The music begins and ends with the violin creating its own stellar landscape through a looping pedal, out of which instruments begin to articulate an unchanging series of eleven chords which governs the harmonic language of the piece. Three minutes in, the woodwinds begin twittering in what seems to be random, insect-like formations. Eventually, the piano and solo violin “map” them into the celestially pure key of C major; rapturous pulses ensue. A slightly more stylized and polite version of the insect music appears, and the violin sings long lines above it. After a brief return to the first music, slow, nervous music alternates with fast, nervous music. The fast music takes over, pitches are scattered around, the violin calls everybody back to order with forty repeated notes; rapturous pulses again ensue. The piece ends as it began, with looped educational music depicting the night sky.

Seeing is Believing
Live recording – January 7, 2008
Thomas Gould, violin
Nicholas Collon conducting Aurora Orchestra

Syllables was commissioned by the Brooklyn Youth Chorus as part of their 2006-2007 commissioning season, alongside works by Paul Morvaec and David Lang.

Read a review here.

Texts

Icelandic texts:
Sól tér sortna, sígr fold í mar,
hverfa af himni heiðar stjörnur;
geisar eimi ok aldrnari,
leikr hár hiti við himin sjálfan.

Geyr nú Garmr mjök fyr Gnípahelli;
festr man slitna, en freki renna.

Sér hon upp koma öðru sinni
jörð ór œgi iðjagrœna;
falla forsar, flýgr örn yfir,
sá er á fjalli fiska veiðir.

Þar munu eptir undrsamligar
gullnar töflur í grasi finnask,
þærs í árdaga áttar höfðu.

Völuspá 57-59, 61

English texts:
The sun turns black, earth sinks in the sea,
The hot stars down from heaven are whirled;
Fierce grows the steam and the life-feeding flame,
Till fire leaps high about heaven itself.

Now Garm howls loud before Gnipahellir,
The fetters will burst, and the wolf run free;
Much do I know, and more can see
Of the fate of the gods, the mighty in fight.

Now do I see the earth anew
Rise all green from the waves again;
The cataracts fall, and the eagle flies,
And fish he catches beneath the cliffs.

In wondrous beauty once again
Shall the golden tables stand mid the grass,
Which the gods had owned in the days of old.

Trans. Henry Adams Bellows (1923)

Performance Notes
Radiant Music requires a pair of stereo speakers, placed as far apart on the stage as possible. The tape requires manipulation twice during the piece: at the start and conclusion of the cadenza. If possible, an assistant should execute this pausing and recommencing, but if necessary, the performer can control the tape from the stage.

Live Recording
The Manhattan Choral Ensemble
Thomas Cunningham, conductor

Text

Such knowledge is too wonderful for me;
it is high, I cannot attain unto it.
Whither shall I go from thy spirit?
or whither shall I flee from thy presence?
If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there:
if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there.
- Psalm 139, 6-8

The Brooklyn Youth Chorus
Dianne Berkun, conductor

Text

The Sweets of Evening by Christopher Smart (1722-1771)

The sweets of evening charm the mind,
Sick of the sultry day;
The body then no more confin’d,
But exercise with freedom join’d,
When Phoebus sheathes his ray.

While all-serene the summer moon
Sends glances thro’ the trees,
And Philomel begins her tune,.
And Asteria too shall help her soon
With voice of skillful ease.

A nosegay, every thing that grows,
And music, every sound
To lull the sun to his repose;
The skies are colour’d like the rose
With lively streaks around.

Of all the changes rung by time
None half so sweet appear,
As those when thoughts themselves sublime,
And with superior natures chime
In fancy’s highest sphere.

These canticles were first performed in November, 2004, at Girton College, Cambrdige, and then at Clare College, Cambridge. They were subsequently broadcast on the BBC 3’s Choral Evensong programme in February, 2005.

The Magnificat features an anxious two-note octave in the organ, nervously twitching in anticipation. The Nunc Dimittis (which is one of my favorite things written in the English language) starts slowly, and then focuses all of its energy towards the beginning of the Gloria Patri, a New Testament harmonic culling of everything that has come before it. – Nico Muhly

Many thanks to Judith Clurman for organizing the performances.

Magnificat

Nunc Dimittis

Clare College Choir
James McVinnie, organ
Tim Brown, conductor

Texts

MAGNIFICAT
My soul doth magnify the Lord,
and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour.

For he hath regarded the lowliness of his handmaiden.
For behold, from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed.
And his mercy is on them that fear him throughout all generations.

