I had unwittingly left in someone’s hands. I have often sympathized with Tony’s frustration at the difficulty in having access to the tapes on which he appears, yet what can sometimes be seen as a conspiracy, is partially due to La Monte’s interest in later periods of what he understands as his own work, periods which La Monte considers to be more “mature.” But how are we now to interpret the controversy which surrounds the release of Day of Niagara? I have looked through my collection of public statements by both parties over the years. Tony questions the notion of the role of the composer in a Post Cagean-Fluxus world, and presents the ensemble as a “loose collective” where by “improvising, we eliminated the role of a composer” (Interview, EST). The members felt to be part of “history in the making,” as a music had emerged which was clearly greater than any individual collaborator. In my experience, the “locking in tune” within just harmonic relationships between musicians

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is without doubt an unforgettable experience. Tony clearly identities with those collective moments as the most important in his life, and he consistently refers to Dream Music as “our music,” even as early as in a letter which I found from 1965, which was published in “Film Culture” in the Summer of 1966.4 La Monte, on the other hand, has consistently identified himself as a “composer,” either breaking with or functioning within a tradition, whether that of Western Classical music, or the one which he claims to have created. La Monte points out in his most recent response to this situation that, “throughout the known history of composition and improvisation there has always been an interplay between that which was more predetermined and ‘fixed’ and that which was to be determined on the spot during performance . . .” One can certainly find a case for improvised activity under the leadership role of a “composer” as an accepted form of compositional activity during the last thirty years—in “serious” music. Yet La Monte finally admits in that same text that the issue of authorship was “in fact, a source of discontent with Conrad and Cale” at the time. For some insight into this period, one might look to the creative atmosphere in the early and mid-sixties. There were many collective endeavors in the theater, art and music world at the time (names such as Julian Beck/Living Theater and Robert Wilson/Byrd Hoffman come to mind). Most of these groups had at their center a director, composer etc. whose vision and energy provided the focus, and whose name was later associated with the activities of the group. In my work with large ensembles and performance projects over the last twenty years, I certainly know how difficult these issues are to define. For those of us who cherish the contributions of both parties, recent developments have been doubly painful. We find ourselves confronting two opposing world views, both of which seem valid: one accepting the role of the composer/author in a central and traditional role, the other presenting a collective model, with a decentralized structure. La Monte, in a recent response, acknowledges the input of Tony and John Cale as being in “the realms of performing, acoustics, mathematics, and philosophy,” while not in composition. He claims to be “extremely interested in arriving at a fair and just solution . . .” Tony has been able to re-introduce dream music to a larger and younger audience whose ears have finally been prepared to receive it. The rediscovery of my own work has been made possible indirectly through his efforts. Tony, always conscious of current political and

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social concerns, is well aware that the production tenets of this younger generation are not as interested in questions of personal authorship as those in the realms of “serious” music. La Monte’s insistence on complete control of his works in all aspects is oriented towards posthumous status, and, while consistent in its obstinacy, this has resulted in a legendary and yet inaccessible aura until recently. I apologize to La Monte and Marian, for any personal pain the release of an unauthorized tape may have caused, through a youthful misguided act and further negligence. Yet, as a result of this release, steps in defining the issues are now being made, including an invitation towards reconciliation. And while the recording quality of the music certainly leave much to be desired, the attention that the release of Day of Niagara has received might suggest to La Monte a contemporary relevancy which this music may now hold. Is it not in the interests of all parties that other, perhaps more wellchosen tapes from this period be finally released, with ample notes and packaging? Could not a verbal formulation be found, which grants a “composer” status to La Monte, in a postmodern, leadership sense, yet grants Conrad and Cale an extensive credit as contributors to overall theory and performance methods—applying only to music which was created during a specific period—perhaps coupled with a guaranteed release of more material in a form agreeable to both sides? Your places in music history are certainly now assured, surely the rhetoric on both sides could be put to better use. It may be naive to be optimistic, yet we are waiting for you.

nico muhly on philip glass’s music in 12 parts (2017) I first heard Music In 12 Parts when I was 18 years old. I’d just moved to New York, and the whole city was musical: concerts everywhere, libraries, the giant Tower Records by Lincoln Center and another downtown! I bought the multi-disc set of Music In 12 Parts as part of an ongoing project to own as much of Philip’s music as possible, but there was so Nico Muhly, “Nico Muhly’s ‘Mathematical, Organic and Achingly Beautiful’ Philip Glass,” NPR, January 24, 2017, www.npr.org/sections/deceptivecadence/2017/01/24 /511268723/nico-muhlys-mathematical-organic-and-achingly-beautiful-philip-glass. Courtesy of Nico Muhly.

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much music and so little money for CDs. This felt like an extravagance, but a beautiful one. The Nonesuch recording was lovingly packaged with a Mapplethorpe portrait of the composer on its cover. I popped the first disc into my Discman (!) and started walking uptown and was shocked. I had expected rippling arpeggios, powerful machines, the unforgiving muscle of the dances from Einstein on the Beach. Like much of Philip’s music from the 1970s, the basic building block is a single “cell” of music which expands and contracts rhythmically. The scaffolding of the music is clear to the casual listener. Part 1 of Music in 12 Parts, though, is somehow special. While the rest of the 11 parts are hyperkinetic and bubbly, this first part is at a relaxed speed, the pulse a luxurious stroll not much faster than one second long. It is scored for woodwinds, a solo female voice and multiple keyboards—the delicious buzz of Farfisa organs. The combination is electric and acoustic at once; it’s not immediately clear what’s in there—a flute, a saxophone? The insect-like timbre of the organs obscures and lightens the other instruments, a citrus-like river through the center of the sound. The voice sings solfège syllables rather than words, and while it sounds like an exercise in school, the effect is magically emotional. She begins this enormous multi-hour piece with the syllables “do, re, mi” repeated over and over, while an angular yet aquatically flexible bassline supports a latticework of organs and winds. Each little cell gradually unfolds and folds up again—it isn’t a simple process of getting longer or shorter each time. Each cell invites us to explore the possibilities of the simplest musical processes: one plus one, do plus re. The result is rapturous: mathematical, organic, familiar and achingly beautiful. I think about this piece all the time in my own work, particularly that involving the voice. Is there a way to resist the singer on stage being an operatic heroine and instead allow her to be the bearer of small, simple pieces of information? In a large work of mine, Mothertongue, I ask the soprano to think about her life: What phone numbers do you know by heart, which addresses? Those become the building blocks of a huge structure of electronic and acoustic instruments (including the Farfisa organs!) that tries to access a moment in my own archive—a young man, slowly walking up Broadway, listening to Music In 12 Parts.

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jace clayton, “reverence is a form of forgetting” (2020) Those who speak of history’s spiral, warns Ralph Ellison’s invisible man, are about to boomerang you in the back of the head.5 That novel begins with a solo voice accompanied by a turntable underground. It ends the same way. Of course, a vinyl record is as fine a spiral as there is. Its coil of sound ends in what’s called a runout groove—where the spiraled sound-writing loops back on itself to form a circle. We hear it as silence or quiet skipping. The runout groove creates a suspended time calling the listener to flip the record or restart. Linear time is a sham. For all his many absences, the composer and musician Julius Eastman has been defined in recent years by a series of ongoing introductions. Each one drops the needle on his historical record in much the same way. We rewind to see what myths of progress skipped over. The excitement with which Eastman is now embraced is a result of healthy enthusiasm, prurient interest, and collective, corrective zeal. In the span of a few years, Eastman has emerged from the shadows into visibility as a secular saint. We converts proselytize and repeat. But what about Eastman as problem? How to harness his antagonistic energy? What if Eastman is not a figure to be celebrated—after all, reverence is a form of forgetting—but a snarl of questions to be asked? My engagement with Julius Eastman began in 2011, when I created a twelve-minute piece for voice and piano called The Julius Eastman Memorial Dinner. Two years later I debuted a much expanded eveninglength version of the performance under the same name, which continues to tour internationally. I also made a related album version called The Julius Eastman Memory Depot. However, back then he was still an obscure figure. This lack of visibility fascinated me—but it all started with a piano. Performa had commissioned a short radio play from me, to be staged at a venue with a baby grand tucked away in the corner.6 While living in Barcelona I’d founded an ensemble called Nettle, dedicated to the interplay between electronic and acoustic soundworlds (e.g., processing a

Jace Clayton, “Reverence Is a Form of Forgetting,” in Creative Black Music at the Walker: Selections from the Archives, ed. Simone Austin and Danielle A. Jackson, vol. 4, Living Collections Catalogue (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2020). Courtesy of Jace Clayton and the Walker Arts Center.

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string player’s sounds through my laptop), so this struck me as a perfect opportunity to continue that exploration, focusing now on piano timbres. Writer Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts suggested that I check out the music of Julius Eastman as a possible source. I did and was floored. It was muscular, romantic, delicate, momentous. Many of his works are longform compositions written for multiples of the same instrument, thus insuring that their realization requires a coterie of highly trained performers as well as the financial resources to get, say, four grand pianos in the same room. (This is not inexpensive.) Those pieces were the first I heard. My thrill deepened as I looked over the handwritten scores. Eastman marked precise timings next to particular sections—meticulously organizing sound down to the second. It was incontrovertibly epic. Yet prior to Sharifa’s tip, I’d never heard of Eastman. He was not present in any of the many cultural histories of New York City in the 1970s and ’80s that I’d encountered. As it turns out, I’d even heard his voice—Eastman’s potent baritone graces Meredith Monk’s Dolmen Music, a longtime favorite—but had no sense of his contexts.7 My surprise was not only about the historical lacunae. Yes, various bigotries influence the way rumor and action condense into accepted narratives. But I understood Eastman’s absence from the historical record as a complex sign of success. He was in-your-face and self-effacing, a composer devoted to bending sound and time into unruly shapes—and, critically, also invested in the agency of (self-)destruction. He had an ambivalent attitude toward institutional acceptance, demonstrated little faith in archival memory. Eastman resisted easy historicization—and suffered the consequences. This is where things got interesting. Every person is multiple, but Julius Eastman amplified his multitudes by scattering them across enough categories to confuse any logic that might attempt to keep them separate. To take one example, let’s look at how Eastman’s song titles continue to perform this bristling work. Titles such as Nigger Faggot (1978), If You’re So Smart Then Why Aren’t You Rich? (1977), and Crazy Nigger (1980) operate as conceptual artworks. They draw attention to who can say or print them, limit where they can be performed, even dramatize the perceived identities of the musicians performing them. For better or for worse, the spells cast by these words likely had the biggest impact on Eastman himself. More people would have had the opportunity to experience the brilliance of Evil Nigger if Eastman had named it Music for Four Pianos, that’s for sure. These titles were part of his many and varied efforts to frustrate his own institutional legibility.

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Eastman’s relationship with the contemporary classical music world was as agonistic as it was intimate. His 1975 performance of a John Cage score is perhaps the best-documented example of this.8 Cage was in the audience. The ordinarily soft-spoken man found Eastman’s onstage proceedings so offensive that the following day he banged on a piano and shouted a public declamation against him. What the avant-garde patriarch John Cage perceived as overt provocation takes on new shades of meaning when one stops to consider that, in many of Eastman’s contexts, the mere presence of black skin and/or open gayness registered as a threat to the status quo. In an early instance of this, Eastman studied composition at Philadelphia’s prestigious Curtis Institute—the conservative institution that had rejected Eunice Waymon a decade prior. Long after she achieved worldwide fame as Nina Simone, she repeatedly discussed the rejection, blaming it on racist hostility towards the simple notion of a classical pianist who happened to be young, gifted, and black. Back in the 1970s, naming conventions within new music at the time were, as now, respectably vanilla. Brusque self-referentiality was in vogue: The Well-Tuned Piano, Music for 18 Musicians, and so on, linguistic versions of the ersatz neutrality of the gallery’s white box. Eastman’s titles did not allow his compositions to exist apart from the messily social world. The music defies all attempts at circumscription, sure as its titles strain against the very idea that a piece of artwork is (only) itself. How can we think of the space between Eastman’s bristling titles and the instrumental music they name? You can call it the distance between signifier and signified, or the difference between hearing Evil Nigger on the radio (not knowing what you’re listening to), then having the announcer disclose the title. Part of it manifests a spirit of Christian anarchism that runs throughout his work, where gutter/heaven inversions are a key way to challenge worldly values. This can be heard when chords from Martin Luther’s hymn A Mighty Fortress Is Our God come crashing into Eastman’s Gay Guerrilla. By charging the air around his works, Eastman’s titles scoff at the notion of pure formalism or neutral aesthetic choices; not just for his music or his body, but for everyone’s. Eastman understood that one never “hears” music; clear or natural reception is never possible. Music results from listening closely; listening brings to bear extra-musical prejudices and joys in unequal measure; and only by acknowledging our inability to fully listen can one begin to hear anything at all. This is a starting point. And to make it he had to use titles that positioned him on the edge of historical silence.

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Evil Nigger and Gay Guerrilla became scripts and commands for The Julius Eastman Memorial Dinner (JEMD) as I developed it in the expanded form. As titles, they still perform the work of problematizing who can speak them, and how. As compositions and performances, they demand that we listen, respond, and shift our understanding of the canon in response—they are that powerful. That said, I didn’t see a point in re-presenting these works. Nor did I want to remix them. The former relies on revival and lineage, the latter is aligned with DJ culture and novelty. JEMD was the first large performance I’d staged under my own name (and not as DJ/rupture) and stepping away from notions of mix/remix was important. More to the point, neither classical “playback” nor contemporary “remix” felt compatible with what I understood as Eastman’s resistance to standard historicization, and that friction was precisely what I found so kinky about his work. Here was a problematic figure by all accounts. His multi-sited oeuvre doesn’t ask to be accepted in a canon—despite all the championing doing precisely that—it asks that we rethink historiography itself. Grappling with these issues informed the structure of JEMD. I created theatrical interludes in which I’m being interviewed for a job as a Julius Eastman impersonator (with verbal and musical jokes), wrote a new libretto and song with vocalist Arooj Aftab, and brought in two world-class pianists to perform Evil Nigger and Gay Guerrilla.9 As the pianists do their thing, I take a microphone feed from each piano and route the audio into my laptop, where I morph and otherwise transform it using my own Sufi Plug Ins and an array of third-party software. A listener determined to experience masterful interpretations of Evil Nigger and Gay Guerrilla can certainly get that—but they’ll also get all manner of denaturalized piano sounds from me. As I like to say: at The Julius Eastman Memorial Dinner, pianists David Friend and Emily Manzo provide the music, I provide the problems, and dinner will not be served. In JEMD the twin pianos are doubled—electronically, asymmetrically. I step inside Eastman’s logic of the multiple and treat it as a site of departure. The twin pianos’ sounds merge with my manipulations to create an organic, if alien, soundfield. I don’t add any external audio; all the material I transform comes, in real time, from the pianos. JEMD aims to create a constantly shifting soundfield, where interpenetration is the operative procedure. At times, my additions are minimal. For example, in the beginning of Gay Guerrilla I will often pass

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figure 25. Jace Clayton’s Julius Eastman Memorial Dinner, Rewire Festival, the Hague, 2017. From left: Saskia Lankhoorn, Jace Clayton, and David Friend. Photograph by Maurice Haak. Courtesy of Rewire Festival.

the sparse staccato piano notes through a cloud of reverb and pitch the resulting ambience up by several tones, so that the rising tension of the piano chords floats atop a musically-related drone bed, which is filtered (to give a shimmering quality to its soft texture) and slowly raised in volume (so that one cannot readily distinguish where the reverberant piano “ends” and the processed sonics begin). In certain moments, electronics overwhelm the pianos’ audio. One technique I use for coaxing divergent soundworlds from them is called granular synthesis. This involves capturing the incoming audio as tiny slivers of sound (“grains”), which can then be manipulated—frozen, stacked, reordered, and more—in unorthodox ways, live. What emerges can be tonal or organic in feel, but it lends itself to industrial sounds. Each piano gets sent through its own processing pathway (which can be plugged into itself in any number of ways), so at any given moment I can be producing two very different streams of audio. A British journalist called JEMD “prophetic satire” because it imagines a world in which Eastman fandom is rampant, with lots of corporate sponsorship to boot, while the actual JEMD performances and

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album helped to spread the composer’s queer gospel. When we began booking the project in 2013, it was impossible to bring to Europe. Nobody had heard of him. In the past three years, his rising recognition changed everything. Now we play in Europe more than in the States. What can we learn from looping back to Eastman now? First, we have to leave behind any idea of progress in canonizing Eastman. The carefully ordered canon is better thought of as a site to traverse rather than a resting place. Alongside the positive enthusiasm about reconsidering Eastman lies a certain amount of performative wokeness. Eastman’s face provides great optics to advertise an otherwise staid concert series’ upcoming season. Reviving an “unjustly malaised,” black, gay talent, who is no longer able to speak back to our many uses of him, confers a kind of sideways ethical blessing on all involved.10 But Eastman didn’t die for our historiographic sins. He died unsung. Who are we missing, now? How can we support the regular ole crazy niggers and joy boys and gay guerrillas enshrined in his titles? To be unheroic. To be downwardly mobile. To be on the wrong side of history and realize there’s a lot of people beside you, like you, untalented in a million ways. Spotlights create shadows—how to turn off these bright lights?

david toop, “black minimalism” (2018) Here’s Tyler, The Creator, dressed with snap and flair, gorgeous colours, “Golf boys, it’s them golf boys,” styling his own line of Golf Wang, Golf le Fleur, even Golf Pride tees, tops and bottoms, turning white pride and blackface to the service of LGBT and black pride, and now here’s something from the Michael Ochs archive, circa 1950, Nat “King” Cole dressed impeccably as ever in a double breasted, white buttoned cardigan/blazer hybrid, big smile, golf club jauntily resting on his right shoulder. Given the shoddy, hypocritical way he was treated during his heyday it’s a surprise that nobody arrested him for carrying an offensive weapon or snuck up behind him to hang a bundle of Dick Whittington’s possessions from the crooked end. But wait, what’s this, Nat presenting a trophy to a black golfer, Charlie Sifford. Of course, all three men in the photograph are black, which David Toop, “Forever and Never the Same,” The Wire 414 (August 2018): 30–35; this version was expanded and revised by Toop in September 2021. Courtesy of David Toop and The Wire.

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suggests the white people stayed away. About to putt his ball on the first hole, it was Charlie Sifford who discovered, during the 1952 Phoenix Open, that the cup was full of human shit. We might think of a line from the theme song to Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life—“Without this, our lives are merely, an imitation of life”—apparently sung by Nat, though in truth the vocalist was Earl Grant, also known for his minimalist Hammond Organ exotica, tracks like “Trade Winds” that replicated the tropical bird songs of Martin Denny and Arthur Lyman with organ effects. In her blog, Welcome to My Simple Life, Yolanda V. Acree quotes a comment from Joshua Becker’s site, Becoming a Minimalist. Becker is a good looking white guy who has done very well out of his philosophy. Basically: Simplify. Ten ways minimalism will change your life, his website advises, and who am I to argue? The thing that caught Yolanda’s eye was from Jon, who suggested that discarding outward signs of status and identity if you were African American risked forfeiting respect and any kind of foothold in an unequal society. “Therefore,” Jon concluded, “is minimalism, much like golf, a white man’s philosophy?” Something similar could be asked about all that jungle exotica of the 1950s and early ’60s, or ambient music or, come to that, minimal music. Are we really so backward that this question still smacks us in the face, even though music is supposedly so far ahead of golf in such matters that it swings in a parallel dimension? All of these genres, if that’s what they are, share a common characteristic: through sound they articulate fantasies of lives unlike the life that is actually lived. For that reason they are both powerful and dangerous. Jennifer Lynn Stoever’s book, The Sonic Color Line, identifies tropes of purity, “the vibrational transmission of whiteness’s alleged connection to spirit and intellect,” the least bodily, tempered sentiment. Listen for a moment to Beyoncé’s “Hold Up” from the video album of Lemonade. Underwater, she speaks of cheating and betrayal, under her words a repeated sound sample which may be the reversed-world auditory ghost of Andy Williams (a golf guy, for sure)—“. . . fasted for sixty days, wore white, abstained from mirrors, abstained from sex, slowly did not speak another word. In that time my hair I grew past my ankles. I slept on a mat, I swallowed a sword, I levitated, went to the basement, confessed my sins and was baptized in a river, got on my knees and said Amen.” Moving from that pure shriven state of renouncement glowing white to a righteous rage that is anything but tempered, she moves speedily along a darkening trajectory that includes Bible pages soaked in menstrual blood

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(thus setting off all the conspiracy crazies, the Satan snipers and Horus hunters), the unbound voice recalling a recording by Alan Lomax, an Alabama baptizing scene in which the Reverend W. A. Donaldson baptizes his fifteen-year-old daughter. After buying this record in the early 1970s a vivid image fixed itself in my mind—the setting is at the river— but then an account by Shirley Collins, present in 1959 for the bodily, untempered sentiment of this event, describes a scene more saturated in the symbolism of rebirth, two deacons pulling at an iron ring on a trap door set in the floor of the church, revealing a sunken baptism pool. “By now,” she writes, “the Pastor and two deacons were standing knee-deep in the water, and they helped her down. She jumped up and down, halflaughing, half-crying, shouting and screaming ‘Thank you Jesus!’ over and over again.” This scream is repeated nine times before the recording fades. She was completely submerged by her father, then, like Beyoncé, “she came out really shouting.” “Without ever consciously expressing the sentiment,” Stoever writes, “white Americans often feel entitled to respect for their sensibilities, sensitivities, and tastes, and to their implicit, sometimes violent, control over the soundscape of an ostensibly ‘free,’ ‘open,’ and ‘public’ space.” She cites the example of a white man named Michael Dunn marking his aural territory within a Florida petrol station in 2012: “Dunn didn’t want to hear hip-hop at the pumps, so he walked to the jeep where Davis and his friends were listening to music and demanded they turn it down. When the teenagers refused, Dunn shot into their car and fled.” Jordan Davis, all of seventeen, was shot dead. So minimalism. Less is definitely more than you bargained for. Ask a random bunch of academics, composers, whatever, to identify the originary source of the big M and more than a few will call up John Cage’s 4ʹ 33ʺ, the piece that we all know was inspired by Robert Rauschenberg’s white paintings, because in their nothingness they reflected and collected the moving shadows of the world beyond themselves. Subsequent history could have been different had Cage chosen to be inspired by Rauschenberg’s black paintings of 1951–3 instead, embedded not with shadows but newsprint and gravel. Those sounds heard during Cage’s silences; are they shadows or newsprint? Rauschenberg’s intention was for these two series—black and white—to be considered in relation to each other. As Stephanie Rosenthal wrote in the catalogue essay for Black Paintings, an exhibition she curated for the

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Haus der Kunst in Munich: “[The white paintings] register as cool and aloof when juxtaposed with the black paintings, which appear variegated, warm and literally earthy.” Alongside and against these readings of black and white (in which nothing is black and white) we should counterpose Fred Moten’s essay, The Case of Blackness, who assembles in the writing what he calls an “audiovisual ensemble” of Ad Reinhardt and Cecil Taylor, Albert Ammons and Piet Mondrian, quoting and commenting extensively from a 1967 conversation between Reinhardt and Taylor in which Taylor was moved in exasperation to address Reinhardt’s insistence on black as a non-colour, an absence of colour: “Don’t you understand that every culture has its own mores, its way of doing things, and that’s why different art forms exist?” Amplifying Cecil Taylor’s point that black (painterly) minimalism can never be a retreat into neutrality or nothingness is the recent discovery by researchers from Russia’s State Tretyakov Gallery, who studied Kasimir Malevich’s Black Square under a microscope, only to find that Malevich had written under a topcoat of black paint what seemed to be a racist joke: “Battle of negroes in a dark cave.” Clearly, this referenced an earlier racist joke, from either Alphonse Allais, a French writer who might be considered one of the forerunners of twentieth-century minimalism, or his friend Paul Bilhaud. Allais produced “silent” and monochrome works, including one based on Bilhaud’s 1882 black painting, entitled Negroes fight in a tunnel. So much for nothingness. Correct me if I’m wrong but Cage never spoke about Africa or Africandiaspora arts, other than when he was denigrating jazz as a music of habit(s). One of the stories he liked to recount concerned his class in Oriental Music at the New School of Social Research, playing a record of a Buddhist service (presumably Japanese), that began with “a short microtonal chant with sliding tones, then soon settled into a single loud reiterated percussive beat.” The two polarised reactions—“Take it off, I can’t bear it any longer” and “Why’d you take it off? I was just getting interested?”—pointed Cage in the direction of an allegedly Zen idea, that if something is boring, keep doing it and eventually it gets interesting (like a habit, for example?). Buddhist controversialist Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche had a different idea about this, that boredom in a Japanese monastery is supposed to be boring. According to him, all the repetitive gestures and practices typical of this life are twisted by American students into an aesthetic of

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simplicity, a work of art. “The black cushion is supposed to suggest no colour,” he wrote, “complete boredom. But for Americans it inspires a mentality of militant blackness, straightforwardness.” One of the attendees at Cage’s New School course in 1958 was Richard Maxfield. The following year he taught his own class in electronic music at the school, La Monte Young as his acolyte/teaching assistant and George Maciunas among the attendees. Maxfield committed suicide in 1969, hence his ongoing obscurity, but his importance to specific scenes in which minimalist acts were foregrounded as the work-initself—La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Terry Jennings, Yoko Ono, Henry Flynt and George Maciunas—becomes evident as soon as you investigate their stories. Within this milieu Maxfield was the first to use tape loops; in 1960 he manipulated, filtered, repeated and pitch-shifted loops to make a piece called Amazing Grace. It also happened to incorporate as material the voice of a revivalist preacher named James G. Brodie, not necessarily African American but almost certainly so, to judge from the small fragments of intelligible voice that emerge from the murk of a tape composition that could use some restoration and remastering. Maxfield returned to this idea in 1966 with another short, chaotic loop piece called For Sonny Wilson, dedicated to “Sonny Wilson, the world’s greatest wonder preacher.” From Maxfield, via direct influence or some sort of mysterious osmotic process, came the unexamined trope of the black voice in early white minimalism (EWM) and, by extension, the musics of black America, Bali, India, north Africa, Ghana and Japan that provided in every case the stimulus to thinking about notated composition and performance in ways that were not new but for young music students shattered the prevailing European orthodoxies of socalled higher learning. They were, so to speak, raw materials. Raw in the troubling sense of being “captured” as field recording, or sound object manipulable according to laws set down in the hearing world of European musique concrète, in which a sound can allegedly be isolated from its ecology. Raw in the troubling sense of being harmonically, bodily and emotionally untempered, intense with rampant energy and vibration. By EWM I’m referring, of course, to the “reduced canon”: Steve Reich, Terry Riley, La Monte Young and Philip Glass. In 1964 Reich recorded a black Pentecostal preacher—Brother Walter—in Union Square, San Francisco. Walter was preaching about the Biblical flood and Reich’s piece—“It’s Gonna Rain”—made in early 1965, was based on the phase movements of two tape loops, extracting that phrase and the sound of a pigeon’s wings from the original recording. As someone

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calling himself Ebony Prince comments on YouTube: “That ni**a cold invented sampling.” Which is only partially true but it should give us pause, this presence of black voices and black music lifted out of context, transposed into a world of entirely different values in which the majority of its listeners will be entirely ignorant of the originary source and its own tradition of minimalism. Speaking to Parabola journal in 1988, Steve Reich described the environment of his listening between 1962–5: Father A. M. Jones’s book—Studies In African Music, hearing the John Coltrane Quartet play live and then what he calls the early rock scene, Martha and the Vandellas, Bob Dylan and “Junior Walker was playing ‘Shotgun’ with a repeating bass line throughout the whole tune with no change.” Junior Walker & the All Stars also showed up in one of Terry Riley’s early experiments with tape loops, “Bird of Paradise,” “Shotgun” warped and twisted out of recognition by tape manipulation techniques no doubt learned from Richard Maxfield. At this moment I am listening to a famous recording made by Michel Vuylsteke in Burundi, 1967, two young girls singing a greeting called akazéhé. One of them rapidly alternates chest voice and head voice, like a sound poet repeating and subtly varying her enunciation of this word, in truth so much softer, more aspirated than its transcription suggests; the other repeats short phrases in a voice frail as dry reeds, the polyphony of the two so interwoven as to be mesmeric and confounding. “Elemental Soul or Mindless Monotony?” a Melody Maker writer asked in his 1971 review of James Brown’s Hot Pants. In June of the previous year another writer dismissed “I Want To Take You Higher” by Sly and the Family Stone in four words, repeated three times with one misplaced comma: “Sock it to me, sock, it to me, sock it to me.” Obviously he had yet to hear the silent 0’ 00” title track of There’s a Riot Goin’ On. Prejudice against repetition and variation as musical form has a long history. Here is an account of a vodun ceremony performed in Congo Square in 1825: “I recognized an old negro by the name of Zozo, well-known in New Orleans as a vender of palmetto and sassafras roots . . . he was astride of a cylinder made of thin cypress staves hooped with brass and headed by a sheepskin. With two sticks he droned away a monotonous ra-ta-ta, ra-ta-ta-, while on his left sat a negro on a low stool, who with two sheep shank bones and a negress with the leg-bones of a buzzard or turkey, beat an accompaniment on the sides of the cylinder.” These are raw materials of reduced circumstance. In W. T. Lhamon Jr’s remarkable book, Raising Cain: Blackface Performance from Jim

