The Heart Is Back in the Game

By Michael Walsh

Hypnotic and infectious, minimalism is emotional in its appeal

The mood at the concert was growing ugly. The audience had divided into two warring camps. Some listeners yelled for the music to stop, others called for it to continue. Umbrellas were brandished menacingly. Cheers and catcalls grew so noisy that the musicians had to count aloud to keep their places. One distressed listener, unable to contain her emotions any longer, jumped from her seat, ran down the aisle and pounded on the stage. "I can't stand it any longer!" she screamed at the startled performers.

The riotous Paris premiere of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring in 1913? The hostile demonstration in Vienna that prevented the first performance of two of Alban Berg's Altenberg Lieder a couple of months earlier? The disruptive reception accorded Verdi's La Traviata or Puccini's Madama Butterfly?

Not exactly. The focus of the Carnegie Hall audience's turmoil was Steve Reich's Four Organs, a deceptively simple, 24-minute work for four electric organs and maracas whose musical substance is but a single six-note chord repeated insistently in varying patterns. In 1973, when Four Organs was performed in New York City by members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Reich's style of music, called minimalism, was hardly known outside a few SoHo lofts.

But when the New York Philharmonic opens its subscription season this week under Conductor Zubin Mehta, it does so with an eagerly sound. Reich orchestral premiere: Tehillim, an infectious, high-spirited laudation set to Hebrew psalms, which begins with the sound of two hands clapping and ends in a full-throated blaze of hallelujahs. For both Reich and the style of which he is a leading representative, the concert will be a cause of celebration. Minimalism, a joyous, exciting--and sometimes maddening--amalgam of influences as disparate as African drumming, the Balinese gamelan and new wave rock, has come uptown at last.

With its short, catchy melodic fragments, simple chordal harmonies, rock-steady rhythms and virtually trance-inducing repetitions, the minimalist music of such composers as Reich, 45, Philip Glass, 45, and John Adams, 35, is directly emotional in its appeal, a deliberate rebuke to three decades of arid, overly intellectualized music produced by the post-war avantgarde. Although minimal music is often tightly organized, its objective is to create a mood in the listener, not to have him follow a complicated puzzle. Minimal music (the term is borrowed from the less-is-more visual-arts movement of the '60s, led by such artists as Sculptors Sol LeWitt and Donald Judd) invites the audience to revel in hypnotic sounds and take delight when one prolonged, incessantly repeated passage suddenly gives way to another. It is a kind of musical kaleidoscope whose each new turn can reveal sudden, unexpected beauties.

"Minimalism sees the world in a grain of sound--in one sound there is the whole universe of possibility," says Art-Rocker Brian Eno, whose own music has been influenced by the minimalist aesthetic. "The whole exploration of something in nothing is a minimalist concern; no matter how much you take away, there is always something rich left. It's like putting a microscope on the sound and discerning tiny aspects of it." Says Choreographer Lucinda Childs, who performed in Glass's pioneering Einstein on the Beach in 1976: "It takes you out like a mist, where you can see 20 miles, then you see nothing. It is an emotional experience to find you are in different places, but you don't know how you got there."

In its impact and growing influence, minimalism may be one of the most significant musical developments since Arnold Schoenberg's invention of the twelve-tone system 60 years ago. Schoenberg and his followers freed music from a reliance on the exhausted melodies and harmonies of late romanticism, mercifully writing finis to an art that had culminated in the agonized Freudian uncertainties of Gustav Mahler. But the twelve-tone composers set modern music on a severe, emotionally parched course that resulted after World War II in a body of highly organized pieces whose attraction for a small circle of listeners was mainly intellectual. Retrenchment has taken many forms: George Rochberg's return to tonality, the stylistic eclecticism of such younger composers as David Del Tredici and John Corigliano, and the comfortable music of traditional composers like Carlisle Floyd and Robert Ward, who were not seduced by the siren song of Schoenberg in the first place. But minimalism is the most radical reaction of all. "People sometimes tell me my problem is I don't know Schoenberg," observes Glass. "On the contrary, I know him too well."

The style goes by many names: "trance" music, "process" or "system" music, "steady-state-structuralist" music and, even less flatteringly, "going-nowhere" and "needle-stuck-in-the-groove" music. Minimalism is nothing if not controversial, and many prominent musicians find those last two epithets especially accurate. Composer Elliott Carter, who won Pulitzer Prizes for his complex, brainy String Quartets Nos. 2 and 3, dismisses minimalism with a shrug: "Silence is the most minimal music. About one minute of minimalism is a lot, because it is all the same." Minimalists, thinks Carter, "are not aware of the larger dimensions of life. One also hears constant repetition in the speeches of Hitler, and in advertising. It has its dangerous aspects." Fellow Composer Luciano Berio agrees. Asked what he hears in minimalism, Berio replies, "It doesn't give me anything. I see it as a very naive experience, the musical equivalent of Grandma Moses."

