Music Maze 3

Today's aural pleasure is a compilation of minimalist music from the 70s and 80s simply titled Minimalist, and featuring works by John Adams, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, and David Heath - most of whom no longer use the term 'minimalism'.

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).

A musical interlude

It's work, work, work today, following an extra-long swim and an extra-long breakfast. Neal's moved into my office to write his MSc, and everyone thinks he works here. To aid concentration, we're having a Minimalist Marathon, mostly Steve Reich stuff with some Andriessen, Glass, Adams, Feldman and Riley thrown in. Mmmmm… hypnotic. Make a difference from singing Devo's Mongoloid and Sir Mix-A-Lot's 'Baby Got Back' all the time.

Talking of Devo…

Nessun bloody Dorma? You're having a laugh

Cynical Ben has been to the opera - Rufus Wainwright's supposed revival of the genre in particular - Prima Donna, and came back with mixed feelings. Despite not being able to spell 'apparently', he's got some really interesting things to say about it. Here's the pennyworth I added in the comments section of his piece.

I was really interested in what you'd make of this. I'm not a huge fan of Rufus Wainwright, but don't dislike his music either. I applaud his adventurousness, and think that the classical world could do with some new blood. But: a classical composer who thought he could wander into a record company's office, toss off some songs he made up on the tube and expect respect would be laughed at, so I'm not sure who thought getting Rufus in would be a good move. Whether you're an opera fan or not, it takes a lifetime to understand the genre's requirements, history and limitations - only then can you start to break the rules creatively, as Shakespeare points out in Sonnet 130. The same goes for pop music of course.

This thing about bringing tunes back betrays the lack of understanding behind the project. I like tunes. However, modernism in classical music posed the central question of how prettiness and order, which tunes represent - though not always the former - can reflect into a world of mechanisation, mass slaughter and so on: a world without direction in a sense. Composers turned to other ways to order their music, or to disorder. Pop music, with some exceptions (Scott Walker?), largely but not entirely turns away from examining and representing the philosophical and existential dilemmas. That's why contemporary classical music is more challenging and experimental than rock and pop: even Glass's Doctor Atomic, which is post-minimalist and melodic, is still experimental. If Wainwright thinks opera is or should be about tunes, he's actually writing a musical.

On the singing style - I absolutely loathe the exaggerated warbling style (coloratura, it's called). Thankfully, this German Romantic/post-Romantic style is very much on the way out, so it'll be safe to go back into the opera house. Finally, everyone - opera's only the preserve of the posh in the Anglophone world. In Italy, it's a lot cheaper than seeing a Serie A match and everybody goes.