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Crow to Hip Hop, the practice of paying slaves, either with money, fish or eels, to dance at Catherine Market, close to Chatham Square (by happy coincidence the name of Philip Glass’s record company) is examined in great detail. “The dancing for eels,” he writes, “was a performance of eclecticism that modeled later performance in the Atlantic world.” Thomas F. De Voe’s The Market Book, published in 1862, describes this dancing, a “shake-down” in which some dancers would turn around and “shy-off” from their designated spot on the board or “shingle” to which they were confined. Lhamon questions this confinement, suggesting instead that transgressions of the shingle’s boundaries may have been a deliberate enticement through which the patron, perhaps a joking butcher, would be drawn into African American customary practice: “This shingle scene shows black performers early toying with the way patrons think they control black gestures,” he writes. The unhearing (or “severe and partial hearing” as Fred Moten says in another context) of James Brown as monotony or of Sly Stone as nothing more than cliché is a toxic survival of this complacent belief that black minimalism can be controlled through self-delusion as a form of low incapacity whereas white minimalism, even when clearly derived from radical black music is, as Jennifer Lynn Stoever wrote, somehow miraculously connected to the higher places of spirit and intellect. “Hot Pants” may not have been Brown’s greatest recording—it was one of his biggest hits, however, and eighteen years later was buried within other samples as the basis of Public Enemy’s “Fight The Power”—but the interlocking minimalism of “Sharp Cheese” Martin and Robert Coleman on guitars, Fred Thomas on bass and John “Jabo” Starks on drums was far beyond the abilities of any white group of the time. Listen to the lyrics of a 1968 recording, “Licking Stick—Licking Stick”: “People standing, standing in a trance, Sister out in the back yard, doin’ her outta sight dance.” What are they saying? That this is trance music, music in which a woman can shy off from her designated spot on the shingle, “doing the latest thing.” Maybe there is some memory in there of Brown’s harsh and lonely childhood, whippings he didn’t deserve from his father or a “vicious man” named Jack Scott who strung him up naked and beat him with a belt to near unconsciousness, or maybe an ancestral memory was imprinted on the song, a blues quoted by Jelly Roll Morton, sung by Tony Jackson in Storyville, New Orleans, at some early point in the twentieth-century: “Mama, mama look at sis, she’s out on the levee doing the double twis’.” Maybe, but the words are

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also explosions, rhythmic allusions to nowness, energy and culture, the imagery fitting the form, licking stick, a means to make you move. As Brown related in his autobiography: “It was another one-chord song like ‘I Can’t Stand Myself,’ but it had even more of a funk groove. It was a rhythm section tune, a licking stick . . . My music said where I stood.” At the time Brown was the target of criticism for his politics and patriotism, his rags to capitalism trajectory, but the music proclaimed itself of the body, of community and history, of infinite subtlety within the rigour of stasis, of a higher purpose. Listen to Jimmy Nolen’s guitar part, the precision of a three part phrase on an E flat ninth chord (the first part a fast slide up and back from E ninth): duyeuh-dakadahdukukdukdukuduk. Nolen was a T-Bone Walker disciple in the 1950s, playing uptown blues with jazz chords, tunes like “Strollin’ With Nolen,” over time refining the style into what was known as chank or scratch guitar. It remained uncompromising black minimalism out of which has flowed an unending stream, from Bootsy’s Rubber Band to Miles Davis’s “Honky Tonk” to Chic to RP Boo’s “Daddy’s Home” to A$AP Rocky’s “Fukk Sleep” (with FKA Twigs) and Tyler, The Creator’s “Who Dat Boy” and “Pothole” to Beyoncé’s “Formation,” Solange’s “Almeda” and Playboi Carti’s “@ MEH.” Recently I read a tribute to Julius Eastman, written by bassist Susan Stenger, and was moved by her account of his tenderness. Bootsy, he nicknamed her, after she took up the bass. There, in a word, is a parallel history that will never reach those accounts of minimalism that focus on white control of the soundscape, a limiting to personalities that rejects the entangled, discursive nature of complex multiple histories. In 1959, during the trip in which Alan Lomax and Shirley Collins recorded the collection speech and lining hymn of Reverend R. C. Crenshaw many years later sampled by Beyoncé for “Freedom,” this unlikely duo came by chance to Como, Mississippi, a site of tumbledown shacks, mangy hound dogs and hens, children hiding behind their mother’s skirts, where they found three brothers, Ed, Lonnie, and G. D. Young. Lonnie played cane whistle, called a “fiste”; Ed played bass drum and G. D. played snare drum. Lomax’s account, in The Land Where the Blues Began, is intoxicatingly poetic if wildly speculative. “The sweet African sound washed across the yard,” he writes. The Young brothers began with a tune called “Oree,” “. . . no words,” writes Lomax, “just an occasional low-pitched howl from Lonnie, answering the high call of the fife.” Beautifully, he describes the women dancing, shadows rising

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up like a big bird in the orange light of the kerosene lamp. For Lomax, this relationship between improvisation, the interplay of the musicians and dancers and their relationship to earth, the ground, the shingle, was a sacred ideal. From his somewhat myopic, rigid political position as an execrator of all commercial music he takes the trouble to contrast this rhythmic collective with counting beats with the fingers, dancing with only the legs and feet: “The results of taking the non-African road and trying to play hot rhythms with the extremities are manifold, ingenuous sometimes, and often offensive. They are called everything from hard rock to funk, from minimalism to Einstein on the Beach.” Shirley Collins, offensively reduced by Lomax in this same passage to “the lovely English folksinger who was along for the trip,” has her own account in America Over the Water, more balanced, less florid yet equally overcome by the strange minimalism flourishing in a poor Mississippi settlement. “I was completely spellbound watching this man reduce himself in size,” she wrote, “the women clapping him on. When he was level with the earth, the women bent down and drummed the ground with their hands. He swept his hand over the dust then brushed it across his forehead, leaving a white mark. As he slowly uncoiled and regained his full height, I turned to look at Alan to convey my wonder at what I’d seen. Like me, he had tears in his eyes.” As Lomax acknowledges, albeit reluctantly, this music was not purely African. It grew from the entanglement of what Paul Oliver called “African retentions” with fife and drum orchestras of the European military in America, going back to early seventeenth century militia units in New England and the Middle colonies, where all slaves were forced into military training. Thomas Jefferson’s slaves formed a fifeand-drum band for the War of Independence; a black fife-and-drum corps played for a Confederate regiment during the Civil War. According to David Evans, the authority on this research, this is a complex history of hybridization and divergence. The minimalism of the music is not monotony, but repetition and variation founded in ancestral African forms, minstrelsy, popular music of the 1920s and the disciplined aurality of battle. So what have we learned? Reductionism names a process applicable to a broad range of practices—Mieko Shiomi and Taku Sugimoto, Bo Diddley and John Lee Hooker, João Gilberto’s “Undiú,” Laurie Spiegel’s “Drums” and Pauline Oliveros with the Deep Listening Band, Hamilton Bohannan’s “Let’s Start the Dance” and Soft Machine’s “We Did It Again,” Jlin’s “Ra” and Tapper Zukie’s “Man Ah Warrior”—yet to reduce any such tendency in music to the career paths

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of a few individuals, let alone a small group of white men, is morally, historically and politically indefensible. Minimalism ain’t so simple as it sounds. Speculative notes towards a diasporic mixtape: black minimalism Farley Funkin’ Keith—“Funkin’ With the Drums,” Sonny Terry—“Fox Chase,” Alice Coltrane—“Battle At Armageddon,” Bongo Joe— “Transistor Radio,” Thelonious Monk—“Epistrophy,” The Fearless Four—“Rockin’ It,” James Brown—“Ain’t It Funky Now,” Baby Dodds—“Spooky Drums No. 1,” Sly & the Family Stone—“In Time,” Mr Fingers—“Washing Machine,” John Lee Hooker—“Walkin’ The Boogie” (double-tracked version), Edwin Birdsong—“Rapper Dapper Snapper,” Bo Diddley—“Bo’s Guitar,” Ed and Lonnie Young—“Hen Duck,” Sun Ra—“Rocket Number Nine,” Fela Anikulapo Kuti— “Shakara,” Prince—“Kiss,” Fatback Band—“Wicky Wacky,” Shabazz Palaces—“Dèesse Du Sang,” Miles Davis—“Mademoiselle Mabry,” Grace Jones—“Private Life,” Napoleon Strickland—“My Babe,” Al Green—“Love Ritual,” One String Sam—“I Need a Hundred Dollars,” Company Flow—“Friend Vs Friend,” Phuture—“Acid Trax,” De La Soul—“Transmitting Live From Mars,” Donny Hathaway—“Vegetable Wagon,” Jimmy Yancey—“Melancholy Blues,” Dorothy Ashby—“The Moving Finger,” The Meters—“Look-ka Py Py,” Duke Ellington/Coleman Hawkins—“Mood Indigo,” Getatchew Mekurya—“Antchi Hoye,” Parliament—“Flash Light,” Goodie Mob—“Cell Therapy,” Herbie Hancock—“Butterfly,” Barbara Mason—“Another Man,” J Dilla—“Time: The Donut of the Heart,” Drexciya— “Bubblemetropolis,” J. B. Lenoir—“I Sing Um The Way I Feel,” Maze— “Twilight,” Timmy Thomas—“Funky Me,” Bobby Hutcherson— “Prints Tie,” Aux 88—“Direct Drive,” Syreeta—“Tiki Tiki Donga,” Junior Walker & The All Stars—“Shotgun,” Lyn Collins—“Think,” Lee Perry—“The Rightful Organiser,” The JB’s—“Same Beat,” John Coltrane—“After the Rain,” King Tubby—“Dub Fi Gwan,” Coleman Hawkins—“Picasso,” Konono No. 1—“Kule Kule,” Shirley Horn— “Blue In Green,” Mbuti Pipe Ensemble—“Luma Pipes,” Critical Rhythm—“Fall Into a Trance,” ESG—“Moody,” The Isley Brothers— “Fight The Power,” Jomanda—“Make My Body Rock,” Love Unlimited Orchestra—“Strange Games and Things,” Method Man—“P.L.O. Style,” Model 500—“Night Drive,” Nitro Deluxe—“Let’s Get Brutal,” Mantronix—“Bassline,” Reese—“Just Want Another Chance,” T-La

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Rock—“It’s Yours,” Reese and Santonio—“The Sound,” African Headcharge—“Primitive,” Baby Face Leroy—“Rollin’ and Tumblin’,” Dave & Ansell Collins—“Double Barrel,” DJ Screw—“Drank,” Don Cherry/ Ed Blackwell—“Smiling Faces, Going Places,” Fantasy Three—“Biters Dub,” Junior Kimbrough—“Burn In Hell,” Kasai AllStars— “Kabuangoyi,” Madlib—“Pyramids (Change),” Masanka Sankayi— “Le Laboureur,” Robert Pete Williams—“Grown So Ugly,” Sensational—“Thick Marker,” Frank Ocean—“Nikes,” Bootsy’s Rubber Band—“Vanish In Our Sleep,” Isaac Hayes—“Ike’s Mood,” King Stitt—“Dance Beat,” Shuggie Otis—“XL-30,” Jay Dee—“You’ve Changed,” The Success All Stars—“Doctor Satan All Stars,” Mandrill— “Fencewalk,” Playboy Carti—“@ MEH.”

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chapter 20

Silences

In a plenary address at a Society for Minimalist Music conference in 2009, composer and critic Tom Johnson focused his attention not on the minimalists that he had sketched out so vividly in his epochal writings for the Village Voice in the 1970s, but instead on a wide range of European experimentalists, including those who created what he called “silent music.” Among the most active proponents of silent music, Johnson argued, were a group of obscure composers, based in Germany and Switzerland, who shared the moniker “Wandelweiser.” He described Wandelweiser, who root their work in the midcentury silences of John Cage and a renewed engagement with listening, as “the only truly avantgarde new music group in existence.”1 Their membership includes composer Jürg Frey, who finds a quixotic and intriguing space between the path and the expanse, between teleological narrative and environmental stasis; and Eva-Maria Houben, who engages with the presence of sound as it fades away. The efforts of these composers and their cohort have been recognized by prominent critics, academics, and musicians as a crucial new stream of minimalism for the twenty-first century.2

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alex ross, “silent song” ( the new yorker , 2016) Wandelweiser is the name of an informal network of twenty or so experimental-minded composers who share an interest in slow music, quiet music, spare music, fragile music. The word might be translated as “signpost of change” or “sage of change.” It brings to mind a vaguely Romantic image of solitary figures meandering along circuitous paths. The composers live in Switzerland, Germany, New York, and California, among other places, and are seldom all seen together. Most of them take inspiration from John Cage; they understand his legendary work “4'33",” in which the performer remains silent, not as a conceptual conundrum but as a practical point of departure. Eva-Maria Houben, a mainstay of the group, has written, “Music may exist ‘between’: between appearance and disappearance, between sound and silence, as something ‘nearly nothing.’ ” This is not music for everyone. No music is for everyone, just as no language or no religion is for everyone. But Wandelweiser poses a particular challenge to long-established notions of how a piece should unfold. Silence overtakes sound to the point where the work seems on the verge of vanishing. More than once, I’ve put on a Wandelweiser recording, gone about another task, and momentarily forgotten that music is playing. Then a tone startles me, like a voice speaking in a room that I thought was empty. When the listener focusses intently, wisps of sound can become expressive characters, silhouetted against an empty expanse. The composer Jennie Gottschalk, in her new book, “Experimental Music Since 1970,” observes that the typical Wandelweiser piece is “not a duration to mark, but a space to occupy.” This otherworldly music does not necessarily sound alien. Many Wandelweiser composers feel free to dwell on a sweetly consonant interval or chord. Such gestures are a departure from Cage, who generally allowed tonal materials only as meaningless flotsam and jetsam, and from his ally Morton Feldman, who treated them as melancholy relics. At the same time, Wandelweiser’s ghost tonality never achieves stability; it will frustrate those who expect one chord to lead logically to another. The composers enact a kind of double rebellion, both against a mainstream audience that pines for tonality and against an institutionalized avant-garde that spurns it. Through that twin negation, Wandelweiser Alex Ross, “Silent Song,” The New Yorker, September 5, 2016. Courtesy of Alex Ross.

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breaks with the past, and is exerting a powerful influence on music of the new century. The group formed in 1992, the year of Cage’s death. The founders— Antoine Beuger, of the Netherlands, and Burkhard Schlothauer, of Germany—had met at a far-left commune in Austria, and established a slightly cultish atmosphere from the start. Some Wandelweiser pieces could be mistaken for obscure meditation practices. Beuger’s “night music” can go on for eight or nine hours, and does not discourage listeners from sleeping. Manfred Werder’s “stück 1998” comprises four thousand sheets of music, each page consisting of an array of six-second tones that are interspersed with silences. If played from end to end, the work would last for well over five hundred hours, although so far it has been performed piecemeal, in different cities, page by page. Craig Shepard, who directs the Music for Contemplation series, in New York, undertook a project in which he walked across Switzerland for thirty-one days, writing a solo trumpet piece each day and playing it that evening. In some ways, Wandelweiser is not so much a style as a life style. Other scores are of more manageable size. During a summerlong immersion in Wandelweiser recordings—they appear on a house label, Edition Wandelweiser, and also on Another Timbre, Erstwhile, Gravity Wave, and other small labels—I became addicted to the string quartets of Jürg Frey, a Swiss composer and clarinettist. In much of Frey’s music, achingly Romantic harmonies drift to and fro, as if a Mahler Adagio were suspended in zero gravity. In the Second Quartet (1998–2000), bows barely touch the strings, and pitches are blurred by eccentric fingering. Minor-mode harmonies emerge, but they have a whispery, spectral character. The Third Quartet (2010–14) comes dangerously close, by Wandelweiser standards, to possessing a conventional structure: it progresses from dusky, almost Chopinesque chords at the outset to something like luminous E-flat major at the end. It is too static and fragmentary, however, to provide a comforting neo-Romantic bath. The Quatuor Bozzini has made rapt recordings of the quartets, for Edition Wandelweiser; in a further challenge to contemporary listening habits, they are available only through mail order. (Erstwhile Records is the American distributor.) Houben, a German composer, pianist, organist, and musicologist, likewise brushes against tonal harmonies in her music; they resemble figures in thick fog, familiar yet incorporeal. In her 2009 piano piece “abgemalt” (“painted out”), which R. Andrew Lee has recorded for Irritable Hedgehog, you hear at one point a D in the bass and an F-sharp

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in the treble; your ear naturally perceives a D-major-ish atmosphere, but when the bass descends to a C that impression dissolves. Like Feldman, Houben has a gift for evoking huge spaces with a smattering of notes. Some of her most impressive creations are quasi-improvisatory works for organ. A suite entitled “Orgelbuch,” with rumbling pedal tones and breathy hoots in the treble, suggests the noise that the king of instruments makes in the middle of the night, while the world slumbers. Michael Pisaro, the leading American member of Wandelweiser, likens his approach to a move from city to country: “After a history walking down narrow streets, cluttered with shops and traffic, music is able to walk in open spaces, to measure itself against the limitless.” For Pisaro, who teaches at CalArts, northwest of Los Angeles, this is more than a metaphor: he often brings nature into his scores, by way of field recordings that are heard in conjunction with live instruments. The three-CD set “Continuum Unbound,” on Gravity Wave, incorporates a hypnotic seventy-two-minute recording of the sounds of Congaree National Park, in South Carolina, at sundown. Pisaro also reveals popmusic influences, which are rare in the Wandelweiser world. His vocal cycle “Tombstones,” which the singer-composer Julia Holter has recorded for Human Ear, alludes to DJ Screw’s remix of UGK’s “One Day” and to Bob Dylan’s “Blind Willie McTell” (the line “All the way from New Orleans to Jerusalem” has been slowed to a crawl). The hour-long 2014 work “A mist is a collection of points,” for piano, percussion, and sine tones (pure electronic tones), is one of Pisaro’s most formidable achievements. The pianist Phillip Bush and the percussionist Greg Stuart have recorded it for New World; last fall, they played it at Redcat, in Los Angeles. In some ways, the score diverges from the Wandelweiser norm, if such a thing exists. Much of the piece has an unsettled, brooding quality, with scattered piano pitches accumulating over sustaining pedal into dissonant clouds. Periodically, though, the texture thins out dramatically: in one remarkable passage, a crotale is repeatedly struck, its swinging motion audible against the laserlike clarity of the sine tones. Only at the Redcat performance did I register the magic of the ending, in which the percussionist stands over a set of cymbals placed on the floor and pours grains of rice and millet on them. Stuart began with fistfuls of grains, creating a sound like a rainstorm or a chorus of crickets; later, following instructions in the score, he reduced the stream to a trickle, eliciting intermittent plinks. (Pisaro cherishes these rice noises, and also features them in a pair of pieces entitled “ricefall”; the Interna-

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tional Contemporary Ensemble will perform the second at the Abrons Arts Center, on Grand Street, on September 16th.) Bush, meanwhile, played lone tones separated by huge intervals, ending on the lowest A on the piano. I imagined a bell ringing in a ruined cathedral and raindrops falling into a pool. This is the Wandelweiser illusion: from almost nothing, vast forms arise.

jürg frey, “and on it went” (2004) One possibility of experiencing time is the path. It is what lies ahead at the start of a performance: the composition develops, takes first one direction then another, perhaps doubles back, sets an accent here and there, focuses on certain sonorities or thematic levels. It unfolds continuously, and the more we hear of the piece, the more of a past the piece acquires. This past lays a path in our memories, we remember it as fragments of a sound edifice we have traversed with our ears, or as something more organically grown, evolving its path in time. The questions arising here are in the nature of: How will the piece go on? Why will it go on? What direction will it take? And at what speed? Another possibility of experiencing time is expanse. Music consists of sound; unchanging and unchanged, it expands in space. Attention is not trained on the individual event but wanders in space, laying claim to space just as sound does. Composition and space merge, and both are components of a sonic situation without temporal direction, a situation that may even be unbounded and, through its very presence, determined by sound, space and listeners. Memory is shaped less by the individual details than by a situation in which one has spent a certain period of time. The questions here are: How do boundaries come to be? Where are those boundaries? How do special qualities come to be? Where is the core of the composition, the core that accords the situation its identity and its energy? What gives sonic and compositional texture to the work as a whole? Let us imagine the composition sketched above: 672 slow quavers, each one notated individually, ranging over staves and pages, played by four performers with eight triangles; then 672 slow quavers, each notated individually, ranging over staves and pages, played by four performers

Jürg Frey, “And On It Went,” Wandelweiser website, 2004, www.wandelweiser.de/_ juerg-frey/texts-e.html. Courtesy of Jürg Frey.

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with eight finger cymbals. Later, for minutes, the sound of cymbals, then tam-tam noises and the soft sounds of bowed stones, metal sheets, and then, after a good half hour, the first rests—and in between, long passages marked by the unvarying sounds of the bass drum, played pianissimo, and later the rustling of leaves, the sound of stones and humming. I am on the threshold between these two experiential worlds: the world of the path and the world of expanse. But let me make clear that I am not intent on exploring the whole spectrum between processive composing—an activism focused on ceaseless change—and work with static sounds, or on installational thinking. I am not oscillating imaginatively back and forth in the hope of occupying as many compositional positions as possible. On the contrary, I am on the precise threshold where static sonic thinking almost imperceptibly acquires direction, where static, wholly motionless sounds meet the onset of movement and directionality of the sound material. On this threshold—an airy, mobile threshold that is entirely elusive as a place, but occasionally allows music to be experienced as a place—there is still enough scope, uncharted territory and vitality to inspire the compositional process and pose a challenge. Often differing only in nuance, these two fundamentally divergent patterns of compositional behaviour can meet in both consecutiveness and simultaneity. In the process they create the space and perspective necessary for the composition as sonic space to converge into a single situation with the performance venue as performance space. While the idea of the path is more strongly associated with essentially melodic thinking—even if melodies, of whatever kind, cannot necessarily be heard in the composition—spatial thinking has more to do with sound or the idea of the monochrome. Melody and the path have a beginning and an end, but sound and space have a timeless presence. Musical experience shows that the two aspects so cleanly separated here engage complexly with one another: for instance, when a static electronic sound is suddenly perceived as a very high speed, or when a movement progressing evenly, step by step, gradually tends towards an experience of monochromy. That is when the path gradually transforms into space. On the other hand, a sound can tell a story, or—by virtue of very small, initially imperceptible changes—a seemingly static, monochrome sound gradually allows us to recognise that we are suddenly somewhere totally different. That is when sound in time lays a path. So we find ourselves in complex experiential worlds: as a result of a long duration in time, a path, a way, can become an expanse or a space—and conversely, where attention is turned to detail, to small changes, an

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expanse or space can be experienced as a path, a way. Combined, the two revolve around the core of the piece: monochromy as a sense of the overall, narration as a way from one thing to the next. These dual situations present the interpreter with an unaccustomed challenge. When he is confronted with the monochrome existence of sound, it means genuinely vanishing behind the sound and making any hint of theatricality generated by his very presence disappear. This implies, first and foremost, that the sparse, specific material central to this monochrome situation must be left, so to speak, unsullied by the playing. In other words, it must not be given weight and interest through interpretation and the individuality of the reading: that is precisely what these sounds abstain from. Transcending this conventional idea, the interpreter deploys his mastery of the instrument to achieve a virtuosity consisting in producing sounds in such a way that he himself disappears and all that remains is sound in space. Any insecurity, be it instrumental, emotional or physical, immediately shifts the interpreter into the foreground and interferes with the monochrome experience. This is the basis on which the presence or absence of sound and performer can gain thematic importance. At the same time, it is the point of departure from which sounds set off on their path: the composer’s strategies and attitude towards the material frequently need only a slightly different energy to give direction to sounds, introduce a change or leave one section and arrive at another. The faintest stirring is enough abruptly to banish the monochrome space: the focus is turned on the composition and with that on the presence of the player, who, as interpreter, is communicating this compositional change. Attention shifts from an undirected spacetime situation to a directed situation in which sounds begin to wander and subtly radiate a direction that causes the situation to appear in a slightly different light. This may happen in order to truly set off on a path, or perhaps to shift quickly and lightly from one sonic situation to another. At all times, the interpreter is expected not to want to hold and shape the sounds, but to let go of them as he plays, enabling the inherent qualities of the sounds to become perceptible and experienceable. Time flows through the performer, and he not so much showcases his own presence as he articulates the presence of the overall space. He reacts with seismographic sensitivity to the slightest change, the subtlest crossing of the threshold between monochromely undirected situations and the shaping of time, which suggests direction and a path. This is where a composer’s formal interest is kindled—an interest that might be described as the composition breathing between the two states

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of space and path. What can be said for the interpreter applies at least as much to the composer: he decides about the musical and compositional parameters, he approaches the musical material with meticulous precision and is the inventor of these situations. But they can emerge only if, as a composer, his attitude towards his artistic intentions renders him, so to speak, absent. At the same time, however, precisely what he considers right for the respective composition is supposed to happen. This is not a paradox, it is the foundation on which this kind of compositional work builds. The result distinguishes itself from a musical experience centered on listening to an object of art and artifice presented at a performance venue, which I observe from outside in a listening mode. Instead, space, sound and listener create a field of tension informed by the various balanced presences, a field that can become an existential experience of physical and mental existence for the listener. The fragility characteristic of this field of tension derives from the fact that motionlessness and movement, monochromy and narrative are close enough together for them to be able to shift quickly and easily from one to the other. In either state, there is always a sense of the other’s absence: monochromy as the absence of movement and directed material as the absence of monochromy. It is this oscillation that infuses the field of tension with much of its energy and complexity—additionally enhanced if listeners’ experiences are taken into account as well. A monochrome sound world will not always resonate in the listener as a monochrome experience. It may easily be that, at the end of a performance of static music that has remained motionless, the listener is in himself no longer where he started out—just as, conversely, directed, mobile music that lays a path need not always take the listener along on a journey.

eva-maria houben, “presence—silence— disappearance” (2010) Some thoughts on the perception of “nearly nothing”: Yesterday there was my piano recital with two compositions of John Cage (works for piano) and two of my own compositions for piano: Eva-Maria Houben, “Presence—Silence—Disappearance,” Wandelweiser website, 2010, www.wandelweiser.de/_eva-maria-houben/texts-e.html. Courtesy of Eva-Maria Houben. The essay was first presented as a lecture at the I- and E- Festival Dublin in 2010. Edited by Houben in April 2022.

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klavier (piano) (2003) and three chorales (penser à satie) (2007). What is it about the sound of piano? The sound of the piano decays. It cannot be sustained. I let it loose time and again. It appears by disappearing; starting to disappear just after the attack. In disappearing it begins to live, to change. The piano: an instrument, that allows me to hear how many ways sound can disappear. There seems to be no end to disappearance. The sound of piano! I can hear, how listening becomes the awareness of fading sound. Here is one more example after the recital yesterday: The beginning of the third movement of my three lullabies (2007) for piano. The sound of the piano decays—and the decaying sound goes on in the overtones played after a long pause. And if you would ask me for a statement to composing, to my composing—I would answer: listening becomes the awareness of fading sound. Fading sound is the link between life and art; between perception in daily life and perception while performing, while composing. And the awareness of fading sound may become the awareness of presence. I am pianist and—in addition—organist. As organist I never forget that the organ is a wind instrument. My pieces for organ and my “installations” for organ (the installations last many hours) ask: Am I realizing a piece? There is hardly anything you may hear in the church. The organ releases as a jewel each single sound; each stream of air; each noise: disappearing into the space of the hall. The listener will find the way to listening: in this particular room with this particular organ and its streams of sound/air/wind. All sound, all streams of air and noises are quiet; sometimes hardly recognizable. The sound of music; the noise of music; the sound and noise of everyday life: they cut into each other. Both sound and noise of music do not depend on silence as with a piece of music. Both sound and noise do not need any silent location: they are quiet themselves; their quietness creates silent rooms, which welcome all sounds. With the organ, the machine and human beings work together. Man cannot breathe sounds of almost eternal duration; but the organ must not be considered a machine. My pieces for organ require the player: moving the keys; make the winds stream. Sounds, wind, noises of the organ as a wind instrument and the silence at sacred spaces: not a coincidence. Churches’ sacred spaces turn into locations for people to do nothing more than just be there and breathe; where people can listen—unhindered by any possible meaning of sounds and streams of air.

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In spite of the fact that the organ may have an endless breath— I composed one of my first organ pieces dazwischen (between) (2000) with two drones—you can hear “nearly nothing” by listening to the streams of air. Here some examples of those sounds I use in my oratorio Hiob, im siebten stockwerk der geduld (2009/2010): Listening to the organ as a wind instrument becomes the awareness of fading sound, too. Listening in this way (listening to fading sound, to decay and vanishing objects) I pay attention to presence. Today I am invited to speak about “presence—silence—disappearance” and about “nearly nothing”: and I begin to offer you first of all some thoughts on disappearance. My first study on “presence” was a book titled: The Abolition of Time: Thoughts on the Utopia of Unlimited Presence in Music of the 20th Century.3 This book was published in 1992. And now, nearly twenty years afterwards, I still think about these things. My first thoughts at the beginning of the nineties: There is a special feeling of time in improvised music, a perception of pure presence, the philosopher Jean Gebser spoke about “eternal presence.”4 Many musicians and composers at the beginning of the last century and then later on spoke about the relationship between a special experience of presence and improvisation, between the experience of presence and composition. Ferrucio Busoni wrote: “Pause and fermata in the music of our time will bring music near her own origin, her real destination. Great performers and improvisers know how to use these means of expression.”5 And Busoni adds some thoughts on the silence between sounds, on the silence between two movements, which becomes music as well. The German composer Bernd Alois Zimmermann, known as the inventor of the idea of a “sphere of time,” which may combine past, present and future as well, liked most of all improvisation, adding at the same time, that he did not think that absolute improvisation could really exist.6 But he thought that by improvising the musician could have experiences of time he never would have otherwise. There are publications in the last years about the “Free Fantasy” in the 18th century, for example those of C. Ph. E. Bach: Peter Schleuning, one of the authors, says that Bach lost himself by improvising—and the “Fantasy” as a kind of composition (with notations and score) could never reach the actual performance. And: Bach performed hours and hours, sometimes five, six hours in the evening and night, he really forgot time as a matter of watches and clocks. (As I do in my organ installations which may last four, five, six hours and longer.)