He hath shewed strength with his arm.
He hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.
He hath put down the mighty from their seat
and hath exalted the humble and meek.
He hath filled the hungry with good things.
My soul doth magnify the Lord.
He remembering his mercy hath holpen his servant Israel
as he promised to our forefathers Abraham, and his seed forever.
Gloria Patri

NUNC DIMITTIS

Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace : according to thy word.
For mine eyes have seen : thy salvation,
Which thou hast prepared : before the face of all people;
To be a light to lighten the Gentiles : and to be the glory of thy people Israel.
Gloria Patri

The backside of King’s College Chapel, with Clare College at left

Below, an excerpt from the end of the film, a slow and tense piece. I am really happy with the way this particular nugget turned out.

Excerpt from Joshua
Caroline Pliszka, solo violin

NB The link above – which I will keep up as long as it is extant, has a preview of the film which uses a bunch of my music in the first two thirds, and then when the pace of the preview heats up, the sort of typical Showgirls synth drum stuff starts. Culturally, the way we prefer to indicate “excitement” has always been an endlessly fascinating thing to me, because I feel like I have a completely alternate way of getting at this sort of tension.

Joshua was recorded by Dan Bora at the Looking Glass Studios in September, 2006.

Choking Man M17: Thanksgiving Day

Choking Man M20: Thanks

Wonder Showzen M18: Birds

Wonder Showzen M7: Tax Guy
Claire T. Bryant, solo cello

The other fragments, imitated in character by the sputtering harp and percussion of the accompaniment, sound more like scraps swept from a cutting-room floor somewhere – all false starts, warm-ups and afterbeats – and the glitchy, staticky noises in the background contribute to the sense of something rough, half-finished. The result is to suggest that all of Honest Music is an out-take, a rehearsal for another, wholly imaginary piece. But the gravity and authority of the harmonies (and the low drones) lend the makeshift nature of the piece an authentic drama in its own right: the sad beauty of things coming together and things falling apart.

Performance Notes
The irregularities in the tuning of the pre-recorded organs are intentional and should be loosely followed; in general, however, the spirit of the solo “live” part should be much more aggressive and forward than the pre-recorded violins.

Lisa Liu, violins
Monika Abendroth, harp
Nico Muhly, keyboards

Honest Music is recorded on Bedroom Community Hvalur 001 (Nico Muhly Speaks Volumes).

Una Sveinbjarnardóttir plays Honest Music in Rotterdam, April, 2007

Live Recording
June 2006
New Haven, CT

A commercial recording is available via New Amsterdam Records.

Although Louis Andriessen has been lumped together with American minimal composers Reich and Glass, he is a much more aggressive and uncompromising musician. In the 60’s and 70’s, when the American minimalists were focusing on extending small repeating patterns over a long period of time like a large communal tapestry, Andriessen was writing aggressive, almost impossibly loud essays in repetition. In 1975, for instance, Andriessen finished Workers’ Union, a pounding, relentless work for unspecified (but loud) ensemble. This is a piece at whose performances woodwind players have been known to bleed from the gums – a near-hysterical, blue-collar rant.

