Minimalism on Stage

Let’s talk a little bit about Musical Theater.

Indisputably one of the most important cornerstones of the Arts, Musical Theater combines Drama and Songwriting to create a form of storytelling unlike any other. The use of Music allows for smoother pacing and better showing of otherwise ungodly long and utterly boring sequences. Likewise, the use of music (when used well, of course) betters displays the emotion of a scene than with words and action alone.

But in order for this to work, the music must be expressive, be able to capture the pure essence of a scene, above all, be flexible. Which begs the question: can something as inexpressive, un-capturing, and inflexible as Minimalist Music work for a piece of Musical Theater?

Oddly enough, yes. Yes it can. It is incredibly difficult, considering the aforementioned limitations, but it can be done, and the proof of that lies in the stage works of Philip Glass.

In traditional opera, music provides the emotional backbone to a story, whether it’s lighthearted or serious. This is exemplified in the opening number of one of Glass’ better known minimal operas, Akhnaten, “Funeral of Amenhoetp III”.

The minimalist elements one would come to expect are there, though it sounds like the Moondog equivalent of The Imperial March. Yet, there’s nothing there that sounds truly mournful. Sure, there is the Egyptian text glorifying the late king (as they should, he was the guy who brought all of Egypt together), but the piece is up tempo. There’s nothing really there that truly suggests a state of mourning.

But remember, this is Ancient Egypt this opera is being set in. This was the time of the Pharaohs, of the Sphinxes, a time where having your internal organs getting sucked out of your body with a bendy straw was considered not only socially acceptable but also desirable.

Now with organs removed at half price!

In fact, based on observations of hieroglyphics and ancient paintings and carvings, a composer named Jeffery Goodman believes that the spirit song of King Tutankhamun may have sounded something like this:

If I didn’t know any better, I’d say that was a Native American tune written by Edgard Varese or Steve Reich or something. But no. That’s a modern interpretation of genuine Ancient Egyptian drumming music.

Now, to be fair, it’s hard to tell if Glass even knew of these artifacts’ existence, let alone know how to dissect them, so it’s more than likely that this is merely a coincidence. However, the similarities are striking, from the constant repetitions to the hypnotic factors and even the similarities in bass lines between the two pieces. It’s unclear what Glass was thinking when he wrote Akhnaten, but it’s clear that he had a bit of an idea of what he was doing.

Now, Akhnaten isn’t a typical Minimalist piece. It has a large orchestra and other factors that were designed to help the more mainstream audience ease in more to the idea of Minimalist Music. This next example, on the other hand, is pure minimalism throughout.

Einstein on the Beach began as a collaboration between Cage and director Robert Wilson. Their eventual agreement that the end goal would be an opera of around 4-5 hours centered around a historical figure. And after some name tossing (including Mahatma Gandhi and Adolf Hitler), they eventually settled on Albert Einstein. Every aspect of the play thus revolves around aspects of Einstein’s life; his Theory of Relativity frames the three major scenes in the play.

As for the actual story...there isn’t any. Wilson was a believer in formalism, where the music is supposed to excite the emotions of its listener, such as Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District. This way, Wilson claims that more truth on stage is presented than a naturalist work can do. The text is thus filled with mostly solfege, numbers, and short sections of poetry.

Einstein on the Beach consists of five continuous acts, separated by 20 minute interludes called “Knee Scenes”. Below is the first of these that starts the opera.

As you can hear, the piece is incredibly minimalist. There’s constant repetition of the numbers in the choir (a possible reference to Einstein’s various mathematical and scientific discoveries), but it’s the chord progression in this piece which is the true standout of this piece. According to Professor Timothy Johnson says that in every Knee Piece, there are repetitive formulae simple triads that reach a goal, repeated again and again in a hypnotic pattern. In this case, vi-V-I. It ironically takes much for a piece to be minimal. It requires just the right combination of elements to make minimalist music minimalist music, and Einstein on the Beach not only hits those elements perfectly but does so to motion.

Einstein on the Beach is a landmark opera, setting the stage for operas like it to come.

Returning to my original question: can Minimalist Music be used effectively in Theatrical Performance? The answer is a clear “Yes”, but the result is unlike anything the world has seen before. In fact, there are some people who refuse to consider Einstein on the Beach an opera. In fact, this kind of performance can loosely be considered Performance Art because it goes against every convention ever brought forth on stage. But there is no rule that says Minimalism can not be incorporated at all. And when it’s done right, the result is magic.

