With all of the classical prototypes for musical minimalism that are so perennially trotted out – Perotin, the first six minutes of Das Rheingold, Bolero, Vexations and other Satie works – I’m surprised no one ever mentions the duet between Point and Elsie, “I have a song to sing-O,” in Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Yeomen of the Guard. The entire, rather long song is sung over a drone on D, and the verses follow a strict additive process, adding four new measures with each verse, somewhat akin to the early works of Glass and Rzewski:

This strikes me as a much more truly minimalist impulse than the Das Rheingold opening, which is nothing but a spectacularly long dominant preparation of a type Beethoven would have recognized. I suppose Gilbert gets credit for the additive process idea, since his lyrics necessitate it – and Sullivan carries it off so gorgeously. This I can accept as a minimalist prototype.

UPDATE: To stave off further ludicrously off-topic comments, let me clarify the context of this post. That Young, Riley, Reich, and Glass were inspired, in their early minimalist efforts, by John Coltrane, Indian music, African drumming, Ravi Shankar, and other non-European traditions is well documented. I have written many times, in many places, that minimalism was an irruption of non-Western influences into the Western tradition – even, American music’s attempt to connect with the rest of the world. This blog entry is not about the actual origins of minimalism.

This blog entry is about what I see as a simplistic tendency, which I’ve written about here repeatedly before, on the part of people who don’t know much about minimalism to identify various relatively static examples in the classical repertoire as precursors of minimalism. I find it ridiculous to think of Das Rheingold or Bolero as minimalist, but I did find this one G&S song to which I thought the term could legitimately apply. Perhaps, as Doug Skinner suggested, G&S were channeling some ancient Saxon archetype foreign to the European mainstream. I find this interesting as a comment on the occasional originality of G&S. Believe me, I am not sitting around wondering where the minimalists (Young, Riley, Reich, Glass) got their ideas and jumped on this song as the only thing I could think of because Western classical music is the only thing I know. I do not imagine that La Monte, Terry, Steve, and Phil started minimalism after seeing The Yeomen of the Guard together.

 

 

We don’t often bring guest composers to speak at Bard, and sometimes we feel guilty about that, and make an effort. So a few weeks ago we brought in a fairly well-known composer of my own generation, who told the students that “the problem with minimalism is that it’s self-indulgent to make attractive music just because people like it.” I spent a long time trying to parse that – that it’s self-indulgent to make music that people like. And today a composer slightly older than myself came to Bard – where we house the John Cage Trust, offer a course on Cage, and have a faculty member (me) who wrote a book about Cage and the introduction to the new version of Silence – and told the student composers that Cage was a “dangerous” composer who tried to destroy what great composers had been doing ever since Monteverdi. (For the record, he also told them Philip Glass wasn’t any good and that Shostakovich’s music “wouldn’t last.”) And suddenly I feel pretty good that we don’t bring guest composers to Bard. I may even initiate a policy that composers are not allowed on campus.

UPDATE: I was discussing the second composer with a colleague, and he said, “It’s not like anyone’s forcing him to listen to Cage’s music.” But then we conceded that 4’33” seems to be playing almost perpetually, and that maybe he was just sick of hearing it.

 

I’m a big fan of the comic strip xkcd. I wish today’s strip had been around to include in my 4’33” book:

If there’s anything I remember about being a grad student, it’s what a ruthless and unobstructed view one has of the world. You are not yet complicit in its ubiquitous ills, you are not yet bought off by its bribes, you have made no moral compromises, and your judgments are made with a relentlessly clear eye. In the intervening decades I have learned to make admissions of self-interest and allowances for human frailty and differences of taste, but I do not at all feel more right today than I was then. A certain amount of willful blindness has proved necessary for survival.

After my Ives lecture the other day, a grad student composer came up and plaintively asked, “Does anybody really get excited about the music of all the composers who are getting a lot of attention these days?” Many will be quick to suggest a counter-example here and there, but that a well-informed student could ask such a question speaks volumes about the extent to which our institutions have reduced a great art form to a mere profession.

