I recently returned from a semester abroad in London, where I intensely studied art and culture. While I was there I was required to take a few different arts courses. This included a music history course entitled, “Topics in Music History,” which sounded absolutely thrilling. As a music major, I had already taken two semesters of music history and was feeling slightly unenthusiastic about a third semester of studying Gregorian chants and memorizing opus numbers. Little did I know that this course would open my eyes and ears to new musical understanding and fascination. Before taking the course in London, I had heard the term “postmodern” in my classes but had little knowledge about what it was or its musical application. After several lectures and articles, I am beginning to grasp the concept and would like to share my findings with you all.
Throughout musical history we have been able to name each musical era and pick out the characteristics that make that compositional era unique. However, the post-modern era is ambiguous and nonlinear. In fact, the name itself just lets us know it is the era after the modern era. So, what is the postmodern musical era, and how does it affect you? I will do my best to explain this musical era to you because I feel it is important to understand our current musical environment, and how it not only affects our music, but our daily lives.
Jonathan D. Kramer was probably the leading expert on Postmodern musical theory. His book, Postmodern Music, and Postmodern Listening, which he completed just before his death in 2004, was recently published in 2016. I highly recommend reading it, or at least skimming a few excerpts from it. However, if you are not inclined to spend hours reading up on postmodern music philosophy, I will attempt to break down some of his ideas for you.
The first step in understanding postmodernism is distinguishing the difference between postmodern and anti-modern. Often these two labels are used interchangeably, but there is a clear distinction. Anti-modernists reject modernist values and attempt to return to traditional musical values. Both styles look back to the musical elements of classicism and romanticism, but there is a clear distinction between the two. Anti-modernists, in their attempt to revive traditional values, still hold onto the elitist values of earlier musical periods. Postmodernists, however, both embrace and repudiate the past. They attempt to break down the barrier between “high-brow” and “low-brow” music. Postmodernists challenge the divide between popular and classical music, while anti-modernists prefer to establish themselves as a superior musical form. Both styles look to the past for inspiration but use the past differently within their compositions. Anti-modernists re-embrace earlier styles, techniques, phrasing, and structures. Postmodernists, on the other hand, take familiar elements of the past and transform them, and combine them with new elements to create something unique.
To give you a better understanding of what I mean by anti-modern and postmodern I will provide you with an example of each. The first example is George Rochberg’s Ricordanza. Once a serial composer, Rochberg returned to tonality and traditional techniques in 1964 to find more musical expression. This piece demonstrates the anti-modern return to earlier styles and has an unexpected early sound for a piece composed in 1972
Although Rochberg composed a quintessentially anti-modern piece, he also composed a quintessentially postmodern piece in that same year. Rochberg’s Third Quartet takes a traditional string quartet and moves beyond it and transforming it into something entirely different. There are moments of tonality and traditionalism, which become skewed by intense moments of atonality and extended technique. Rochberg has created something unique with his blending of styles, and clearly demonstrates a postmodern voice.
Now so far, I have been referring to postmodernism as if it fits perfectly on the linear timeline of Western music; the classical era followed by the romantic, followed by the modern, and so on, but I have been lying to you. Postmodernism no longer fits within our linear timeline of Western music. Kramer explains that it is an “attitude” rather than a musical period. Music from other eras can be listened to with a postmodern perspective. Some may even say that all works are postmodern at their conception. The French philosopher Jean-Francios Lyotard puts it beautifully when he writes, “A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern. Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant.” All works in the beginning look to the past and simultaneously embrace and reject it, thus making them postmodern before they become anything else.
Postmodernists also have begun to question all elements of current Western musical understanding. Postmodernists believe in challenging social binaries; they question everything that we have believed to be inherent. I have, and I believe most people have, always considered a musical work as a whole. When I go to the symphony, I understand the entire symphony as a unified work made up of the sum of four movements. Yet, the postmodern composers and listeners reject this entire idea of musical unity. What if you were to accept each musical passage as it comes? Each passage is its own entity that does not add to an overarching narrative or structure. Is unity inherent or is it a value we have we have projected onto music? Postmodernists challenge all our preconceived notions about music, and what we believe to be inherent. Kramer explains that the postmodern listener is, “more willing to accept each passage of music for itself, rather than having- in accordance with the strictures of modernist analysis and criticism- to create a single whole of possibly disparate parts.” Occasionally, at a more contemporary music concert I find it easier to listen to each phrase as it comes, and not try and place it within a larger context. Perhaps postmodern listening helps make certain types of music more accessible for audiences.
The other components that postmodern composers really gravitate towards are intertextuality and eclecticism. Some take direct quotations from other works and place them within a new musical context. Postmodernism is about taking from a variety of sources and creating something new. Taking something that sounds familiar but adding something to it or giving it a new meaning. Postmodernists are about transformation of the familiar, all while taking from a variety of sources. Quotation is an important element in this process. A great example of this is George Crumb’s quotation of Richard Strauss’ Zarathustra in his work Vox Balaenae (Voice of the Whale). Crumb takes a passage that originally is this triumphant and iconic moment between the brass and the tympani, and recontextualizes it into an eerie conversation between flute and piano using extended techniques. This is a great example of a postmodern composer’s ability to give the familiar a new identity.