Graphic Notation Project

Here are the instructions:

and here's the piece itself.

Sorry you have to turn your head to see it properly. That's just the way it worked out.

Minimal Music, Part 1

Minimalism’s cool. How’s that?

Dennis O’Keefe Minimalism Part 1 Young, Reily, Reich 3/20/14 This barely qualifies as a sentence. GRADE: -2

Okay Miss Busy Body, I’ll go into more detail.

Minimalism is a form of composing and art that’s grounded in simplicity. It began as an architecture term in the 19th century, inspired by the traditional architecture of Japan. In fact, it is from this movement that the famous phrase “Less is More” comes from.

In music, minimalism (or minimal music as it’s technically called) first had its roots in the 1940s and 50s, with the music of Louis Hardin, better known by his nickname Moondog. A street musician during his New York years, he is best known for music like this:

Now, to be fair, this piece is part of record released in 1969. However, one can already hear the influences in the constantly repeating, unwavering ostinato behind the Tenor and Baritone Sax solos. They certainly caught the attentions of two important men: Philip Glass and Steve Reich. And of course, the rest is history.

This leads to topic that I’ve been curious about: what are the characteristics the define Minimal Music? I raise this question because many of the defining characteristics of Minimal Music is easily accessible in other genres of music. One would assume that the characteristics that make Minimal Music Minimal Music would be obvious.

Not so as it turns out.

In 1994, Leonard Meyer defined Minimal Music thusly:

“Because there is little sense of goal-directed motion, [minimal] music does not seem to move from one place to another. Within any musical segment there may be some sense of direction, but frequently the segments fail to lead to or imply one another. They simply follow one another.”

This one’s fairly easy to define because here, he’s basically saying that all the segments blend into each other. It’s not like a suite where each piece clearly leads into each other. Even in continuous works like the Symphonic Dances from West Side Story, there are clear indicators where each movement starts and ends. In Minimal Music, however, the piece is seamless. Even with multiple movements, there is no clear indicator of where each movement starts and ends. To show what I’m talking about, let’s take a look at a textbook example: Steve Reich’s 18 Musicians.

4:58 in the above video marks the end of the 1st section and the beginning of the 2nd. It is defined by the introduction of B minor into the equation. While noticeable, the music does not pause for its appearance in any way, nor do they really find a need to. By contrast, let’s look at the Symphonic Dances.

4:12 marks the transition between the Prologue and Somewhere. Notice how the Prologue slows down considerably in preparation for Somewhere: there is a clear cut warning that the next section is about to begin. In 18 Musicians, however, there’s almost no warning. The only sign of a transition is a slight diminuendo. Otherwise, hardly anything. The Vibraphone comes in and we’re in the next section. This is only one of Minimal Music’s defining qualities: abrupt shifts in music. On that note, let’s move on to the next subject I want to talk about.   

Another defining feature of Minimal Music is its use of repetition, not only internally (as in 18 Musicians) but also externally as I’ll explain. Now, this feature probably is misplaced the most often of the features because, well, it’s repetition: you don’t really get more basic than that. I mean, listen to the beginning of Zadok the Priest:

Some people can confuse, and have confused, it for genuine Minimal Music. But there are two major problems with their conclusions:

1.) The tonic shifts at every measure, unlike repetitiveness in Minimal Music where everything is kept at a constant.   

and 2.) This repetitiveness doesn’t last long as we go into a boisterous waltz section: the repetitiveness heard at the beginning was only the introduction to a coronation anthem.

There’s also the Snare Drum part to Bolero where, up until only the final measure, only the same rhythm is played ad nauseum:

Repeat again and again until your death bed.

This doesn’t work either because, well, it’s part of a larger work. Besides, it’d make for a mighty boring piece by itself.

Besides, when repetition is the forefront of a Minimalist work, it’s usually never used straight. Two notable examples are both by Steve Reich: Clapping Music (which delves into abrupt repetition):

and Piano Phase (which is done more gradually; it’ll make sense when you hear it.):

Then we have perhaps the most infamous feature of Minimal Music: Silence. First pioneered, of course, by John Cage, this is probably the most sparingly used of the features, but it’s still used nonetheless. This is perhaps the most flexible feature in all of Minimal Music because is mostly used as anticipation, just like a G.P. in a common work.