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I do not think today that the possibility of the experience of presence depends on the decision: composition—improvisation; score—no score; work/“opus”—process/performance; eye—ear. I think that the experience of presence depends on the faculty to let it loose, to let loose things, sounds; to be able to do without the effort to keep the idea, to keep the sound, to keep the score with an unchangeable face. There is one main question: May you get rid of assurances? In other words: Are you ready to fall into provisional circumstances? (And “pro-visional” may mean: nothing is worth to be kept, to be preserved—no effort, no work, no object; everything is coming up in a future which just will arrive—but not yet.) It is the paradoxical feeling: you work with an aim, but without intentions. And this paradoxical situation of the composer and/or performer does not depend on the question whether the sounds are improvised or not, whether you work on a composition or on an improvisation. My last book on Hector Berlioz ends with these thoughts: which way is something (like a sound) given to us?7 This is the same question as: which way is something let loose and/or lost, and which way is something a loosened and/or lost thing? By listening I am aware: nothing remains, everything is lost—something always is given to me so that I may loosen it. Composition thinks about ways of loosening sound. The last question: Why? Why sound, why composition (you could add: why improvisation)?—One answer: Sound is given. There is sound, there are sounds. It’s becoming more and more silent. That’s all I may answer to the question: Why composition? I would like to mention now some examples of traditional music; in addition I will quote some sentences from my own compositions. Hector Berlioz (1803–1869) was a composer with great visions. His scores often show the annotation: “presque rien” (“nearly nothing”). This annotation may be found in combination with extremely reduced dynamics. Sound may become nearly inaudible. As an annotation to dynamics “nearly nothing” may be compared with Schoenberg’s “wie ein Hauch” (“like a breeze”; Arnold Schönberg, sixth piano piece, 6 kleine Klavierstücke op. 19; Anton Webern, zweites Orchesterstück aus Fünf Stücke für Orchester op. 10) or “kaum hörbar” (“nearly inaudible”) or “äußerst leise” (“extremely soft”) (Anton Webern, third piece for orchestra, Fünf Stücke für Orchester op. 10). We listen to the movement “La harpe eolienne—Souvenirs” (The aeolien harp—remembrances) of Lélio ou Le retour à la vie (Lélio or the Comeback to Life).

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You may notice not only special dynamics, but single, isolated sounds, short sounds (pizz.), repetitions, many pauses, fermatas, sustained sounds, too. This movement at first was part of the Cantata La Mort d’Orphée (The death of Orpheus); in the cantata you hear this part after the furies murdered the artist, it’s the moment of great silence after the catastrophe. The silence says: Finished! There is no music anymore, all music finished. Now music may begin. The awareness of fading sound is listening to the future; the space becomes wide and ears become antennae: presence that lasts. I may read the annotation “nearly nothing” in a second way: there nearly is no composition. There are some vibrations, some noises, some fragments in the air—nearly nothing. The aeolian harp: an instrument with strings in unison. Partials are attempted and unfold, merging into multifaceted, richly coloured harmonies. Music happens all by itself, seemingly uncomposed. This is the sound of the aeolien harp, its strings set in motion by a passing wind. With this composition Berlioz aims at a paradoxical kind of composition: he tries to compose without composing. He tries to let loose his own work. Yesterday I played two pieces of John Cage’s works for piano. In these pieces Cage treats the piano nearly as an aeolian harp: the right pedal is held throughout the time; so the player refuses to control the life of the sounds. In the recital following this lecture you will listen to my piece quelques riens (2005) for Mauritius flute. This piece is part of a trilogy: calme, silence, solitude for piccolo flute, quelques riens for Mauritius flute and moments musicaux for bass flute. The scores contain the note: “upon listening to hector berlioz.” Berlioz was one of the first to radically expand the listening space by his reference to “nearly nothing” (“presque rien”). You may listen “between”—and there are two ways: You listen 1) between sound and silence 2) between two movements of a symphony or a sonata.

At first let us have a look at the first “between,” between sound and silence. We listen to the beginning of the first movement of Franz Schubert’s Sonata B flat major (D 960).

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There are questions: When does sound begin, when does silence end? When does silence begin—and sound come to an end? I am listening between the fading sound, which nearly disappeared—and the new one, which has not yet appeared. Sometimes you may not distinguish exactly appearance and disappearance. Let us speak about the other between: between two movements of a symphony or a sonata. Listening between two movements, you may listen to sounds, which evoke a special atmosphere of attention at the end of a composition: music will not come to an end; sounds disappear (“morendo” or “perdendo” or “sostenuto perdendo” “al niente”), the music passes and the piece seems to come to an end—but there is no end, it really goes on and on. Think about the paradoxical term “sostenuto perdendo”: keep on decaying! You may perhaps speak of an end after finishing the piece; but sometimes sounds “morendo” or “perdendo” will last and never finish. You will find a lot of examples in traditional music. A very good one: Hector Berlioz’s “March of the Pilgrims,” second movement of the symphony Harold in Italy. The last sounds: “sostenuto perdendo.” We listen to my nachtstück (nightpiece) (2007) for double bass. Music may exist “between”: between appearance and disappearance, between sound and silence, as something “nearly nothing.” There seems to be no end to disappearance. The other way: there are pieces—there seems to be no end to appearance. I remember for example the beginning of Anton Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony (Romantic Symphony); the string-tremolo may indicate that music has not yet begun, will begin soon; it says: Listen! The musicologist Peter Gülke speaks about “beginning before beginning,” speaks about music, which is on the way to become music.8 This kind of beginning (“misterioso”) creates a specific situation: something might happen, but you do not exactly know. In my music you will find pieces or sounds, which seem to avoid the decision: appearing or disappearing? They appear while disappearing, they disappear while appearing. In the following recital the solo piece im stillen. atmungen für bass-flöten (in silence. breaths for bass-flutes) (2009) as well as the two duos throngs and waves might never come to an end. Presence that lasts. Why such composing, why such listening? What to do with pieces of Bruckner, Schubert, Berlioz, Cage, Feldman and others today? As composer I want to create situations which may open a wide space of possibilities. While listening I want to find a location where

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nearly nothing is fixed, where nearly everything is possible. Not yet vanished, not yet a new attack: but within “between” there may be the chance that I am aware of something I don’t know. I want to continue observing decay, listening which ways things vanish, sound fades. I hear nearly nothing, and I continue listening to nearly nothing—continue after the end and further on—even if really nothing can be heard. I continue to finish my own work. Music and every-day-life, art and life are combined. Compositions like these and many others say to me as listener: Listening may become breathing with the ears. I hear nearly nothing: then I may hear, that and which ways I am in the world. Ears may become antennae, instigated by nearly nothing. Between appearance and disappearance I find as a listener the possibility to create by myself. Listening in this way is a kind of activity: it’s the activity to let it loose. To listen: to let loose. Become and remain silent. Without action, without intention. That’s the activity. I let it loose—until nearly nothing is left. Now I am here, this is my location. I listen to (nearly) nothing. And now I am invited to fall into life. This is—for my work—an important aim: to compose without composing; to create situations: something might happen. The best—perhaps: you really don’t know if a performance might have happened or not. This performance will be present for you forever.

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chapter 21

Futures

Since 2014, the hip arts venue Basilica Soundscape has offered a “24-HOUR DRONE” festival, with an eclectic line-up and open call for submissions, in its converted factory space in upstate New York. The twenty-first-century resurgence of drones—via doom-metal bands, indie acts with looping pedals, and new avant-garde composers—might be surprising given how minimalism had seemed to canonize around pulses and tonal harmonies, but such developments point to the enduring legacies of the movement’s many tributaries. Sunn O))) and likeminded bands blast amplified, sludgy feedback at decibels that might have made Tony Conrad or Yoshi Wada jealous, with cultish theatrics from the black metal scene. Disciples of La Monte Young such as Randy Gibson develop new tuning systems and metaphysical lenses through which to elucidate them. Producer Floating Points and legendary saxophonist Pharoah Sanders carve out a space between ambient music and experimental jazz, one that echoes Sanders’s own historic collaborations with Alice and John Coltrane. Composer and percussionist Sarah Hennies explores psychoacoustic effects reminiscent of the music of Alvin Lucier. And Éliane Radigue, the doyen of drones, continues to produce astonishing new work with rich histories and powerful futures.

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brandon stosuy interviews sunn o)))’s stephen o’malley ( the believer , 2006) BLVR:  A friend of mine was wondering how Khanate’s drummer maintains his slow-mo tortoise pace for so long. I could say the same thing about you—your projects involve a lot of drone, sustain. Live, you stalk the amp and eke different tones from it. Do you ever get tired of the build and just want to jam into a Van Halen–style solo? SO:  Oh, I don’t know, not really. My hand doesn’t move that well, for one. [Laughs] I’ve never really gone down that road. The closest I’d get to Van Halen is cooking the hell out of the tubes. To me, there’s a lot of interaction in what I do: every detail’s a choice; it’s not just feedback. There’s an attack here; you only need to move one degree to get a difference in sound. It’s very involved. And I think our drummer really enjoys this super-coiled tension where he’s in command. Everyone has to follow him, so he’s almost the director—of tempo, anyway. BLVR:  I saw Khanate at the Mercury Lounge a few months back—my friend dropped his beer when you guys chimed in together. SO:  Yeah, it’s like, what’s the purpose of a payoff in music? It’s the climax of a sentence or a paragraph or whatever. There has to be some big event and there has to be a resolution, conventionally. But why does it have to exist in the structure of a song? It doesn’t. It can be pure build that lacks a conclusion—or the whole structure could be spun as the conclusion. BLVR:  That’s reminiscent of Tony Conrad. SO:  I’m a fan of Tony Conrad’s music, but I don’t know very much about him personally or historically, aside from the albums. His music takes one event and opens it up, blossoming the tone. It’s not so much an examination or analysis; it’s another way of hearing, a old way of making sound, actually. By listening to the tone and the detail of the sound, a one-point detail becomes more planar. BLVR:  What else do you listen to?

Excerpt from Brandon Stosuy, “An Interview with Stephen O’Malley,” The Believer 35, June 1, 2006, https://believermag.com/an-interview-with-stephen-o-malley. Courtesy of Brandon Stosuy.

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SO:  Recently I’ve been trying to check out more Roy Orbison. Khanate had a concert in Nashville, and we went to this bar called the Sherlock Holmes Pub, which was basically a shrine to Roy Orbison. They had a huge projection screen on the wall with an Orbison concert from the ’60s. The concert was amazing— completely hypnotic. They had this set of lights that said Roy Orbison on the back of the stage—huge, maybe twenty feet wide— and it would flash at different paces. Now, combine the lights with meter tricks the band was doing with the tempo: He would sing the verse from one of his hits, and then he would leave the stage, waving; the crowd would be screaming, and the band would double the pace of the song while he was gone. When he came back out, they’d do the next verse. It was totally cultish. BLVR:  In a quieter way, Sunn O))) creates a similarly cultish vibe. I mean, it’s mind-blowing to see what a smoke machine can do: at the December Northsix show the column in front of me was like a tree trunk in some foggy valley—steam drifting up from some swamp, or whatever—and then these guitar-toting druids materialize. SO:  [Laughs] Where our performances take place is a big part of why we use the smoke and robes—I mean, it’s strange to do that kind of performance in a bar in Boston. These elements act as a contrast to that space. If we played in a music theater, it might lessen the necessity to have robes and smoke, or make the purpose of those trappings much more apparent. By amplifying the visual side, it in turn amplifies the direction of the music. For instance, each time we’ve switched the colors of the robes it’s been for a reason. When we first started, we told ourselves it would be too obvious to use black. Like, what are we, some teenagers from Norway? No, we were teenagers from Seattle, but . . . [Laughs] but now, it’s an appropriate time because the music has moved in that direction. The people involved have been into exploring different states of mind. Black One is more emotionally charged than our other albums—it’s challenging people. It’s like, OK, now that we’ve gone through this, we can try using black robes, and it’s not going to be a gimmick. Though, actually, speaking of a gimmick with robes . . . Brian Turner from WFMU posted this video from The Richard Pryor Show in the ’70s. There’s a skit where he’s fronting this band called Black Death and he kind of looks like Funkadelic—he comes

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flying down with this huge insane hairdo, bat cape, makeup and stuff . . . there’re coffins onstage, smoke everywhere—the coffins open up and these dudes emerge in black robes . . . it looks like Sunn O)))! It’s Richard Pryor fronting a Funkadelic version of Sunn O)))! I guess that means we’re part of that lineage, that camp of rock and metal. But there’s got to be a lite aspect to something so heavy—to validate it. BLVR:  How many different styles of robes do you own? SO:  We’re on the third generation now. The first ones were these gray and red medieval peasant, druidic-looking ones, which only Greg and I were using. The second ones had embroidery—Vatican or Catholic-inspired stuff, looking back on it. Now we have the black, simple ritualistic-looking ones. BLVR:  Who makes them? SO:  My sister, who’s a fashion designer. BLVR:  What else does she design? SO:  She worked in preteen/teen lingerie for a while in L.A. . . . strange niche. BLVR:  People tend to overemphasize the robes. SO:  Yeah, definitely more and more, but we made our own beds with that one. At the same time, the robes are a very simple way of entering another state of mind. We use them for the ceremony of the performance, which isn’t steeped in any real doctrine or anything, aside from the music and the sound itself. But it’s also significant in a meditational way, with the trance. It’s a uniform. It also adds to the ambiguity of the people involved with making the Sunn O))) sound. Actually, though, with more direct attention focused on the robes, it’s become more of a personality-based thing—a stylistic identifier. BLVR:  You’ve put a lot of thought into each aspect of your work— are you doing drone for the same reasons as Conrad or La Monte Young? SO:  I don’t think drone really requires a purpose. The old archaic sound: literally vibrating your molecules. I love a lot of music— Indian classical music and its old structures. Listening to something like that, based on several thousand years of development, makes me feel totally inadequate. The actual nearsightedness of my eyes is

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how I feel with music at this point. You question the point—why you’re making music, performing for people, releasing commercial products. BLVR:  With Black One it seems you’ve pushed toward a purer sound. SO:  The work of Sunn O))) is not just one record at a time—it’s a culmination of everything we’ve done. It gets more specific and more liberating. The more you understand your work, the better you can execute it, and the more honest and accurate it is. Black One’s certainly the most focused we’ve been as a group, as a duo. Everything about the production’s more meticulous than any album I’ve ever been involved with. We did a lot of plotting to make it cohesive, to make it more cinematic. Some of our other stuff— White 1 & 2—worked as an overall collection, but the tracks were more individualized. The concept or the mood sort of comes after the fact, with repeated listens. With Black One we went in with a more specific idea of what we wanted to accomplish. The live aspect of Sunn O))), to me, is more important than the records. It’s about the life of the idea, the actuality. It’s very different to get that across on an album because of the sheer physics of sound. On this one, we’ve gotten closer to that.

randy gibson, “on tuning” (2018) Tuning is the cornerstone of a contemplative sonic artistic practice. My thoughts have been drawn to considering how my conception of tuning evolved over time and how ratios became the driving force in my work. It is through the sustained practice of tuning that I came to understand time and its inextricable relationship to ratio. Reflecting on the example set by La Monte Young, tuning is already firmly established as a function of time. Therefore by listening, hearing, and truly experiencing a ratio and its tuning we can endeavor to develop an understanding of the feeling of time and perceive it through an intense focus on tuning, or rather, ratio. I began studies with Young and Zazeela in 2003. At that time the idea of pure non-equal tuning was entirely novel. Considering an interval as a ratio was only something I had read about. Over time I learned Randy Gibson, “On Tuning,” Sound American 20 (October 2018). Courtesy of Randy Gibson.

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tuning first-hand in the Kirana tradition and developed an appreciation for a devoted approach to ratios and refinement. In a remarkable confluence of events, I came to La Monte and Marian when my work needed it most. In the subsequent years events would align such that time and place would allow for the creation of my own integrated numerical cosmology: The Four Pillars, a tuning system built from pure exponential harmonics of a single fundamental frequency. Of course, Just Intonation itself is a very open tuning concept. You can recreate sounds from an older time or explore ratios more abstract than anyone has ever heard. This tuning practice—clarifying it, focusing it—we come to its core in time: exploring the energy of pure ratio, expressed as tuning, heard in the real world. The fundamental tenets of Just Intonation allow us over time to expand our focus from tuning a single ratio perfectly to experiencing a rich web of relationships. The way we choose to use this system of tuning (as with any system) is where art happens. Ratios are the building blocks, and their combinations become transcendent when a confluence of intervals creates a new otherworldy sonic situation. Moving beyond the standard or accepted ratios (threes and fives, say) a tuning can, with time and attention, take on wilder numbers—La Monte’s sevens. I quite like elevens too. Larger prime numbers can align to highlight certain intervals (Prime Time) and can even be used in combination to create new tones that reinforce the tuning that is already present. These ratio relationships, if time is taken to cultivate them, become self-reflective all-encompassing universes built from tuning a small set of pitches. These can feel familiar through the harmonic series—it’s all around us, resonating out its tuning from every sound, complex or simple. Overtones follow these numerical rules (most of the time), spell out ratios across the tuning spectrum, getting smaller and smaller the higher up we go. Knowing this we can embark on a time-honored ancient tradition: tuning a single ratio to the overtone series, say with a tambura or sine wave drone, allowing freedom through reference. The confluence of stasis and freedom brings rise to new ratio possibilities. Knowing the point of reference, we can travel far. This tuning practice takes time to develop; hearing the beats slow and eventually stop, feeling the ratio lock into place. Working with tuning in this way feels transcendent. Time stops when the whole composite waveform comes into sharp focus. The way the interval aligns becomes the composite waveform

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expressed in space every time the interval is heard. Within a system of Just Intonation these tuning shapes become periodic. Using pure ratios it becomes possible, within a lifetime, to comprehend these intervallic relationships precisely. While developing tunings system of my own I became interested in the way that ratios, content, and time could come together as a tuning of the entire performance situation. Durations within a work became tied to these same numbers. How many harmonics available for tuning became tied to these same numbers. The visual environment of the performance became tied to these same numbers. I observed confluences in these ratio relationships across mediums. The impetus of the composition became inextricably linked to the expression of this total tuning system with time as the primary concern. A ratio in sound translated elegantly to a similar relationship in duration. With tuning of the pitches decided, the time of the composition becomes the next stage for ratio exploration. A work where the tuning is built exclusively from nines readily fills the time of 81 minutes. With this sort of interrelated ecosystem, compositional concerns align to create powerful resonances often imperceptible to the listener regardless of time. Expanding now my use of Just Intonation beyond tuning in the sonic realm the ratios can be explored in their purely physical manifestations. Time itself can become the definitive tuning experience. Considering that sound is itself physical, jumping to objecthood means ratio can be delineated abstractly and time can reveal tuning as a concrete conception. The direct relationship of line, space, color, word, tone, vibration, or light outline ratio in a confluence of medium and intention. I have long considered my work as an ongoing refinement of a specific set of relationships. Tuning of a harmonic started as the foundation of this practice, as learned from La Monte, but now I find myself considering tuning as a function of life. Time becomes a ratio of experience, a fluid medium equally subject to the principles of tuning. Shape and form (compositional form or physical), clock time (or astronomical); these concerns of ratio translate readily to the physical tuning of objects and environment. An art of light and space and time built wholly on the foundational physics of sound. Aligned with this new paradigm I have a blueprint for a way to make work.

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Time is my primary compositional concern. Tuning has been decided upon, and ratio is a given within this cosmology. The decisions become quite simple. Time works within tuning to create form. Dimensions and pigments reference the numbers of my ratio systems. The lines in the video work enjoy confluence of shape, duration, and speed, all referencing these numbers. What I’m after is an artistic situation where ratio, color, duration, tuning, pitch, and time all exist in the same self-logical environment. They are, and simultaneously aren’t, part of one piece, existing as conceptually pure ratios and embodying time and space in the moment: fluid but logical from iteration to iteration. If I’m tuning a piano or setting a wedge in paint, harmonic structure is the backbone whether audible or not. Having this foundational tuning experience outside traditional western methods has encouraged my tendencies toward extreme time. Allowing the ratio to speak for itself through tuning, and asking unmediated focus on that experience, is an act that takes a long time. I had to learn to align myself to these interests and understand that this world was one of gradual change. Degrees of difference (time-based or not). Tuning as a manifestation of concept. Ratio as definitive form. Working in this way presents an unusual set of challenges. Exploring confluence across mediums means the work can rarely exist as a single ratio unimpeded. The entire situation must conform to the tuning so that time can become malleable. The entire experience is “in tune” and therefore the audience understands ratio, and yes tuning, through a new lens. Each time these ideas are returned to, the audience can access memory of the past and tuning can highlight ratio in a way that uses time to its advantage. Hearing or seeing an interval durationally means that tuning becomes a common language. One may not perceive ratio, duration, color, or time as conforming to the rules of the tuning, but the imperceptible allows discovery. The outward similarity of the experience (minimalism) encourages a harmonic experience that becomes self-reflective. Redefining tuning as an all-encompassing activity means it’s not necessary for the experiencer to know the structure involved. Spending time with this aligned work is all that’s required. Your own experience is paramount. You may notice a new subtle detail. You may find confluence while others’ attention is elsewhere. Ratios become readily apparent when your perception is sufficiently, slowly, opened.

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Your own experience is tuned to your time in this world. My experience, your experience. This ratio, that relationship. We all have individual predispositions, so tuning this way becomes about allowing time for discovery, embracing the individual experience and understanding that, for each ratio within the tuning, a high level of intention must be given time to flourish. Knowing this, we ask the same of our audience. Tuning activates the ratio of experience. Perception activates the totality of shared time. Just Intonation is a lens through which a tuning of this magnitude can be cultivated beyond the ratios, beyond the notes, beyond the time of it. This practice of tuning our situation proves relevant throughout our existence; a new methodology to engage our perception. Ratio mediates the timed experience of tuning as totality. We embark on this practice as a shared sublime experience. Our aim is a pure and completely transformative harmony.

philip sherburne on ambient jazz ( pitchfork , 2021) One of the year’s most memorable melodies consists of a seven-note refrain repeated, with slight variation, for more than three quarters of an hour. Sam Shepherd’s keyboard part from Promises—a full-length collaboration between the 35-year-old British musician better known as Floating Points, the 81-year-old American jazz legend Pharoah Sanders, and the London Symphony Orchestra—is soft and silvery. With an air of unquenchable mystery, it forms the frame for Sanders’ eloquent horn lead. The unobtrusive figure is the opposite of showy, and yet it frequently slips unbidden into my thoughts—when I’m washing dishes, say, or showering, or driving in silence—and germinates there, like a seed cracking open. Promises is an unusual piece of work: a cross-generational hybrid of lyrical jazz and electroacoustic abstraction, with a touch of classical orchestration thrown in. Shepherd and Sanders come from considerably different backgrounds, but there are clear commonalities in their approaches. Floating Points’ earliest work was devoted to groove-heavy dance beats, but since his 2015 album Elaenia, Shepherd has increasingly Philip Sherburne, “Ambient Jazz’s Quiet, Forceful Return,” Pitchfork, December 9, 2021. Philip Sherburne, Pitchfork © Condé Nast.

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focused on the expressive dimension of sound-sculpting. Sanders, spiritual kin to John Coltrane and Albert Ayler, has spent decades exploring the nuances of tone: In just the first minute or so of “Astral Traveling,” from 1971’s Thembi, he proves that a held note can be as transporting as the most dazzling cadenza. What unites the two musicians on Promises is a shared interest in the ways that timbre and texture are just as crucial as melody, harmony, and even rhythm—that is, a mutual fascination with the properties of sound itself. Usually when we talk about the kind of repetition and sonic detail that are central to Promises, we talk about minimalism. But in the case of Shepherd and Sanders’ meditative album, untethered from any sort of percussive anchor, a different genre seems more germane: ambient. Promises may have been the most high-profile ambient jazz album of 2021, but it was hardly the only one. The fusion of the two styles has been gathering steam over the last few years, culminating in a bounty of recent recordings in which music born of the American jazz tradition took on a particularly ethereal and otherworldly air. It’s a sound that feels particularly timely, given the enforced pause we’ve been forced to endure for nearly two years now, as well as the abiding feeling of strangeness that hangs over so much of modern life. But its roots run deeper—and its artistic possibilities stretch further—than the current predicament. Much like jazz, ambient can be a vague and frustratingly open-ended term that inspires plenty of knee-jerk associations—from ’90s chill-out rooms to new-age elevator music. Brian Eno, who popularized the concept on a series of albums in the ’70s and ’80s, famously said that ambient music should be “as ignorable as it is interesting”—a potentially provocative assessment that also doomed the style, in the eyes of its detractors, as a lesser category of music, something closer to interior design than actual composition. Given the rise of mood-based streaming playlists (and the resultant rise of music created expressly for moodbased streaming playlists), there’s no shortage of aural wallpaper these days. But Promises is something different: an attempt to combine the expressive language of jazz with the atmospheric quality of ambient music, to introspective and enveloping effect. If Floating Points and Pharoah Sanders represent the meeting of the 20th-century avant-garde with the 21st-century electronic underground, those two traditions come together in 25-year-old harpist, composer, and synth obsessive Nala Sinephro. Her debut album, Space 1.8, collects some of the leading lights of the contemporary London jazz scene—including saxophonists Nubya Garcia, James Mollison, and

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Ahnansé, guitarist Shirley Tetteh, and drummer Eddie Hick, of Sons of Kemet—but it seldom sounds like anything as straightforward as a group of musicians jamming together in real time. Sinephro’s harp playing inevitably draws comparisons to Alice Coltrane, whose use of the instrument opened up heady new frontiers in jazz on albums like 1971’s Journey in Satchidananda (which features Pharoah Sanders). But it’s Sinephro’s synthesizers that really give Space 1.8 its shape-shifting dimension; several of the album’s key tracks take the melodic/harmonic language of jazz and dissolve it into a burbling stream of electronic sound. One of the most notable features of the record is its fusion of improvisation and studio-based post-production. The album’s 18-minute closing track, “Space 8,” was born as an impromptu jam session with saxophonist Ahnansé. After meditating to their recording, Sinephro began fleshing out the track, and the final version includes 10 extra layers of harp, eight more modular-synth parts, and seven tracks of guitar. Still, it sounds elemental—a vast universe of feeling distilled into a moon-colored pool of sound. That focus was intentional. “I wanted to show how the pure simplicity of one note or one chord can be really effective when it’s loaded with emotion,” Sinephro told me. It may be tempting to see this rising tide of ambient jazz, with its soothing moods and healing frequencies—Sinephro wrote some of Space 1.8 in the wake of serious illness, and has spoken of her music in explicitly medicinal terms—as a response to the stresses of the pandemic. I’m not so sure. For one, Promises and Space 1.8 were completed long before the pandemic broke out. I’m also leery of reducing the unpredictable, alchemical process of artistic creation to mere current events or trends in self-care. I do wonder, though, what the popularity of some of these records says about the way people are listening, and what they are listening for, at a moment like this. While concerts and festivals have begun again, the fear around new variants suggests there’s no guarantee that nightlife will return to business as usual any time soon. Will stay-at-home listening send people in search of mellower sounds? In extended periods of crisis, do more contemplative modes of listening offer a different kind of spiritual nourishment? The pairing of ambient and jazz is not new. David Toop once wrote about the shift that occurred with Miles Davis and producer Teo Macero’s records like 1969’s In a Silent Way, in which studio sessions were spliced and rearranged into sprawling multi-track collages. In describing the sound, Toop wrote that “music that was once structured like an

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armadillo now took the shape of a jellyfish.” Alice Coltrane’s ’70s recordings drew on drone music and Indian classical; this year’s reissue of Kirtan: Turiya Sings, her 1981 album of devotional chanting and synthesizer music is also meant to accompany guided meditation. In the late ’90s, Pharoah Sanders himself dipped his toes into ambient waters, collaborating with the ambient-dub bassist and producer Bill Laswell on records like Save Our Children. In Europe, Manfred Eicher’s ECM label single-handedly defined an entire realm of atmospheric jazz and post-classical composition starting in the ’70s. These days you’ll find Spotify playlists dedicated to “ECM Atmospheres,” “ECM Meditation,” and “ECM Ambient.” One of ECM’s foremost heirs is Norway’s Rune Grammofon, which since the ’90s has mapped the intersection of ambient, jazz, noise, and more on records from artists like Supersilent and Arve Henriksen. And no discussion of the ambient-jazz canon would be complete without mentioning Jon Hassell, the avant-garde trumpet player and composer who died this year at the age of 84. Hassell’s exquisitely ethereal touch on albums like 1977’s Vernal Equinox and 1981’s Dream Theory in Malaya: Fourth World Volume Two—guided by his processed horn tones, which frequently suggest rays of light bursting into halos as they pierce heavy fog—is the lodestar for the increasing number of artists working at the intersection of ambient and jazz. In 2021, that group also included saxophonist Bendik Giske, who delivered a literally breathtaking work of circular-breathing techniques and processed horn on Cracks. Drummer Eli Keszler twisted his electronically treated kit into spongy, amorphous shapes on Icons. Modular synthesist King Britt and drummer Tyshawn Sorey established a beachhead for rhythm on the hypnotic, post-techno duet record Tyshawn / King. Teaming up with singer-composer Rosie Lowe, the multi-disciplinary artist and pianist Duval Timothy stretched choral music into gauzy abstraction on Son. Laurel Halo joined dub-techno pioneer Moritz von Oswald’s trio, alongside ECM-signed drummer Heinrich Köbberling, on an album fusing dub, trip-hop, and ambient house. Collaboration led to an array of striking fusions. In Los Angeles, a loose-knit group of peers—Carlos Niño, Sam Gendel, Sam Wilkes, Jamael Dean, Jamire Williams, Nate Mercereau—have spent the past few years mapping out various points along the axis between the structure of jazz and the formlessness of ambient. Between them, they racked up an impressive number of records this year, including Carlos Niño &

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Friends’ More Energy Fields, Current, Sam Gendel’s Fresh Bread, Gendel and Wilkes’ Music for Saxofone & Bass Guitar More Songs, Nate Mercereau’s Sundays, and more. And the Fuubutsushi quartet wrapped up a four-album series launched late last year that blends the sounds of Tortoise, Talk Talk, and ECM into low-key dreamscapes as captivating and ephemeral as afternoon light grazing worn floorboards. Nicolás Jaar’s evolving composition Weavings is an exploration of the possibilities—formal, expressive, and maybe even spiritual—at the atmospheric end of improvisation. The title reflects its structure as a group-improv piece written for a shifting set of duos, in which players “weave” an overlapping series of collaborations. The project premiered in 2020 as part of Unsound Festival’s online-only quarantine edition, with the players all performing remotely. Then, at this year’s IRL edition of the Polish festival, Jaar and a group of 11 musicians, including Chicago multi-instrumentalist Angel Bat Dawid, Polish guitarist Raphael Roginski, Italian drummer Valentina Magaletti, and Iraqi-British oud player Khyam Allami, brought the piece to the stage for the first time. Lasting nearly an hour and a half, Weavings is a durational work in which close listening is paramount. There are no repeated melodic or even harmonic themes; Jaar described it to me as “telling stories through waves of texture.” Sitting in the audience in October, I was struck by the way that the piece foregrounds patience—not only for the audience but for the players as well. All 11 performers were present for the entirety of the show, yet each one had only 21 minutes of total playing time. For the vast majority of their time on stage, they sat silently, just like the crowd. Given the composition’s quarantine origins, I found that collective patience profoundly moving. It made me think about the way we’ve all had to reckon with patience over the past two years, and the sacrifices required for the sake of the greater good. The restraint baked into Weavings is more than a merely aesthetic choice; it’s an expression of solidarity, empathy, and even ethics. A few weeks after the performance, I asked Jaar about the extent to which he had thought consciously about the role of patience in the piece. “From the very beginning, it was very important that the show was as much about listening as it was about playing, so you would also be watching the musicians listening to each other,” he said. “One of the most beautiful gifts that you can have as a musician is when someone patiently listens.” For Jaar, part of the intention behind Weavings was to create a space in which “background” sounds we might associate with passive listening

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not only come to the fore, they subsume us. Perhaps that enveloping quality is the best way of describing this year’s ambient-jazz renaissance: music made out of little more than amorphous shapes swimming in empty space, whose nuances are too compelling to ignore. This year in particular, hearing virtuoso players rediscover the merits of simplicity proved irresistible. As Sinephro said, “A million chords can sound impressive, but it doesn’t necessarily make you feel better.” But one chord, or even one note, played just the right way? Sometimes that’s all you need.

steve smith profiles sarah hennies ( new york times , 2020) “One of the things that I’m drawn to is living with someone for a long time, being in love, and what that’s like after you’ve lived together for 10 years,” the composer and percussionist Sarah Hennies said recently. “It becomes, somehow, more banal and routine, but also more intimately bonded at the same time. So that’s the piece I wanted to write.” Speaking by phone from Ithaca, N.Y., where she lives with her partner, the visual artist Mara Baldwin, and their young son, Ms. Hennies, 41, was explaining what had led her to compose “The Reinvention of Romance.” The duet for cello and percussion comprises some 90 minutes of spare, economical gestures, played not quite in sync. A recording of the 2018 piece by Two-Way Street, the duo that commissioned it, arrived recently on Astral Spirits. The arresting cover image, a photograph by Ms. Hennies, depicts a pink party balloon resting atop a compact bed of nails. What Two-Way Street—the cellist Ashlee Booth and the percussionist Adam Lion, who are romantically involved—requested from Ms. Hennies was simply a very long piece. Embarking on what would become “The Reinvention of Romance,” Ms. Hennies experimented with the cello, notating ideas she found compelling and grouping them into concise cells. She then visited the duo at an artists retreat, and adopted a collaborative approach to complete the work. What resulted was an extended sequence of simple figures arranged in succinct packets, each repeated at length until a timer prompts moving on to the next. Ms. Booth might bow a keening interval over and Steve Smith, “Sharing an Intimate Musical Vision,” New York Times, October 15, 2020, AR 12. From The New York Times. © 2020 The New York Times Company. All rights reserved. Used under license.