A great example of a postmodern composer’s use of eclecticism is Laurie Anderson. Anderson was initially trained as a classical violinist, but as she developed as an artist she began to combine the elements of popular and classical music to create a unique avant-garde sound. Laurie Anderson’s album Big Science is a great example of postmodern music that fuses the separate musical worlds into one. As a listener you can hear the influences of classical, jazz, and pop, but ultimately Anderson has taken from a wide range of sources and created something truly original.
Now that I have given you a glimpse at postmodernism in music, I want to reflect on postmodernism in our own lives. You are most likely more postmodern than you think. One of the biggest causes of postmodernism is something Kramer refers to as “social saturation.” This is the saturation caused by the constant flow of information through technology. It causes us to have a life of fragmentation, short attention spans, and multiplicity; our attention is constantly drawn in several different directions. Kramer writes, “There is no time to reflect, no time to savor, no time for contemplation, no time for considered choice, no time for depth. Conflicting claims on our attention, as well as constant bombardment with information, lead to the fragmented sensibility associated with postmodern attitudes.” The other day I had a conversation with my friend, in which we both realized we are never really bored anymore; if I get bored with Instagram I’ll go watch Netflix or listen to Spotify. My attention is constantly pulled in several directions. Because of all these constant distractions, our sense of self is constantly in flux; we are constantly being molded by the information being fed to us. Postmodern music cannot help but reflect this societal state. In addition to personal fragmentation, our relationship with the past has also shifted. People from our past are no longer distant; I can search for my kindergarten classmates on Facebook right now. The past is no longer far and unapproachable the way it once was, and this is reflected in postmodernism’s nonlinear attitude.
Even artists who may not consider themselves to be postmodernists cannot help but be affected by social saturation and fragmentation, and thus ultimately end up making postmodern art. Although postmodernism is difficult to define, I find myself understanding where I fit in within postmodernism. We are no longer stuck within specific channels of life. Each of us can experience as many aspects of life as we want. I am a musician, a rugby player, and a cook. Many adults nowadays experience more than one career in their lives because they are no longer confined to specific social channels. Postmodernism is about accepting things for what they are, challenging norms, processing the constant stream of information, and transforming the past into a present context. The question is: are you postmodern?
In April, the Oregon Symphony presented a remarkable and powerful concert as part of its “Sounds of Home” series, where young mothers experiencing housing insecurity, had the opportunity to write lullabies for their children. These were performed by OSO musicians. Their concert was inspired by Carnegie Hall’s “Lullaby Project”, which recently released a CD under that title. I had the opportunity to speak with the acclaimed opera singer, Joyce DiDonato, about the CD. I think that you will find our conversation to be inspiring and moving; a message of hope for everyone who believes that if we give people a chance to express themselves through art, good things can happen.
American pianist Simone Dinnerstein’s newest CD pairs Bach’s Concerto in G minor with a newly-commissioned one by Philip Glass. Ms. Dinnerstein shares the story of how she asked Mr. Glass for a new concerto, Bach’s influence on both pianist and composer, and the process of bringing the concerto to life. Hear more in the pianist’s conversation with John Pitman, and some samples of this beautiful new work, which John calls his “favorite new work”.
(Special Note: If you are new to this blog, click here to first read Part One of this series.)
New Horizons: Postminimalism
In our last post, we left off with a broader conception of minimalism as a music which creates a listening experience that is meditative, non-teleological, and process-oriented. It is through this broader lens in which minimalism has expanded and evolved in more recent years. After the first wave of minimalist music in the 1960s and ’70s, the early 1980s brought about a trend music critic Kyle Gann calls the “post-minimalism,” arising from a new generation of up-and-coming composers which included William Duckworth, Janice Giteck, Daniel Lentz, Ingram Marshall, Jonathan Kramer. Early minimalist pieces were frequently very long (over 30 minutes) and had open instrumentation, with composers using their own flexible ensembles to perform the music. Postminimalist pieces, on the other hand, were notably shorter and often scored for a specific instrument or chamber ensemble.
Postminimalist music still retained minimalism’s core value: a usage of limited materials. New to postminimalism, however, was frequent quotation of other styles of music, both classical and non-classical. Daniel Lentz’s The Crack in the Bell (1986), for example, based on an e.e. cummings poem of the same name, utilizes minimalism’s repetitive arpeggios and chords, but references everything from patriotic tunes to Renaissance motets. Another striking aspect of The Crack in the Bell is the way the piece constantly shifts between different keys and tempos, creating a feeling of turbulence that departs from the steady beats of early minimalism. William Duckworth’s Time Curve Preludes (1978-9), a cycle of 24 pieces for piano, is another example of an early postminimalist work. Like minimalism, the movements feature clean, non-modulating tonalities, but occasionally a sharp dissonance obscures the texture. Phase-shifting rhythmic patterns and ostinatos dominate the texture, a nod to the additive and subtractive processes of minimalist composer Steve Reich. Exactly these processes work, however, remain unclear to the ear – the structure cannot be figured out by simply listening.
William Duckworth, Time Curve Preludes, No. 4, performed by Silas Bassa
A more well-known composer associated with the postminimalism movement is John Adams (b. 1947). Adams’s use of driving rhythms led to him initially being viewed as a minimalist, but he went on to incorporate elements from Romanticism and Stravinsky-informed neo-classicism into his music, resulting in pieces with wide sound palettes and large-scale instrumentations. Adams’s orchestral fanfare Short Ride in a Fast Machine (1986) exemplifies this style. The piece consists of short, pulsating ideas that are insistently repeated, yet constantly evolve. Adams creates a sense of harmonic progression through sudden shifts in key area from one chord to another (a concept known as “gating”). The chords go on under extended melodies, and a rapid, driving rhythm led by a consistent pulse in the woodblock. Like in minimalism the piece is in perpetual motion, but it has a more clearly defined four-section structure.