Two years later, Andriessen wrote Hoketus – a slightly more tame but steel-built construction in which an ensemble of pairs of unspecified instruments is split in two sections across the stage – the classic recording features electric guitars and bass, wood flutes, pianos and other amplified instruments. The canons played by these two ensembles create a spatial effect referencing renaissance music, but here recast as an athletic feat of aggression and mental gymnastics. Compared to this, Terry Riley’s music from the same period of time – consisting of looping organs and chilled-out patterns – evokes a sort of hippie utopia – paisley skirts swirling and the smell of organic weed wafting to the top of the yurt.
Andriessen, like the American minimalists, has a signature sound that comprises his music for ensemble: saxophones, pianos, percussion, electric guitars and bass. Built into the idea of creating one’s own ensemble sound is a rejection of the notion of the orchestra, which is why the pieces tonight are billed as being scored for “large ensemble.” This rejection is more than just nominal; it enables Andriessen to manipulate the way material is distributed throughout the ensemble. The normal hierarchies of the relationship between the orchestra are equalized here – the percussionists and pianos play very important roles, the strings (who normally aristocratically dominate the front of the stage) are reduced in number, and Andriessen invites amplified instruments to share the stage.
The influence of Andriessen is as pervasive as it is hard to trace. Andriessen is an incredibly active teacher, and many young composers from many countries have taken years off from their own conservatories to study with him in Holland. However, his influence spreads far beyond his students. While the influence of the American minimalists seems to be measurable by gestures – a Reichean rhythmic canon, a blissed-out Riley-esque drone, an eager Glassian arpeggio – one speaks about the “spirit” of Andriessen being found in the music of the younger generations. While it is difficult to pinpoint what exactly comprises this spirit, some key Andriessen emotional tricks include the strategic (as opposed to textural) use of repeated notes, a strong sense of community from within the orchestra (expressed by certain pairings of instruments always playing in unison), and an uncompromising rhythmic agenda.
These three tactics are clearly visible in Julia Wolfe’s 1989 The Vermeer Room. Like Trilogy of the Last Day, The Vermeer Room begins with a series of strong doublings in the orchestra – strings in groups, oboe and trumpet paired, piano and harp doubled with metallic percussion. Throughout this entire work, in fact, instruments very rarely play anything on their own – there is always somebody doubling them. However, the make-up of these couplings changes every few bars or so, which creates an unexpected soap opera of shifting alliances and strange allegiances within the orchestra. The way that Wolfe uses space and light in this work is directly influenced by Vermeer, specifically the painting “A Girl Asleep”, in which a young girl sits, dozing at a table with an open, well-lit doorway behind her. Apparently, an X-ray of the painting revealed that Vermeer originally had a man standing in the doorway, but that he had erased it at a certain point. This absence – creating a hole, a tear – is a springboard for the way Wolfe manipulates the density of her own composition.
About two and a half minutes in, all the instruments play together for the first time, on a downbeat. From this moment, Wolfe slows down the aggressive movement of the opening into a much more stylized, procession of chords throughout the available registers of the orchestra. Next, a slow, wandering and mysterious section of block chords that explodes outwards in a giant tremolo to a series of repeated brass chords – a cycle which itself is repeated and then slowed. This is a key Andriessen-like formulation: the non-developmental and yet clearly directional use of repetition is one of the ways in which this music keeps its energy going and still resists traditional forms of musical narrative (the sonata allegro form, the scherzo, the rondo). This is not to say that the piece does not “build;” rather, the piece of music is constructed out of giant LEGO pieces, built, torn down, and reconfigured into large towers of different sizes. Certainly, some combinations work better than others, but the composer is more interested in showing us what blocks she has access to and then stacking them together such that we can always see what blocks she’s used. This is like old fashioned Legos when they were just primary colors, or even Montessori school Cuisenaire Rods. This is music that feels not only beautiful and sensitive to color, but also, in a sense, beneficial to society – picture a modern color-coded apartment block in Amsterdam, creating a society out ten families, each enclosed in their own box. Living in New York also works in this way. A neighborhood is composed vertically, with people’s lives stacked on top of each other yet always fiercely separate and distinct, unlike the lazy horizontal homogeny of the suburbs.
The final four minutes of Julia Wolfe’s piece give the impression of a vast landscape of light and color, circled by a helicopter. This is not a Wagnerian landscape rife with meaning and symbolism – a rune carved into a rock, a Rhinemaiden’s suggestive form coquettishly diving into a pond –but instead, a slow trip around a complex natural formation. She allows us to dwell in the complexity of the combined chords she has used to build up the texture, and the piece just cuts off at the end. The ending of the piece seems deliberately jarring; the intensity of the motion of the piece has changed from short rhythmic dislocations into full-on tremors from all the instruments – a landscape turned volcanic.
Evan Ziporyn’s The Ornate Zither & The Nomad Flute deals with an imagined Asian landscape. The piece is a setting of two texts: first, “The Ornate Zither”, a poem by Li Shangyin (813-858), and the second, W.S. Merwin’s “The Nomad Flute”. The first song is sung in Chinese, and the second in English, but Ziporyn overlaps the two texts, alternating them freely. In the first page of the score, Ziporyn clearly outlines the way he wants the stage to be set up – pairs of instruments divided into left and right “channels.” Ziporyn highlights this division at the onset of the piece – one saxophone plays a melody based on four pitches, while the pair of bowed vibraphones creates a halo around certain notes. After a breath, the second saxophone plays a nearly identical melody, and the vibraphones shimmer around it. Brass instruments outline a melody in open fifths, taking turns playing and resting across the stage. After the soprano sings a melody in Chinese reminiscent of the saxophone’s introduction to the piece, the bass begins to outline a gamelan-type scale, and is joined by bassoons, bass clarinets, clarinets, oboes, flutes, and finally piccolo.

