Minimalism as Political Stance

There's a quote from Christopher Small's book "Music-Society-Education" which I keep nearby and is relevant to Kyle's experience. Small is talking about a gamelan performance, but the relevance is clear: "Each individual iinstrumental part, in itself, makes no great demands on the player; the skill lies in the integration of each part into the whole, the precise timing of the beater stroke, the interaction of two instruments which may share the same melodic line - all demanding communal rather than individual virtuosity, social rather than individualistic skills." --- that last phrase has shaped just about every endeavor I've undertaken, and continues to inspire almost all of my projects.
Best to all, ...
Dan B. --
Common Sense Composers' Collective

Thanks, Kyle, you got me thinking. So I'm writing a piece for my middle school band using some of these "old" techniques.

Kyle, you've hit the nail on the head. I have some live tapes of Glass's ensemble where it is clear that some of the wind and vocal performers drop out from time to time to catch their breath. And it's fine---the idea isn't that all these patterns be 100% perfect. It's like the imperfections in Turkish rugs that Feldman admired; the lack of mechanical repetition is what makes the music human.

Kyle --

Your explanation of what so-called minimalist composers in the 60s and 70s were doing, and why, is a lot more compelling to me than the sociological explanations for the rise of minimalism offered by Robert Fink in his recent book ("Repeating Ourselves", 2005, UCal Press). Although his arguments are ingenious and his observations sometimes insightful, his naive views on advertising would be laughed off-the-stage by anyone with any commercial experience.

Hi, Kyle,

Thank you for posting this. I often wonder why my radio show so often ends up playing 70s music. I think you've nailed it - the attitude of Everyman is easier to find in those raw sounds. Just to make the point as a consumer of music: The 70s recordings of Einstein on the Beach or Music in 12 Parts or Music for 18 Musicians are fundamentally different from the 90s recordings - again, I bring up production techniques (as opposed to composing techniques) to illustrate the overall consistency of what you describe. The recordings are "punk," in a DIY, raw, less processed sense. They happen. They aren't clean. And you don't have Glass praising the virtuosity of his ensemble (like in the 90s), you just have him going "hot damn! I've got a record!"

In yet another artistic area, I have begun reading Varnadoes history of abstract art since 1950, "Picutures of Nothing." Beyond the little joy that Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage, and Merle Cunningham were an inseparable quad in the late 50s, it shows many other parallels with what you describe. Perhaps we are too close to the original moments to understand the times well enough, but the "Reagen Revolution" really did seem to usher in a deeper conservatism that pushed aside the liberalism of the 60s and 70s.

I honestly look forward to newer pieces, in the vein you describe, be they for middle school band (how I would have loved to play something like that in our high school saxophone quartet!) or more expert student ensembles or someone like the Tin Hat Trio or Ethel. The infrastructure for New Process music exists. It just has to be tapped. And then I'll do my damnedest to promote it here in little old Maine...

To Dan Becker: thanks for the quote - while I only played in a gamelan for 2 years, that is *exactly* how I felt about the experience, and why it has remained a valuable part of my life as a musician. And so very apropos to Kyle's material.

Which leads to ...

To Kyle: thanks again for your synthesis and reportage on these matters, and for reminding me how lucky I was to be at a formative age in the 70's.

I've said it before, but again: your students are SO lucky!

Cheers,
Jon

If minimalism was the answer to 400 years of reinforcing tonality with increasingly sophisticated harmonic progressions and dynamics, maybe it will always be the answer to any form whose complexity outruns its ability to communicate.

I'm both intrigued and little surprised to hear that a student ensemble has been organized specifically to play this music. It seems as thought there may be a slowly gathering zeitgeist in this direction. I'm a member of the group Ne(x)tworks in NYC, a group committed to learning and playing some of the repertoire Kyle brought to his students, leaning more toward the 50's NY School and the European music influenced by their work (Cardew, Stockhausen, etc.). We're also developing our own "open" works as well as other contemporaries doing the same. We also performed our own "realization" of Eastman's Stay On It at Issue Project Room in June.

The communal and non-hierarchical aspects inherent to making this music have everything to do with our interest in performing and researching it. In addition, though, I like to inform my own interpretations from a more global view of how society is organizing around digital culture presently, and particularly the type of thinking and transactional perception experienced "online." I gather from some colleagues that young musicologists are digging deeper into Postmodern critical writings (Lyotard, Foucalt, etc.), looking more closely at how musical output can be analyzed in this way. To me, a number of Cage's works, such as the transparency pieces (Variations II, etc.), resemble structural manifestations that possess an anarchic inner logic and encourage the sort of "intertextual" relationships that are hallmarks of Postmodern theory. It's my opinion that "hypertextuality" is having a broadening effect on how performers and audience interact with these open scores. Their ears are able to adapt quickly to the seeming chaos because their everyday experience has an inherent non-linearity.

I might not be saying anything novel here, but I hope to develop my thoughts further into a more cogent argument. To that end, I'm researching by reading things like Umberto Eco's admittedly Euro-centric "The Open Work", James Saunders short essay "Modular Music", and look forward to the imminent publication of George Lewis' AACM book.

David Toub makes an excellent point -- the imperfections are crucial to the musical effectiveness of minimalism. If the reiterated notes and phrases were repeated exactly with no variations in dynamics or articulation or timing, as acomputer would reproduce 'em, the music would entirely lose its effectiveness. For me a great deal of minimalism's values involves dilating your sense of time so that you focus in on the microscopic and involuntary changes in articulation and dynamics as the phrases and notes get repeated.

In fact, the Japanese have a term -- "wabi sabi," which means "the imperfection that produces perfection." Japanese artisans often deliberately introduce flaws into their work in order to break the sterile spell of simple perfection and improve the artifact they're creating. Something of the same sort goes on as a natural outgrowth of reiteration in minimalism, and also as a consequence of the difficulty of following the score (as noted).

In examining why minimalism fell out of favor, we shouldn't forget the vast technological changes that swept through music in the 1980s. The fall of 1984 sent shockwaves through the entire process of musical performance when MIDI equipped synths finally arrived. MIDI computer-based sequencers (on the Commodore 64, the Apple ][+ and the Mac a year later) combined with digital synths like the DX7 and, earlier, in 1980, the advent of fully polyphonic synths (the Prophet 5) allowed single individuals with a small amount of money to produce vastly complex ensemble compositions. That had been possible prior to 1984 only for the ultrawelthy who could afford $10,000 for a Moog modular synth and another $10,000 for a multitrack 16-track open reel tape recorder...plus the $200 per reel of 2-inch multitrack tape.

The fascination with synthesizers and MIDI that led to home computer music probably pushed minimalism out of the limelight, but something else happpened too. The mechanical computer-generated repetition of sequences of notes and phrases also started to give repetition itself a bad name. For the first time, you could exactly literally repeat a musical phrases with perfect metonomic timing and exactly uniform dynamics and perfectly 12-equal intonation...and the result wasn't pretty, from a musical standpoint. As discussion on Sequenza 21 has noted, getting rid of the "mechanical" feeling produced by MIDI renditions of music is still a big issue. You have to wonder if that tincture of the mechanical leaked over to taint the entirely different-sounding and different-feeling human-produced repetition of minimalism...

KG replies: Good point about MIDI's impact on minimalism, Brian. Never seen it articulated before.

how exciting! Kyle plans to rekindle an old flame! Wonderful to hear things went so well.

Well, high schools are playing what is perhaps the '00s version of this kind of music: check out this video.