John Adams, Short Ride in a Fast Machine, performed by the San Francisco Symphony
Post-minimalist composers loosened some of minimalism’s formal structures and were even more open to musical influences outside the classical realm. Composers like David Lang, Michael Gordon, and others from the New York-based group Bang on a Can, had their roots in minimalism but adopted contemporary music influences from world music and electronica. Multiple musicians in experimental rock during this period were both influenced and were influenced by minimalist styles, particularly Reich’s technique of building up layers of sound through closely spaced canons. The experimental/ambient composer Brian Eno (b. 1948) discovered Reich’s It’s Gonna Rain in the early 1970s, and in 1973 he saw a live performance of Reich’s ensemble. Reich’s influence shows up in Eno’s solo albums, including his Discreet Music, and the Ambient series, and in his work as a producer. David Bowie, too, was affected by Reich’s work. In 1976 he attended the European premiere of Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians, and was also working with Eno for his album Low. Bowie was also influenced by Glass’s flavor of minimalism, and Glass, in turn, has based his Symphonies No. 1 and No. 4 on albums by Bowie (Low and Heroes, respectively).
David Lang, “sunray” (2012), performed by Bang on a Can All-Stars
From Minimal to Maximal
The legacy of minimalism grows on. Both the minimalist vanguard of the 1960s and the rich exchange of ideas between musical worlds brought on by postminimalism has profoundly shaped the musical landscape of the 21st century, continuing to influence emerging composers of today. Many composers writing in the classical tradition have adopted some elements of minimalism while rejecting others in forming their own voice. In this way, minimalism has become something arguably more maximal, evolving from a style grounded in radical simplicity to a toolbox of popular techniques capable of a wide range of expressive content.
Fifty years later, the members the original vanguard are in their mid-70s and 80s, but they continue to compose, especially Reich and Glass, drawing from an even wider range of influences to inform their musical languages. Reich has increasingly branched out in utilizing different instrumentations for his works. In 1988, he collaborated with the Kronos Quartet in the making of Different Trains, a piece for string quartet and prerecorded spoken phrases which sample interviews with Americans and Europeans about the years before, during, and after World War II. Reich frequently uses a different type of quartet, two pianos and two percussion instruments, in pieces including his Quartet (2013). Pulse (2015), a response to his earlier Quartet, features an ensemble of winds, strings, piano, and electric bass. Others works of Reich incorporate non-classical music, such as his Radio Rewrite (2012), which rework songs from the British rock band Radiohead.
Steve Reich, Different Trains, performed by the Smith Quartet
Philip Glass, while originally focusing on writing works for his chamber group, broke into opera beginning with his Einstein on the Beach of 1976. This led to Glass writing in other conventional classical genres for the concert hall, from his First Violin Concerto (1987) to his numerous symphonies and strings quartets. Many consider Glass to be the most influential American composer alive today, especially in the area of film music. Glass’s film music explorations began in the 1960s-80s underground scene of “synaesthetic cinema,” which consisted of non-narrative films grounded in a language of a language of light, space and sound. Many synaesthetic films used minimalist music, combined with swirling, lush visuals, to guide the viewer into a hypnotic state. Glass’s first score was for Godfrey Reeggio’s Koyaanisqatsi (1982), the first of his Qatsi trilogy of environmental documentaries. Most film music is recorded after the film has been assembled and edited, but Koyaanisqatsi was specifically edited to the rhythms contained in Glass’s score. Today, Glass has scored over two dozen films for movies and television series, receiving nominations for Academy Awards for his soundtracks to Kundun (1997), The Hours (2002) and Notes on a Scandal (2006).
Philip Glass, excerpt from Koyaanisqatsi (1982)
Philip Glass, from The Hours (2002)
Minimalism in “Neo-Classical” Music
Where minimalist music has maybe had the most substantial impact on today’s music scene is in what has come to be known as “neo-classical” or “indie classical” music. The term neo-classical broadly refers to a group of composers, labels, and promoters centered on independent labels such as Erased Tapes, New Amsterdam Records, and 13071. Elements of indie rock, ambient, hip-hop and even dance surface up in this music. As with early minimalism, neo-classical music is defined less by a certain type of sound and more by the setting and context in which it can be heard – neo-classical musicians are as equally likely to be heard performing in concert halls, bars, nightclubs, attracting younger age ranges of listeners.
Some “Neo-Classical” composers we will explore. Clockwise from upper left: Nils Frahm, Ludovico Einaudi, Olafur Arnalds, and Max Richter.
On a whole, neo-classical music retains many of minimalism’s core elements: a simplicity of musical materials, a focus on repeating ideas that gradually change over time, and a constant underlying rhythmic pulse. However, much neo-classical music also places a renewed emphasis on melody and lyricism. Neo-classical music does not shy away from beauty and sentimentality of emotion, harkening back, in a way, to the mid-19th century Romanticism of composers like Schubert, Schumann, Chopin, and Liszt.