This gives way to the soprano’s first line of the poem in English: “you that sang to me once sing to me now / let me hear your long lifted note” decorated by stereo bells and triangles. After this, another delicate gamelan flurry (this time, headlined by the alto flute) leads the way to another vocal exposition in Chinese. Ziporyn continues this trade off, with each section and interlude expanding in depth, adding pulsed percussion to the mix – cowbells on opposite sides of the stage, hi-hats, struck vibraphones, bowed cymbals.
The voice’s melodies are deceptively simple. Usually, they outline a major chord, or a major 7 chord, whose notes are reinforced by the ensemble. This gives the voice the sense of existing on top of the music sonically, but in the middle of it harmonically. This creates a supple tension between ensemble and voice, in which all of the dissonances are smoothly resolved by a reassuring pulse or a generous stroke on the vibraphone. This is music that, while clearly influenced by Andriessen, has, at its heart a lyrical decadence. Unlike the uncompromising, difficult way in which the voice is used in Andriessen’s large staged and concert works, Ziporyn has the ensemble support the ensemble gently.
Like his other large ensemble works De Tijd and De Materie (Time, and Matter, respectively), Andriessen treats a large-scale subject in Triolgy of the Last Day: Mortality. Andriessen, however, can be very multi-layered in discussing his pieces (his detractors would say deliberately dense). This collection of 3 pieces is a trilogy that, in its full incarnation (played all at once,) the composer has called “overindulgence,” although all three pieces seem to make the most sense when paired up. The piece is not about death, or mortality, specifically, but rather, the way in which artists from 3 different time periods have interpreted death. The second movement is entitled “Tao”, has texts from Lao Tzu and Kotaro Takamura, requires the use of a pianist who also plays the koto and recites in Japanese, but Andriessen writes in his own program notes, “I have made no attempt to relate to what is known as ‘music from the Far East,’ or even worse, ‘world music.’” The third movement contains an almost scientific text by the composer defining death, but the music itself is superimposed on one of the most romantic, decadent pieces about death: Saint-Saëns’ “Danse Macabre”. These frustrations and complications make Andriessen’s music incredibly exciting to listen to and fruitful to think about.
The first movement begins with a choir of men chanting – almost shouting, one syllable at a time – the text by the poet-and-painter Lucebert (1924-1994). The men, accompanied by celli, a pair of guitars and a synthesizer are the only instruments to play directly on the beat. The high winds, vibraphone, and synthesizer (marked to play a patch entitled ‘terrible bells’) play notes lasting seven 16th notes while the oboes, horns, and piano outline chords five 16th notes apart. Andriessen uses a pattern of twenty-two chords – an irregular number which, by its nature, will prevent the music from aligning in easy, straightforward ways.
This pattern continues overlapping relentlessly, until the men stop, and the orchestra divides into two sections again, declaring two aggressively different, non-aligning rhythmic patterns. This music works itself into a frenzy, until a bass drum and anvil cut everything off, leaving only a drone in the bass instruments. A solo child then sings a macabre folksong, almost unaccompanied.
An instrumental interlude follows, again with the orchestra exploring two or three simultaneous tempi. After the music reaches a certain complexity, it suddenly cuts off, and we are left with a bar of silence. The composer describes these gaps as, “the image of a sort of coffin made of planks, but with gaps in between, so you’d fall through them…the point is that this should be a slightly unpredictable element – even if you know the piece well.”

Andriessen makes full use of the awkward and deceptive nature of these silences and alternation – the piece proceeds between sections with the boy soloist, silences, quiet murmurings, and loud, angry interludes.
After a brief recapitulation of the beginning, Andriessen breaks out with a classic, frenzied tutti in the low stings and clarinets reminiscent of his early works – Worker’s Union in particular – in which guitars, electric bass, pianos, winds, woodblocks, all slam against one another. This is not easy music to listen to, nor is it designed to be so. There is something brutal and psychedelic about having identical loud musics thrown at you at two different speeds; appropriately, this section is titled in the score “The Triumph”. Another tutti for the entire orchestra with shrill piccolos and claw-like piano clusters heralds the way for a more generously accompanied solo from the boy soprano.

The piece proceeds from this point in a series of false endings – huge crescendi and scales leading upwards followed by awkwardly long cliff-hanging rests. The piece ends with a loud chord, and the intoning of a single note (F), played by a flute, a horn, a synthesizer, and a harp. This ending is one of the elements that links the three movements of the trilogy together.
The second movement – “Tao” – begins gently, with another two-tempo intonation of a series of chords, but this time, the pitches are refracted, extended, and played very quietly by muted strings, harp, and piano. After a slight quickening of the heartbeat of the piece, high winds and high strings begin to imply a more aggressive melody all in unison. This, like the material in the first movement, is cut off at the height of its excitement and replaced by a recapitulation of the opening material at a lower transposition – which feels strange, slower, drugged. A choir of women joins the orchestra, mysteriously (but not “world-musicky” –imagine Andriessen’s horror at the Music from the Tea Lands CD’s on the Putomayo label sold near the check-out of Whole Foods and you can understand his aversion to the term). The solo pianist begins banging away on a cycle of thirteen chords at the very top of the keyboard – this is an incredibly dramatic exposition of material. Andriessen writes, “My metaphor for Tomoko is – I can’t explain it, but it’s certainly a strong image – a very large spider that slowly descends along a fine thread.” This descent is a process that continues throughout this entire movement, but that is the most exposed at the beginning of the solo piano’s entrance.
After the spider-pianist descends far enough, the strings pick up where she left off, playing the cycle of thirteen chords. The women continue their solemn recitation, and at a certain point, the piece climaxes with clanging bells, intoning a descending minor third. Suddenly, the focus changes, and Tomoko, the pianist, has assumed her position at the koto, from which she ends the piece on the same F that ends the first movement.
Andriessen points out that the number thirteen is especially prominent in this piece – the poem that Tomoko recites has thirteen lines, there are thirteen chords in the cycle at the beginning, Lao Tzu references thirteen companions in the selected text. These are on top of the already rich history of interpretations that this number brings with it.