Even Conductor Michael Tilson Thomas, who led the Four Organs performance at Carnegie Hall, has reservations. "Minimalism still has a lot to come to terms with," he says. "Will it show us dichotomies of human nature and thought that have made good classical music fascinating through the years?" Conductor Mehta, despite his championing of Reich's Tehillim, also sees some limitations. "After all," Mehta says, drawing an analogy to painting, "Seurat and his points didn't go on too long. I don't think it could last."

In spite of such skepticism, minimalism has grown rapidly in popularity. Last fall, Glass's visionary opera Satyagraha sold out five performances at the Brooklyn Academy of Music after being performed successfully at Artpark in upstate New York and in Europe. At the Royal Palace in Amsterdam last May, Glass's newest music-theater piece, The Photographer, was premiered at a command performance for Queen Beatrix of The Netherlands. And in Chicago this summer, 10,000 listeners at Grant Park lustily cheered a performance of Adams' powerful 1981 choral piece, Harmonium. "When I was a student," says Adams, "I thought that if I wrote something that was attractive there must be something wrong with it. Now I feel there are a lot of people out there actually waiting for my next piece."

Reich's Tehillim should also find popular favor. The most formally conventional piece Reich has yet written, Tehillim (the name means psalms or praises in Hebrew) is in four movements and reflects its composer's interest in cantillation, or chanting of the Scriptures. The music has a strong Middle Eastern flavor with its crisp, jagged rhythms and exotic melodic turns, which compound and pile up on one another until the piece explodes in an irresistible shout of triumph. In Tehillim Reich has added an ecstatic element to his musical vocabulary, and his work has become more poignant and expressive than ever before. The maturing of minimal music sounds in every note of Tehillim.

Yet the movement actually has old and honorable antecedents. In the first of the 48 preludes and fugues that make up The Well-Tempered Clavier, Bach unfolded a serene meditation in the key of C over a placid, unchanging rhythmic pattern. To set the proper bardic tone for his mythological Ring of the Nibelung operatic saga, Wagner spun the entire Prelude of Das Rheingold from a single E-flat major triad, embellishing a bass note into a torrent of arpeggios to depict the primal nature of the Rhine. Ravel built Bolero around a sinuous, reiterated melody, clad in shifting orchestral colors, which only once lurches briefly away from its home key.

The ideas that directly formed modern minimalism began circulating nearly a quarter-century ago. The first piece to achieve widespread recognition--or notoriety--was Terry Riley's In C (1964). Early minimalism in its purest form, In C consists of 53 short musical motives that can be played by any combination of instruments. Each motive may be played as many times as an individual performer wishes; the piece ends when all 53 fragments have been heard. Unpretentious and, except in the patience required from the listener, undemanding, In P:was an explicit reaction to the intellectualized compositional climate of the time.

"At the time I wrote In C," Riley, 47, recalls, "I was almost ready to drop out of music. Classical music was very mental; the mind governed the musical activity. I think the shift in what this music was doing was letting the heart back into the game. I wanted to make the score so minimal that it wasn't important any more." Like many minimalists, Riley has been heavily influenced by Asian music, with its spacious time frames and slow-moving, almost imperceptible changes. Within a decade after the In C premiere, Reich was studying African drumming at the University of Ghana and Balinese gamelan music on the West Coast, while Glass was working with Indian Sitarist Ravi Shankar.

The commonly acknowledged founder of the minimalist style, however, is not Riley but La Monte Young, a prodigiously bearded disciple of the guru Pandit Pran Nath. Young, 46, works in a Lower Manhattan building owned by the Dia Art Foundation, which commissions and presents artistic projects, and spends six hours daily studying classical Indian music. He credits his researches into Indian music with influencing "by osmosis" his own works. Says Young: "The subtle nuances of raga showed me there were aspects of music I never suspected existed."

Young is fascinated by how sounds sound. His five-hour magnum opus, The Well-Tuned Piano, was composed on a specially adjusted piano tuned in true or "just" intonation (as opposed to the familiar "tempered" scale of ordinary pianos, which allows transposing among all 24 keys) that strictly observes the mathematical relationships between notes of the scale. But Young's uncompromising music has never won him a large following. "My direction is much less commercial," he says. "It's not the kind of thing you can sell at the disco. But I established a climate and an atmosphere. Minimalism never would have happened without me."

If minimalism began with men like Riley and Young, it is personified today by Reich and Glass. They are often mistakenly considered Gemini twins, two collegial composers with five-letter last names whose music is interchangeable. But such an impression is misleading. Although Reich and Glass attended the Juilliard School together, worked closely as performers and shared their early compositional discoveries, they hardly communicate now. They are both very competitive men.

Of the two, Reich is the theorist and Glass the dramatist. It was Reich who made a significant advance in minimalist technique with his development of phase-shift music in the mid-'60s. Beginning with tape pieces like Come Out (1966), Reich explored the patterns created when identical phrases, played simultaneously at first, gradually get out of sync as one speeds slightly ahead of the other. When, to his surprise, Reich discovered that live musicians were able to muster the intense concentration necessary to play phase-shift music, the result was Four Organs.