Coming from a range of musical backgrounds, musicians in neo-classicalism often combine electronic and acoustic instruments to explore new sound worlds. Take pianist and producer Nils Frahm, whose recent 2018 album All Melody uses a set-up of pianos, pipe organs, plus a slew of retro synthesizers and processors. During his recent concert tour, Frahm could be seen dashing between each of these instruments like an expert orchestral percussionist, building up electronic loops and setting up melodies and counter-melodies before switching to more contemplative solo piano works. Even within the swirl of melodies, Frahm’s music retains minimalism’s rhythmic drive, using microphones to bring out the heartbeat-like pulse of the hammers and felt within the body of the piano.
Nils Frahm, “Says” from Spaces (2013)
Another neo-classical musician who has dabbled in electronics is Max Richter, the composer of “On the Nature of Daylight.” Classically trained in composition and piano, Richter co-founded the Piano Circus ensemble, which was known for commissioning and performing works by minimalist and postminimalist composers including Arvo Pärt, Brian Eno, Philip Glass, Julia Wolfe and Steve Reich. Richter later struck out on his own, composing for a wide array of mediums: ballet, opera, cinema, and collaborating with other musicians and media artists.
Richter has also released a series of solo albums, soundscapes of piano, strings, and electronic ambience that span from beautifully melancholic to a quiet despair. Richter’s “On the Nature of Daylight” appears in his 2004 album The Blue Notebooks, which feature readings by Tilda Swinton from Franz Kafka’s The Blue Octavo Notebooks. Another album of note include is Richter’s 24 Postcards In Full Color (2008), a series of atmospheric, cinematic scenes composed for cell phone ringtones. Richter describes his 2015 album Sleep, eight hours in length, as a “personal lullaby for a frenetic world and a manifesto for a slower pace of existence.” The gently pulsating chords and strung-out phrases, in a way, call back to the meditative, drone-based music of La Monte Young, inviting a listener to let go and truly soak in each sound as it comes. Richter’s Sleep is a sound world of profound consolation, and helps a restless listener feel at piece.
Max Richter, “H In New England,” From 24 Postcards in Full Color (2008)
Multi-instrumentalist and producer Ólafur Arnalds create a similar effect in his works through their comforting simplicity. Arnalds began his musical career as drummer for several hardcore and metal bands, later moving on to compose neo-classical strings and piano-based music. His language is informed by a rich confluence of classical, pop, ambient, and electronica music, and thrives as a collaborator, bringing out a breadth of personal artistry in many different musicians. Some of his notable solo albums include Eulogy for Evolution (2007) and For Now I Am Winter (2013). For his 2016 album Island Songs, Arnalds explored the culture of his native Iceland by producing seven songs with seven different local artists, in seven different locations in Iceland. Arnalds released each song weekly, accompanied with a video and in depth interview. The penultimate song in the series is the touching Particles, featuring Nanna Bryndís Hilmarsdottír from the indie folk band Of Monsters and Men. This simpe song was recorded inside a lighthouse in the community of Garður on the Reykjanes peninsula, where Nanna grew up. A four-chord progression revolves itself around Nanna’s lyrics, complementing the wave-like rising and falling motions of her melody.
Ólafur Arnalds, “Particles” ft. Nanna Bryndís Hilmarsdóttir from Island Songs (2016)
The Italian pianist and composer Ludovico Einaudi (b. 1955) also takes minimalism towards the direction of the beautiful and sentimental. Einaudi began his career composing in traditional classical forms, but in the mid-1980s he began to search for a more personal expression through the mediums of dance, multimedia, and piano. 1996 marked the release of his first solo album for piano, Le Onde. Einaudi has subsequently has become one of Europe’s best-selling pianist/composers and one of the world’s most-streamed classical artists. Einaudi’s most recent album is his 2015. Elements, ““inspired by nature, math, science, music, art, and how parts connect to form a whole.” Featuring Einaudi on piano as well as electronics, violin, and percussion, the album explores the concept of organic growth. Each song evolving out of a simple starting motif or gesture, reflecting the way minimalism creates expansive processes and musical journey out of a simple set of starting materials.
Ludovico Einaudi, “Night” from Elements (2015)
Breaking Down Barriers
Neo-classical music is striking in its ability to create poignant, immersive experiences out of the simplest of techniques. This may be one of the greatest impacts early minimalism has made on the classical scene today: the permission to create music that was comprehensible, appealing, and emotionally engaging to listeners.
Minimalism and postminimalism in the mid-20th century stood out in direct opposition to the modernist trends that came before it. Where the language of many experimental works in serialist and experimental music was dense, dissonant, discontinuous, abrupt, and arrhythmic, minimalist syntax was generally more comprehensible, continuous, melodic, smooth, and naturally rhythmic. The works of early minimalist like Reich and Glass started out by appealing to a niche market of listeners, but gradually, it has become a profound influence on the sonic experience throughout popular culture. In this way, minimalism brought back audiences to classical music who felt alienated by the avant-garde.
Neo-classical music has carried on this spirit of accessibility, working to break down barriers between composer and listener. Composers working in the neo-classical genre place a high value on communicating with their listeners, without feeling the need to “dumb down” their work or give up their drive to innovate and expand. Ludovico Einaudi, for example, is celebrated for sensitivity and warmth he projects through his body language and interaction with the audience in his live performances. Einaudi once remarked, “it is in the live arena in communion with the audience that my work really comes alive.” Visit the website Ólafur Arnalds and you’ll find the following reflection on his homepage: “For me, the greatest thing about being a musician is being in the position to inspire other people… Music is not a one way street, it is a conversation where the listener’s role is as important as the artist’s.”