Here, it is useful to point out the importance of proportions in Andriessen’s work. Each movement in this trilogy is 2/3 the length of the one before it, giving an overall ratio of 9:6:4. The third movement is precisely seven times the length of Saint-Saëns’ “Danse macabre”. Many of Andriessen’s pieces bear evidence of this sort of pre-compositional planning; what makes Andriessen’s music unique is that he puts his money where his mouth is, and makes these structures audible. You can feel the difference in length between the three movements of the Trilogy; if you know the “Danse macabre”, all you can do is wait for the entrance of the xylophones, seven times longer than in the original.
The third movement is a dangerously gaudy trip into high romanticism – a set of references that does not normally figure in contemporary minimal and post-minimal thought. Entitled “Dancing on the Bones”, Andriessen depicts a cartoon nightmare landscape, fully using the coloristic resources of the orchestra. Contrabass clarinet and contrabassoon weave pornographically slimy lines over synthesizer and piano bass lines. Sudden roars and outbursts from the entire ensemble violent interrupt the music, as do occasional silent bars. The Saint-Saëns piece famously features the xylophone to represent bones (a musical cliché best explored in Disney’s “Silly Symphony” cartoon featuring a graveyard dance number set to Grieg), and accordingly, Andriessen features the xylophone playing similar gestures here.
A horrifying pause is punctuated by two sets of bells playing another descending third, the orchestra plays a sinister six bar phrase, and the choir of children comes in, singing Andriessen’s naughty, atheistic schoolboy take on what death is: “Death is when your circulation stops, your breathing stops, your liver, your kidneys, your stomach, your lungs; you do not crap, you do not piss.” The vulgarity of the text is key to the success of this piece – it allows Andriessen to write an ending that is completely over-the-top, absurd, dramatic, and romantic. The trilogy ends with the inevitable F, played here by two horns and two pianos.

The definition of the term “Minimalism” is hotly contested, and even more so amongst those accused of writing minimal music. This music is often repetitive, but sometimes it consists of a single chord pitch sustained at great length. So-called minimalist music is usually tonal, at least in the United States, but there is a strong showing of atonal minimalist music in Europe. Some argue that minimalist music started in the 1960’s in New York and California, but others trace it much farther back to the experimental works of John Cage in the 1950’s. The minimal pantheon of composers comprises several composers whose current output could not be defined as minimal even with the most radical working definition. How, then, can we discuss what comprises minimalism as a movement or school of thought?

One of the most important elements of this music is the pulse. Most of the early minimal masterpieces were unconducted, or were conducted from a keyboard instrument like Baroque chamber music. A pulse helps this kind of music keep together, and it turns music-making into a communal experience – pictures of the first performances of Philip Glass’s early works depict seven or eight musicians sitting in a circle, sitting at keyboards, various wind instruments, scraps of paper and cups of coffee. This is music written by a composer for his friends. The music repeats until a leader nods his head, at which point everybody agrees to proceed to the next line of the page. The same is true for Steve Reich’s early works, wherein repetition is ended by a single player incanting a series of notes from a vibraphone – a technique he borrows from West African drumming. Again, the communal experience and the shared pulse are at the heart of these works. Glass has said about this music: “What was radical wasn’t the language of the music but the way you were invited to hear it.” It is a sort of urban folk music that, for some, is as evocative of the 1960’s as Joni Mitchell or Bob Dylan.

Like most important musical innovations, the minimalist music of the 1960’s and 70’s was vociferously rejected by many established composers. In that minimalism was, in part, a response to the music of Arnold Schoenberg, Milton Babbitt, and Pierre Boulez, there was very little mutual respect between composers working in lofts in SoHo and those working in the universities of New York and Paris. The negative reactions are too numerous to list here, but there are famous stories: the brilliantly cantankerous Ned Rorem has called Glass’s music “all style and no content,” a disgruntled concertgoer angrily rapped her high-heeled shoe against the stage during the premiere of Steve Reich’s Four Organs, a critic wrote that John Adams’s Nixon in China did for the arpeggio what McDonald’s did for the hamburger. What shocked critics and composers alike was that audiences were having positive reactions to this repetitive, sterile music. Minimalism, as a reactionary movement, is not unlike the Puritan movement in New England with its central idea of removing ornaments and irrelevant decoration from its most basic messages. And like most reactionary movements, it had internal resistance and development, like the 17th century factions offshooting to Rhode Island under the even more refined spiritual leadership of Roger Williams. It is significant that the first published piece in Glass’s catalogue is called 1+1 and does not even call for instruments (only an amplified table-top): this is an explicit and radical break from the elaborate matrices and cryptography of serial music. There was an immediate response: audiences were beginning to seek out these musical ‘happenings’ rather than attending traditional concerts with thorny (but character-building) twelve-tone programming.