Take Lamonte Young’s Excerpt 31|69 C 12...eh, I’ll just call it Phil. Phil begins with 30 seconds of pure silence. The audience is no doubt wondering what’s going to happen, and are a little scared about what will happen. Then, when 30 seconds passes, boom! A piercing B♭5 comes in and stays unrelentingly for 6 ½ minutes straight. The audience is caught off guard. Many have to be taken to the hospital.

This is the power of silence. It builds anticipation, it builds fear, it builds wonder, and often the payoff is worth it. Of course, as I mentioned earlier, traditional G.P.s work the same kind of magic, but most G.P.s aren’t usually 30 seconds long. So I suppose in terms of silence, because you can’t get much more minimal than that, more is more. Just ask John Cage.

You know, maybe I’m judging these pieces too harshly. After all, none of the contrary-examples I mentioned are actually Minimal Music. But then again, the tropes of Minimal Music must be used in a careful function. It is not enough to simply put something on loop for 30 minutes. Something must be done with that loop. It shouldn’t be too severe, but with a good combination of skill and talent, it can be done. One can make something from nothing.          

There. Better?

Dennis O’Keefe Minimalism Part 1 Young, Reily, Reich 3/20/14 Not really. GRADE: -1.5  

Politics and the Avant-Garde

How do you make a political statement?

Thanks to our democratic structure, the possibilities are endless. How you make your statement is limited only by your abilities as a person. Most people usually write online petitions to speak their minds. Some join mass protests, joining their brothers and sisters to speak out for or against a similar interest. These are common ways, but they are not the only ways. Some strip naked in support of Animals and Muslims (recognizing the awkward wording in that last sentence), some boycott products from countries because they dislike the way it’s being run, and others still will plant bombs in cats to end a rival forever.

Or you can do what John Cage did in 1969, get everything and their grandmas into the Assembly Hall at the University of Illinois, and compose HPSCHD.

Certainly (and literally) the biggest thing John Cage has ever composed, the piece is more of an exhibition than a composition. With dozens of tape players, hundreds of computer-generated tapes, thousands of slides, and the kitchen sink, it was a virtual computer engineer’s Noah’s Ark.

And that was quasi-intentional on Cage’s part.

Cage intended this work to be a massive political statement, one that was “...not about politics, but political itself.” He wanted to showcase his vision of utopia: a world where man had personal freedom, abundance, and where each opinion differed but was nonetheless regarded with equal dignity.

Yes, John Cage was a massive anarchist, why do you ask?

But of course, one man’s vision of utopia may differ from another’s.

This begs the question: what was the politics of the Avant-Garde composers?

One would assume they were all leftist liberals because of their willingness to accept what all others have vehemently shunned. But though it’s true or some, it’s not true for others.

Let’s look at a man we've discussed before who was very much Avant-Garde for his time: Charles Ives.

For his time, Ives was a decidedly Avant-Garde composer. He dabbled in Dark Arts that many composers refused to acknowledge, let alone touch. Cluster Chords, Polytonality, and a lack of Time Signature ran rampant like blood through veins in his works, often resulting in pieces like this:

But it’s also easy to determine from that same music that Charles Ives was a deeply religious man. Not just because many of his pieces borrow religious melodies (Ives did that sort of thing now and again), but because of his conservative beliefs. He’d disown you as a confident if you’re so much as suspected of doing anything that can be interpreted as promiscuous (as Henry Cowell learned the hard way), and let’s not forget the amendment he proposed.

Of course, many Americans in the late 19th-early 20th centuries held these beliefs. But many Americans were not Charles Ives. Many Americans, as I said, wouldn’t dare touch the musical conventions Ives embraced during the times. It’s reasonable to assume Ives a conservative, but he was a crazy conservative.

And I mean the GOOD types of crazy conservative. Not like most of these guys.

In contrast, Cage’s newfound sense of anarchism seemed to have been spreading to the rest of the New York School. To be clear, though, I couldn't tell exactly where on the political spectrum the men lie. However, the differing viewpoints in the meaning of music, as best demonstrated by an interview conducted between Heinz-Klaus Metzger and Morton Feldman & Earle Brown, should be enough to know there is a difference.

Morton Feldman believed that his music, at least, was not political in the U.S., because he had lived under the presumption the it was actually a free country. The belief that America is a dictatorship is a common one for those who seek change. Earle Brown feels similarly (though he does have disagreement about Feldman’s love of quiet, but that’s another matter entirely), famously saying that “...there is no music that can't be used politically, but the motives behind the creation of that music can be non-political.”