In the summer of 2016, Greenpeace filmed Einaudi playing his piece “Elegy for the Arctic” while floating on a platform beside melting glaciers in the Arctic Ocean.
Beyond Genre
In centering on the relationship between composer and audience, neo-classicism and other music styles influenced by minimalism work to refute the dichotomy that is often perceived in classical music between “high” and “low” art, or “avant” and “populist.” Minimalism launched a rich exchanges of ideas across music genres and artistic disciplines, exposing the new possibilities that form when we move beyond categories, labels, and genres as artists and consumers of art. In a 2016 interview with the New York Times, Ludovico Einaudi expressed, “I think labels are in a way restricting. You can put the Beatles and the Rolling Stones in the same category, but the types of music, the colors each band evokes, are completely different… Today when they ask me if my music is minimal, is classical, is contemporary — I can say yes or no, but it doesn’t make sense of what I am doing.”
The story of how minimalism has changed over time, too, has challenged us to rethink how we understand and define genre not as static, but fluid, dynamic, and interactive, especially in the context of the long and complicated history of classical music. In a 2014 interview with Crack Magazine, Max Richter remarked, “I think the thing about classical music is that it’s not really about the sounds, it’s more about the forbidding culture that surrounds it. It’s like a museum with a barbed wire fence around it! In a way, that’s a social and economic construct which is weighed down by historical baggage.” Understanding the complexities of genre means recognizing that a type of music isn’t only about its sound, but its context, who values the music, where you hear the music, and how you feel when exposed to the music. Both minimalism and neo-classical music sit in an odd place, generally recognized as “classical” music but unlikely to be seen in a program next to Beethoven or Brahms. But in a sense, minimalism and neo-classicism are simply doing what new forms in the classical music have always done: trying to navigate their way through as a tradition steeped in history, balancing influences of the past with an evolution to new realms of sound.
Minimalism and its musical legacies mark just one example of the many branches of 20th and 21st century classical music. I encourage you to explore these branches and seek out what speaks to you – All Classical’s Club Mod program, airing 9pm each Saturday evening, can be a great starting place. But for now, consider this one last piece of advice from Max Richter: “the whole thing is about just using your ears and not worrying too much about the labels.” Find a sound you love and let yourself simply soak it in.
Kazem Abdullah is an American conductor (he hails from Indiana, studied at Tanglewood and Peabody), and was General-Musikdirektor of the Symphony Orchestra in Aachen, Germany from 2012 to 2017. Maestro Abdullah has also been to Oregon: About ten years ago he subbed for one of Carlos Kalmar’s concerts.
Based on the new recording (a live recording made during Aachen’s annual music festival), it would be great to have him back to conduct the Oregon Symphony, because Ravel’s “Symphonie choreographique”, Daphnis et Chloe, comes across as a ravishing tone-painting, as the Aachen strings mingle with the sinuous choruses (Aachen has four distinct choirs, and they are joined by the Salt Lake Vocal Artists). Abdullah holds all these energetic elements together, all the way to the rapturous finale. The conductor shares more about the music, and himself, in my downloadable conversation, posted on this page.
“What you hear depends on how you focus your ear. We’re not talking about inventing a new language, but rather inventing new perceptions of existing languages.” – Philip Glass
If you’ve tuned into All Classical Portland recently, you may have come across some music your ears weren’t expecting to hear from a classical radio station. On a recent Wednesday morning, Christa Wessel shared Philip Glass’s Piano Etude No. 6 from a new CD by Víkingur Ólafsson. One late Thursday night, Andrea Murray treated us with Max Richter’s On the Nature of Daylight. While both these works could be argued to be “classical” pieces, they stand out for the way they pervade popular culture and entertainment – both Glass and Richter have composed extensively for films and television.
Richter and Glass’s pieces can be described as examples from a movement and genre in classical music known as “minimalism.” Minimalism started in mid-1960s on the experimental outskirts of classical music. Now, minimalism has become an international phenomenon that has profoundly influenced the direction of new music in the U.S. and beyond, leading to the claim of minimalism as the “common musical language” of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
Philip Glass, Études, No. 6, performed by Víkingur Ólafsson
Minimalism is also a prime example of how labels and categories in music and art can be inherently limited, making it hard to see how trends grow, change, redefining themselves over time. By absorbing a diversity of influences, and in turn influencing so many areas of our musical culture, minimalism breaks down the walls commonly forged between “high” and “low” art in classical music. Minimalism has reached the corners of almost every part of musical culture, from film scores to pop albums, jazz riffs to contemporary classical soundscapes. And has grown beyond its own label: evolved over time, branching out, becoming something arguably more “maximal” than minimal.
Max Richter, “On the Nature of Daylight,” performed by the Ataneres Ensemble
What happens when a music appears to transgress the boundaries of what is “classical”? What happens when a music attempts to closes riff created between composer and audience in early-20th century modernist music? What happens when a music re-conceptualizes the very core of how we listen, reuniting audiences with sound as a visceral experience and emotional affect? This is the story of minimalist music.