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over without variation, paired with Mr. Lion’s similarly uninflected glockenspiel strokes; moments later, bowed metal shrieking at length threatens to obliterate the cello’s modest plucks and strums. Weaving together the kinds of fragmentary figurations with which Morton Feldman might have evoked twirling mobiles or intricate tapestries, Ms. Hennies instead evokes the slightly akimbo biorhythms of lives intimately conjoined. The recording of “The Reinvention of Romance” initiates a small boom of projects documenting Ms. Hennies’s recent music. “Spectral Malsconcities,” due on Oct. 16 on the venerable New World label, includes two pieces in accounts by the groups for which they were written: The trio Bearthoven plays the awkwardly buoyant title work, and Bent Duo the spare, ritualistic “Unsettle.” (These ensembles will repeat the program in a concert at Roulette in Brooklyn, streaming live on Oct. 28.) And Ms. Hennies’s “Loss,” stark and disorienting, is included on a new album from Judith Hamann, “Music for Cello and Humming,” to be released Oct. 30 by the curatorial organization Blank Forms. These compositions—and a few that came earlier, like “Reservoir 1,” in which the pianist Phillip Bush responds almost imperceptibly to the increasing din from the percussion trio Meridian, of which Ms. Hennies is a member—demonstrate a substantial shift in her work. Having started primarily as a composer of solo pieces meant for her own use, Ms. Hennies now finds herself increasingly in demand to provide pieces meant for others, and to entrust those artists with the profoundly personal motivations encoded into her music. Core concerns she enumerates in her professional biography are “queer and trans identity, love, intimacy and psychoacoustics.” Ms. Hennies writes music rife with psychological effects and emotional undercurrents, like those that pulse within “The Reinvention of Romance.” And she conveys alienation and ambiguity with instruments altered, muffled or played unconventionally in “Spectral Malsconcities” and “Unsettle.” But in those same works and others, Ms. Hennies also evokes recognition, transformation and acceptance. “In almost everything I’ve done,” she said, “there are psychoanalytical, nonmusical aspects to it that I feel are various aspects of my being.” Much of her work evokes aspects of her experience as a transgender woman, both before and after her transition in 2015. That she had taken up percussion while growing up in Louisville, Ky., may well have had to do with intuiting that drumming was a suitably masculine pursuit for a child already grappling with gender ambiguity and bullying, as she

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figure 26. Sarah Hennies performing at Ende Tymes Festival in Brooklyn, 2018. Photograph by Walter Wlodarczyk. Courtesy of Sarah Hennies.

recounted in “Queer Percussion,” an essay published by the new-music journal Sound American in February. From her start in punk-rock bands, she gravitated toward experimental music by John Cage and Harry Partch—“both queers, coincidentally,” she wrote in “Queer Percussion.” She began to explore composition, studying scores in private. Embarking on what she hesitates to term “classical training,” Ms. Hennies attended the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, studying there with the German composer Herbert Brün. She earned her master’s degree at the University of California, San Diego, where she worked with the eminent percussionist and conductor Steven Schick. Moving to Austin in 2003, she continued to engage with the contemporary classical repertoire in the Austin New Music Co-Op, while also playing in a well regarded indie-rock band, the Weird Weeds. Ms. Hennies began to fashion uncanny solos for herself. Some of these pieces, like “Work” and “Clots,” involved repetition and endurance pushed to punishing extremes—something Ms. Hennies would identify later as abusive behavior directed toward a physical vessel inhospitable to its occupant. (“Casts,” a 2015 Astral Spirits cassette reissued alongside “The Reinvention of Romance,” includes several pieces that involve deliberate awkwardness and discomfort.)

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Other pieces in her solo repertoire offered a different perspective. A watershed moment came in 2009, when Ms. Hennies composed her three “Psalms,” solos for snare drum, vibraphone and wood block, respectively. The premise behind each piece is simple: An instrument with specific, universally recognized identity is transformed—through minute inflections and inconsistencies in a player’s attack, and by the space in which it’s played—into an object of unknowable variety. “When I wrote those pieces, I consciously was like: This is it. This is what I’m going to be doing for a long time,” Ms. Hennies said. “That’s still basically true, after 10 years. But my thinking about those works has changed over the years. I realized that they were imbued with more conceptual content than I had thought when I made them. They were more tied to my humanity and my personhood than I’d thought.” Ms. Hennies employs the whisper-to-scream dynamics and timbral extremes common to Xenakis and free improvisation, and shares with Alvin Lucier an occupation with acoustic phenomena that verge on illusion. She endorses both the laborious repetition and the material frugality of Minimalism. (“I’m trying to do as little as I can to make the thing happen that I’m interested in,” she is quoted as saying in the liner notes of “Spectral Malsconcities.”) She continues to create and perform solo works, and will participate in that capacity during “Out/With/In,” a daylong installation event on Governors Island on Oct. 31. But the sonic transformations she conjured in “Psalms” have recurred in some of the recent works she has created for other performers. Karl Larson, the pianist in Bearthoven, an idiosyncratic trio comprising piano, bass and drums, describes such an experience when he and a bandmate, the percussionist Matt Evans, first heard her music: an account by Bent Duo of “Unsettle.” “It was in this old church, and the overtones from the bells, the vibraphone and the piano, mixing together, kind of created threedimensional objects in the air above them,” Mr. Larson recalled. That experience, in Buffalo in 2017, moved him, along with Mr. Evans and the bassist Pat Swoboda, to commission “Spectral Malsconcities,” in which piano, bass and drums, their signature sounds often profoundly altered, dance without ever quite aligning. “The thing that struck us most was that, especially for Matt and Pat, the extended techniques she used were so physically disruptive to the task,” Mr. Larson said. “These physical motions that are related to your instrument, but detached from your training, seem very purposely there to orient you as a person playing the music you’re trying to express.”

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Struggle also plays a part in “Loss,” part of a collection of works in which Ms. Hamann, an Australian cellist currently based in Berlin, hums while playing. In an email, she explained that Ms. Hennies had asked her to identify her humming range, and then intentionally set parts of the piece well outside that comfort zone. (In “Song,” included on the “Casts” tape, Ms. Hennies imposed the same challenge on herself.) “The interesting thing is that it’s not setting up the performer to fail, but to create a setting in which the attempt at the task creates the artifacts and phenomena that make the performed work alive,” Ms. Hamann said. “That’s where all the richness and magic is, in the cracking voice and the slackened C string, in the breaths between gestures, in the awkwardness, in the sonic properties of trying, and what emerges from that.” What Ms. Hennies’s disparate works have in common is their forthright yet subtle, moving evocation of queerness. Throughout the tragicomic solo “Monologue,” a trumpeter literally disassembles the horn, producing a litany of hisses, sputters and rattles. In “Reservoir 2,” a flutist struggles to connect with a surrounding ensemble of singers in motion. “Contralto,” a 2017 multimedia work, involves a video made by Ms. Hennies in which transgender women intone exercises meant to help them alter their voices toward societal conformity, accompanied with sonic detritus from a string quartet and a percussion trio. “The idea of subverting identity is queer,” Ms. Hennies said. “There’s a spectrum of sexuality. There’s a spectrum of identity. And the representation of that is taking something that seems simple, and showing that it is a spectrum.”

éliane radigue, “the mysterious power of the infinitesimal” (2009) In the beginning, there was the air’s powerful breath, violent intimidating tornados, deep dark waves emerging in long pulsations from cracks in the earth, joined with shooting fire in a flaming crackling.1 Surging water, waves streaming into shimmering droplets. . . . Was it already sound when no ear was tuned to this particular register of the wave spectrum in this immense vibrating symphony of the universe? Was there any sound if no ear was there to hear it? Éliane Radigue, “The Mysterious Power of the Infinitesimal,” trans. Anne Fernandez and Jacqueline Rose, Leonardo Music Journal 19 (2009): 47–49. Courtesy of Éliane Radigue.

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The wind then turns into a breeze, the base of the earth into resonance, the crackling fire into a peaceful source of heat, water, the surf against the bank, cooing like a stream. Life is there. Another level, another theme begins. An organ adapts itself to transformation of a minuscule zone from the immense vibrating spectrum decoded into sounds captured, refined, meaningful. Crackling, roaring, howling and growling, the noises of life—cacophony punctuating the deep ever-present rhythm of the breath, pulsations, beating. . . . A few more million years, the noisy emissions organize into coordinated sounds and with reflection, become a language. But breath, pulsations, and beating remain. How, why, the sound of the wind, of the rain, the movement of clouds across the sky as they appear and disappear against the blue of space, the crackling of fire, how, why, through what mysterious alchemy will all this turn into a chanted recitative for one of these beings, recently appeared; how, why does the experience of an impression become sound, music? An ordering is underway. Breaths caught in hollow tubes become tamed sound sources, hollow percussive objects become sources of rhythm, strings stretched over yet other hollow objects, through the stroke of a bow, turn into sound waves. Haunting recitative. The Voice, the Path is there. Hollow tubes with holes, assembled in different lengths. Hollow objects with a skin stretched over cylinders of various dimensions. Strings stretched over resonating chambers with more sophisticated shapes, fitted with sound posts that transmit and hear, animated by “arcs” turned into “bows.” And the Path, always more and more the mysterious “Path.” Supple and fluid, breath, earth, heat and water, everything at once. The subtle alchemy of sounds becomes, oh wonder, understood. One-half, onequarter, one-third of a string’s length reveal their perfect harmony, as later confirmed by images on an oscilloscope. Except for . . . the tiny, infinitesimal difference—when left to their own devices, natural harmonics unfurl into space in their own language. Temperament. . . . So many marvels came from it. It had to happen, it was worthwhile.

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Then came the electronic Fairy; through the power of magnetic, analog and digital capture, breath, pulsations, beating, and murmurs can now be defined directly in their own spectrum, and thus reveal another dimension of sound—within sound. The occasional accident, a disrupted relation between recorder— transmitter—recorder—playback, and there our medium assumes some independence. How, then, does it behave? Breath, pulsation, beating, sustained sound, depending on the mood. So much richness in all this “feedback” and other chance or provoked “interference.” Such a challenge to keep them under control while maintaining the correct distance, the tiny adjustment that makes them develop until a terrible “fit” causes them to self-destruct. This is when other splicers of four piece tubes and surveyors of variably sized strings over resonating chambers decided to take everything back to the primary elements. The frequencies and everything that ensues. Varying modulations giving rise to new spectra. In short, all so called “electronic” music. In the beginning, from the beginning, the first generators and all the possible treatments, modulating, filtering, mixing etc. . . . (cf. Milton Babbitt’s studio at Columbia University, those from the time of dear Karlheinz and others). Irascible and unreliable mastodons that required patient taming. On the other hand, by reducing all this paraphernalia, by “modulating” it. . . . Another story was beginning. A story where breath, pulsations, beating, murmurs and above all the natural production of these marvelous, delicate and subtle harmonics could be deployed in a differently organized manner. No acceptable intervals to tolerate or obey. No harmonic progression. No recursion or inverted series, no respect for rules of atonality tending toward “discordant.” Forget everything to learn again. The freedom to be immersed in the ambivalence of continuous modulation with the uncertainty of being and/or not being in this or that mode or tonality. The freedom to let yourself be overwhelmed, submerged in a continuous sound flow where perceptual acuity is heightened through the discovery of a certain slight beating, there in the background, pulsations, breath.

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The freedom of a development beyond temporality in which the instant is limitless. Passing through a present lacking dimension, or past, or future, or eternity. Immersion into a space restrained, or limited by nothing. Simply there, where the absolute beginning is found. Lending a new ear to a primitive and naïve way of listening. Breath, pulsation, beating, murmur . . . continuum. I dreamt of an unreal, impalpable music appearing and fading away like clouds in a blue summer sky. Frolicking in the high mountain valleys around the wind, and grey rocks and trees, like white runaways. This particular music, that always eluded me. Each attempt ended in seeing it come closer and closer but remain unreachable, only increasing the desire to try again and yet again to go a bit further. It will always be better the next time. . . . How can sounds or words transcribe this imperceptibly slow transformation occurring during every instant and that only an extremely attentive and alert eye can sometimes perceive, the movement of a leaf, a stalk, a flower propelled by the life that makes it grow? How to know a little, just a very little, simply to try, to train oneself to look better in order to see, to listen better in order to hear and to know these transient moments of being there, only there? Like the butterfly emerging naked from its chrysalis, with only small white, blue or grey dots developing imperceptibly into the wings that will take flight. I have known the enchantment of discovery by forgetting all I had learned, I have of course also encountered doubt, denial, and the feeling of absurdity during long years, alone with my ARP and all of the difficulties “we” had to go through, before perhaps understanding each other . . . a little. Now, it is in the iridescence of these slowly flowing grains of sand, that some wonderful musicians have agreed to share what I call my “sound fantasies.” Carol Robinson, Charles Curtis, Bruno Martinez and I have just completed the third part of Naldjorlak. With their instruments, cello and basset horns, they agreed to explore this subtle, delicate sound world fashioned from breath, pulsation, beating, murmurs and the richness of the natural harmonics that radiate from it. The instruments tuned almost into unison, with just a minuscule interval of a few commas to give more freedom to the breaths, beatings, pulsations, murmurs, sustained sounds . . . And above all, the wonderful experience of sharing, with the most subtle affinity, complicity. The joy of hearing the music I dreamt of, and that these marvelous musicians make for me, giving all of their talent,

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their virtuosity, their souls. What a strange experience after so much wandering, to return to what was already there, the perfection of acoustic instruments, the rich and subtle interplay of their harmonics, subharmonics, partials, just intonation left to itself, elusive like the colors of a rainbow. Simply returning to my first loves, those never forgotten. And yet it is clear that this long journey through uncertain lands also enabled me to simply recognize what was already there, buried, hidden. May it lead to yet others. Further adventures, explorations of this infinite mystery of the transmutation of noise into sound, of sound into music and, as with all true questions, to receive in response only a few “hows,” never a “why,” thus leaving endless freedom to trace one’s path, to find one’s voice. Pulsations, breaths, beatings. . . .

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Acknowledgments

This is not our book. It is the product of decades of profound thinking, speaking, and writing by many, many people who are not us. First and foremost, we are extraordinarily grateful to the writers, musicians, artists, and photographers who shared their words and images with us, and allowed us to retell their stories. Without you, this book would not be possible. This book would further not be possible without the amazing library staffs of the University of Maryland, Cornish College of the Arts, and the University of Washington, who obtained and scanned hundreds of documents that allowed us research and write in the midst of a global pandemic. We are deeply thankful for your assistance in this project, and the ongoing work you do to help scholarship flourish. Our editor, Raina Polivka, was a dedicated champion of this project, and provided us with generous support and guidance. Julie Van Pelt, Robert Demke, Sam Warren, Madison Wetzell, and the University of California Press team assisted tremendously in bringing our work to fruition. Joan La Barbara was at the top of our dream list of musicians to introduce the book, and we are so grateful she wrote such an amazing foreword. Many scholars assisted us in grappling with the task of this project, from its very beginnings right up until we submitted the final manuscript. Back in 2017, at a hotel bar in Knoxville, this book was conceived by a group of five junior scholars with big ambitions. The original members of that editorial team— Ryan Ebright, Sasha Metcalf, and Patrick Nickleson—laid the groundwork for our project and provided ongoing guidance and advice. Many of the best ideas for what to include in this volume came from the keen mind of Benjamin Piekut, who helped us fully imagine the revisionist narrative we attempt to lay out here. Sarah Hill provided astute feedback and encouragement as a reader.

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Our manuscript was enriched by numerous writers, scholars, and musicians who offered insight and advice based on their areas of expertise: we owe many thanks to Jay Arms, David Chapman, Amy Cimini, Ryan Dohoney, Elena Dubinets, Bernard Gendron, Richard Glover, Ted Gordon, Jeremy Grimshaw, David Grubbs, Douglas Kahn, John Kapusta, Mary Jane Leach, Alice Miller Cotter, Michael Palmese, Tim Page, Victor Szabo, and Leah Weinberg. The Society for Minimalist Music has been a steadfast home base for our work, and we are grateful to Twila Bakker, Maarten Beirens, Robert Fink, Kyle Gann, Sumanth Gopinath, Russell Hartenberger, Keith Potter, John Pymm, and Pwyll ap Siôn for their wisdom. The initial idea for this book came at the Society’s Sixth Annual Conference, hosted by the University of Tennessee and the Nief-Norf Summer Festival; special thanks to Andy Bliss for helping to envision that festival, and to the artists and scholars who participated. We are fortunate to receive ongoing mentoring and support from Alex Ross, Mark Katz, and Phil Ford. We are lucky to have such fantastic colleagues at UMD and Cornish, and we are very fortunate to have been able to bounce ideas off of incredibly bright students in the minimalism seminars we taught at our institutions. Additional funding and support for the book came from UMD’s ARHU Faculty Fund subvention and Cornish’s Music Department. And, finally, we could not have written any of this without our extraordinarily supportive families. Georgia, Kenzi, Emily, Ira, Goldie, Alex, and Leo: thank you.

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Listening Guide

Many of these recommended albums remain widely available, but others have fallen out of print. We have chosen not to list record labels here given that reissue status is constantly changing, but we hope that you purchase these albums from their labels. Introduction Ali Akbar Khan, Music of India: Morning and Evening Rāgas Ravi Shankar, Music of India: Three Classical Rāgas Michael Babatunde Olatunji, Drums of Passion John Coltrane, Impressions La Monte Young, Trio for Strings

part one 1. Improvisation and Experimentation Miles Davis, Kind of Blue John Coltrane, My Favorite Things John Coltrane, Africa/Brass La Monte Young, Dorian Blues Yoko Ono, Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band Reinbert de Leeuw / Erik Satie, Vexations 2. Dream Music Tony Conrad, Early Minimalism La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela, 31 VII 69 10:26–10:49 PM / 23 VIII 64 2:50:45–3:11 AM the Volga Delta 395

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Velvet Underground, Velvet Underground & Nico John Cale, Loop Lou Reed, Metal Machine Music 3. Loops and Process Terry Riley, In C Terry Riley, Poppy Nogood and the Phantom Band “All Night Flight” Steve Reich, Early Works Philip Glass, Two Pages; Contrary Motion; Music in Fifths; Music in Similar Motion Philip Glass, Music with Changing Parts Meredith Monk, Our Lady of Late Mother Mallard’s Portable Masterpiece Company, Like a Duck to Water 4. Altered States Terry Riley, A Rainbow in Curved Air McCoy Tyner, Sama Layuca Pyramids, King of Kings Master Musicians of Jajouka, The Primal Energy That Is the Music and Ritual of Jajouka, Morocco Éliane Radigue, Psi 847 Charlie Morrow, A Variety of Chants Laraaji, Celestial Vibration Pauline Oliveros, Accordion & Voice 5. Gurus and Teachers Pandit Pran Nath, Earth Groove Pandit Pran Nath, Ragas Alice Coltrane, Journey in Satchidananda Pauline Oliveros, The Wanderer 6. Cultural Fusion Charlemagne Palestine, Terry Jennings, Tony Conrad, Robert Feldman, Rhys Chatham, Sharing a Sonority Alice Coltrane, Africa Steve Reich, Drumming Terry Riley, Persian Surgery Dervishes Don Cherry, Organic Music Society 7. Across the Arts Philip Glass, How Now / Strung Out Alvin Lucier, Still and Moving Lines of Silence in Families of Hyperbolas

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Charlemagne Palestine and Simone Forti, Illuminations Yoshi Wada, Earth Horns with Electronic Drones Steve Reich, Drumming Meredith Monk, Key 8. Ensembles Steve Reich, Six Pianos / Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices and Organ Philip Glass, Music in Twelve Parts Dickie Landry, Solos Jon Gibson, Songs & Melodies, 1973–1977 Meredith Monk, Dolmen Music

part two 9. 1976 Steve Reich, Music for 18 Musicians Philip Glass, Einstein on the Beach Catherine Christer Hennix, The Electric Harpsichord 10. The New Downtown Rhys Chatham, Guitar Trio Is My Life! Julius Eastman, Femenine Arthur Russell, World of Echo Glenn Branca, Indeterminate Activity of Resultant Masses 11. Instruments and Environments Ellen Fullman, The Long String Instrument Phill Niblock, Nothin to Look at Just a Record Yoshi Wada, Lament for the Rise and Fall of the Elephantine Crocodile Maryanne Amacher, Sound Characters (Making the Third Ear) 12. Ambient and New Age Brian Eno, Ambient 1: Music for Airports Peter Michael Hamel, Nada Laraaji, Ambient 3: Day of Radiance Harold Budd, The Pavilion of Dreams Midori Takada, Through the Looking Glass 13. Canons John Adams, Shaker Loops / Phrygian Gates Steve Reich, Tehillim / Three Movements Philip Glass, Satyagraha

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Remko Scha, Machine Guitars Jon Gibson, Two Solo Pieces *Please also consult Alan Licht’s “Top Ten” playlist in the chapter itself. 14. Backlash Philip Glass, Koyaanisqatsi Steve Reich, Desert Music Philip Glass, Mishima John Adams, Harmonielehre Charlemagne Palestine, Schlongo!!!daLUVdrone 15. Politics, Identity, and Expression Louis Andriessen, De Staat Julius Eastman, Unjust Malaise John Adams, Harmonium Steve Reich, Different Trains 16. Postminimalists Janice Giteck, Home (Revisited) Bang on a Can, Classics Elodie Lauten, Piano Works Revisited Ann Southam, Glass Houses Alexandre Rabinovitch-Barakovsky, “Terza Practica”: Orchestral Works/ Chamber Music Sergei Zagny, Sonata 17. Spiritual Minimalism Henryk Górecki, Symphony No. 3 Arvo Pärt, Tabula Rasa 18. Popular Culture Donna Summer, Love to Love You Baby The Orb, Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld Orbital, Orbital 2 Aphex Twin, Donkey Rhubarb Reich Remixed

part three 19. Histories Inside the Dream Syndicate, Vol. 1: Day of Niagara Nico Muhly, Mothertongue

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Jace Clayton, The Julius Eastman Memory Depot *Please also consult David Toop’s “Black Minimalism” playlist in the chapter itself. 20. Silences Michael Pisaro, A mist is a collection of points Jürg Frey, String Quartet No. 3 / Unhörbare Zeit Eva-Maria Houben, works for piano 21. Futures Sunn O))), Black One Randy Gibson, The Four Pillars Appearing from the Equal D under Resonating Apparitions of the Eternal Process in the Midwinter Starfield 16 VIII 10 (Kansas City) Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders, London Symphony Orchestra, Promises Sarah Hennies, The Reinvention of Romance Éliane Radigue, Naldjorlak I, II, III

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Notes

introduction 1. See, for example, Wim Mertens, American Minimal Music (London: Kahn & Averill, 1983), first published in Belgium in 1980; Edward Strickland, Minimalism: Origins (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993); K. Robert Schwarz, Minimalists (London: Phaidon, 1996); Keith Potter, Four Musical Minimalists: La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 2. To be fair, many white male composers working in the Western classical tradition have also been overlooked in minimalism’s histories. As Amy C. Beal notes, for example, “none of books considered authoritative sources on minimalism takes into account the large body of work created during the 1970s by composers like Peter Garland, Daniel Goode, Michael Byron, David Mahler, and others.” Amy C. Beal, “ ‘Why We Sing’: David Mahler’s Communities,” Journal for the Society of American Music 7, no. 1 (2013): 11. 3. Robert Palmer, “Trance Music—a Trend of the 1970s,” New York Times, January 12, 1975, 99; Alfred Frankenstein, “Extended Timers—and the AntiIllusionists,” San Francisco Sunday Examiner and Chronicle, June 8, 1969, 30; Joan La Barbara, “Philip Glass and Steve Reich: Two from the Steady State School,” Data Arte 13 (Winter 1974): 36–41. 4. Jill Phillips, “Sounds of Discovery,” Musical Times 109, no. 1505 (July 1968): 644–45. Phillips was reviewing a performance by Cornelius Cardew’s ensemble, which also included a “loud and fast” version of Terry Riley’s In C at a concert presented by Music Now. On Music Now, see Benjamin Piekut, “Indeterminacy, Free Improvisation, and the Mixed Avant-Garde: Experimental Music in London, 1965–1975,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 67, no. 3 (2014): 769–824.