Reich's carefully crafted scores, meticulously notated in a small, clear hand, are the product of a Cornell philosophy major's search for systems and structures to support his musical vision. Although some of his music can seem as severe as his customary costume of unadorned white shirt and dark trousers, there is a deep warmth in his best works: Music for 18 Musicians (1976), one of Reich's longest (nearly an hour) and texturally richest pieces, infused with an uncharacteristic sense of brooding and menace; the Octet (1979), a sunny minimalist ode to joy; and Tehillim.

Despite his music's careful organization, Reich intends his work to be accessible. Says he: "I am interested in my music's surviving me. Anybody who is a composer and doesn't have any feelings about that would strike me as very odd and very inhuman."

Unlike Reich, who writes largely abstract, or "absolute" music, Glass revels in his music's inherent theatricality, and his best works have been for the stage. With his slightly bug-eyed stare, shock of unruly hair and his jeans and work shirts, he is the very picture of the bohemian composer, admirably captured in a huge portrait, Phil, by Artist Chuck Close that hangs in New York's Whitney Museum. Glass's adventurous collaboration with avant-garde Dramatist Robert Wilson resulted in Einstein on the Beach, an experimental five-hour "opera" that played to packed houses in Europe and twice sold out the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City. Satyagraha, a more conventional work based on an episode from the life of Gandhi, is perhaps the most accessible, spiritually exhilarating opera composed since World War II.

Glass's recent music-theater work, The Photographer, contains some of his best music to date. A first-act song for six voices, called Circles, has an immediately appealing melody that sticks in the mind as vividly as a Top 40 hit. Later, the music grows longer and denser; by Act III, the piece has become a raging cataract of sound that invokes the spirit of Wagner's Rheingold Prelude: a mighty river at flood tide, frightening in its intensity. The elemental force of his music has made the Baltimore-born Glass perhaps the best-known international exponent of minimalism.

The fastest-rising minimalist composer--and potentially the most influential of all--is John Adams, a New Englander who now lives in San Francisco, where he is composer in residence with the San Francisco Symphony. Adams' music represents less of a conscious break with the past than either Reich's or Glass's; instead of reducing his music to the bare bones, Adams draws inspiration from composers like Beethoven, Mahler, Sibelius and Stravinsky. His works have a lushness and emotional depth largely absent in the ascetic though fundamentally cheerful sounds of Reich or the giddy, explosive rhythms of Glass. The least "minimal" of the three, Adams has forged a big, strong, personal style, expressed in complex forms that employ a more extensive use of dissonance than other minimalists.

"I'm trying to embrace the tragic aspects of life in my work," says Adams. "That's something minimalism has not really succeeded in doing yet." Adams, Harvard-trained, wrote electronic music before turning to minimalism. In works like Harmonium, a dark, atmospheric large-scale choral work on texts by John Donne and Emily Dickinson, and Grand Pianola Music, a crazy, rollicking good time for two pianos, chamber ensemble and vocalists, he has marked himself as a composer of diversity and breadth. His highly accessible music makes a bridge between the avant-garde and traditional concert-hall fare.

If minimalism is still eyed suspiciously by classical musicians, it has been embraced by such new wave rockers as David Byrne of the Talking Heads and bands like King Crimson, as well as by experimentalists like Eno and Performance Artist Laurie Anderson. Rock and minimalism share obvious characteristics, including a steady beat, limited harmonies and hypnotic repetition; one early example of minimalist rock was Mike Oldfield's album Tubular Bells (1973), part of which was used as theme music for the movie The Exorcist. Byrne's compelling score for Twyla Tharp's 1981 ballet The Catherine Wheel is a good example of the healthy interactions between pop and classical experimentalists. So is Eno's Discreet Music, a 30-minute piece that consists of two melodies of different duration that overlap and combine, creating fresh patterns from familiar material.

Meanwhile, the composers who formulated the movement are going in ever more ambitious directions. Glass is hard at work on his next opera, Akhnaten, which will be premiered by the Stuttgart Opera in 1984, and his record Glassworks has sold 50,000 copies since its release in February. Reich has four orchestral commissions in hand, and Adams' Grand Pianola Music will be performed by Amsterdam's prestigious Concertgebouw Orchestra in November.

The sounds of trance music are also turning up elsewhere. Within the next few weeks, both Matter of Heart, a film about Jung with music by Adams, and Koyaanisqatsi (a Hopi word for "life out of balance") with music by Glass, will have New York premieres. And in December, the Joffrey Ballet will perform a new work by Composer-Choreographer Laura Dean, who. two years ago created the stark, driving minimalist ballet Night.

Such vitality marks minimalism as a movement to be taken seriously. In a musical culture weary of superratiocinated works, suspicious of overt returns to the tonal language of romantics, and condescending to the conservatives who were never affected by the twelve-tone style at all, minimalism has detonated in a burst of kinetic, visceral excitement. Ordinary audiences, who do not care to know twelve-tone serialism from breakfast cereal, now listen raptly to minimalist concerts and debate their merits afterward. No one knows how long the style may last, or what contributions to the repertoire it may ultimately make. Posterity decides that. But any new music that could inspire normally placid people to leap from their seats and run around the aisles must have something going for it. Ask the folks who first heard The Rite of Spring.

-- By Michael Walsh.

Reported by Nancy Newman/New York

With reporting by Nancy Newman

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