Minimalism’s Origin and the Four “Vanguard” Composers
The journey minimalism has taken is a long one, but let us start at the beginning. The original minimalist movement was not restricted to music, touching nearly every art form, including the visual arts, literature, film. Minimalism originated in a slew of underground activity in the cinema, music, painting and sculpture in the late 1950s and early 1960s, centered in New York and San Francisco. There were strong links between early minimalist composers and artists, with performances often taking place in art galleries and lofts rather than traditional concert venues. And similar to minimalist art, minimalist composers were reacting against the complexity, density, and sheer difficulty of recent modernist music.
A charismatic group of four composers are typically labelled at the “vanguard” composers of minimalist music. They were all born within several years of each other – La Monte Young (b. 1935), Terry Riley (b. 1935), Steve Reich (b. 1936), and Philip Glass (b. 1937). An eclectic array of musical ideas influenced this initial group, making it difficult to describe the movement itself in anything but broad terms. We can, however name some commonalities. Core to minimalism is the reduction of materials to a minimum. Procedures are simplified, and often what goes on in the music is immediately apparent to a listener. Minimalist music typically features repetition, diatonic scales and harmonies, a grid of steady beats, without a change in tempo (making it similar to certain genres of Baroque music), and monochrome or terraced dynamics (unlike the expressive fluidity of the Romantic and modernist eras).
The “vanguard” of minimalist music. (clockwise from upper left: La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and Philip Glass.)
Notably, all four of these vanguard composers were brought up in the Western classical tradition, studying music at various prestigious classical music schools. However, these composers stand out for the way they created art that stood outside of the establishment – being influenced by other, non-Western styles including Indian raga and African drumming. Minimalist music is often seen as a rejection of European modernist trends such as the complex and mathematically-strict Serialism. There is an intentionally sparse use of traditional elements of form and style in minimalist music. It returns to the roots, the basic elements of music: melody, modality, and rhythm.
A key predecessor to minimalism’s radical simplicity were recent avant-garde trends in music, especially the music John Cage. Cage’s 4’33”, for example, take reductionism to the extreme, and could be seen as the ultimate minimalist composition – the performer does not play a single note, allowing everyday sounds to formulate the aural experience of the piece. Another aspect minimalism took from the avant-garde was the aleatoric: creating unpredictability in performance by abandoning conventions like rhythm and tempo. Aleatoric techniques are especially employed in the music of La Monte Young. Take, for example, Young’s “The Melodic Version Of The Second Dream Of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer” From The Four Dreams Of China (yes, a mouthful of a title). The work is played by eight muted trumpets, who play four distinct, recurring tones in a spontaneous, improvised style.
La Monte Young, “The Melodic Version Of The Second Dream Of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer” From The Four Dreams Of China, performed by the Theatre of Eternal Music Brass Ensemble
La Monte Young is probably the least known of the minimalist vanguard, but he is generally considered to have launched the movement with his “long-tone” pieces. While a graduate student at Berkeley in 1958, Young submitted a work for his composition class he called Trio for Strings. But it is not just any conventional Trio: it is long, monotonous, and consists of only three notes. His professor refused to give him a grade for the work. There is thought behind it, however: the entries and exits of the three tones are paced to create different harmonic effects that emerge in and out of the texture.
Young’s Trio for Strings reflects a lot of his later music, which centers in on a small number of pitches sustained for long periods of time. His Composition 1960 No. 7, for example, consists only of the notes B and F#, instructed “to be held for a long time.” Young’s The Tortoise: His Dreams and Journeys (1964) is a type of improvisation, where instrumentalists and singers come in and out on various harmonics over a drone by a synthesizer.
With not much to listen for in Young’s sparse scores, the listener’s attention is directed to more minute changes in pitch and timbre that happen as a musician attempts to sustain a pitch on their instrument. Young’s music is striking in that deliberately disregards classical music’s tendency to be a teleological narrative with a clear opening, development, climax, and resolution. In Young’s music, goal-oriented directionality is replaced with an overt stasis.
La Monte Young, Trio for Strings, performed by the Trio Basso.
It was the lack of structure and narrative Young’s Trio for Strings that likely contributed to his professor refused to give him a grade for the project. The piece was, however, admired by a fellow student named Terry Riley, our second vanguard composer. Riley, who had once performed in an ensemble of Young’s, branched out from Young by exploring patterns with more repetition than sustaining tones. Riley is known for his experiments with tape loops, short segments of spliced tape that when fed through a tape recorder play the same sounds over and over again. His tape piece Mescalin Mix (1960-62) piles up many such tape loops over a regular pulse, creating a creepy collage of interacting phrases and utterances.
Riley’s most well-known work, In C (1964), applies a similar process to live instruments. The piece consists of 53 melodic cells in numbered sequence, the whole score fitting on one page. The piece can be performed by any group of instruments, with one performer providing a rhythmic motor on the note C. As the performers move through each cell, the number of repetitions in each part and the coordination of parts are left indeterminate. The sonic result is an unpredictable and ever-changing landscape of layered sounds over a hypnotic pulse, with a gradual shift from consonance to dissonance and back as certain notes are introduced and disappear from the cells. Riley’s technique of repeating cells of material is called modularism: using a repeated, cell-like motif as the basis for an entire work – in other words, taking repetition to an extreme degree.
Terry Riley, In C, performed by the VENI Academy.
Steve Reich, our third vanguard composer, grew upon this idea of modularism, using it to create a process-oriented musical language of subtly shifting elements that change over time. Many of Reich’s compositions use a technique called phase-shifting, where musicians play the same material but “out of phase” with each other like a closely-spaced canon, with each part starting at a slightly different time and even proceeding at different speeds from one another.