401

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402   |   Notes to Pages 3–5

A few months after Phillips’s review, Michael Nyman described Springen, a work by the Danish composer Henning Christiansen, as “minimal music.” Michael Nyman, “Minimal Music,” Spectator, 221, no. 7320 (October 11, 1968): 518–19. For an overview of this early history of naming, see Kyle Gann, Keith Potter, and Pwyll ap Siôn, “Introduction: Experimental, Minimalist, Postminimalist? Origins, Definitions, Communities,” in The Ashgate Research Companion to Minimalist and Postminimalist Music, ed. Keith Potter, Kyle Gann, and Pwyll ap Siôn (Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2013), 1–18. 5. Tom Johnson, “Changing the Meaning of Static,” Village Voice, September 7, 1972, 47. 6. Michael Nyman, Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), 139–71. Nyman also discussed the minimalist music of British composers Gavin Bryars, Christopher Hobbs, Howard Skempton, and John White. See also Virginia Anderson, “Systems and Other Minimalisms in Britain,” in Potter, Gann, and ap Siôn, The Ashgate Research Companion to Minimalist and Postminimalist Music, 87–106. On Nyman’s exclusion of improvisatory forms of experimental music, see Piekut, “Indeterminacy, Free Improvisation, and the Mixed Avant-Garde,” 811. 7. Robert Palmer, “A Father Figure for the Avant-Garde,” Atlantic, May 1981, 49. Following Foucault, Branden Joseph points out how La Monte Young’s life and work often form the “discursive center of gravity” in minimalist historiography. Branden W. Joseph, Beyond the Dream Syndicate: Tony Conrad and the Arts after Cage (New York: Verso, 2008), 40–44. 8. Christophe Levaux examines how minimalism came to be held as historical “truth” through the “science” of writing. Following a paper trail of scholarly accounts, newspaper reviews, and dictionaries, he shows how minimalism has been grouped and regrouped over the years, culminating in its 2001 entry in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. Levaux reminds his readers that “minimalism” was not this music’s original grouping—alternative names included “trance music,” “music with roots in the aether,” “hypnotic music,” and others. Christophe Levaux, We Have Always Been Minimalist: The Construction and Triumph of a Musical Style (Oakland: University of California Press, 2020). 9. Nyman’s explanation of minimal music and its four main progenitors resonates strongly with his definition of “experimental music.” As Benjamin Piekut writes, “an explanation of experimentalism that already assumes the category it purports to explain is flawed from the outset.” Categories like “experimentalism” (or, in this case, minimalism) represent “the result of the combined labor of scholars, composers, critics, journalists, patrons, performers, venues, and the durative effects of discourses of race, gender, nation, and class.” Piekut, Experimentalism Otherwise: The New York Avant-Garde and Its Limits (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 7. 10. As George E. Lewis writes, “Who is ‘really’ a jazz musician at a time when so many artists in the world of white American experimentalism, for example, were able to describe themselves without opposition as ‘former’ jazz musicians? The example highlights how what I whimsically call the ‘one-drop rule of jazz’ is effectively applied only to black musicians. . . . Musicians of other ethnicities have historically been free to migrate conceptually and artisti-

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Notes to Pages 5–7   |   403

cally without suffering charges of rejecting their culture and history.” George E. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), xli. 11. See Don Cherry and Terry Riley, “Tambourinen Session,” Copenhagen: Anökumena, 1970 (cassette); Don Cherry and Terry Riley, “Live Köln,” February 23, 1975; and Ronald Radano, New Musical Figurations: Anthony Braxton’s Cultural Critique (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 160–61. Sumanth Gopinath has focused on Reich’s music and its intersections with the politics of race in the United States; see Sumanth Gopinath, “Contraband Children: The Politics of Race and Liberation in the Music of Steve Reich, 1965–66” (PhD diss., Yale University, 2005); Gopinath, “The Problem of the Political in Steve Reich’s Come Out,” in Sound Commitments: Avant-Garde Music and the Sixties, ed. Robert Adlington (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 121–44; Gopinath, “Reich in Blackface: Oh Dem Watermelons and Radical Minstrelsy in the 1960s,” Journal of the Society for American Music 5, no. 2 (2011): 139–93. 12. This is not, however, to valorize primary sources, which are subject to many of the same inequities and oversights as secondary scholarship. Which sources are freely available (like the New York Times) and which are not (like Black American) often determines how frequently they are cited, quoted, and accessed. This book includes numerous difficult-to-locate items, with the goal of making rarer sources more accessible. 13. Patrick Nickleson argues that minimalist scholarship often follows this kind of proleptical historiography. For example, he notes that John Cale—an early member of the Theatre of Eternal Music—is often described as “John Cale of the Velvet Underground,” even though the Velvet Underground did not yet exist when Cale was in the Theatre. Patrick Nickleson, The Names of Minimalism: Authorship, Art Music, and Historiography in Dispute (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2023). 14. Tom Johnson, The Voice of New Music: New York City, 1972–1982 (Eindhoven: Het Apollohuis, 1989). 15. For other articles reprinted in the book, Johnson revised titles to draw attention to the word “minimal”: a column on Alvin Lucier originally titled “Concerts in Slow Motion” became “The Minimal Slow-Motion Approach”; a review of Éliane Radigue went from “Oozing Out of the Wall” to, simply, “Minimal Material.” Tom Johnson, “Concerts in Slow Motion,” Village Voice, March 30, 1972, 39; Johnson, “Oozing Out of the Wall,” Village Voice, March 29, 1973, 43. 16. In 2002, Johnson generously donated a digital version of his collection to the public domain. Johnson’s revised titles are cited in Potter, Four Musical Minimalists; Levaux utilizes the revised titles throughout his study, even using Johnson’s revised Big Four title as a subheading for his chapter “The New York Hypnotic School.” Levaux, We Have Always Been Minimalist, 60. 17. We have also chosen to correct misspellings when relevant, and change grammatical formatting to US standard. 18. We do not reprint scholarly sources, both because they are widely accessible and because they are more difficult to excerpt. We encourage readers to

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404   |   Notes to Pages 9–10

follow the endnotes, visit the bibliography, and pair primary sources with academic studies.

part one. introduction 1. Yehudi Menuhin, “The Music of India—an Ancient Art Form,” New York Times, April 17, 1955, X9. Ustad Ali Akbar Khan (sarod), Pandit Chatur Lal (tabla), Shirish Gor (tamboura), Music of India: Morning and Evening Rāgas (Angel Records, 1956); reissued as Ali Akbar Khan: Then and Now (AMMP, 1995). 2. Peter Lavezzoli notes that this recording represented “the first time that Indian classical music was preserved for a Western audience with no attempts to mitigate its contents.” Peter Lavezzoli, The Dawn of Indian Music in the West (New York: Continuum, 2007), 1; on the influence of this recording on drone music, see Barry Shank, The Political Force of Musical Beauty (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 112–23. 3. Young’s Trio for Strings (1958) is often cited as the inaugural piece. Responding to Julius Eastman’s 1970 work The Moon’s Silent Modulation, which includes the score note “Light cannot shine where no light is,” Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung writes, “To claim that La Monte Young’s Trio for Strings is the starting point of minimalism is making light shine where light is.” Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, “A Prologue: We Have Delivered Ourselves from the Tonal: Of, towards, on, for Julius Eastman,” in We Have Delivered Ourselves from the Tonal: Of, towards, on, for Julius Eastman, ed. Federica Bueti, Antonia Alampi, and Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung ([Berlin]: SAVVY Contemporary, [2020]), 12. Another notable early minimalist work is November, a six-hour-long piano composition that utilizes a significant amount of stasis and repetition, created in 1959 by Young’s friend Dennis Johnson. See Kyle Gann, “Reconstructing November,” American Music 28, no. 4 (Winter 2010): 481–91. Much earlier candidates have included Richard Wagner’s “Das Rheingold” prelude and Erik Satie’s Vexations, which instructs performers to repeat a simple piano prelude 840 times. 4. Quoted in Richard Kostelanetz, “La Monte Young,” in The Theatre of Mixed Means (New York: Dial, 1968), 190. 5. Ravi Shankar, Music of India: Three Classical Rāgas (Angel Records, 1957). Shankar’s album was first released in the United Kingdom and India in 1956; it was reissued in the United States by Angel Records in 1957. See Victor Rangel-Ribeiro, “Classics of India: Music in Old Tradition Now Available on LP,” New York Times, April 27, 1958, X16; and Lavezzoli, Dawn of Indian Music in the West, 43–64. 6. Jean Clouzet and Michel Delorme, “Entretien avec John Coltrane,” Les Cahiers du Jazz 8 (1963): 12–13; quoted in translation in Lewis Porter, John Coltrane: His Life and Music (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 211. 7. Coltrane’s melodies closely resemble a Vedic chant. Lewis Porter credits jazz scholar Bill Bauer for discovering this, and suggests that Coltrane’s approach was likely inspired by the Folkways album Religious Music of India. Porter, John Coltrane, 209–10, n21. As Elliott Powell has shown, Coltrane’s

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Notes to Pages 10–11   |   405

engagements with South Asian music and spirituality extended into works like A Love Supreme. Elliott Powell, Sounds from the Other Side: Afro-South Asian Collaborations in Black Popular Music (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020), 19–40. 8. Glass describes his work with Ravi Shankar, as well as studying tabla with Alla Rakha, in Willoughby Sharp and Liza Béar, “Philip Glass: An Interview in Two Parts,” Avalanche 5 (1972): 29. See also Philip Glass, Words without Music (New York: Norton, 2015), 129–35. 9. Our foregrounding of Coltrane as an early minimalist is indebted to George E. Lewis, who points out how Coltrane is often viewed as an influence on minimalist composers, but not a minimalist himself. George E. Lewis, “Foreword,” in Gay Guerrilla: Julius Eastman and His Music, ed. Renée Levine Packer and Mary Jane Leach (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2015), xiv–xv; see also Lewis, “The Idea of Eastman: Reflections on the Otolith Group’s The Third Part of the Third Measure,” in Bueti, Alampi, and Ndikung, We Have Delivered Ourselves from the Tonal, 41. Our approach is also indebted to Susan McClary, whose pioneering 1998 “convoluted genealogy” of minimalism included the virtuosity of Ravi Shankar, the “trance states” of New Age seekers, “the cyclic processes explored by feminist musicians,” and much more. Susan McClary, Rap, Minimalism, and Structures of Time in Late Twentieth-Century Culture, Geske Lectures ([Lincoln]: College of Fine and Performing Arts, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, 1998), 25. 10. Young’s Compositions 1960 were published in Young and Jackson MacLow, An Anthology of Chance Operations (New York, 1963); Yoko Ono’s scores were published in Grapefruit (Tokyo: Wunternaum, 1964). As Brigid Cohen has shown, Ono was less inclined toward inscribing her works into scores, and thus score collections do not fully capture this moment in minimalism’s early history. Brigid Cohen, Musical Migration and Imperial New York: Early Cold War Scenes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022). 11. Porter, John Coltrane, 212. Regarding his interest in “Eastern music,” Coltrane also points to the influence of Yusef Lateef, who began performing with Olatunji in 1960. Olatunji’s hugely popular 1960 Drums of Passion was the first album of African music that was recorded in studio, not a collection of field recordings. John Coltrane, in collaboration with Don DeMicheal, “Coltrane on Coltrane,” DownBeat, September 29, 1960, 27; Yusef Lateef with Herb Boyd, The Gentle Giant (Irvington, NJ: Morton, 2006); Jon Pareles, “Babatunde Olatunji, Drummer, 76, Dies; Brought Power of African Music to U.S.,” New York Times, April 9, 2003, D8. Steve Reich, interview with Ev Grimes, December 15–16, 1987, Yale Oral History of American Music: American Music Series 186 a–i, 18–19. 12. See Robert Palmer, “Terry Riley: Doctor of Improvised Surgery,” Downbeat, November 20, 1975, 17–18; and Peter Margasak, “Terry Riley’s The Gift,” Sound American 21 (2019): 18–21. 13. Tony Conrad, “Inside the Dream Syndicate,” Film Culture (1966): 8. While a college student at Harvard, Conrad had created musical canons using tape delays, one of which sounded like, according to a critic, “an air-raid siren inside an old drum.” R. S. “New Music at Harvard,” Christian Science Monitor,

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406   |   Notes to Pages 11–13

December 19, 1961; cited in Branden W. Joseph, Beyond the Dream Syndicate: Tony Conrad and the Arts after Cage (New York: Zone, 2008). On Conrad’s tape work as a precursor to Riley’s and Reich’s compositions, see Joseph, 65–72. 14. See Pauline Oliveros, “Memoir of a Community Enterprise,” in The San Francisco Tape Music Center: 1960s Counterculture and the Avant-Garde, ed. David Bernstein (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 80–94. See also Theodore Barker Gordon, “Bay Area Experimentalism: Music and Technology in the Long 1960s” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2018), 147–205. 15. Pauline Oliveros, “On Sonic Meditation,” Painted Bride Quarterly 3, no. 3 (Winter 1976): 56. 16. According to Steven Watson, John Cale was “a delivery man for La Monte Young’s drug dealing.” See Steven Watson, Factory Made: Warhol and the Sixties (New York: Pantheon, 2003), 161. Billy Name stated that Young was “the highest-quality dope dealer in the avant-garde movement.” Watson, 103. When asked about his politics in a 1971 interview for the French magazine Actuel, Reich stated, “I took LSD at the time [in the 1960s]. I was also very politically active. That is all over now.” [“Je prenais du L.S.D. à l’époque; j’étais aussi très engagé politiquement. Tout cela est aujourd’hui terminé.”] “Steve Reich,” Actuel 8 (May 1971): 52. 17. Palestine’s piece, “Singing against the Wall,” is collected in Roger Johnson, ed., Scores: An Anthology of New Music (New York: Schirmer, 1981), 67–68. See also Tom Johnson, “Meditating and On the Run,” Village Voice, January 31, 1974, 44. 18. Harold C. Schonberg, “Music: The Medium Electric, the Message Hypnotic,” New York Times, April 15, 1969, 42. 19. On the intertwined history of minimalist music and other artforms, see Edward Strickland, Minimalism: Origins (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993); and Michael Maizels, In and Out of Phase: An Episodic History of Art and Music in the 1960s (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2020). 20. See “Steve Reich: Interview by Michael Nyman,” Studio International 192, no. 984 (November–December 1976): 300–302. 21. Jan Greenwald, “An Interview with Meredith Monk,” EAR Magazine (April–May 1981): 5. 22. Before she formed Meredith Monk & Vocal Ensemble, Monk founded the House, an interdisciplinary theater company. 23. Tom Johnson, “The New Reich,” Village Voice, June 9, 1975, 110. 24. On Reich’s Bay Area experiments, see Sumanth Gopinath, “Reich in Blackface: Oh Dem Watermelons and Radical Minstrelsy in the 1960s,” Journal of the Society for American Music 5, no. 2 (2011): 139–93; and Ross Cole, “ ‘Fun, Yes, but Music?’: Steve Reich and the San Francisco Bay Area’s Cultural Nexus, 1962–65,” Journal of the Society for American Music 6, no. 3 (2012): 315–48. For Reich’s views on improvisation, see David Chapman, “Improvisation, Two Variations on a Watermelon, and a New Timeline for Piano Phase,” in Rethinking Reich, ed. Sumanth Gopinath and Pwyll ap Siôn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 323–43. On Reich’s self-proclaimed “end to electronics” and his spiritual practices at that time, see Kerry O’Brien, “ ‘Machine

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Notes to Pages 13–15   |   407

Fantasies to Human Events’: Reich and Technology in the 1970s,” in Gopinath and ap Siôn, Rethinking Reich, 323–43. Reich’s now-withdrawn tape piece Livelihood (1964) was made while he was working as a taxi cab driver in San Francisco. In New York, Reich worked for Low-Rate Movers, a company started by artist Richard Serra, and Chelsea Light Moving, which Glass founded. See Kynaston McShine et al., Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2007), 25–26. On Four Organs at Carnegie Hall, Harold Schonberg wrote, “The audience reacted as though red-hot needles were being inserted under fingernails. After a while there were yells for the music to stop, mixed with applause to hasten the end of the piece. At the end there were lusty boos. There also was a contingent that screamed approval.” Harold Schonberg, “Music: A Concert Fuss,” New York Times, January 20, 1973. See also Sumanth Gopinath, “ ‘Departing to Other Spheres’: Psychedelic Science Fiction, Perspectival Embodiment, and the Hermeneutics of Steve Reich’s Four Organs,” in Gopinath and ap Siôn, Rethinking Reich, 19–52. On Reich’s visit to Ghana, see Gopinath, “ ‘A Composer Looks East’: Steve Reich and Discourse on Non-Western Music,” Glendora Review: African Quarterly on the Arts 3, nos. 3–4 (2004): 134–45. Steve Reich and Musicians went on multiple tours to Europe in the 1970s. See Amy Beal, New Music, New Allies: American Experimental Music in West Germany from the Zero Hour to Reunification (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 197–209. The most overt criticism of Reich’s music came from German composer and conductor Clytus Gottwald, who compared Reich’s music to an “assembly line.” Reich responded to that criticism with an open letter in the journal Melos. See O’Brien, “Machine Fantasies,” 330. 25. As Edward Strickland writes, in the opening sentence of Minimalism: Origins, “The death of Minimalism is announced periodically, which may be the surest testimonial to its staying power.” Strickland, Minimalism, 1.

chapter 1. improvisation and experimentation 1. Nat Hentoff, “An Afternoon with Miles Davis,” Jazz Review 1, no. 2 (December 1958): 12. 2. Reich’s 1963 composition Pitch Charts instructs musicians to freely improvise on a sequence of notes that build to a twelve-tone row. Steve Reich, interview with Ev Grimes, December 15–16, 1987, Yale Oral History of American Music: American Music Series 186 a–i, 10–11. See also David Chapman, “Improvisation, Two Variations on a Watermelon, and a New Timeline for Piano Phase,” in Rethinking Reich, ed. Sumanth Gopinath and Pwyll ap Siôn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 218. 3. In summer 1962, Young, Marian Zazeela, and Angus MacLise presented a series of seven concerts at Walter Gaudnek’s 10/4 Gallery on 4th Ave and E. 10th Street. Keith Potter, Four Musical Minimalists: La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 60.

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408   |   Notes to Pages 16–33

4. Young’s Compositions 1960 were published in La Monte Young and Jackson MacLow, Anthology of Chance Operations (New York, 1963). On Young’s involvement in Fluxus, see Sally Banes, Greenwich Village 1963: Avant-Garde Performance and the Effervescent Body (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 60–65 and 237–39. 5. La Monte Young, “Lecture 1960,” Tulane Drama Review 10, no. 2 (Winter 1965): 81 and 83. On Young’s work in 1960, see Jeremy Grimshaw, Draw a Straight Line and Follow It: The Music and Mysticism of La Monte Young (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 66–83. 6. On Ono’s work in the early 1960s, see Yayoi Uno Everett, “ ‘Scream against the Sky’: Japanese Avant-Garde Music in the Sixties,” in Sound Commitments: Avant-Garde Music and the Sixties, ed. Robert Adlington (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 201–2; on Ono’s work with Lennon, see Tamara Levitz, “Yoko Ono and the Unfinished Music of ‘John & Yoko,’ ” in Impossible to Hold: Women and Culture in the 1960s, ed. Avital Bloch and Lauri Umansky (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 217–39. 7. Notes for this essay are Flynt’s own notes from the original text. 8. Called “ethnomusicology” by the university. 9. Dick Higgins, Postface (New York: Something Else, 1964). 10. A. B. Spellman, Four Lives in the Bebop Business (New York: Pantheon, 1966), 125–26. 11. Nobody would mistake new jazz for a treatment of the STAX Records sound, for example. 12. William Thomson, Schoenberg’s Error (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), 181. 13. The original text prints “Simone Morris,” Forti’s last name when she was married to Robert Morris. 14. In 2014, Ono said of the Chambers Street series, “The idea was mine, and we did it together.” Yoko Ono, “Chambers Street Loft Series,” in Yoko Ono: One Woman Show, 1970–1971, ed. Klaus Biesenbach et al. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, [2015]), 71. 15. Eight music critics held shifts throughout the day and night. One writer, Howard Klein, even stepped in to perform when one of the players didn’t show up.

chapter 2. dream music 1. These invitations can be found in multiple archives, including the Peter Yates Papers and the Betty Freeman Papers, University of California, San Diego. 2. For another contemporary perspective on this collaboration, see Diane Wakoski, “The Theatre of Eternal Music: La Monte Young Marian Zazeela,” IKON 1, no. 4 (1967): 15–19. 3. While later programs listed the group’s name as Theatre of Eternal Music, Conrad and Cale often called the group the Dream Syndicate. See Patrick Nickleson, The Names of Minimalism: Authorship, Art Music, and Historiography in Dispute (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2023). 4. Jeremy Grimshaw, Draw a Straight Line and Follow It: The Music and Mysticism of La Monte Young (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011),

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Notes to Pages 33–52   |   409

97–98. For more on the turtles, see William Robin, “The Secret Muse of the Downtown Scene? Turtles,” New York Times, November 8, 2016. 5. Regarding the group’s approach to intonation, see Grimshaw, Draw a Straight Line and Follow It, 88–93. On the tuning of La Monte Young’s contemporaneous work The Well-Tuned Piano, see Kyle Gann, “La Monte Young’s The Well-Tuned Piano,” Perspectives of New Music 31, no. 1 (1993): 134–62. 6. Young told an interviewer in 1964, “If it is a loud, continuous sound, my ears often do not regain their normal hearing for several hours; and when my hearing slowly comes back, it is almost as much a new experience as when I first hear the sound. I like to get inside a sound.” Quoted in Jean Vanden Heuvel, “The ‘Fantastic Sounds’ of La Monte Young,” Vogue (May 1966): 246. On loudness within the avant-garde more broadly, and in the Theatre of Eternal Music specifically, see Douglas Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 226–36; on the “hidden history of loudness” within experimental music, see Benjamin Piekut, Experimentalism Otherwise: The New York Avant-Garde and Its Limits (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 190–93. 7. As Branden Joseph has written, the “history of minimal music is to a surprising degree a history of authorship disputes”; see Branden W. Joseph, Beyond the Dream Syndicate: Tony Conrad and the Arts after Cage (New York: Verso, 2008), 35–36 and 109–152; and Nickleson, The Names of Minimalism. 8. Quoted in K. Robert Schwarz, Minimalists (London: Phaidon, 1996), 39. 9. In fact, it is only Composition 1960 #10, “To Bob Morris,” that reads, “Draw a straight line and follow it.” 10. Conrad was responding to Peter Yates, “Music,” Arts & Architecture (October 1965): 35. 11. In the magazine, this article is paired with Jean Vanden Heuvel, “The ‘Fantastic Sounds’ of La Monte Young,” a profile of Young himself. 12. The performers for this concert were Young, Zazeela, Conrad, and Terry Riley. 13. Souster is referring to the Theatre of Eternal Music.

chapter 3. loops and process 1. Janet Rotter, “Sound,” Glamour, February 1969, 66. 2. McLuhan most thoroughly articulated his ideas in The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) and Understanding Media (1964), but his work reached a wider audience in more aphoristic writings like The Medium Is the Massage (1967). Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962); McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1964); and McLuhan, Quentin Fiore, and Jerome Agel, The Medium Is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects (Berkeley, CA: Ginko, 2001). On McLuhan’s influence on ambient music, see Victor Szabo, “Pacifica Radio’s Music from the Hearts of Space and the Ambient Sound of California’s New Age,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 74, no. 1 (2021): 69–79.

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3. Veniero Rizzardi, “The Complete Birth of the Loop: Terry Riley in Paris,” in Crosscurrents: American and European Music in Interaction, 1900–2000, ed. Felix Meyer, Carol J. Oja, Wolfgang Rathert, and Anne C. Shreffler (Suffolk: Boydell, 2014), 350–63. 4. Robert Carl, Terry Riley’s In C (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 44. 5. For Music of Our Time, see Michael Hicks, “Mass Marketing the American Avant-Garde, 1967–1971,” American Music 35, no. 3 (Fall 2017): 281– 302. On “Baba O’Riley,” see Ellen Willis, “Their Generation,” The New Yorker, August 28, 1971, 80; reprinted in Out of the Vinyl Deeps: Ellen Willis on Rock Music, ed. Nona Willis Aronowitz (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011). On Tubular Bells, see Benjamin Piekut, Henry Cow: The World Is a Problem (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), 107. John Rockwell, who wrote the “Pop Life” column for the New York Times, chronicled these crossover influences. See John Rockwell, “Pitching Tent in 2 Culture Camps,” New York Times, February 21, 1975, 13; and Rockwell, “Space Rock—into the Weird Blue Yonder,” New York Times, February 13, 1977, D26. On Rockwell’s influence on histories of minimalism, see Christophe Levaux, We Have Always Been Minimalist: The Construction and Triumph of a Musical Style (Oakland: University of California Press, 2020), 141–56. 6. The full title It’s Gonna Rain, or Meet Brother Walter in Union Square after Listening to Terry Riley appeared on concert programs in 1966, 1967, and early 1968. The first concert program with the shortened title was in the summer of 1968. Concert programs, Sammlung Steve Reich, Paul Sacher Stiftung. For a discussion of Reich’s renaming of the work, see Patrick Nickleson, The Names of Minimalism: Authorship, Art Music, and Historiography in Dispute (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2023). 7. Sumanth Gopinath, “The Problem of the Political in Steve Reich’s Come Out,” in Sound Commitments: Avant-Garde Music and the Sixties, ed. Robert Adlington (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 121–44; Siarhei Biareishyk, “Come Out to Show the Split Subject: Steve Reich, Whiteness, and the Avant-Garde,” Current Musicology 93 (Spring 2012): 73–93; and John Pymm, “Steve Reich’s Dramatic Sound Collage for the Harlem Six,” in Rethinking Reich, ed. Sumanth Gopinath and Pwyll ap Siôn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 138–58. 8. On Reich’s “Music as a Gradual Process,” see Sumanth Gopinath, “Contraband Children: The Politics of Race and Liberation in the Music of Steve Reich, 1965–66” (PhD diss., Yale University, 2005), 59–68; Nickleson, The Names of Minimalism; O’Brien, “ ‘Machine Fantasies into Human Events,’ ” in Gopinath and ap Siôn, Rethinking Reich, 332–34; and Schwarz, “Steve Reich: Music as a Gradual Process: [Parts 1 and 2],” Perspectives of New Music 19 and 20 (1980–1982): 373–92 and 225–86. 9. For “systems” minimalism, see Virginia Anderson, “Systems and Other Minimalisms in Britain,” in The Ashgate Research Companion to Minimalist and Postminimalist Music, ed. Keith Potter, Kyle Gann, and Pwyll ap Siôn (Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2013), 87–106.

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Regarding Glass’s additive processes, see Keith Potter, Four Musical Minimalists: La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 277–303. David Chapman traces the use of additive processes in Jon Gibson’s music; see Chapman, “Collaboration, Presence, and Community: The Philip Glass Ensemble in Downtown New York, 1966–1976” (PhD diss., Washington University, 2013), 171–98. On Riley’s “timelag accumulator” and his projects as Poppy NoGood’s Phantom Band, see Nickleson, “Terry Riley in New York,” in Ecstatic Aperture: Perspective on the Life and Work of Terry Riley, ed. Vincent de Roguin (Rennes, France: Shelter, forthcoming). For a second review of Monk’s concert, see Tom Johnson, “Hit by a Flying Solo,” Village Voice, January 18, 1973, 42. 10. In the original text, Frankenstein calls the work “On C”; we have corrected it here. 11. In the original text, Moore writes, “come out and show them”; we have corrected it here. 12. The 1971 version is printed here because it includes three additional paragraphs that did not appear in the original 1968 version. 13. For Nyman’s full article, see Pwyll ap Siôn, ed., Michael Nyman: Collected Writings (London: Routledge, 2016), 126–30. See also Michael Parsons, “Systems in Art and Music,” Musical Times 117, no. 1604 (October 1976): 815–18.

chapter 4. altered states 1. Paul Williams, liner notes for In C (Columbia Masterworks, 1968). 2. Sarah Hill, “Psychedelia and Its High Other,” in San Francisco and the Long 60s (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 273–94; Keith Potter, Four Musical Minimalists: La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 103–5; Robert Carl, Terry Riley’s In C (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 22–24. 3. Ramon Sender, interviewed by MaryClare Brzytwa and Tessa Updike, San Francisco Conservatory of Music Library & Archives Oral History Project, April 14, 16, 21, 2014, 69–70; John Cale and Victor Bockris, What’s Welsh for Zen: The Autobiography of John Cale (New York: Bloomsbury, 1999), 59. 4. Ian Nagoski, “Interview with La Monte Young,” Halana 1 (1995–96): 32. 5. Describing the “disastrous effects” of drug use within La Monte Young’s circle, Keith Potter notes, “[Angus] MacLise died a possibly drug-related death, in 1979; in 1981 [Terry] Jennings was murdered, apparently on the wrong side of a bad deal.” Potter, Four Musical Minimalists, 67. Young detailed the 1964 arrest in correspondence with Betty Freeman and requested her financial support for his legal fees. Letter from Young to Freeman, August 26, 1964. Betty Freeman Papers, UCSD Special Collections, MSS 227, Box 11, Folder 5; cited in Theodore Barker Gordon, “Beyond ‘East’ and ‘West’: La Monte Young, Pandit Pran Nath, and the Negotiation of Identity” (article forthcoming).