So what does all of this have to do with anything? The point I’m trying to make is that all these men’s politics differed significantly. It’s clearly shown with Ives, and though they were influenced later on, the composers of the New York School came in with their own points of view and their own political beliefs. Additionally, their music was influenced by the politics of the time. The only reason Charles Ives fared better than his modern day counterparts is because, as I said in a previous post, his music was more of a compromise between Mainstream and Avant-Garde.

But maybe I’m rambling too much. Maybe it’s as Morton Feldman said and I’m seeing politics in places where it’s not really there. Maybe, but I guess it all depends on how you see the world.  

The science of music

WHAT AM I LISTENING TO?!?

That is the first reaction to listening to these pieces. Yes, I’m aware this phrase and its variants thereof has creeped up into various blog posts before, but...what am I supposed to make of this? How can I find some semblance of sense in conceptualism?

In thinking about it, though, like in most things, there is order in chaos.

Conceptualism is a form of composing where “...the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work”. In other words, it is a composition based almost entirely around a single idea or thought. With that in mind, yes it is a form of minimalism.

They can be based on a sole line of dialogue, like Steve Reich’s Come Out to Show ‘Em or James Tenney’s Collage #1 (“Blue Suede”), a tape piece based on Elvis Presley’s Blue Suede Shoes.

I'm not even joking. Look. LOOK.

Then, there are pieces like Alvin Lucier’s I am sitting in a room. What Lucier does in this piece is that he records a bit of dialogue, and then he played that recording back in the same room, re-recording that. The room has a certain frequency and when the recording is played back in the same room, that frequency is picked up again and amplified two-fold, resulting in an increased echo that’s better demonstrated than explained:

This process repeats itself until only the natural harmonies and tones of the room itself can be heard, “...articulated by speech”. And the sounds themselves are quite surreal, almost as though they are the anguished screamings of thousands of guilty souls in the eternal pits of hell.

And on a side note, it’s worth bringing up that Lucier is one letter away from “Lucifer”, but that’s another subject for another day.

Now, to be clear, the intent of this piece is more to, in Lucier’s own words, “...smooth out any irregularities my speech might have.” And he does stutter three times in his original recording. But still, there is a certain science to this piece. I may not be a “scientist”, but I think one may need to know something about the acoustics of a room to know how to do something like this. It transcends its original intent and ends up being a combination of frequency study and vocal transformation that is a science unto itself.

I recognize that the above might simply be a coincidence, but it’s still something worth bringing up.

Of course, the voice is only one way of expressing an idea. There are other means to do so as well. Take the piano, for instance.

Going back to James Tenney, he was a rather unusual composer. Unusual in that he’s a man without a specific genre of music. Some called him a father of Electronic Music, and there are some ways in which that is true. He was one of the first composers for the genre, having composed at Bell Laboratories during the 1960s, ending in 1969 with For Ann(rising). Likewise, others have called him a great minimalist composer. He has performed with the likes of Steve Reich and Philip Glass, not to mention have written for plenty of musical instruments.

Above all, though, he is an experimenter. Every piece is like a science experiment. In the New York Times article about him, Anne Midgette specifically names Ain’t I A Woman as an example of this. Regrettably, a recording is unavailable, so I’ll be brief. The experiment here is to mimic the speech patterns of Sojourner Truth with string instruments. This is done by analyzing the acoustics of speech, and though he admits that he can’t get it exactly right, he still says the results are beyond anything anyone’s ever seen.

Then, there’s his Chromatic Canon for 2 pianos.

It has been described as the love child of Serialism and Minimalism. And that’s not my comparison; after the premiere, Steve Reich jokingly criticized the piece, saying that he was “put in bed with Schoenberg”, entirely the point of the piece. The piece is a virtual battle between Minimalism and Serialism. What starts out as a simple broken Perfect 5th gradually gets taken over by a 12 tone row before going back to a broken Perfect 5th, transposed up 5 semitones. A virtual arc. The idea found in the piece goes back to his personal life. According to Tenney, the tension found between two clashing elements is supposed to simulate the tension between his parents and his desire to bring them together.

It’s a grand experiment, one that, thanks to Tenney’s love of harmony, one that paid off spectacularly. And that’s what science is all about: to experiment, to test new things, to take risks. I say these things running the risk of me sounding like an evangelistic, but in a way: Conceptualists are musical scientists: they experiment, they see what works and what doesn't, and they present their findings to the world to be scrutinized. A bit of a stretch, maybe, but it’s a theory worth looking into.