Like Riley, Reich’s initial musical explorations were made on tape. His first tape piece to use phase-shifting, It’s Gonna Rain, begins with a repetitive loop of a recording of a preacher on a New York street. Reich doubles the loop so that two copies are playing at once, but at slightly different speeds. One loop gradually moves ahead of the other, causing the loops gradually shift in and out of rhythm with each other, like turning a musical kaleidoscope. Another early tape piece of Reich’s is his Come Out (1966). Again, Reich begins with a tape loop of a spoken phrase (“come out to show them”). This time, however, the texture grows from two, to four, to eight simultaneous loops, each slightly out of phase with one another. The words of the speaker become incomprehensible, a mash of vowels and consonants remain.
Steve Reich, It’s Gonna Rain
Reich later applied his phase-shifting concept to acoustic instruments. His Piano Phase (1967), for example, recreates this effect using not tape, but two pianos. Both pianos begin by repeating the same simple melodic line in unison, but one piano gradually speeds up until it is a full beat ahead of the other piano. Each performance of Piano Phase will be slightly different, as the number of repetitions; speed of the transitions; and, consequently, the length of the piece are up to the performers. It is fascinating to observe how new rhythms emerge out of the ever-shifting interactions between the two melodies of Piano Phase. Into the 1970s, Reich pushed into this area of rhythm even further. Much of his music became percussion-oriented, with superimposed layers of polyrhythms that in many ways parallel styles of African drumming. (An example of this is his Drumming of 1970-1).
Steve Reich, Piano Phase
Reich formed his own ensemble and has made a living by performing, touring, and recording his works. This ensemble drew in a wide range of listeners, not just from the classical world, but those accustomed to jazz, rock, and pop music. Philip Glass, our final member of the vanguard, was similar to Reich in that he also struck out of the musical establishment by forming his own ensemble. Glass stands out, however, through his more roundabout means of arriving at minimalism. He was at Juilliard when Young, Reich, and Riley’s early performances were happening in New York, and then left to study composition in Paris with Nadia Boulanger. It was there that Glass became influenced by non-Western music, particularly through working with the great Indian sitarist Ravi Shankar. Glass became Shankar’s assistant on the soundtrack for the 1966 film Chappaqua, and his work since the 1960s became heavily shaped by Hindustani classical music. Various facets of this style– including circular rhythmic organization, melodiousness, and simple harmonic progressions which place an emphasis on consonance – parallel similar trends in minimalism.
Ravi Shankar feat Philip Glass, Ragas In Minor Scale from Passages
Philip Glass had studied at Julliard with Steve Reich and made contact with him again after his travels in Europe and India. Influenced by Reich’s rhythmic phase-shifting music, Glass began to simplify his music down to what he described as ‘music with repetitive structures.’ Examples in this style include Strung Out (1967) and Music in 12 Parts (1971–4), a massive four-hour piece scored for voices, electric organs, flutes, and saxophones. Glass’s music is quite idiosyncratic and often immediately recognizable to a listener familiar with his work. His pieces, built on a foundations of cyclically repeating triadic patterns, represent a unique confluence of Indian music, minimalism, and Glass’s own expressive sensibility, at once emotionally charged and held back in melancholic restraint.
Young, Riley, Reich, and Glass all emerged onto the music scene around the same time, standing out from the classical music establishment through music that created new hypnotic listening experiences, wherein emergent complexities in rhythmic and melodic interactions arise out of a radical simplicity of materials. As we have seen and heard, however, individual stylistic differences distinguish each composer from one another. Young’s minimalism emphasizes drones and static sounds, and while drones were also central to Riley’s music, he developed more rhythmic cyclical patterns on top of the stasis. Reich’s incorporation of phase shifting and additive/subtractive rhythmic processes created a minimalism based not in stasis, but time and motion, and Glass took this style further through his studies with Ravi Shankar and his unique harmonic language.
“Men”-imalism: Beyond the Vanguard
These individual differences considered, it is worthwhile to note that all four members of the vanguard have expressed uneasiness with being grouped under the label of minimalism, a foreshadow to the way minimalism would soon break out in many different directions. In creating the story of the Young-Riley-Reich-Glass “vanguard,” music history also ends up passing over many composers who don’t perfectly fit the prescribed mold, slipping through the cracks of recognition. The way that music historians have singled out a vanguard group helps provide us with an introductory overview of early minimalism’s elements. However, it also creates an exclusive, narrowly male narrative of minimalism, neglecting the many women composers who were working on the frontiers of the central New York minimalism scene. Crucial female figures like Pauline Oliveros, Joan La Barbara, Meredith Monk, Eliane Radigue, and Laurie Spiegel expanded beyond the borders of minimalism by delving into radical experimentations in electronics, computer-based music, and performance art, and are deserving of a post on their own.
Midori Takada.
Consider, for example, Midori Takada, a female a composer and percussionist in Japan who released a series of records – first with the Mkwaju Ensemble, then on her own – in the 1980s. Takada plays an impressive range of instruments and found objects – from marimbas and gongs to ocarinas and Coca-Cola bottles – using layers of overdubs to create an ensemble of her own. Her work recalls numerous aspects of minimalism. In her 1983 album Through the Looking Glass, layered textures and interlocking rhythmic patterns recall Steve Reich, with an atmospheric and hypnotic feel akin to the drone-based works of Young and Riley. Ultimately, however, Takada creates a contemplative and whimsical sound that is unique to her alone.