Andy Lee links me to a lively interview with the resurrected Dennis Johnson. (Wow, I’m blogging this from an Amtrak train to Buffalo, where I’m lecturing on the Concord Sonata for the musicology grad stoonts this afternoon.)

My analysis of Phil Glass’s Einstein on the Beach is now up at New Music Box, thanks to Frank Oteri.

Via pianist Andy Lee and David McIntire’s Irritable Hedgehog record label, Dennis Johnson’s November is taking its place in the repertoire. Andy is giving the five-hour, 1959 piano work its European premiere at Cafe Oto in London on March 9 (and I’m thrilled to see that he’s playing music by the greatly underrated Paul Epstein there the previous evening). Then he’ll give the New York premiere at Issue Project Room on March 16, starting at 2. And Andy’s absolutely lovely four-disc recording, which I’ve been enjoying mp3s of, is now available, with my liner notes (which you can read in their entirety at the link). This definitely changes our picture of the history of minimalism – it will be difficult for anyone ever again to refer to Reich, Glass, and Riley as three of “the original minimalists.”

I’m rather obsessed with bitonality at the moment, and the three composers who are much on my mind and stereo lately – Charles Ives, Kaikhosru Sorabji, and Darius Milhaud – all have a strong bitonal streak in their music, though that’s not as well known about the first two as it is about Milhaud, who wrote a book on bitonality. My wife Nancy gave me a three-octave toy piano for my recent birthday, and as a kind of sketchbook I wrote a suite for it called Surrealities; of the seven movements, two are atonal, one tonal, three bitonal, and one bi-modal (C harmonic minor in one hand, C Lydian in the other). I’m particularly pleased with the sixth movement, “Incommensurate Quantities,” which is a bitonal canon in A and D-flat, the only canon I know of at the interval of a diminished fourth. More to the point, it follows all the traditional contrapuntal rules, resolving every dissonance correctly, and of course contains an episode in the equidistant key of F (Gbb):

You can hear me play it here. Also another bitonal movement “Deep Denial” (A in one hand, C alternating with F# in the other), and the last (tonal) movement “Mistimed Adieu,” which I’m quite happy with.

In my youth Milhaud was one of my favorite composers, and he’s never quit being, though one doesn’t encounter his name much these days, or get opportunities to write about him. When I last visited San Francisco, Richard Friedman reminded me of a wonderful Milhaud piece I remember well from the 1960s, recorded only on vinyl, called A Frenchman in New York, written to go on the flip side of Gershwin’s American in Paris – and the Milhaud is by far the better work. To allow you to assess that judgment, I temporarily upload the recording he gave me here. I hadn’t heard it in thirty-five years, and with the first notes it all came flooding back from the recesses of my memory. Philip Glass has told me that Milhaud is one of his ongoing influences as well.

 

This Thursday I will escape this long frigid spell we’ve been having in the northeast – to go to Miami! Where I will give a talk on John Cage’s 4’33”, at 6:30 Thursday evening, to open the New World Symphony’s John Cage festival, which lasts through the 10th. And I’m staying down there for it. Beachfront hotel, smoke a few cigars with my friend Mikel Rouse who’s down there doing an installation, sit on the beach, high near 80 degrees every day. If this is what musicology can get me in my old age, I’ll take it. I’ve been thinking lately, these are terrible times to be a composer, but pretty damn good times to be a musicologist.

 

Apparently the Utrecht Wind Ensemble played the second movement of my piano concerto Sunken City in Utrecht at their concert of last Saturday night, along with works by Stravinsky, Donnacha Dennehy and others:

I remember they had contacted me about the possibility several months ago, but hadn’t heard anything more. They have a short audio clip at their general web site. Don’t know why only one movement, but it’s the “serious” one.