Perhaps, then, the music is not as emotionally empty as some have argued. For a generation of audiences and musicians raised on the great symphonic works of the 19th century, it is true that the churning, hypnotic repetitions of minimalist music can seem pointless and content-less. The question, of course, is what defines content, and in turn, what that content is meant to do (if anything). An example: in Wagnerian composition, musical content consists of a collection of motives, harmonies and themes associated with certain characters, moods, or physical gestures. This content is then molded and sculpted along a dramatic arc, reaching a climax and resolving itself somehow. The great scene of Götterdämmerung wherein the world comes crashing down is a perfect example of music that is overflowing with this sort of content. However, a generation later, the idea of a large romantic expression of emotion can itself seem dated, trite, and melodramatic. In twelve-tone music, content is generated and manipulated through certain mathematical devices and can generously be compared to the elegance of complex sciences (the venerable Milton Babbitt, in a delicious anecdote, tells of sharing an office with Albert Einstein at Princeton). In the 50’s and 60’s, minimalist composers discovered that audiences could become emotionally engaged by listening to a gently repeating pattern, as if they were looking at the ocean or the sky for an extended period of time. This experience can be no less sublime than the tossing and turning of Wagner or Mahler. To this day, Steve Reich and Musicians (many of whom are the same from the loft concerts in the 60’s) make yearly world tours, and live performances by the Philip Glass Ensemble are attended like rock concerts. Even John Adams, who is a generation younger than Glass and Reich, has a following among young people and non-musicians.

The importance of John Adams’s contribution to (and subsequent departure from) so-called minimalism cannot be overstated. While he is clearly heavily influenced by Glass’s bubbling internal rhythms and Reich’s harmonies, there has always been something more expressive and outdoorsy about Adams’s music. One of the earliest pieces in his catalogue, Phrygian Gates (1977) for solo piano, demonstrates the contrast between his influences and his innovation: it starts simply, with pulses and repetition, but soon blossoms into an explosion in the bass register that has more to do with late Beethoven than Reich or Glass. Shaker Loops (1978) for string septet starts with mechanical-sounding music that, by the end of its 30-minute duration, has expanded into a churning, erotic music with the emotional weight of Mahler or Anton Bruckner. Adams, some say, reintroduced a more romantic idea of “content” into minimalist music. In the case of Shaker Loops, though, the content is one of the most primal and essential options: God. Adams’s project – implicit or explicit – is to call attention to the fact that respectful and religious content can be found in even the simplest musical devices. This itself represents a break from the simple and pure but rigid math of Glass’s early works, which brings to mind that Shakers and Quakers were themselves ecstatic offshoots of the Massachusetts Puritans. In this case, however, almost everybody followed Adams’s lead, and the work of both Reich and Glass began to explore the ecstatic possibilities of simplicity. Tehillim is therefore an even more important development in the minimalist movement, as Reich presents the chanting of the Psalms – one of the simplest and purest forms of worship – with twitchy and radiant fervency. We are all Rhode Islanders now.

ELENA RUEHR (b. 1963)
Shimmer

Elena Ruehr’s Shimmer takes many cues from Shaker Loops. From the onset, we hear a pulse that remains essentially constant throughout the piece’s ten minutes. The pulse outlines a ten-note series which itself suggests a continuous harmonic progression. Gradually, individual notes begin to be sustained by solo strings only to vanish into the pulsing texture again. Is this the outline of a melody? Or just the ear focusing on a detail in the fabric? Ruehr writes, “Shimmer uses imitative counterpoint as its basis. However, the harmony, rhythm, and form is structured using a cyclical ten-note series instead of traditional tonality.” One of the compositional advantages of using a cycle (which we will also see in the third movement of Glass’s Symphony No. 3) is that the music can move through different textures and still retain its continuity. Ruehr uses various techniques such as pizzicato, snap pizzicato, trills, and ornaments to vary the texture but retains the cycle at the heart of the piece. She continues, describing that “the piece starts with a four-part canon in mid-range, overlaid with two-part counterpoint in the treble and bass. Undergoing constant variation, the music finally culminates in an extended passage of five-voice counterpoint. After a brief recapitulation, it continues building to an energetic and percussive end.”

Ruehr’s work contains many of the fundamental characteristics of minimalist music – a steady pulse, a constant harmonic progression, a smooth, homophonic texture – and yet, it is expressive, powerful, and always interesting. Additionally, its repetition occurs on a larger, more structural level than found in “classical” minimalism. Can this piece be considered minimalist? I would propose that this music is decidedly post-minimal, demonstrating a solid grounding in the classical techniques of 1960’s minimalism, but pointing towards older music (Ruehr cites Vivaldi as an influence in Shimmer) as a gesture towards the future.