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6. On the Pyramids, see Geeta Dayal, “Idris Ackamoor & The Pyramids,” The Wire (July 2016): 26–31. 7. Tom Johnson, “Changing the Meaning of Static,” Village Voice, September 7, 1972, 47. 8. On this healing group and Annea Lockwood’s work during this period, see Douglas Kahn, Kerry O’Brien, and Pia van Gelder, “Annea Lockwood and Energies,” in The Energies Artists Say (forthcoming). 9. The original article contains here a simple drawing of a circle with a dot in the center. 10. Sonic Meditations I–XI appear in Source: Music of the Avant-Garde 5, no. 2 (1971): 103–7.

chapter 5. gurus and teachers 1. “Year of the Guru,” Life, February 9, 1968, 53–56; Lola Williamson, Transcendent in America: Hindu-Inspired Meditation Movements as New Religion (New York: New York University Press, 2010), 80–105. 2. As scholars of religion have noted, many gurus presented Americanized and modernized versions of Hinduism; see Thomas A. Forsthoefel and Cynthia Ann Humes, eds., Gurus in America (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005); and Ann Gleig and Lola Williamson, “Introduction: From Wave to Soil,” in Homegrown Gurus: From Hinduism in America to American Hinduism, ed. Ann Gleig and Lola Williamson (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2013), 5–6. 3. George Murray, “Akron Has Guru: Spiritual Classes Started by Indian,” Akron Beacon Journal, May 18, 1968, 10; Bhatnagar’s wife was from Akron, so the Bhatnagar family visited Ohio often. 4. Through Ralph Metzner, Young and Zazeela were first introduced to Bhatnagar at a Bismallah Khan concert in 1967. See Keith Potter, Four Musical Minimalists: La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 79; Jeremy Grimshaw, Draw a Straight Line and Follow It: The Music and Mysticism of La Monte Young (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 51; and Kerry O’Brien, “Experimentalisms of the Self: Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T., 1966– 1971)” (PhD diss., Indiana University, 2018), 114–19. 5. On Pran Nath and his work within the Kirana gharana (stylistic tradition) of North Indian classical music, see Grimshaw, Draw a Straight Line and Follow It, 85; and Theodore Barker Gordon, “Beyond ‘East’ and ‘West’: La Monte Young, Pandit Pran Nath, and the Negotiation of Identity” (article forthcoming). 6. Franya Berkman, Monument Eternal: The Music of Alice Coltrane (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2010), 78–79; Jayna Brown, Black Utopias: Speculative Life and the Music of Other Worlds (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021), 41–45. 7. On Oliveros’s work in the early 1970s, see John Kapusta, “Pauline Oliveros, Somatics, and the New Musicology,” Journal of Musicology 38, no. 1 (2021): 1–31; Kerry O’Brien, “Listening as Activism: The Sonic Meditations of Pauline Oliveros,” The New Yorker, December 9, 2016, www.newyorker.com

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/culture/culture-desk/listening-as-activism-the-sonic-meditations-of-paulineoliveros; and O’Brien, “Experimentalisms of the Self,” 139–81. 8. Glass outlines his 1960s travels in his memoir; Philip Glass, Words without Music (New York: Norton, 2015), 150–64. 9. Track titles are in all-capital letters in the original text; they are lowercase and italicized here for clarity. 10. This section has been cut for space; the “other sources” Glass discusses include his work with Mabou Mines on Beckett and Brecht plays, Duchamp, and abstract expressionism.

chapter 6. cultural fusion 1. “The Music of Terry Jennings with his All-Star Band,” concert program, Steinway Hall, January 12, 1968, Pauline Oliveros Papers, MSS 102, University of California, San Diego, Box 13, Folder 31. See also Brett Boutwell, “Terry Jennings, the Lost Minimalist,” American Music 32, no. 1 (Spring 2014): 82–107. 2. See Franya Berkman, Monument Eternal: The Music of Alice Coltrane (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2010), 78–79; and Tammy L. Kernodle, “Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Alice Coltrane and the Redefining of the Jazz Avant-Garde,” in John Coltrane & Black America’s Quest for Freedom, ed. Leonard L. Brown (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 94–98. The Alice Coltrane All-Stars performed Africa on February 21, 1971. Other performers on the benefit bill included singer-songwriter Laura Nyro (a student of Satchidananda) and the rock group New Rascals (whose band member Felix Cavaliere also studied with Satchidananda). See Kara A. Attrep, “Review: Monument Eternal: The Music of Alice Coltrane,” Critical Studies in Improvisation 8, no. 1 (2012), www.criticalimprov.com/index.php/csieci/article/view/2056/2656. The Alice Coltrane All-Stars included Alice Coltrane (piano, harp), Pharoah Sanders (tenor sax, soprano sax, flute, percussion, fife), Archie Shepp (tenor sax, soprano sax, percussion), Tulsi (tambura), Kumar Kramer (harmonium), Jimmy Garrison (bass), Cecil McBee (bass), Clifford Jarvis (drums), and Ed Blackwell (drums). The concert was broadcast on WQXR-FM; see Alice Coltrane, Live at Carnegie Hall (Alternative Fox, 2020). 3. See Franya Berkman, “Appropriating Universality: The Coltranes and 1960s Spirituality,” American Studies 48, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 41–62. 4. Alain Daniélou, Tableau Comparatif des Intervalles Musicaux (Pondichéry: Institut Français d’Indologie, 1958). According to Conrad, Cale introduced Young to the book. Brian Duguid, “Tony Conrad Interview,” Hyperreal, June 1996, http://media.hyperreal.org/zines/est/intervs/conrad.html. 5. On A. M. Jones’s work, see Kofi Agawu, “The Invention of African Rhythm,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 48, no. 3 (1995): 380– 95. On Reich’s transcriptions, see Agawu, The African Imagination in Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 357–58; and Sumanth Gopinath, “ ‘A Composer Looks East’: Steve Reich and Discourse on Non-Western Music,” Glendora Review: African Quarterly on the Arts 3, nos. 3–4 (2004): 134–45.

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6. Reich brought back instruments from Ghana and even performed his own transcriptions at a concert in Berkeley. The program listed “Hatsyiatsya patterns for Azida and Gahu dances: Steve Chambers and Jon Gibson, atokes; Art Murphy and Steve Reich, gong-gongs [These patterns were not composed by Steve Reich. They are traditional music from Ghana].” “An Evening of Music by Steve Reich,” concert program, November 7, 1970, Sammlung Steve Reich, Paul Sacher Stiftung. 7. Tom Johnson, “Music,” Village Voice, December 9, 1971, 47. 8. Scholarly critiques of these approaches as forms of orientalism, appropriation, or exoticism include John Corbett, “Experimental Oriental: New Music and Other Others,” in Western Music and Its Others, ed. Georgina Born and David Hesmondhalgh (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 163–86; Gopinath, “A Composer Looks East”; Martin Scherzinger, “AfroElectric Counterpoint,” in Rethinking Reich, ed. Sumanth Gopinath and Pwyll ap Siôn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 259–302; and Lloyd Whitesell, “White Noise: Race and Erasure in the Cultural Avant-Garde,” American Music 19, no. 2 (Summer 2001): 168–89. 9. Benjamin Patterson profiled Jennings the previous week; Benjamin Patterson, “Terry Jennings: Making of a Musician, 1968,” Village Voice, January 11, 1968, 24–25. 10. In this article, editorial interpolations in brackets are from the original text.

chapter 7. across the arts 1. Barbara Rose, “ABC Art,” Art in America (October–November 1965), 57–69. 2. The month-long exhibit was titled “Dean Fleming Primal Panels / Charles Ross Prisms and Lenses / Jerry Foyster Mirrors / Steve Reich Continuous Tape Music.” Reich’s program for his three evenings of concerts included Improvisations on a Watermelon, Come Out, Saxophone Phase, Melodica, and Four Pianos; Steve Reich, “Four Pianos: Three Evenings of Music by Steve Reich,” concert program, Park Place Gallery, March 17, 18, 19, 1967, Steve Reich Sammlung, Paul Sacher Stiftung. See also Linda Dalrymple Henderson, Reimagining Space: The Park Place Gallery Group in 1960s New York (Austin: University of Texas at Austin, Blanton Museum of Art, 2008), 30–31; Cole, “ ‘Sound Effects (O.K., Music)’: Steve Reich and the Visual Arts in New York City, 1966–1968,” Twentieth-Century Music 11, no. 2 (2014): 221–30; David Allen Chapman, “Collaboration, Presence, and Community: The Philip Glass Ensemble in Downtown New York, 1966–1976” (PhD diss., Washington University, 2013), 31–41; and Kerry O’Brien, “Experimentalisms of the Self: Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T., 1966–1971)” (PhD diss., Indiana University, 2018), 64–72. 3. Chapman, “Collaboration, Presence, Community,” 49–54 and 207. 4. Simone Forti, Handbook in Motion: An Account of an Ongoing Personal Discourse and Its Manifestations in Dance (Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1974), 128–40. See also Virginia B. Spivey, “The

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Minimal Presence of Simone Forti,” Women’s Art Journal 30, no. 1 (Spring/ Summer 2009): 11–18. 5. Scholarship on early minimalism tends to focus more on collaborations with visual artists, and the influence of visual art, than relationships to dance, film, sculpture, and theater. See Dean Suzuki, “Minimal Music: Its Evolution as Seen in the Works of Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Terry Riley, and La Monte Young, and Its Relation to Visual Arts” (PhD diss., University of Southern California, 1991); Edward Strickland, Minimalism: Origins (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993); Jonathan Bernard, “The Minimalist Aesthetic in the Plastic Arts and in Music,” Perspectives of New Music 31, no. 1 (1993): 86–132; H. Wiley Hitchcock, “Minimalism in Art and Music: Origins and Aesthetics,” in Classic Essays on Twentieth-Century Music: A Continuing Symposium, ed. Richard Kostelanetz and Joseph Darby (New York: Schirmer, 1996), 308–19; Michael Maizels, In and out of Phase: An Episodic History of Art and Music in the 1960s (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2020); and Carrie Lambert, “More or Less Minimalism: Six Notes on Performance and Visual Art in the 1960s,” in A Minimal Future?: Art as Object 1958–1968, ed. Ann Goldstein (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2004), 102–9. 6. On the Anti-Illusion exhibit, see Sumanth Gopinath, “Contraband Children: The Politics of Race and Liberation in the Music of Steve Reich, 1965– 66” (PhD diss., Yale University, 2005), 56–59; Chapman, “Collaboration, Presence, Community,” 73–78; Cole, “ ‘Sound Effects,’ ” 231–39; and O’Brien, “Experimentalisms of the Self,” 91–101. 7. Lucier was musical director of the Viola Farber Dance Company from 1972 to 1979; see Viola Rusche and Hauke Harder, No Ideas but in Things: The Composer Alvin Lucier (Mainz, Germany: Wergo, 2013), DVD. Dean and Reich’s collaborations began around 1971 and continued until 1975. In 1972, they toured Europe with Clapping Music (Walking Dance), Phase Patterns (Square Dance), and Four Organs (Trio). In 1975, they staged a collaborative Drumming at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Programmen, Sammlung Steve Reich, Paul Sacher Stiftung. See also Jody Dalton, “Laura Dean, Composeographer?,” Ear Magazine 15, no. 6 (October 1990), 36. Video recordings of Dean and Reich’s performances are held in the Laura Dean Papers, 1966– 2007, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University. 8. On his background in art and Fluxus, see Yoshi Wada, “A Memoir of the Flux-Priest,” in Critical Mass: Happenings, Fluxus, Performance, Intermedia, and Rutgers University, 1958–1972, ed. Geoffrey Hendricks (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003), 141–43; and William Robin, “Yoshi Wada, Inventive Creator of Sound Worlds, Dies at 77,” New York Times, June 5, 2021, B11. 9. On Conrad’s work in film, see Branden W. Joseph, Beyond the Dream Syndicate: Tony Conrad and the Arts after Cage (New York: Verso, 2008). On Niblock’s work, see James Saunders, “Phill Niblock,” in The Ashgate Research Companion to Experimental Music, ed. Keith Potter, Kyle Gann, and Pwyll ap Siôn (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2019), 313–30; Alan Licht, “The Films of Phill Niblock,” in Phill Niblock: Working Title, ed. Yvan Étienne (Dijon: Les Presses du Réel Editions, 2012), 459–66; and Richard Glover, “Minimalism, Technology,

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and Electronic Music,” in Potter, Gann, and Siôn, The Ashgate Research Companion to Minimalist and Postminimalist Music, 175–77. 10. Deborah Jowitt, “Dance: Underwater All Islands Connect,” Village Voice, April 26, 1976, 125; Arthur Sainer, “Theatre: We Cease to Be Victims of the Past,” Village Voice, April 26, 1976, 138, 140; Johnson, “Music: Meredith Monk Doesn’t Make Mistakes,” Village Voice, May 3, 1976, 96. 11. This concert was also reviewed in Tom Johnson, “Found in the ‘New Wilderness,’ ” Village Voice, January 25, 1974, 47. 12. Deborah Jowitt, “Take a Trip with Monk,” New York Times, January 13, 1974, 9.

chapter 8. ensembles 1. Ernest Leogrande, “The Sound and the Music,” Daily News, January 16, 1970, 6. 2. As Benjamin Piekut has noted, “the younger generation of experimentalists customarily performed in loose, improvisatory group formations more reminiscent of rock or jazz bands than of the traditional, cultivated split between composer and performer.” Benjamin Piekut, Experimentalism Otherwise: The New York Avant-Garde and Its Limits (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 16. On the porous nature of “ensemble” as a category, see William Robin, “Understanding Contemporary Music Ensembles,” Contemporary Music Review (forthcoming). 3. Edward Strickland, Minimalism: Origins (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 174. 4. Before Meredith Monk & Vocal Ensemble, Monk formed the House. As described in a 1971 concert program, “The House is a group of artists, actors, dancers and a scientist who are committed to performance as a means of expression and as a means of personal and hopefully social evolution. We seek to unite our life and our work without losing our . . . individuality. Our work is full of remembered things and dreamed things and felt things that aren’t seen and things that are seen outside and things that are only seen inside. There are things about each other that we don’t know.” Quoted in Lanny Harrison, “Working with Meredith,” September 19, 1975, Meredith Monk Archive, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Series IV, Box 28, Folder 8. On the history of the House, see Nancy Putnam Smithner, “Directing the Acting Ensemble: Meredith Monk, Elizabeth Lecompte, and Anne Bogart” (PhD diss., New York University, 2002), 76–81. 5. Joan La Barbara, who played in Reich’s and Glass’s ensembles, also chronicled minimalist music in writings for the SoHo Weekly News and elsewhere; see David Allen Chapman, “Collaboration, Presence, and Community: The Philip Glass Ensemble in Downtown New York, 1966–1976” (PhD diss., Washington University, 2013), 199–239. Her writings included Joan La Barbara, “Philip Glass and Steve Reich: Two from the Steady State School,” Data Arte 13 (Winter 1974): 36–41; La Barbara, “Living Music: Phil Glass Ensemble,” SoHo Weekly News, March 21, 1974; La Barbara, “Living Music: Avant [Dream House],” SoHo Weekly News, May 9, 1974, 19; La Barbara, “Spring

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Rush: La Monte Young’s ‘Well-Tuned Piano,” SoHo Weekly News, May 22, 1975, 40. 6. As George E. Lewis has shown, John Cage’s distaste for improvisation and jazz left a lasting imprint on what he calls “Eurological” experimental music. Whereas “Afrological” experimental music created in the legacy of Charlie Parker valorized improvisation as the expression of personality, Eurological experimentalists sought to attenuate the ego and the self. Thus, though Reich’s and Glass’s ensembles resemble jazz or rock “bands,” their rejection of improvisation locates them instead within a post-Cagean, Eurological tradition of “ensembles.” See George E. Lewis, “Improvised Music after 1950: Afrological and Eurological Perspectives,” Black Music Research Journal 16 (1996): 94–99; and Lewis, “Afterword to ‘Improvised Music after 1950’: The Changing Same,” in The Other Side of Nowhere: Jazz, Improvisation, and Communities in Dialogue (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2004), 163–70. 7. Patrick Nickleson reveals how several important works of early minimalism were not originally performed from scores, and that scores were instead later generated as transcriptions from recordings. Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians, for example, did not have a full score and parts until composer Marc Mellits created one for a 1996 Boosey & Hawkes edition, based on his transcription of the 1978 ECM recording. See Patrick Nickleson, “Transcription, Recording, and Authority in ‘Classic’ Minimalism,” Twentieth-Century Music 14, no. 3 (2018): 377–82. 8. For a performer’s account of Steve Reich and Musicians, see Russell Hartenberger, Performance Practice in the Music of Steve Reich (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016). For the fiftieth anniversary of Drumming, Sō Percussion created an extensive website about the work’s history; see www .drummingat50.com. 9. On the making of Music in Twelve Parts, see Chapman, “Collaboration, Presence, and Community,” 126–43. 10. Ryan Ebright, “Assembling Meredith Monk and Vocal Ensemble, 1975– 1991” (article forthcoming). 11. See William Robin, “The Secret Muse of the Downtown Scene? Turtles,” New York Times, November 8, 2016, AR 12.

part two. introduction 1. Michael Walsh, “The Heart Is Back in the Game,” Time, September 20, 1982, 60–62 (with reporting by Nancy Newman). For a full accounting of the Four Organs reception, see Sumanth Gopinath, “ ‘Departing to Other Spheres’: Psychedelic Science Fiction, Perspectival Embodiment, and the Hermeneutics of Steve Reich’s Four Organs,” in Rethinking Reich, ed. Sumanth Gopinath and Pwyll ap Siôn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 19–52. 2. Tim Page, “Framing the River: A Minimalist Primer,” High Fidelity (November 1981): 64–68 and 117; and Linda Winer, “A Minimalist Makes the Mainstream,” USA Today, September 21, 1982. For other mainstream profiles of minimalists in this period, see Kristine McKenna, “Philip Glass: The Future Is Now,” Rolling Stone, March 8, 1979,

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19; Robert Coe, “Philip Glass Breaks Through,” New York Times Magazine, October 25, 1981, 69–70; and Annalyn Swan, “The Rise of Steve Reich,” Newsweek, March 29, 1982. On the breakthrough success of Reich’s and Glass’s work, see Robert Fink, Repeating Ourselves: American Minimal Music as Cultural Practice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 25. 3. On Glass’s work in film, see Rebecca M. Doran Eaton, “Minimalist and Postminimalist Music in Multimedia: From the Avant-Garde to the Blockbuster Film,” in The Ashgate Research Companion to Experimental Music, ed. Keith Potter, Kyle Gann, and Pwyll ap Siôn (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2019), 181–200; and Tristian Evans, Shared Meanings in the Film Music of Philip Glass: Music, Multimedia, and Postminimalism (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2015). Michael Bloom wrote of Reich in New Age magazine, “Meanwhile, downtown, the lacy, introspective, meditative and glorious music known vulgarly at ‘the Soho minimalist school’ takes several quantum jumps toward knowledgeable acceptance. . . . Music for 18 Musicians presents another, immediate rhythm, a pattern of themes and riffs that dive in and out of the time-stream. Set in a matrix defined by low, breathy instruments (bass clarinet, cello) complemented by bright high percussives (piano, marimbas, xylophones), the melodic fragments dance about and metamorphose in cyclic outpourings.” Michael Bloom, “Zappa and the New Reich,” New Age (January 1979). 4. Riley and Kronos were on faculty at Mills College in Oakland, CA, where they began a decades-long collaboration in 1980 with Riley’s Sunrise of the Planetary Dream Collector. (In 1975, Riley had performed a very different, improvised version of Sunrise of the Planetary Dream Collector with Don Cherry.) Kai Christiansen, “Sunrise of the Planetary Dream Collector for String Quartet,” Earsense, www.earsense.org/chamber-music/Terry-Riley-Sunrise-OfThe-Planetary-Dream-Collector-for-String-Quartet/. 5. On No Wave’s intersection with minimalism, see Bernard Gendron, Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club: Popular Music and the Avant-Garde (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 236–38; and Patrick Nickleson, The Names of Minimalism: Authorship, Art Music, and Historiography in Dispute (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2023). 6. As Sumanth Gopinath has argued, the multiplicity of Eastman’s work cannot be fully contained by classifying him as a minimalist. Instead, Gopinath suggests that Eastman may have been “against” minimalism, by both rejecting minimalism’s tonal stasis and being “up against it,” as in “flirting with it.” Gopinath, “ ‘Black Forces’: Julius Eastman Against Minimalism,” in We Have Delivered Ourselves from the Tonal: Of, towards, on, for Julius Eastman, ed. Federica Bueti, Antonia Alampi, and Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung ([Berlin]: SAVVY Contemporary in collaboration with Archive Books, [2020]), 177. 7. See Kyle Gann, “La Monte Young’s The Well-Tuned Piano,” Perspectives of New Music 31, no. 1 (1993): 134–62. 8. On Amacher’s work, see Amy Cimini, Wild Sound: Maryanne Amacher and the Tenses of Audible Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021); on Fullman, see Kerry O’Brien, “A Composer and Her (Very) Long String Instrument,” New York Times, May 31, 2020, AR 5.

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9. William Robin, Industry: Bang on a Can and New Music in the Marketplace (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021). 10. Oil money funded other significant projects. The Dia Foundation, a major patron of Young and Zazeela, was founded by the de Menil family, who earned their fortune through Schlumberger Ltd., a petroleum consulting and technology firm; see Ryan Dohoney, Saving Abstraction: Morton Feldman, the de Menils, and the Rothko Chapel (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 4–5. 11. Dimitri Devyatkin, “The House of the Horizontal Synch,” 2004, www. vasulka.org/Kitchen/essays_devyatkin/K_Devyatkin.html. Quoted in Joshua Plocher, “Presenting the New: Battles around New Music in New York in the Seventies” (PhD diss., University of Minnesota, 2012), 347. 12. Alan Licht, “Interview with Charlemagne Palestine 9/17/89,” Sonic Death no. 7 (1996). 13. Amy C. Beal, New Music, New Allies: American Experimental Music in West Germany from the Zero Hour to Reunification (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 197–201. 14. Tim Rutherford-Johnson, Music after the Fall: Modern Composition and Culture since 1989 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017), 24–31. 15. Tara Wilson, “Russian Post-Minimalist Music: A Semiological Investigation into the Narrative Approaches Employed by Alexander Knaifel between 1978 and 1994” (PhD diss., Goldsmiths College, 2015), 33. 16. Paul Roquet, Ambient Media: Japanese Atmospheres of Self (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016). 17. See Maarten Beirens, “European Minimalism and the Modernist Problem,” in Potter, Gann, and ap Siôn, The Ashgate Research Companion to Minimalist and Postminimalist Music, 61–86; Šarūnas Nakas, “What Is the Lithuanian Brand of Minimalism?,” Lithuanian Music Link 8 (April–September 2004); Dragana Stojanović-Novičić, “Musical Minimalism in Serbia: Emergence, Beginnings and Its Creative Endeavours,” in Potter, Gann, and ap Siôn, The Ashgate Research Companion to Minimalist and Postminimalist Music, 357–70. 18. Wim Mertens, American Minimal Music: La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, trans. J. Hautekiet (London: Kahn & Averill, 1983); Tom Johnson, The Voice of New Music: New York City, 1972–1982 (Eindhoven: Het Apollohuis, 1989); Edward Strickland, Minimalism: Origins (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993); K. Robert Schwarz, Minimalists (London: Phaidon, 1996). 19. Michael Gordon, interview with Libby Van Cleve, August 29, 1997, Yale Oral History of American Music: Major Figures in American Music, 185 j–m.

chapter 9. 1976 1. On the breakthrough success of Music for 18 Musicians and Einstein, see Robert Fink, Repeating Ourselves: American Minimal Music as Cultural Practice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 25 and 47–61. 2. On Music for 18 Musicians, see Russell Hartenberger, Performance Practice in the Music of Steve Reich (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016),

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185–234; Keith Potter, “Sketching a New Tonality: A Preliminary Assessment of Steve Reich’s Sketches for Music for 18 Musicians in Telling the Story of This Work’s Approach to Tonality,” in Rethinking Reich, ed. Sumanth Gopinath and Pwyll ap Siôn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 191–215. On Einstein, see Jelena Novak and John Richardson, eds., Einstein on the Beach: Opera beyond Drama (London: Routledge, 2019); and Leah Weinberg, “Opera behind the Myth: An Archival Examination of Einstein on the Beach” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2016). 3. See Sasha Metcalf, “Institutions and Patrons in American Opera: The Reception of Philip Glass, 1976–1992” (PhD diss., University of California, Santa Barbara, 2015); Jeremy Grimshaw, “High, ‘Low,’ and Plastic Arts: Philip Glass and the Symphony in the Age of Postproduction,” Musical Quarterly 86, no. 3 (Fall 2002): 472–507; and Ryan Ebright, Making American Opera after Einstein (forthcoming). 4. Some of Reich’s best-known works of this period include Tehillim (1981), Different Trains (1988), and the video opera The Cave (1990–93); on these works, see Antonella Puca, “Steve Reich and Hebrew Cantillation,” Musical Quarterly 81, no. 4 (1997): 537–55; Amy Lynn Wlodarski, “The Testimonial Aesthetics of Different Trains,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 63, no. 1 (2010): 99–142; and Ebright, “ ‘My Answer to What Music Theater Can Be’: Iconoclasm and Entrepreneurship in Steve Reich and Beryl Korot’s The Cave,” American Music 37, no. 1 (Spring 2017): 29–50. 5. David Allen Chapman, “Collaboration, Presence, and Community: The Philip Glass Ensemble in Downtown New York, 1966–1976” (PhD diss., Washington University, 2013), 5–6; and Patrick Nickleson, The Names of Minimalism: Authorship, Art Music, and Historiography in Dispute (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2023). Reich and Glass reunited in 2014 for a performance at the Brooklyn Academy of Music; Anthony Tommasini, “Banging Out an Armistice on Keyboards,” New York Times, September 10, 2014, C1. 6. See Catherine Christer Hennix, Poësy Matters and Other Matters, ed. Lawrence Kumpf (New York: Blank Forms, 2019); and Marcus Boon, “Catherine Christer Hennix, the Practice of Music and Modal Ontology,” in Practical Aesthetics, ed. Bernd Herzogenrath (New York: Bloomsbury, 2021), 149–58; and Spencer Gerhardt, “Minimalism and Foundations,” in Simplicity: Ideals of Practice in Mathematics and the Arts, ed. Roman Kossak and Philip Ording (Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2019), 234–37. 7. See Hennix, The Electric Harpsichord [booklet and CD] ([Milan]: Die Schachtel, [2010]). 8. Notes for this essay are Flynt’s own notes from the original text. 9. That we only have this one word for everything from quality and structure of perception, to personality and identity, to life with others governed by valuehierarchies is more evidence of the culture’s loathing of humanness. 10. I had spoken of dignity in “Geniuses’ Liberation Project” in 1975; Christer’s writing of the late Seventies foregrounded the notion. Later I worked at creatively explicating the word. 11. New York Times reviewer Ken Emerson was more generous to me than to Christer. He assumed, overall, that our purpose was to entertain by produc-

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ing mental vacancy. [Editors’ note: Ken Emerson, “Kitchen Trancing,” New York Times, February 9, 1979; and Tom Johnson, “Richard Teitelbaum, George Lewis, William Hawley,” Village Voice, March 19, 1979.] 12. A review Johnson wrote of my band in 1975 had been killed by Robert Christgau.

chapter 10. the new downtown 1. As George E. Lewis has shown, Black experimental groups like the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians played a crucial role in making such forms of musical mobility and hybridity possible, even though white “downtown” composers often received credit for it. See George E. Lewis, “Experimental Music in Black and White: The AACM in New York, 1970– 1985,” Current Musicology 71–73 (2002): 101. 2. Arthur Russell also emblematizes the long-lasting influence of Ali Akbar Khan on minimalism; in 1970, a young Russell studied with Khan at the Ali Akbar Khan College of Music (founded in 1967). See Tim Lawrence, Hold on to Your Dreams: Arthur Russell and the Downtown Music Scene, 1973–1992 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 24–32. On the spiritual dimensions of Russell’s work, see Matt Marble, Buddhist Bubblegum: Esotericism in the Creative Process of Arthur Russell (Brooklyn: Coolgrove, 2021). On Eastman’s work between genres, see Ryan Dohoney, “A Flexible Musical Identity: Julius Eastman in New York City, 1976–90,” in Gay Guerrilla: Julius Eastman and His Music, ed. Renée Levine Packer and Mary Jane Leach (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2015), 116–30. 3. On New Music, New York, see Joshua Plocher, “Presenting the New: Battles around New Music in New York in the Seventies” (PhD diss., University of Minnesota, 2012), 317–52. 4. Excerpt from “Report #3,” June 10, 1979. 5. Excerpt from “Report #9,” June 16, 1979. 6. The interview followed Branca’s performance of Indeterminate Activity of Resultant Masses. Cage made similar comments at a panel discussion during the festival; see Deborah Campana, “New Music America 1982, Chicago, July 5–11, 1982,” Perspectives of New Music 20, nos. 1–2 (Autumn 1981–Summer 1982): 609; and Tim Lawrence, “Pluralism, Minor Deviations, and Radical Change: The Challenge to Experimental Music in Downtown New York,” in Tomorrow Is the Question: New Directions in Experimental Music Studies, ed. Benjamin Piekut (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014), 76–77. A recording of the interview was included on the compilation Chicago ’82: A Dip in the Lake (Les Disques Du Crépuscule, 1983), and subsequently on Glenn Branca, Indeterminate Activity of Resultant Masses (Atavistic Records, 2009).

chapter 11. instruments and environments 1. On Amacher’s use of eartone responses, see Amy Cimini, “ ‘In Your Head’: Notes on Maryanne Amacher’s Intelligent Life,” Opera Quarterly 33, nos. 3–4 (2017): 269–302.

