Music that dupes the audience
Stephen Pettitt believes that because minimalism has lost its radical edge it is now meaningless
Aaround 40 years, the history of minimalist music is a relatively short one. Hard to comprehend it now that Philip Glass and Steve Reich are all the rage, but nobly antiestablishment sentiments lay behind its creation. This was a radical new music, intended to counterbalance the complexities that some composers — those whom the naturally rebellious young saw as members of a dyed-in-the wool establishment — were intent on extending to the nth degree. It used only the simplest, most essential materials, and techniques which seemed straightforward, though it garnered influences both from rock music and from non-Western musics, in particular that of India. It was invented in America, and its early practitioners included La Monte Young, who worked amidst the laid-back flower-power culture of California, and the triumvirate of Terry Riley, Steve Reich and Philip Glass, who were based in the urban freneticism of Manhattan. Reich and Glass, together with John Adams, soon found themselves the leaders and the most popular figures of the movement, though Adams was quick (and right) to disavow the label minimalist for his own, more Eurocentric, art.
Like its counterpart in visual art, minimalist music was conceived as something ruthlessly abstractionist and reductionist. But, far from being severe, it was a modest music, one that deliberately jettisoned cultural loftiness, navel-gazing emotionalism and self-serving intellectualism. It turned its back not only on serialism — the matrixoriented method that is supposed to guarantee the absence of any sense of key — but also on the chromaticism which had lent such dynamic, expressive power to Western music for the previous four centuries. It replaced fluid, flexible rhythms with rigid tactus. Any hint of sensuality or drama was unceremoniously defenestrated. Instead, this was a music that depended upon repetition, pattern-making, phaseshifting, unchanging dynamic, pithiness, rather than upon any organic development, flexibility, subtly painted texture. It turned its back on convention. It was a breath of fresh air. It was young. It was, on the surface at any rate, simple. Your regular bluecollar guy, your average anti-Vietnam war protester, could understand it.
But young and fresh cannot stay young and fresh for ever, and the composers of early minimalist music, classically trained, were unlikely to have shaken off completely the influence of the thousand years' worth of Western music in which they had been steeped as students. Sooner or later, some kind of rapprochement between their radical, new, simple, abstract, non-Occidental ways and what they had earlier so radically eschewed would have to be effected. And that is what happened. Their rebellious periods over, Reich and Glass and Adams found themselves wanting to compose ever more ambitious, ever more substantial, ever more important pieces.
For Adams the problem was no problem at all, since his tendency was naturally to be more eclectic and his music aimed at a brilliant polish. Reich made ever larger forms that were essentially elongations of his smaller forms. Among Glass's activities, however, were — are — the writing of pieces that he could call 'opera' or 'symphony% rather than simply 'music', So much for the abstraction and objectivity, the refusal to engage in drama, the disdaining of mainstream Western musical thought, that had been part of the minimalist ideal.
Glass's operas, however, work in a way that the symphonies cannot. The music is only in essence an atmospheric accompaniment to the sophisticated, thought-provoking ritual drama provided by Robert Wilson and his ilk. In that way they represent a return to opera's first principles. But symphonies? There is no getting away from it. Glass might have chosen to ignore the word's resonances of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, and instead resort, as Stravinsky had, to its literal meaning of 'sounding together'. But no. Glass's symphonies adopt a European symphonic shape. Having effected a reductio ad absurdum, Glass attempts to use his half-pint pots of nothing, his non-ideas, his doodlings, as instruments of contrast, collision, conflict and resolution. It doesn't, and cannot, work. To make a symphony you need solid foundations, and you need musical bricks and mortar, not air. You also need to need to make a symphony. For unlike minimalism, symphony is not merely process.
Still more worryingly, none of the examples of Glass's symphonies played in last autumn's short festival at the Barbican seemed like works that demanded to be written. Rather, one felt that the music was being created to fill a certain amount of time. It was simply another commodity, another way for the punters to plug the gap between work and sleep, a meaningless emollient. It seemed to have no reason for its existence, no urgent motivation or inspiration behind it. And that is what I find so depressing about much — though not all — of the music written by the minimalist tendency. Around me sit thousands of CDs, the accumulation of a 20-year career as a music critic. On the vast majority of them, each and every note has its reason. The decorated clausula in an elaborate plainchant. The elegantly winsome turn of phrase in a Schubert song. The deft touch of metallic percussion in something by Boulez. Not so in the case of the minimalists.
What choices did they have when it came to that moment when they had to ask themselves what now for minimalism? They could have carried on as they were, flogging the idea of fundamentalist musical minimalism to its inevitably early death and then retired on the proceeds. Or they could have taken the path preferred by Adams, and recognised that minimalism was only part of the answer. Or they could have been really brave, and in asking themselves in what directions the minimalist style might lead them, discount traditional forms. Had they adopted this last option they might have arrived at a secular equivalent of the macro-minimalism of John Tavener, or perhaps with something that resembles Arvo Part, two composers of minimalist tendencies who have not tried to apply their languages to irrelevant or insufficiently rethought forms.
I know full well, of course, that vast numbers of people go to concerts of music by Glass, Reich, or indeed the arch-brutalist Michael Nyman, and thoroughly enjoy themselves, not worrying for a moment about whether a Glass symphony is really a symphony or not, nor about issues of substance or its absence, or about whether what they are hearing is simply a rejigged sequence of the same old clichés. Undoubt edly they will be very cross with me. But I believe that somewhere along the line they have been duped. The publicity machine presents minimalist music as a music that still exists at the cutting intellectual edge (whatever that is) of radicalism. Its nonOccidental elements help to secure its fashionability, but the Reich/Glass branch of minimalism has come to the point where all it does is encapsulate the complacencies, the emptypretentiousness, of a material age where comfort is easily found, where warmth, food and shelter, and a big telly in the corner of the living room showing wall-to-wall soap operas are for most of us givens. So much for being a member of an aspirational species.
But let us not think too hard about that, or about anything else. This isn't music to tax the mind. It turns in a handsome profit, thank you very much, and that, these days, is enough.
Previous page