PHILIP GLASS (b. 1937)
Symphony No. 3

Just as Ruehr’s Shimmer glances back to the Baroque period, the very title of Philip Glass’s Symphony No. 3 remembers the Romantic past. Glass’s music in the 1960’s could not have been farther from a classical or romantic symphony, a form usually consisting of three or four movements with varying character with short pauses in between. Glass’s concert and stage works through the 1980’s resist traditionally classical forms, instead relying on quasi-Eastern techniques of large-scale repetitive structures and harmonic stability. Glass’s first footsteps in the symphonic language were, curiously, inspired by David Bowie and Brian Eno’s album Low (1977), resulting in Glass’s Low Symphony of 1992. Further efforts include his Heroes Symphony (1996), also based on Bowie and Eno, and the Symphony No. 2 (1994). Leonard Slatkin will premiere Glass’s seventh symphony in 2005 at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC – a radical change from the rag-tag ensemble of Farfisa organs, winds, and singers in New York City in 1967.

Symphony No. 3 was, however, written for a good friend and longtime collaborator of Glass, Dennis Russell Davies, the conductor of the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra. The symphony begins with an extended movement almost entirely focused on a single pitch (c). The music pulls away and ventures into dark, sometimes ominous terrain only to jump back to the central note. The second movement begins with a long line with strong accents outlining a constantly shifting beat. This line continues for almost the entire movement, but is interrupted by a delicate texture of plucked strings about two minutes before the end of the movement. Glass weaves an ornamented, exotic line over these gentle plucked strings and brings the movement to a quiet conclusion.

The third movement of the symphony is a chaconne – a repeated chord progression that builds through layers rather than through development. The piece starts with cellos and violas, and each time the chords recycle, Glass adds another group of instruments playing slightly different rhythms, creating a highly dynamic series of chords whose textures are constantly undulating. About three minutes in, a solo violin plays a lyrical line several octaves above the churning chords. This line is then supported with another solo violin trilling below it, and then a third joins to play a serpentine collection of scales and broken octaves. The texture grows more and more ornate and elaborate until it fades out with a repeated chord and a trilling violin. The conclusion of the symphony – the shortest of the four movements – revisits the exotic line from the end of the second movement but presents it rhythmically and aggressively. A pair of scales – one ascending and another descending – ushers the movement to a quiet end.

STEVE REICH (b. 1936)
Tehillim

Steve Reich’s 1981 Tehillim (“Psalms”) is one of the best examples of the emotional possibilities in post-minimal music. Unlike in his earlier works, there is no repetition of short phrases in Tehillim. Rather, the work is constructed around long melodies that repeat in their entirety, and are subjected to traditional processes such as canon and augmentation (lengthening) at each repetition. This is not a stylistic revolution in Reich’s work, however. He writes, “I use repetition as a technique when that is where my musical intuition leads me, but I follow that musical intuition wherever it leads.” In Tehillim, it is the texts themselves that guide Reich’s intuition, and as a result, the work is an incredibly sensitive setting of four psalms as well as a powerful piece of music for orchestra. It also marks a spiritual turning point in Reich’s development, as it uses the techniques he honed in the radical music of the 1960’s and 70’s to focus the listener’s attention on God.

The instrumentation itself is informed by the texts as well as by Reich’s personal aesthetic, which is distinct from all other minimal music of the 1970’s and 80’s. The six percussionists are asked to play tuned tambourines without jingles, which are an ancient instrument mentioned in Psalm 150, as well as crotales (small tuned metal discs appearing as “well-tuned cymbals” in the bible), small shakers and rattles, and hand-clapping. These percussive elements form the rhythmic backbone of the work: the pulse that continues from the first note until the end. In addition to the four singers and six percussionists, Reich adds two electric organs, strings, piccolo, flute, oboe, English horn, and two clarinets. The string instruments are to be played without vibrato – a technique Reich takes from Early Music to give his string chords a sharp, precise buzz, and the voices, when singing without vibrato, should be reminiscent of vocal music of the pre-baroque era. This combination of non-repetitive vocal lines, a percussive heartbeat and early music performance style, writes Reich, “marks this music as unique by introducing a basic musical element that one does not find in earlier Western practice including the music of this century. Tehillim may thus be heard as traditional and new at the same time.”

The work begins with solo drumming and clapping as a voice sings in Hebrew: “The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork.” About a minute in, a second voice joins the first, in canon. The voices continue to enter one by one, and are joined by pointed chords in the strings. Suddenly, all four voices are in canon, and are accompanied by Reich’s signature endurance test for the maraca player, which also appears in the austere Four Organs and the more decadent Music for Eighteen Musicians. It’s an ecstatic moment: insistent 16th notes in the maraca, 8th notes pattering in the winds, organs and voices, and glacially slow harmonies in the strings and low winds. The effect is at once fast, athletic, slow, and monumental. Reich prolongs this texture for several minutes, until it dwindles down to solo voice and clarinet over drums and strings, repeating the original melody.