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2. Arnold Dreyblatt, “The Sound of One String,” in Echo: The Images of Sound (Eindhoven: Het Apollohuis, 1987), 82–91; and Dreyblatt, “Origin and Development of the Excited Strings,” in Arcana IV: Musicians on Music, ed. John Zorn (New York: Hips Road, 2009), 71–89. On Yoshi Wada’s instrument and installation building, see Jim Haynes, “Yoshi Wada: Piper’s Lament,” The Wire 292 (June 2008): 20–23. 3. For a reflection on her decades-long development of the Long String Instrument, see Ellen Fullman, “A Compositional Approach Derived from Material and Ephemeral Elements,” Leonardo Music Journal 22 (2012): 3–10. 4. Bernard Gendron, “The Experimental Intermedia Foundation and the Downtown Music Scene,” in Phill Niblock: Working Title, ed. Yvan Étienne (Dijon: Les Presses du Réel Editions, 2012), 469–88. 5. Tom Johnson wrote that Niblock’s “beating” effects in his work of the late 1970s “are purposely out of tune and that the resulting frequencies beat wildly against one another.” Describing a December 1979 concert, Johnson noted that “I was particularly drawn to one piece in which trombonist George Lewis played against trombone tones that had been recorded by Jim Fulkerson in 1977. The trombone frequencies, played in two different octaves, beat against one another with unusual intensity, and since Lewis is quite adept at circular breathing, there was never a let-up.” Johnson, “Sandow and Niblock at the End of the Spectrum,” Village Voice, January 8, 1979, 52 and 54.

chapter 12. ambient and new age 1. Brian Eno, “Ambient Music,” liner notes to Ambient 1: Music for Airports (Editions E. G., AMB 001, 1978). See also John T. Lysaker, Brian Eno’s “Ambient 1: Music for Airports” (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018); Victor Szabo, “Unsettling Brian Eno’s Music for Airports,” Twentieth-Century Music 14, no. 2 (June 2017): 305–33; and Szabo, Turn On, Tune In, Drift Off: Ambient Music’s Psychedelic Past (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022). We are grateful to Victor Szabo for his generosity and advice in compiling this chapter. 2. On Eno’s background in experimental music, see Szabo, “Ambient Music as Popular Genre: Historiography, Interpretation, Critique” (PhD diss., University of Virginia, 2015), 128–64. See also David Sheppard, On Some Faraway Beach: The Life and Times of Brian Eno (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2009). 3. Geeta Dayal, “Ambient Pioneer Midori Takada: ‘Everything on the Earth Has a Sound,’ ” Guardian, March 24, 2017, www.theguardian.com/music/2017 /mar/24/midori-takada-interview-through-the-looking-glass-reissue; Mark Richardson, “Kankyō Ongaku: Japanese Ambient, Environmental & New Age Music 1980–90,” Pitchfork, February 21, 2019, https://pitchfork.com/reviews /albums/various-artists-kanky-ongaku-japanese-ambient-environmental-andnew-age-music-1980–1990/. See also Paul Roquet, Ambient Media: Japanese Atmospheres of Self (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016). 4. Victor Szabo, “Pacifica Radio’s Music from the Hearts of Space and the Ambient Sound of California’s New Age,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 74, no. 1 (Spring 2021): 43–90.

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chapter 13. canons 1. As Christophe Levaux has shown, the term “minimalism” was still “fragile and imprecise” in the 1970s but, by the 1980s, it began appearing in prominent sources like the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. In her Grove entry on minimalism, Ruth Dreier focuses primarily on Young, Riley, Reich, and Glass as the “best-known composers,” but briefly notes other minimalists like Terry Jennings, Jon Gibson, and Tom Johnson. See Ruth Dreier, “Minimalism,” in New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, vol. 3, ed. Stanley Sadie (London: MacMillan, 1986), 240–42; cited in Christophe Levaux, We Have Always Been Minimalist: The Construction and Triumph of a Musical Style (Oakland: University of California Press, 2020), 158–59. Readers looking for “Minimal Music” in the previous 1980 edition of New Grove were redirected to the British-oriented “System” entry, which included Young, Reich, Riley, and Glass, but also Christopher Hobbs and John White. Paul Griffiths, “System (ii),” in New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, vol. 17, ed. Stanley Sadie (London: MacMillan, 1980), 481. 2. Wim Mertens’s Amerikaanse repetitieve muziek first appeared in Dutch in 1980; it was followed by an English translation, with the Big Four composers in the title, that included a preface by Michael Nyman. Wim Mertens, Amerikaanse repetitieve muziek: in het perspectief van de westeuropese muziekevolutie (Bierbeek: W. Vergaelen, 1980); Mertens, American Minimal Music: La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, trans. J. Hautekiet (London: Kahn & Averill, 1983). See Levaux, We Have Always Been Minimalist, 118–34. 3. Mark Abbott recalls that he may have played “O Superman” even earlier in 1980 on his WKCR radio show. The tape was provided by Bob George of 110 Records. The single O Superman was released the next year in 1981. Mark Abbott, interview with Kerry O’Brien and William Robin, August 20, 2022. 4. Tim Page, “Framing the River: A Minimalist Primer,” High Fidelity (November 1981): 64–68 and 117. 5. In a 1982 article, Tom Johnson proposed his own lengthy countercanon of minimalism, listing composers Maryanne Amacher, Robert Ashley, David Berhman, Harold Budd, Joel Chadabe, Philip Corner, Alvin Curran, Jon Gibson, Daniel Goode, William Hellerman, Terry Jennings, Garrett List, Annea Lockwood, Alvin Lucier, Jackson Mac Low, Meredith Monk, Charlie Morrow, Gordon Mumma, Max Neuhaus, Phill Niblock, Pauline Oliveros, Frederic Rzewski, Steven Scott, Richard Teitelbaum, Ivan Tcherepnin, Yoshi Wada, and La Monte Young; see Tom Johnson, “The Original Minimalists,” Village Voice, July 27, 1982, 68–69. 6. We are grateful to Kristin Eshelman and Melissa Watterworth Batt for providing us with this document from the collection, and to Tim Page for sharing it. 7. Licht published three subsequent lists: Licht, “The Next Top Ten,” Halana, no. 3 (Winter 1998); Licht, “Minimalism Top Ten III!!!,” Volcanic Tongue, June 10, 2007; and Licht, “Alan Licht’s Minimal Top Ten List #4,” June 16, 2020, https://alanlicht.tumblr.com/post/621087607856726016/alanlichts-minimal-top-ten-list-4. The first three lists are compiled online at http:// rootstrata.com/rootblog/?p=135.

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chapter 14. backlash 1. “Four Organs caused a near-riot reminiscent of the premiere of Reich’s beloved Rite of Spring.” K. Robert Schwarz, Minimalists (London: Phaidon, 1996), 70. On how this event is remembered (and misremembered), see Sumanth Gopinath, “‘Departing to Other Spheres’: Psychedelic Science Fiction, Perspectival Embodiment, and the Hermeneutics of Steve Reich’s Four Organs,” in Rethinking Reich, ed. Sumanth Gopinath and Pwyll ap Siôn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 19–52, esp. footnote 10. 2. As the legend goes, “In Amsterdam, an audience member leaped on stage to pound on the keyboard. Glass punched him with one hand and kept playing with the other.” Robert Coe, “Philip Glass Breaks Through,” New York Times, October 25, 1981, 78. This concert was likely March 10, 1969, at the Stedelijk Museum, where Glass premiered Two Pages; see David Allen Chapman, “Collaboration, Presence, and Community: The Philip Glass Ensemble in Downtown New York, 1966–1976” (PhD diss., Washington University, 2013), 250. “ ‘Although I don’t want to be derogatory,’ Pierre Boulez, the modernist composer and conductor, said in a recent interview, clearly meaning to be, ‘I think today’s type of minimalist and repetitive music appeals to an extremely primitive perception. . . . If an audience wants to get high with this kind of music . . . that’s OK with me. But I don’t consider that a very high level of enjoyment.’ ” Pierre Boulez, quoted in Richard Sennett, “The Twilight of the Tenured Composer,” Harper’s, December 1984, 71. Gunther Schuller told Musician magazine in 1991 that “Minimalist culture is now dead or dying. All the former minimalists, like John Adams and Steve Reich, are hopping off the bandwagon and saying, ‘Me? I’m not a minimalist. I never was a minimalist.’ That’s like the Nazis who said they were never Nazis. It makes me sick.” Gunther Schuller, quoted in Josef Woodward, “Hail! Gunther Schuller,” Musician, October 1991, 28. Samuel Lipman, publisher of The New Criterion, wrote of the 1985 revival of Einstein: “Doubtless, Einstein, like other products of the counterculture and its fossil remnants, has a political cast attractive to its viewers. But those who are determined to find in this ideology manifestations of an orthodox left-wing, state-oriented disposition will be wrong: the politics of Einstein and its kindred is that beguiling, irresponsible variety of anarchism so endemic in an educated middle class which, no matter how existentially alienated, still wants someone else to pay for its amenities, whether these amenities be urban development or cultural offerings. . . . Even the huge gross for Einstein failed to cover the costs of reviving a previously paid-for production.” Samuel Lipman, “Einstein’s Long March to Brooklyn,” New Criterion 3, no. 2 (February 1985): 15–24. 3. “The conclusion is inescapable: Reich and Glass have lately written what is no more than a pop music for intellectuals, an easy-to-listen-to music shorn of the rage so marked in black-oriented music and the pop culture of the 1960’s.” Lipman, “From Avant-Garde to Pop,” Commentary, July 1979, 61. 4. On Anderson’s “Report From the Front,” see “Interview with Beth Anderson,” April 16, 2019, https://reportfromthefront.wordpress.com/interviewwith-beth-anderson/.

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5. The article opens with a short biographical introduction to Palestine; Licht notes that he only asked one question in the phone interview (after which Palestine gave his extended response): “What are you working on now?”

chapter 15. politics, identity, and expression 1. Robert Adlington, Composing Dissent: Avant-Garde Music in 1960s Amsterdam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 2. Scholars and critics have focused primarily on Eastman’s Black and queer identities; in response, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung writes, “The plea is for a more holistic perception of Julius Eastman’s practice that goes beyond just the fetishization of his blackness and gayness, which are both core elements of his being and music, but also just two of many elements Eastman engaged with, fought with, deliberated upon and expressed so radically in his music.” Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, “I Love to Love, Oh Pleasant Love. The Marvel of Julius Eastman,” Berlinale Forum, 2018, www.arsenal-berlin.de/forumforum-expanded/archiv/programmarchiv/2018/artikel/the-marvel-of-juliuseastman/. The 2018 exhibition “Julius Eastman: That Which Is Fundamental” was instrumental in showcasing this plurality; a January 27 concert, for example, included Eastman’s 1969 work Thruway, rooted in his experience with jazz; the 1984 Buddha, a testament to his spirituality; and a performance and remembrance by his brother Gerry Eastman. “Julius Eastman: That Which Is Fundamental,” curated by Tiona Nekkia McClodden and Dustin Hurt, organized by the Kitchen with the Eastman Estate and Bowerbird, https://thekitchen.org /event/julius-eastman-thruway-plus-gerry-eastman. 3. Andrew Hanson-Dvoracek, “Julius Eastman’s 1980 Residency at Northwestern University” (MA thesis, University of Iowa, 2011); see also Renée Levine Packer and Mary Jane Leach, eds., Gay Guerrilla: Julius Eastman and His Music (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2015). 4. K. Robert Schwarz, “Process vs. Intuition in the Recent Works of Steve Reich and John Adams,” American Music 8, no. 3 (1990): 245–73. On Adams’s prior work and influences in the 1970s, see John Kapusta, “The Self-Actualization of John Adams,” Journal for the Society of American Music 12, no. 3 (2018): 317–44. 5. Antonella Puca, “Steve Reich and Hebrew Cantillation,” Musical Quarterly 81, no. 4 (1997): 537–55; Amy Lynn Wlodarski, “The Testimonial Aesthetics of Different Trains,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 63, no. 1 (2010): 99–142. 6. “Variations: A Conversation with Steve Reich,” Parabola 5, no. 2 (1980): 69–70. 7. We are grateful to Robert Adlington for assistance in locating the provenance of this article. 8. The original document incorrectly identified the text as Plato’s “State.” 9. For additional context on this talk, see Hanson-Dvoracek, “Julius Eastman’s 1980 Residency at Northwestern University.”

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426   |   Notes to Pages 286–307

chapter 16. postminimalists 1. Robert Pincus-Witten, Postminimalism (New York: Out of London, 1977). 2. Kyle Gann, “A Technically Definable Stream of Postminimalism, Its Characteristics and Its Meaning,” in The Ashgate Research Companion to Minimalist and Postminimalist Music, ed. Keith Potter, Kyle Gann, and Pwyll ap Sîon (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2013), 39–60; see also Jonathan Bernard, “Minimalism, Postminimalism, and the Resurgence of Tonality in Recent American Music,” American Music 12, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 112–33. 3. Robert Fink writes that if, in early minimalism, “all of the cards are on the table” (as Reich writes in “Music as a Gradual Process”) then “post-minimalists preferred to keep at least a few [cards] up their sleeves.” See Robert Fink, “(Post-)minimalisms 1970–2000: The Search for a New Mainstream,” in The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 539–56. 4. In his writing for the Village Voice, Kyle Gann also used the phrase “totalism” to describe the compositional style of some composers affiliated with Bang on a Can. Gann, “Totally Ismic: Totalism,” Village Voice, July 20, 1993, 69; see also Gann, American Music in the Twentieth Century (New York: Schirmer, 1997), 325–86; and Gann, Music Downtown (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). On Bang on a Can’s festivals, see William Robin, Industry: Bang on a Can and New Music in the Marketplace (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), 75–103. 5. Tara Wilson, “Russian Post-Minimalist Music: A Semiological Investigation into the Narrative Approaches Employed by Alexander Knaifel between 1978 and 1994” (PhD diss., Goldsmiths College, 2015); and Elena Dubinets, Russian Composers Abroad: How They Left, Stayed, Returned (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2021). 6. David Lang, email message, December 17, 2021. 7. We are extraordinarily grateful to Elena Dubinets for generously sharing her interviews with several major Russian composers.

chapter 17. spiritual minimalism 1. Bradley Bambarger, “Retail Eagerly Awaits ECM’s Arvo Pärt Set,” Billboard 108, no. 6 (September 7, 1996); ECM was also responsible for the crossover success of Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians, released in 1978. See Robert Fink, Repeating Ourselves: American Minimal Music as Cultural Practice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 26. 2. William Robin, “The Success of a Somber Symphony: Recalling an Unlikely Hit Record, 25 Years Later,” New York Times, June 11, 2017, AR 11; Luke B. Howard, “Motherhood, Billboard, and the Holocaust: Perceptions and Receptions of Górecki’s Symphony No. 3,” Musical Quarterly 82, no. 1 (March 1998): 131–59. 3. See David Dies, “Defining ‘Spiritual Minimalism,’ ” in The Ashgate Research Companion to Minimalist and Postminimalist Music, ed. Keith Potter, Kyle Gann, and Pwyll ap Sîon (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2013), 315–36; Benjamin Skipp, “The Minimalism of Arvo Pärt: An ‘Antidote’ to Modernism and

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Notes to Pages 307–331   |   427

Multiplicity?,” in The Cambridge Companion to Arvo Pärt, ed. Andrew Shenton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 159–76. 4. Tim Rutherford-Johnson, Music after the Fall: Modern Composition and Culture since 1989 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017), 24–31. 5. McCarthy included a short preface to the interview: “The following interview took place early in 1986. At the time I was working on a dissertation about Pärt’s work, and I initially approached Pärt to see if I could gain access to some of his unpublished scores and any recordings of pieces other than the few generally available in the West at that time. After an exchange of correspondence it seemed that it would be best if I could travel to Berlin where I could glean all I needed from his own collection and also conduct an interview. With the financial assistance of Leicester Polytechnic I spent several fruitful days working at the Pärt household, receiving invaluable help from Arvo himself and his wife Eleanora. The transcript which follows is a translation of the two interviews conducted in German at that time.”

chapter 18. popular culture 1. Josef Woodward, “Getting Low with David Bowie and Philip Glass,” Musician (June 1993): 41–48. 2. Robert Fink, Repeating Ourselves: American Minimal Music as Cultural Practice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 25–61. 3. As one of the strands in her minimalist genealogy, Susan McClary pointed to “the attempts by a succession of youth cultures to reclaim their bodies through the rhythms of Swing, 50s Rock ’n’ Roll, disco, or techno.” See Susan McClary, Rap, Minimalism, and Structures of Time in Late Twentieth-Century Culture, Geske Lectures ([Lincoln]: College of Fine and Performing Arts, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, 1998), 24. 4. Robert Koehler, “Less Is More,” Variety, January 25, 1998; see also Rebecca M. Doran Eaton, “Unheard Minimalisms: The Functions of the Minimalist Technique in Film Scores” (PhD diss., University of Texas at Austin, 2008). 5. On Reich Remixed, and specifically Ken Ishii’s remix of Come Out, see Sumanth Gopinath, “Contraband Children: The Politics of Race and Liberation in the Music of Steve Reich, 1965–66” (PhD diss., Yale University, 2005), 352–74. 6. Tim Rutherford-Johnson, “The Influence Engine: Steve Reich and Pop Music,” NewMusicBox, March, 27, 2013, https://nmbx.newmusicusa.org /the-influence-engine-steve-reich-and-pop-music/. David Toop describes this tendency as a “reductive determination to prove that underground scenes (black, Hispanic, gay, whatever) must have their source in artists recognized by white media (i.e. mostly white people).” David Toop, Ocean of Sound: Aether Talk, Ambient Sound and Imaginary Worlds (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1995), 122.

part three. introduction 1. “Just Don’t Call It Minimalism,” New York Times, August 10, 2007, E1 and E6.

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428   |   Notes to Pages 332–335

2. Kyle Gann, “Diversity of Taste Is for Losers,” PostClassic blog, August 10, 2007, www.kylegann.com/PC070810-DiversityforLosers.html. 3. Responses include Nico Muhly, “Normal Amounts of Time,” Nico Muhly blog, August 10, 2007, http://nicomuhly.com/news/2007/normal-amounts-oftime/; and Steve Smith, “Maximal Minimalism,” Night after Night blog, August 10, 2007. “Minimalism: Point and Counterpoint,” WNYC Soundcheck, August 27, 2007, www.wnyc.org/story/39880-minimalism-point-and-counterpoint/. 4. The Society was formed at the First International Conference on Minimalist Music, held at the University of Bangor, Wales, in 2007. http:// minimalismsociety.org/about. 5. In 2021, La Monte Young released some of his recordings for legal download on the platform Bandcamp. 6. This post-2000 era also saw multiple monographs on minimalism, including Keith Potter, Four Musical Minimalists: La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Robert Fink, Repeating Ourselves: American Minimal Music as Cultural Practice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Christophe Levaux, We Have Always Been Minimalist: The Construction and Triumph of a Musical Style (Oakland: University of California Press, 2020); and Patrick Nickleson, The Names of Minimalism: Authorship, Art Music, and Historiography in Dispute (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2023). 7. Will Hermes, “Glass’ Menagerie,” Spin Magazine (June 2008): 96–99. 8. The 2022 Big Ears line-up included Meredith Monk, the Bang on a Can All-Stars, and Sarah Davachi. 9. As of early 2022, the most popular and well-known among lofi streams is “lofi hip hop radio—beats to relax/study to,” hosted by the YouTube channel Lofi Girl. 10. Josh Sanburn, “Minimalist Living: When a Lot Less Is More,” Time, March 12, 2015. 11. Kyle Chayka, The Longing for Less: Living with Minimalism (New York: Bloomsbury, 2020). 12. Alan Licht, interview with Charlemagne Palestine, September 17, 1989, printed in Sonic Death 7 (1996). 13. Alex Marshall, “Donald Trump’s Unexpected Thoughts on Music— Revealed,” BBC, November 9, 2016, https://www.bbc.co.uk/music/articles /e5e4572a-0676–4120–9eb3-d34bbea34836. Meredith Monk was also awarded a National Medal of Arts the previous year.

chapter 19. histories 1. Young threatened legal action against the label; see La Monte Young, “On Table of The Elements CD 74 ‘Day of Niagara’ April 25, 1965,” July 10, 2000, www.melafoundation.org/statemen.htm; for the broader controversy around recording, authorship, and the Theatre of the Eternal Music, see Branden W. Joseph, Beyond the Dream Syndicate: Tony Conrad and the Arts after Cage

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Notes to Pages 335–369   |   429

(New York: Zone, 2008); and Patrick Nickleson, The Names of Minimalism: Authorship, Art Music, and Historiography in Dispute (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2023). 2. See Kerry O’Brien, “The World Catches Up to Iconoclastic Composer Julius Eastman,” Chicago Reader, February 21, 2018; and Alex Ross, “Julius Eastman’s Guerrilla Minimalism,” The New Yorker, January 15, 2017. 3. A shorter version was published as Dreyblatt, “Niagra Squalls,” The Wire 1999 (September 2000): 6. See also Tony Conrad, “Tony Conrad’s Response,” www.dreyblatt.net/articles-and-interviews. 4. Tony Conrad, “Inside the Dream Syndicate,” Film Culture (1966): 5–8. 5. Notes for this essay are Clayton’s own notes from the original text. 6. See http://11.performa-arts.org/event/performa-radio. 7. Eastman forms part of the six-person ensemble that performs wordless vocalizations on the title track of Meredith Monk’s 1981 ECM album Dolmen Music. He’s instantly recognizable. Eastman is also credited with percussion. 8. There are transcripts of the proceedings, at least one theater play based around the incident, and most useful to my thinking on this issue is Ryan Dohoney’s scholarly article “John Cage, Julius Eastman, and the Homosexual Ego,” in Tomorrow Is the Question: New Directions in Experimental Music Studies, ed. Benjamin Piekut (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014). 9. Friend and Manzo referenced the Unjust Malaise compilation recordings of performances Eastman led as well as his handwritten scores that, back in 2011, were freely available as PDF scans on Mary Jane Leach’s website. They have since been taken down. Archive and survive. 10. Ask not what Julius Eastman can do for you, but what you can do for Julius Eastman.

chapter 20. silences 1. “Plenary Session with Tom Johnson,” Second International Conference on Minimalist Music, University of Missouri-Kansas City, September 3, 2009; see also Tom Johnson, “Almost Nothing,” Journal of Music, December 2009, https://journalofmusic.com/focus/almost-nothing. 2. See, for example, G. Douglas Barrett, “The Silent Network—the Music of Wandelweiser,” Contemporary Music Review 30, no. 6 (2011): 449–70; and Michael Pisaro, “Wandelweiser,” erstwords blog, September 23, 2009, http:// erstwords.blogspot.com/2009/09/wandelweiser.html. 3. Eva-Maria Houben, Die Aufhebung der Zeit (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1992). 4. “Ursprung und Gegenwart”: “Origin and Presence.” This and following notes were originally printed as parenthetical citations in Houben’s essay. 5. Ferrucio Busoni, “Entwurf einer neuen Ästhetik der Tonkunst,” 1907; 1916. 6. B. A. Zimmermann, “Some thoughts on Jazz,” in “Interval and Time.” 7. Houben, Hector Berlioz. Verschwindungen: Anstiftungen zum Hören (Dortmund: NonEM, 2005). 8. Brahms Bruckner. Zwei Studien. Kassel 1989.

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430   |   Notes to Page 388

Chapter 21. Futures 1. The essay includes three additional images, which are not included here: a wave spectrum diagram, a photo montage of Radigue working at synthesizers, and a photo of Radigue with her Naldjorlak collaborators. At the conclusion of the essay, Radigue includes the following acknowledgments: “P.S. Thanks to all my friends. Not being able to name everyone here, I will cite no one. Conscious that each of you know and understand my unfailing fidelity, a gratitude bound to all of the reciprocal respect and esteem that make up the ferment of Life.”

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Index

Abbott, Mark, 232, 236–37, 252 academic composition, 4, 10, 15, 21, 169, 187, 241, 245 Adams, John, 163–65, 232, 238, 239–40, 244–46, 257, 262, 268, 279–84, 299–300, 305, 332; Grand Pianola Music, 264–65, 283–84; Harmonielehre, 165, 264, 284; Harmonium, 239, 264, 282–84, 331; Phrygian Gates, 281; Shaker Loops, 264, 281–82 additive process, 2, 53, 61–62, 101, 257, 287 African music, 70, 96, 137, 172, 262, 349, 354; and cultural fusion, 104–5, 110–11, 113; as influence on minimalism, 10–11, 20–21, 163, 168, 229–30, 235, 238, 242, 351 Alorworye, Gideon, 104, 110 altered states of consciousness, 69–86 Amacher, Maryanne, 165, 203, 211–15 ambient jazz, 379–83 ambient music, 5, 165, 216–31, 247, 327, 328, 333, 347, 371, 379–83 amplification, 119, 204, 223, 251, 322; as a characteristic of minimalism, 3, 4, 12, 253; and Dream Music, 32, 34, 39, 41, 49; in Philip Glass’s music, 60, 61, 122, 192 Anderson, Beth, 196–97, 271, 254–55 Anderson, Laurie, 197, 200, 232 Anderson, Ruth, 70, 77–78

Andriessen, Louis, 166, 268, 269–74 Anti-Illusion exhibition, 118, 121–23 Aphex Twin, 329, 339 Ashley, Robert, 255 Asian music, 10, 11, 22, 72, 113, 229, 230, 235 “Aspects of Minimalism” playlist, 236–37 atonality, 4, 239, 280, 296, 298, 390 Avignon Festival, 173, 177, 178 Babbitt, Milton, 6, 25, 390 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 152, 181, 238, 254, 277, 303, 309 Balinese music, 109–11, 163, 172, 221, 238, 262, 300 Banes, Sally, 66–68 Bang on a Can, 166, 286, 293–94, 333 Baraka, Amiri, 17–18 Bartók, Bela, 23, 48, 133, 290 Basie, William James “Count.” See Count Basie Beatles, The, 2, 27, 55, 87, 99 bebop, 5, 10, 15, 17, 21, 23, 25, 107 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 16, 45, 277, 283, 303–4 Believer, The, 372–75 Berkeley Barb, 115–17 Berkowitz, Kenny, 324–30 Berlioz, Hector, 367–69 Beuger, Anton, 359 Beyoncé, 333, 347, 348, 353

441

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442   |   Index bhang, 11, 71 Bhatnagar, Shyam, 87–88, 105 Big Four, 4, 5, 6, 166, 232, 332, 333 Black minimalism, 346–56 body, 118, 120, 147, 203, 216, 259, 294, 313, 321, 343, 353; as a source for music-making, xvi, xvii, 11–12, 77–78, 82–85, 123–25, 230 Boon, Marcus, 71–72 Borden, Lizzie, 123–25 Boston Symphony Orchestra, 325 Boulanger, Nadia, 87, 100, 148, 241 Boulez, Pierre, 25, 241, 275, 311–12, 316 Bowie, David, 2, 169, 321 Bowler, Paul, 229–31 Branca, Glenn, 164, 186, 193–202, 247, 286 British composers, 53, 62–63, 234 Brooklyn Academy of Music, 165, 174, 240 Brown, Earle, 24–25 Brown, James, 143, 351, 353, 355 Bruckner, Anton, 246, 300, 369 Bruér, Jan, 112–15 Bryars, Gavin, 216, 248, 257, 402 Budd, Harold, 216, 225–28 Buddhism, 11, 79, 82, 88, 97, 99–103, 202, 349 Byron, Michael, 196, 197 Cage, John, xviii, 59, 99, 137, 168–69, 196, 266, 273, 280, 288, 290, 312, 343, 364, 368, 386; as precursor to minimalism, 4, 5, 10, 15–16, 22, 29, 30, 242, 249, 258, 261–62, 332, 337, 348–50, 357–59; views on other composers, 34, 47–48, 186, 187, 198–202 Cale, John, 30, 32–34, 36, 38, 40, 47–49, 69, 104–5, 250, 258, 337, 339 canonization, 6, 7, 166, 232–52, 331–32, 344, 346, 350, 371, 382 Cardew, Cornelius, 47, 48, 63, 64, 191, 280 Carnegie Hall, 2, 13, 104, 163, 238, 240, 253, 325, 332 Carter, Elliott, 163 Castelli-Sonnabend, 248 CBS, 164, 238, 240, 258, 259, 265 Cerulli, Dom, 20–21 Chambers Street loft series, 10, 27, 28, 29, 35 chanting, 70, 78–79, 96–97, 98, 107, 131, 154, 174, 196, 288, 349, 382 Chatham, Rhys, 70, 78–79, 87, 125–26, 164, 186–89, 196–97, 247, 252; Guitar Trio, 192–97 Chavez, Carlos, 54

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Cherry, Don, 5, 87, 105, 112–15, 242, 356 Childs, Lucinda, 175–77 Childs, Mary Ellen, 289–91 choreography, 36, 66, 118, 127, 132, 137, 174, 177, 274 Clayton, Jace, 335, 341–46 Clayton, Jay, xvi, 136 clubs, 15, 23, 25, 155, 164, 277, 295, 322–23, 327–28 Coleman, Ornette, 19, 23, 24, 96, 107, 112, 116 Collins, Shirley, 348, 353–54 Coltrane, Alice, 5, 11, 88, 104, 106–9, 355, 371, 382; Journey in Satchidananda, 88, 94–96, 381 Coltrane, John, 74, 75, 112, 134, 250, 371, 380; Africa/Brass, 11, 20–21; and Alice Coltrane, 94–95, 104, 106–9; influence on minimalism, 23–24; as a minimalist, xviii, 2, 5, 10–11, 15, 17, 18–20 Columbia Records, 52, 54–55, 69, 70, 116, 244, 248–49 Conrad, Tony, 11, 23, 104–5, 119, 265, 331, 371, 372, 374; conflict with La Monte Young, 336–39; and Dream Music, 32–34, 36, 38, 40–43, 48–51, 249, 251 conservatory, 169, 190, 238, 380, 302, 310 Copland, Aaron, 2, 164, 238, 241, 283 Corner, Philip, 28, 30, 70, 78 Cott, Jonathan, 26–29 Count Basie, 331–32 counterculture, 9, 13, 52, 69, 87, 168, 253, 307, 333–34 Cousins, Linda, 79–81 cultural fusion, 104–17 Cunningham, Merce, xv, 36, 266 dance, 22, 66, 73, 110, 137–38, 146, 174, 229–30, 266, 340, 352–54; and minimalism, 12, 118–21; in performance, 126–33, 176–77; and popular music, 321, 323, 327, 329 Davidson, Tina, 289 Day of Niagara, 336, 337, 339 Davies, Peter Maxwell, 64, 275 Davis, Miles, xviii, 7, 10–11, 15, 16–18, 94, 134, 259, 353 Dean, Laura, 119, 126–29 DeGroat, Andrew, 177 De Leeuw, Reinbert, 269, 271–73 Dennis, Brian, 63–64 Derr, Emily, 70, 77–78 Dews, Angela, 106–9

