My collection of minimalist/post-minimalist music has expanded massively since I acquired this CD sometime in the 1990s. However, this was my first exposure to post-classical music: I loved (and still love) Vaughan Williams and all the other forms of classical music, but until a guy at school played me this and some Penderecki (of which more in a later post), I'd never heard anything which wasn't pretty and tuneful. The idea that serious music could and should reflect the complexities, joys and horrors of contemporary life was a revelation. This was music not to be consumed or hummed, but music which required both an emotional and an intellectual response and engagement.
The first pieces are the four movements of John Adam's 1978 Shaker Loops. Shakers were a small American Protestant sect from the 18th/19th century who used to tremble in ecstasy while praying and singing, and are more famous now for their beautiful, plain furniture - so there's a double reference in the tremolo and oscillation which characterises this music. The individualistic nature of Shaker prayer must have something to do with Adams' intentions too: minimalism privileges the tiniest changes over the course of long, repetitive pieces, creating a claustrophobic relationship between the music and the listener. Shaker Loops is meditative, thrilling, and the perfect introduction to minimalism as a uniquely American and post-modern music, mixing the Classical with jazz, rock, electronica, African and Indian music.
Here's an orchestral version (it was written as a septet then adapted) with a General Motors video - perhaps making a link between industry and repetition.
Next up is Philip Glass's Façades, originally composed for the film Koyaanisqatsi, a minimalist take on filming the human environment. Façades is again highly repetitive, with a haunting oboe line interacting with looping strings.
After that, it's Steve Reich's Eight Lines. Reich was always the most technical of the minimalists, and the most outgoing: he used sampling and tape looping in the 60s, before popular music got anywhere near it, and spent a lot of time in Ghana learning new rhythmical techniques. Eight Lines is a magnificent example of the paradoxically liberating effect of close repetition allied to subtle time shifts - listen to it for a long time and new sounds and rhythms emerge mysteriously. I love the flute part floating over the strings and woodwind.
After that comes Glass's doomy Company and then an extract from John Adams's amazing opera Nixon in China: the first time an opera dealt with current politics, in this case Nixon's bold visit to that country to seek detente with Mao, another wily, murderous weirdo. The final Adams piece on the CD is Short Ride in a Fast Machine, infamously dumped from the Proms after Diana's death. The CD finished with Heath's The Frontier, which mixes minimalism with the shock-horror of atonal modernist music to thrilling effect (not on the web, disappointingly).
(Sorry about the chopped up words at the end/beginning of lines - bloody Blogger's useless formatting that I can't fix).
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