After a short drum and maraca transition, the second text begins with two voices and clarinets in two-part harmony. This second section of Tehillim gives the singers occasional rests, trading their melodies with the English horn and the clarinet. About two minutes in, a high voice joins the other two and fully articulates the highest range of the soprano on the word tov (“good”). The next short section consists of incessant drumming, clapping, and maracas placed over eight long chords in the strings. When the voices rejoin them, the vocal lines have become longer, and smooth melismas make the texture more lush and flexible. The second section ends with the only full pause in Tehillim, after which the drumming and clapping is replaced with marimbas and vibraphones similarly pulsing. Reich writes: “This third text is not only the first slow movement I have composed since my student days but also the most chromatic music I have ever composed.” An important example of 20th century word-painting occurs in this movement on the word ee-kaysh (“perverse”), when Reich employs the tritone: the age-old “bad” interval used since the beginning of notated music to represent wickedness, the Devil, or any sort of perversion.

The fourth and final movement of Tehillim brings all the elements of the first three movements together: the canonical complexity of the first movement, the polyphony of the second, and the rich mallet textures of the third. The text of the fourth movement is taken from Psalm 150 and is one of the most musical passages in the book of Psalms. Reich matches the text by using the ensemble in its entirety, and adding the brilliant shimmer of the crotales (the “well-tuned cymbals” of the text). The coda, on the single word “Halleluyah” is, in effect, a recapitulation of all the techniques of the entire work, reinforcing the last line of the psalm: “Let everything that hath breath praise the Lord. Halleluyah!” The young American conductor Alan Pierson and his Alarm Will Sound ensemble has recently released a disc on Canteloupe records featuring new recordings of both Tehillim and The Desert Music – both large-scale choral works by Reich. It is an important landmark for this music that a young ensemble would record and actively perform such a complex and difficult work, and should indicate the lasting power and generational relevance of Reich’s work.

JOHN ADAMS (b. 1947)
Common Tones in Simple Time

One of the defining characteristics of the early stages of the minimalist movement is simple, descriptive titles. Works like Glass’s Music in Twelve Parts and Music in Similar Motion, Reich’s Music for Eighteen Musicians and Music for a Large Ensemble focus the attention on the music itself rather than on a programmatic agenda (as might be the case with evocatively-titled 20th century works like Ralph Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending or Jean Sibelius’s Finlandia). At first, Adams’s Common Tones in Simple Time (1980) appears to be the same sort of sterile, descriptive title. However, Adams has written that this piece is like “a pastorale with pulse” – a non-melodic and non-programmatic work, certainly, but not one entirely dissociated with images. Michael Steinberg, writing in 1986 when the work was played in its current form in San Francisco likens the experience to “flying or gliding over a landscape of gently changing colors and textures.”

The piece is constructed as a series of harmonies blending into one another through notes that are shared by the two chords (the “common tones” of the title). Each harmony has its own textural identity: some are highly defined, pointillistic mallet and oboe textures, with insect-like outbursts, and others are liquid and shimmering: vibraphone and string glissandi hovering above oscillating trumpets. The transitions between these textures are slow, elegant, and almost imperceptible until they have already happened. There is one texture that is constant, however, made up of two pianos playing the same material one 16th-note apart. This is a live version of a digital-delay effect, giving Adams’s landscape an electric glow, and yet, looking back on Adams’s work, we can see that image of the two grand pianos is one of the cornerstones in the emotional content of his music. They reappear in outrageous, erotic glory in Grand Pianola Music (1981) and again in a more vernacular, West Coast setting in his 1996 Hallelujah Junction.

Taking a hint from Reich, Adams’s early music is at once very fast and very slow. There is a 16th-note pulse that carries throughout Common Tones in Simple Time, and yet, from a harmonic standpoint, the piece barely moves at all. To extend Steinberg’s notion further, Common Tones in Simple Time is an experience in foreground and background: objects close to the listener appear in vivid detail, shimmering and moving quickly, whereas the landscape in the distance changes extremely slowly and monumentally. This illusion is best heard about fifteen minutes into the piece, when the vibraphone and harps begin to pulse incessantly and are soon joined by high strings. This busy motion soon gives way to a foggy glimpse of Bb major in the lowest registers of the orchestra. All at once, the foreground activity of flute, string harmonics, and piercing oboes is overshadowed by a mountainous shift from Bb-major down to A-major, as executed by brass and pianos. Adams then reinforces this harmony with a cascade of quickly moving bells, flutes, piccolos, and slowly glistening strings. This is a distinctly American music: the music of the cross-country road trip, the slowly changing landscape above the quickly moving pavement.

Copyright 2004 Nico Muhly