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Index   |   443 disciples, 2, 11, 74, 87–103, 168, 180, 240, 242, 307, 353, 389 discipline, 4, 48, 62–64, 196, 314, 354 disco, 5, 165, 186, 191, 240, 321, 322–23, 327 Doerschuk, Bob, 225–28 DownBeat, 18–20, 108 Dream House, 71, 72, 92, 208, 243 Dream Music, 32–51, 118, 336, 338 Dream Syndicate, 32, 39, 251. See also Theatre of Eternal Music Dreyblatt, Arnold, 203–4, 336–39 drones, 21, 25, 70, 85–88, 96, 118, 124–25, 208–9, 223, 250–53, 345, 351, 366, 374, 376, 382; and Dream Music, 32–34, 37–39, 44, 49, 91, 104–5, 180, 185, 242; in minimalism, 2–5, 10–12, 15, 18, 111, 325, 333, 371–72 Druckman, Jacob, 246 drugs, 2, 11, 60, 69, 70–72, 182, 255, 273 Dubinets, Elena, 300–306 EAR Magazine, 187–90, 287 Eastman, Julius, 138–39, 286, 341–46, 353; as minimalist, 5, 7, 232; as part of the new downtown scene, 164, 186–87, 189–90; as political and expressive, 268, 274–79 ECM, 156–57, 168–70, 245, 247, 264–65, 307–8, 310, 382–83 Eicher, Manfred, 307, 382 Einstein on the Beach, xvii, 7, 13, 164, 167–68, 172–79, 239–40, 250, 259, 292, 340, 354. See also Glass, Philip Eno, Brian, 2, 4, 5, 163, 216–20, 227, 229, 232, 247, 321, 327–30, 380 Essence, 6, 106–9 Ewe, 13, 104, 110, 230 Experimental Intermedia, 70, 182, 203, 248, 290 Face, The, 255–65 Farber, Viola, 31, 119, 129–31 Feldman, David, 196 Feldman, Morton, 34, 65, 77, 358 film, 27, 28, 65, 116, 132–33, 169, 195, 274, 310, 320–21, 336, 338; and minimalism, 12, 33, 47, 118–19, 122, 207, 250–51; and Philip Glass, 4, 10, 100, 173, 241, 246, 256, 259, 264, 324, 328 Floating Points, 371, 379–80 Fluxus, xviii, 7, 35, 208, 225–26, 242, 261, 263, 271, 272, 337 Flying Hearts, The, 191–92

O'Brien and Robin-On Minimalism.indd 443

Flynt, Henry, 21–26, 28, 64, 87, 168, 179–85, 250–51, 350 Forti, Simone, 28, 29, 105, 118, 124 Fox, Terry, 252 Frankenstein, Alfred, 3, 53–54, 121–23 free jazz, 23–24, 247, 250, 287, 296 Frey, Jürg, 357, 359, 361–64 Fulkerson, James, 207–8 Fullman, Ellen, 6, 165, 203–7 funk, 294, 353, 354 galleries, 12, 15, 25, 56, 248, 249, 272, 294–95, 343, 349; as performance venues, xviii, 2, 115–16, 118–19, 123, 150, 153, 203, 238, 277 gamelan, 109, 164, 165, 168, 172, 194, 195, 238, 262, 288 Gann, Kyle, 286–91, 331–32 Gena, Peter, 287 genre, 2, 5, 21, 75, 181–83, 221, 225, 232, 251–52, 265, 321, 333, 347, 380 Gershwin, George, 2, 238 Ghana, 13, 104, 110, 166, 229–30, 242, 262, 350 Gibson, Jon, 134, 135, 140, 149–52, 251 Gibson, Randy, 271, 375–79 Giteck, Janice, 288, 290–91 Glamour, 52, 54–55 Glass, Philip, 12, 72, 136, 166, 168, 232, 252, 308, 333, 352; additive process of, 53, 60–62, 256; Akhnaten, 240, 260; Buddhist practices of, 88, 99–103; criticism of, 246, 253–65, 272–73, 279, 293; Einstein on the Beach, xvii, 7, 13, 164, 167–68, 172–79, 239, 240, 250, 259, 292, 340, 354; as ensemble leader, xvi–xvii, 158–62; influence of Indian music on, 10, 11, 75, 100–102; influence on other musicians, 186, 192, 280, 286, 321–22, 324–30, 335; Koyaanisqatsi, 246, 256, 264–65, 321, 324, 328; musical development of, 87, 238, 241; Music in Fifths; 61–62, 74, 148, 146, 161; Music in Similar Motion, 61, 70, 74; Music in Twelve Parts, 62, 140–41, 143, 144, 148, 157, 160, 258–59, 326, 335, 339–40; Music with Changing Parts, 61–62, 144, 248; 1 + 1, 61; as an originator of minimalism, 1–6, 70, 101–2, 118, 122, 163, 178–79, 244, 250, 265, 280, 287, 292, 350; Satyagraha, 246, 259, 260, 262–64, 33; success of, 164–65, 167, 193, 238–40, 249, 251, 293, 332, 334

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444   |   Index God, 214, 254, 267309, 318, 328; in non-Western traditions, 81, 88, 90, 94, 95, 98, 109, 260, 307 gong, 34–35, 36, 39, 46, 118, 249, 270 Goodman, Peter, 238–47 Gopal Nayak, 89–90 Gordon, Edward Larry. See Laraaji Gordon, Michael, 166, 286, 287, 291–92 Gordon, Peter, 186, 188–89, 196 Górecki, Henryk, 166, 307, 308–11, 318–20 gurus, 7, 11, 87–103, 180–81, 185, 263, 267 Halprin, Ann, 36 Hamel, Peter, 221–22, 225 Handelman, Eliot, 211–15 Hartnoll, Paul, 324–26 hashish, 71–72 Hassell, Jon, 55, 71–72, 87, 225, 382 healing, 7, 12, 70, 73, 77–78, 80–81, 85, 117, 216, 381 Hennies, Sarah, 371, 384–88 Hennix, Catherine Christer, 5, 11, 87, 232; The Electric Harpsichord, 7, 168, 179–85 High Fidelity, 164, 232, 322–23 Higuera, Henry, 64–66 Hill, Alec, 63–64 Hill, Stephen, 216, 220–25 Hinduism, 9, 11, 22, 74, 91, 95, 98, 109 historiography, 4, 344, 346 Holden, Stephen, 322–23 Houben, Eva-Maria, 7, 357–59, 360, 364–70 Hovda, Eleanor, 289, 291 Huang, Chungliang Al, 85, 88, 96–97 Hurwitz, Robert, 307 hypnotic, 9, 34, 170, 187, 207, 231, 360, 373, 382; as a characteristic of minimalism, 1, 3–4, 6, 13, 60, 66, 70, 74, 79, 164, 261–63 I Ching, 59, 99 improvisation, xvi, 13, 173, 182, 208–9, 211, 243, 276, 288, 295–96, 327, 337, 338, 354, 360, 366–67, 381, 383, 387; as a characteristic of minimalism, 5, 15–31, 165, 257; in early minimalism, 11, 32–33, 53–56, 60, 62, 70, 73–74, 86, 104–6, 112–13, 118, 124, 130, 134–37, 144, 146, 150–51, 153–54, 156–57, 244 Impulse Records, 24, 109 incense, 32, 45, 71, 88, 102, 106, 267

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indeterminacy, 10, 53, 62 Indian music, 238, 251, 262, 374, 382; and cultural fusion, 106–7, 109–15; influence on minimalism, 1, 9–11, 34, 49, 60, 71–72, 87–94, 96, 99–102, 122, 137, 242–43 Ingber, Lester, 88, 97 intonation, 11, 136, 203, 205, 208, 251, 375–79, 392; and Dream Music, 33, 39, 41, 49; and non-Western music, 74, 88–89, 91, 93, 168 Jaar, Nicolás, 383 James, Richard D. See Aphex Twin Jamrozy, Paul, 307, 318–20 Jarvinen, Arthur, 387 jazz, xvi, 48, 54, 73–75, 104, 107–8, 112, 134, 137, 149–50, 152, 156, 187, 221, 224–25, 247, 250, 268, 274–77, 287–88, 296, 305, 307, 325, 349, 353, 371; as ambient, 380–81, 384; as precursor to minimalism, xviii, 5, 7, 10, 15–16, 19–25, 168–69, 179–80, 241–42 Jennings, Terry, 24, 28, 104–6, 251, 350 Johnson, Dennis, 24 Johnson, Tom, 13, 75–77, 105, 165–66, 184, 196, 248, 331; defining minimalism, 3, 6, 70, 233–35, 357 Johnston, Jill, 33–37 Jones, A. M., 104, 351 Jones, Brian, 73, 116 Jowitt, Deborah, 126–29, 132 Judaism, 267–68, 284 Juilliard, 1, 110, 152, 169, 241, 242 Kalvos & Damian, 297–99 Khan, Ali Akbar, 9, 10 Khanate, 372–73 Kirana, 11, 87–90, 93, 376 Kirchner, Leon, 240, 244, 246, 280 Kitchen, The, 75–77, 78–79, 125–26, 129–31, 183–84, 196, 191, 197, 254–55 Koopmans, Rudy, 269–74 Korndorf, Nikolai, 286, 305–6 Kraftwerk, 322, 327–28 Krishna, 45, 91, 101, 266–67 Kronos Quartet, 164 La Barbara, Joan, xv–xviii, 3, 129–31, 134, 136, 152–55 Landry, Richard (“Dickie”), 57, 134, 144, 155–58 landscape, 216, 218–19 Lang, David, 286, 292–93

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Index   |   445 Laraaji, 70, 79–81, 216 Lauten, Elodie, 286, 294–96 Lennon, John, 16, 26–28, 140 Light, Alan, 233, 247–52, 265–67 List, Garrett, xvi, 125, 126, 154 Lloyd, Kate, 43–46 Lockwood, Annea, 70, 77–78 lofts, 180, 188, 190, 203–4, 208, 233, 250, 336; as venues for early minimalism, xvi, xviii, 2, 10, 12, 16, 27–29, 32–33, 35, 77, 87, 104, 132, 133, 164, 238, 242, 256 Lomax, Alan, 348, 353–54 Longo, Robert, 194–95, 197 loops, 295, 341, 371; in early minimalism, 2, 7, 11, 52–68, 136, 242, 249–50, 350–51 loudness, 197–98, 204, 207, 217, 218, 239, 254–55, 273, 328, 349; in early minimalism, 3, 12, 33, 41, 54, 77, 115, 122, 124, 126, 129–30, 142, 146, 166, 325 LSD, 69, 244, 260, 261 Lucier, Alvin, 119, 371, 387; Still and Moving Lines of Silence in Families of Hyperbolas, xv, 129–31 MacDonald, Ian, 253, 255–65 Maciunas, George, 28, 35, 208, 350 MacLise, Angus, 25, 249 MacLow, Jackson, 28, 35, 79 Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, 87, 99 manifesto, 3, 6, 53, 186 Mann, Frankie, 196–97 marijuana, 69 Marshall, Ingram, 164, 286, 299–300 Master Musicians of Jajouka, 4, 73–74 mathematics, 33, 168, 180–83, 206, 247, 313, 336, 338, 340 Maxfield, Richard, 28, 350 McLuhan, Marshall, 52, 323 meditation, 187–88, 222, 225, 256, 267, 295, 359, 374, 381–82; in early minimalism, 2, 7, 12–13, 34, 70, 80–87, 96–98, 101–2, 112, 133; 154, 176, Mehta, Zubin, 247, 275 Mengelberg, Misha, 269–73 Menuhin, Yehudi, 9 Mertens, Wim, 166, 198–202, 260 Metropolitan Opera, 167, 173, 175, 238–40 Mills College, 116, 181, 241 minimalism: across disciplines, 118–33; backlash against, 253–67; canonization of, 6–7, 166, 232–52, 331–32; and

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cultural fusion, 104–17; definition, 4, 232, 332; and ensembles, 134–62; and gurus, 87–103; historiography, 2–7, 346–56; and jazz, 5, 7, 10–11, 15–26, 74–75; origins, 2, 5, 9–13; and popular music, 46–51, 321–30; spirituality of, 69–86, 307–20 modernism, 25, 165, 169, 185, 253, 288, 300, 308–9, 311 modal, 91, 173, 182, 209, 273, 296; as characteristic of early minimalism, xviii, 3, 7, 11, 18, 23, 60, 70, 73–75, 104, 117 modular, 52, 239, 264, 281, 298 Monk, Meredith, 7, 11–12, 53, 79, 119, 131–33, 134–35, 166, 255; Dolmen Music, 138–39, 342; Our Lady of Late, 66–68 monotony, 9, 22, 165, 262, 325, 351, 354 Moog synthesizer, 53, 65 Moore, Carman, 56–58, 105–6 Moroder, Giorgio, 5, 321, 323, 327 Morris, Robert, 28, 34, 118–20 Morrow, Charlie, 31, 78–79, 154 Mother Mallard’s Portable Masterpiece Company, 53, 64–66 Ms. magazine, 131–33 Muhly, Nico, 335, 339–40 Munkacsi, Kurt, 139–43 Murphy, Arthur, 57, 134–35 Museum of Modern Art, xvii, 9, 113, 148 Muzak, 219, 224–25, 329 mysticism, 16, 33, 76, 109, 175, 178, 216, 260, 261, 301–2, 308–11. See also spiritual minimalism Nauman, Bruce, 118, 121, 123 neo-Romanticism, 164, 268, 300, 359 New Age, 164–65, 216, 220–24, 247, 250, 257, 310, 311 New Music, New York, 186, 196–97, 253–55 New Music America, 186, 198–202 Newsday, 232, 238–47 New Wilderness, 154 New Yorker, 358–61 New York Hypnotic School, 3, 6, 13, 70. See also Johnson, Tom New York Philharmonic, 163, 239, 245–46, 275 New York Times, 12, 29–31, 109–12, 125–26, 132, 148, 384–88; defining minimalism, 5–6, 9, 72–75, 232, 308–11, 331

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446   |   Index

Obscure Records, 216, 257 Olatunji, Babatunde Michael, 11 Oldfield, Mike, 52 Oliveros, Pauline, 2, 5, 11–12, 69–70, 81–86, 88, 96–99, 134, 254, 354 O’Malley, Stephen, 372–75 Ono, Yoko, 7, 10, 12, 16, 26–29, 35, 36, 104, 242, 350 Option, 324–30 Orb, The, 324, 328–29, 333 Orbison, Roy, 373 Orbital, 324–26 organ, 173, 191, 249, 254, 258, 347, 359–60, 365–66; in early minimalism, xvi, 12, 74, 105–6, 115–16, 135, 141, 145–46, 160, 250–51, 256, 325–26, 340 Organic Music Society, 112–15 organum, 171 overtones, 194, 197, 205–6, 209, 211, 243, 248, 319, 365, 376, 387; in early minimalism, 34, 38, 41, 61, 71, 74, 77, 79

135–36, 171, 242, 250, 257, 325, 327, 350 Philip Glass Ensemble, xvi, xvii, 12, 134–35, 139–62, 292. See also Glass, Philip Pincus-Witten, Robert, 286 Pisaro, Michael, 360 Pocket Theatre, 29, 33, 34, 36 Poons, Larry, 43–44 postminimalism, 165, 166, 186, 286–306, 332 Pran Nath, Pandit, xviii, 11, 72, 74, 87, 88–94, 168, 180–81, 185, 208, 243, 307, 337, process, 48, 52–68, 90, 182, 188, 227–28, 281, 283, 290, 297, 298, 303–5, 341, 345, 362, 367; in Philip Glass’s music, 2, 12, 101, 257, 335, 340; in Steve Reich’s music, 6, 119, 127, 135, 167, 170–71, 272; pulse, xvii, xviii, 76, 180–81, 207, 212, 281–82, 298–99, 323, 340, 385, 388–92; as a characteristic of minimalism, 1–2, 41, 52, 54, 55, 238–39, 256–58, 260, 263, 269, 286, 327, 329, 332–34, 371; in Steve Reich’s music, 122, 127, 129–30, 164, 170–71 punk, 33, 50, 186, 193, 196, 319, 386 purity, 27, 36, 37, 88, 90, 124, 256, 263, 309, 318, 347 Pyramids, 70, 75

Page, Tim, 168–70, 232, 236–37 painting, 133, 138, 149, 174, 218–19, 348–49; and early minimalism, xviii, 22, 24, 27–29, 35, 37, 43–44, 99, 118, 120–21 Palestine, Charlemagne, xviii, 12, 79, 87, 118, 123–26, 159, 248–49, 252, 331, 333; criticism of minimalism, 165, 265–67 Palmer, Robert, 3, 5, 70, 72–75 Paradinas, Mike, 326, 330 Park Place Gallery, 56, 118, 150 Parsons, Michael, 53, 64 Pärt, Arvo, 166, 302, 307–18, 333 Partch, Harry, 208, 265, 386 Passman, Arnie, 115–17 Paterson, Alex, 328–29 Peck, Richard, 143–45 peyote, 69, 99 phasing, xvi, 65, 79, 111, 120, 180, 182, 187, 289, 296; in Steve Reich’s music, 2, 53, 57, 74, 104, 119, 122, 126–27,

Rabinovitch-Barakovsky, Alexandre, 286, 300–302 Radigue, Éliane, 70, 331, 334, 371, 388–92: Psi 847, 75–77 radio, 26, 27, 43, 49, 133, 149, 153, 155, 184, 196, 216, 238, 271, 275, 277, 310, 322–23, 341; broadcasts of Indian music, 9, 90–91, 94, 100; as presenter of minimalism, 5, 223–24, 249, 295, 307, 332, 343 raga, 1, 9–10, 23, 57, 72, 74, 88–94, 104–6, 117, 181, 238, 243 Rainer, Yvonne, xvi, 28, 36, 118, 120–21 Ranaldo, Lee, 192–96 Rauschenberg, Robert, 348–49 Reed, Lou, 48, 51 Reich, Steve, xviii, 72–73, 150, 243, 246, 251, 270, 305; Come Out, 11, 53, 57, 118, 242, 250, 284; criticism of, 254, 258, 261, 264, 271, 279; The Desert Music, 241, 256, 260; Different Trains, 284–85, 331; Drumming, 74, 105,

Niblock, Phill, 12, 119, 203–4, 207–8, 248–50, 331–32 No Wave, 164, 186 Nonesuch, 73, 229, 248, 256, 259, 264, 307–8, 322, 325, 340 Northwestern University, 268, 278–79 Nyman, Michael, 3–4, 62–64, 257

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Index   |   447 126–29, 135–36, 153, 248, 329; Four Organs, 153, 163, 250, 253, 293, 325; influence of non-Western music on, 75, 104–5, 109–12; influence on other musicians of, 63, 164–65, 186, 193, 216, 229–30, 244, 268, 280–81, 286–87, 297–98, 308, 321–22, 325–30, 332; It’s Gonna Rain, 11, 52, 242, 250, 284, 327, 350; musical development of, 10–13, 15, 69, 118, 239, 242, 249, 351; “Music as a Gradual Process,” 6, 53, 58–60; Music for Eighteen Musicians, 7, 13, 164, 167–72, 293, 326, 329; Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices and Organ, 153, 259; as an originator of minimalism, 1–6, 70, 102, 232, 238, 257, 265, 325, 350; Pendulum Music, 119, 122; phasing techniques of, xvi, 52–53, 56–58, 122, 242; Piano Phase, 53, 57, 135, 153, 250, 269, 272, 289, 322; Steve Reich and Musicians, 12, 128, 134, 136; success of, 162–63, 165, 240–41, 332, 334; Tehillim, 163, 247, 260, 268; Variations for Winds, Strings, and Keyboards, 259; Violin Phase, 122, 265; work with ensembles, 134–38, 153, 191 Reich Remixed, 322 Relache ensemble, 288–91 religion, 34, 188, 192, 199, 223–25, 299, 305, 307, 309, 315, 358; and non-Western traditions, 72–73, 81, 107, 109, 113, 262 repetition: after 1976, 164, 166, 207, 230, 233, 252–53, 262, 268, 272, 279, 282, 288, 295–96, 300–301, 303–4, 308, 325, 349, 351, 354, 368, 380, 386–87; in early minimalism, 1, 3–5, 10, 12–13, 16, 23, 31, 53, 54, 60, 63, 65, 67, 70, 72–75, 81, 116, 120–21, 127, 239, 249, 255–57 resonance, xvii, 67, 131, 154, 192, 204, 208, 209–11, 280, 377 Riley, Terry, xviii, 32–33, 36, 72, 140, 150–51, 180, 240, 251, 261–62, 332; In C, 1, 3–4, 11, 47, 52–55, 69, 121, 134, 164, 166, 232, 242, 244, 257–58, 300; influence of non-Western music on, 74, 87, 105, 113–17; influence on other musicians of, 48, 63, 225, 229–30, 268, 286; Mescalin Mix, 12, 52; musical development of, 11–12, 25, 53, 55–56; Music for the Gift, 11, 52, 56; as an originator of minimalism, 1–7, 47, 70,

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102, 162–63, 238, 250, 257, 271, 325, 350–51; Persian Surgery Dervishes, 115–17, 249; A Rainbow in Curved Air, 69–70, 115–17, 248–49, 258, 263, 297, 331; Reed Streams, 249 ritual, 5, 11, 13, 52, 54, 60, 64, 72–73, 176, 300–301, 374, 385 rock, xvi, 5, 24, 27, 49–50, 73, 111, 138–39, 146–47, 154, 216, 224, 246, 255, 296, 310, 322, 326–28, 374, 386; and minimalism, 57, 60, 163, 168–69, 179, 186–87, 189, 196–97, 242, 251, 286–87, 291, 294, 332, 351 Rockwell, John, 125–26, 148, 172–79, 196–97, 232, 308–11 Rolling Stone, 26–29 Rollins, Sonny, 24, 112 Rose, Barbara, 118 Ross, Alex, 358–61 Rotter, Janet, 52, 54–55 Russell, Arthur, 164, 186, 191–92 Russell, George, 15 Rutherford-Johnson, Timothy, 322 Rzewski, Frederic, 5 Sanders, Pharoah, 104, 371, 379–82 San Diego Magazine, 97–99 San Francisco Chronicle, 53–54 San Francisco Examiner, 121–23 San Francisco Symphony, 239, 244–45, 259, 282 San Francisco Tape Music Center, 53, 69 Satie, Erik, 48, 67, 290, 365; Vexations, 16, 29–31, 97 Scha, Remko, 252 Schoenberg, Arnold, 4, 10, 25, 27, 169, 238, 241, 242, 256, 281, 284, 367 Schonberg, Harold C., 12, 29–31 Schwarz, K. Robert, 279–84 sculpture, xviii, 12, 54, 55, 118–21, 125, 248 serialism, 22, 25, 27, 53, 59, 164, 188–89, 272, 286, 301, 312–14, 316; as precursor to minimalism, 4, 10, 12–13 Serra, Richard, 12, 119, 333 Sahib, Waheed Khan, 89–90 Shankar, Ravi, 10, 99–101, 241 Shepard, Craig, 359 Shepp, Archie, 104, 108 Sherburne, Philip, 379–84 Simone, Nina, 343 sine tones, xv, 77, 92, 180, 249–50, 360, 376 Sinephro, Nala, 380–81, 384

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448   |   Index Skempton, Howard, 63 Smith, Amanda, 131–33 Smith, Rick, 326 Smith, Steve, 384–88 Snow, Michael, 12, 118–19, 122, 250 Society for Minimalist Music, 332, 357 Soft Machine, 48, 354 SoHo Weekly News, xviii, 78–79, 129–31, 155, 176, 191–93 Sonnabend Gallery, 118, 248 Sounds out of Silent Spaces, 70, 78 Souster, Tim, 46–48 Southam, Ann, 164, 286, 297–99 spirituality, 13, 74, 80, 85, 98, 132, 144, 164, 166, 188, 221–23, 256, 281, 299, 301, 381, 383; as a characteristic of minimalism, 11, 262, 334; and non-Western traditions, 87–90, 95–96, 107–9, 267 spiritual minimalism, 166, 307–20 Spotify, 7, 333, 382 stasis, 10, 66, 130, 141, 228, 281, 303, 328, 336, 359, 362, 364; as a characteristic of minimalism, 3–4, 6, 85, 239, 242, 244; and Dream Music, 3–4, 6, 40 Steve Reich and Musicians, 12, 128, 134, 136 Stockhausen, Karlheinz, 22–23, 48, 63, 71 Stoever, Jennifer Lynn, 347–48 Stosuy, Brandon, 372–75 Strauss, Renate, 274–78 Stravinsky, Igor, 48, 164, 264, 268 Summer, Donna, 2, 5, 321, 323, 327 Sunn O))), 6, 371–75 Suzuki, Dean, 225–28 Swami Satchidananda, 11, 88, 94–95, 101, 104 Tableau Comparatif des Intervalles Musicaux, 104, 181 tai chi, 11, 85–86, 88, 96–97, 133 Takada, Midori, 166, 216, 229; Through the Looking Glass, 229–31 Tangerine Dream, 73, 247, 327 tape, 69, 140, 208, 256–57, 284–85, 290, 320, 388; for looping techniques, 1, 11, 13, 52–54, 56, 58, 65, 116, 131, 135–36, 180–84, 242–43, 249–51, 327; for recording purposes, 24, 37, 49, 87–88, 90–91, 106, 108–9, 113, 168, 336–37, 339, 350–51 Taylor, Cecil, 23, 70, 349 techno, 164, 230, 322–30, 382

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technology, 2, 11, 132, 167, 182, 184, 186, 198, 200, 204, 223–24, 290, 322, 323, 328 Telson, Bob, 145–49 Tenney, James, 30, 59, 119, 135 Test Dept, 307, 320 Theatre of Eternal Music, 5, 11, 12, 16, 36–51, 70, 118, 168, 249, 251, 258, 335. See also Dream Syndicate Thomson, William, 25 Time magazine, 4, 163, 232–33 tintinnabulation, 302, 313, 315–17 tonality, xviii, 2, 11, 74, 180, 245, 262, 283, 287, 296, 298, 301, 305, 358, 390 Toop, David, 333, 335, 346–56, 381 Town Hall, 106, 13, 167–68, 170; as venue for Glass concerts, xvii, 139–40, 142–43, 147, 149, 151–52, 157–59, 162 trance music, 3–5, 70, 72–75, 239, 261 Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, 99–103 troubadour, 186–87, 190, 200 Tudor, David, 28–31, 199 Tulsi, 96, 104 tuning. See intonation Turner, Anna, 216 twelve-tone music, 10, 15, 205, 241, 287–88, 297–98, 312. See also serialism Tyler, the Creator, 333, 346, 353 Tyner, McCoy, 5, 19, 21, 70, 73–74, 107 Underworld, 324, 326–27, 329 University of Buffalo Creative Associates, 275 Upshaw, Dawn, 307 uptown, 17, 163, 238, 246, 253, 325 utopian, 33, 69, 113, 260, 263, 334 Van Cleve, Libby, 291–93 Van Tiegham, David, 191 van Zweden, Hans, 269, 271 Velvet Underground, 33, 47–51, 232, 242, 250 Vierk, Lois V., 288–91 Village Voice, 6, 33–37, 56–58, 88–94, 105–6, 119, 126–29, 132, 172–79, 192, 286–91, 329, 331; columns by Tom Johnson, 3, 13, 75–77, 165, 232–35, 357 Viola Farber Dance Company, 119, 129–30 Vishnu, 96, 266–67 visual arts, 12, 118–25, 149, 248 Vogue, 43–46 Wada, Yoshi, 11, 87, 119, 203, 371; Earth Horns, 7, 125–26; Lament for the Rise

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Index   |   449 and Fall of the Elephantine Crocodile, 208–11 Wagner, Richard, 175–76, 178–79, 201, 302; Das Rheingold, 126, 163, 232 Walsh, Michael, 163–64 Wandelweiser, xviii, 333, 357–70 Warhol, Andy, 47–48, 118, 255 Webern, Anton, 27, 64, 111, 281, 312, 314, 316, 367 Werder, Manfred, 359 White, John, 53, 216, 257 Whitney Museum, 12, 118, 121–23 Who, The, 47, 52, 140 Williams, Paul, 69 Wilson, Robert, 167, 173, 175–79, 239–40, 259, 324, 338 Winter, Julie, 70, 77–78 Wire, The, 318–20, 337 WKCR, 5, 169, 232, 236–37 WNYC, 288, 295, 332 Wolfe, Julia, 164, 286, 294 Wolff, Christian, 30, 150 ♀ Ensemble, 12, 70, 86, 96–97 Wuorinen, Charles, 169, 240, 245–46 Yale Oral History of American Music, 291–92 Yates, Peter, 40–43 yoga, 11, 13, 34, 82, 97, 99–102, 104, 109, 117

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Young, La Monte, 1–4, 69, 79, 104–5, 162, 192, 243, 270–71, 374; The Black Record, 249–50; Compositions 1960, 15–16, 35, 64, 118; conflict with Tony Conrad, 336–39; Dream Music of, 25, 32–51, 118, 248, 258, 336, 338; relationship to Indian music, xviii, 10, 72, 74–75, 87–94, 242, 261; Fluxus work of, 10, 15–16, 22, 28–29, 35, 242; influence on other musicians, 47–48, 51, 64, 140, 180–82, 184–85, 196, 208, 216, 225–26, 250, 371, 375–77; as an originator of minimalism, 6, 23, 70, 102, 163, 232, 238–39, 244, 251, 253, 260, 262, 265, 325, 332, 350; performance of jazz by, 5, 11, 15, 22–25, 242; Trio for Strings, 1, 10, 15, 240, 242; The Well-Tuned Piano, 165, 180, 337. See also Theatre of Eternal Music Youngs, Richard, 252 Zagny, Sergei, 286, 302–5 Zazeela, Marian, xviii, 87, 92–93, 105, 165, 208, 243, 249, 375; and Dream Music, 25, 32–36, 38, 40, 42 Zen, 82, 84, 87, 99, 202, 262, 349. See also Buddhism Zummo, Peter, 191–92

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