Midori Takada, “Mr. Henri Rousseau’s Dream” from Through the Looking Glass
Minimalism as a New Way of Listening
Can we call Takada’s work “minimalism” despite a lack of direct association with the original vanguard? Rather than associating minimalist style with a certain generation of composers or certain named compositional techniques, it might be more helpful to view minimalism as a music that encourages a certain way of listening.
It is common to hear minimalist music described as hypnotic or meditative. In Glass’s music, the cyclic repetition of chords creates a moving tapestry of sounds, plunging open-eared listeners into an altered psychological state. You don’t need to pay attention to each note as it passes to feel the effect of the music. In fact, you often can’t, with too many rhythmic and melodic layers to pick out one line from the rest of the texture. In this way listening to minimalist music is a lot like listening to the rain – you don’t hear each drop in isolation, rather, your ears become immersed in a symphony of interactions.
The key here is that minimalist music is non-teleological. Most classical music follows a linear, arch-like storyline, with harmony and melody that move in patterns of building anticipation and tension, to a peak and release. Minimalist music, as musicologist Susan McClary notes, seems to have no past or future tense, with the present –what is going on right here – seeming to unfold forever. There is not necessarily a felt need to “arrive” anywhere. In this space, the listener is fee to travel among the layers of the present moment. If melody were the x-axis and harmony were the y-axis in a musical plane, the shifting rhythms and emergent textural density of minimalism creates a new x-axis, an added third dimension to the experience of music.
Steve Reich, Cello Counterpoint, performed by Rose Bellini
Listening to minimalist music is like being inside of a process. In his essay “Music as a Gradual Process,” Reich describes his music as a process that once set up and loaded, runs by itself. The composer steps back from the materials and lets bloom a sonic result that is vaster than any individual creator, standing on its own almost like a force of nature. The experience of minimalist music is different than just walking up to a finished painting, it’s a journey you must move through from start to finish to get the full effect of the piece. Hearing the very gradual changes among repeating parts allows the listener to experience interactions between melodies, rhythms, and harmonies, at every stage of how they relate to one another.
Where did minimalism go from here, as a radically process-oriented music? Read Part Two for the rest of minimalism’s story.
Gann, Kyle. “A Forest from the Seeds of Minimalism: An Essay on Postminimal and Totalist Music.” Program for Minimalism Festival of the Berliner Gesellschaft fur Neue Musik, 1998. Web. Accessed 29 March 2018. http://www.kylegann.com/postminimalism.html
On Tuesday, May 8, All Classical Portland will be naming its Music Library in honor of Harry Rabinowitz (1916-2016), a British conductor and composer known for his television and film music. Rabinowitz is best known for having conducted the scores for over 60 films, and he regularly appeared on TV and radio throughout the 1950s and ‘60s, where he was a conductor on the BBC Radio and later head of music at BBC TV Light Entertainment London Weekend Television. (Scroll to the bottom of this page to explore a photo gallery of Harry Rabinowitz over the years!)
The late director Anthony Minghella, whom Rabinowitz collaborated with on numerous occasions, described him as “the UK’s best kept secret.” Rabinowitz worked with orchestras around the world and played a key role in the British broadcasting and film industries. We honor him today not only for these important contributions but also for his longtime support of All Classical Portland. Let’s step back for a moment to commemorate his wide-ranging and fully lived life.
Rabinowitz was born in Johannesburg, South Africa. At the age of nine, a neighbor began showing interest in playing piano and dragged Rabinowitz into it. Shortly after, Rabinowitz began taking piano lessons himself, delving into the world of music and never looking back. Rabinowitz attended Witwatersrand University in South Africa, where he studied politics, piano, and composition.
In a way, Rabinowitz’s musical career began with one of his first jobs, where he was a pianist in the sheet music department of a Johannesburg store, playing music for potential customers. With the onset of World War II in 1942, however, Rabinowitz joined the South African army, eventually reached the rank of corporal. During this time, he worked for the Entertainment Unit. Rabinowitz taught soldiers to play music on whatever instruments they could get their hands on. Apartheid would not be established until 1948, but Rabinowitz recalled having to rehearse ensembles with black musicians in secret. “This white man, only 21 years old,” remarked Rabinowitz, “had to write a pass to allow men on to the street.”
After his time with the South African Army, Rabinowitz got his start in conducting the orchestra for a show called Strike a New Note in Johannesburg. In a 2008 interview with Peter Korn, Rabinowitz describes his experience there: “While there I realized there was a discrepancy in timing between the stage and the pit. To overcome it I had to stand up and wave my hands and I seized a rolled-up newspaper – my first baton – and conducted the stage and the orchestra at the same time. And that was the beginning of my feeling that I could really master difficult situations in music.” Rabinowitz never did bother to go out and buy a baton after the newspaper incident. “Working in the studios there was always some jerk of a conductor who left his pencils, erasers and baton,” he described in the same interview. “So all through my professional life I’ve used findings.”
In 1946, Rabinowitz left South Africa to study conducting at the Guildhall School of Music in London. There, Rabinowitz quickly established himself within the industry, largely in thanks to a lucky chance encounter that initially launched off his conducting career. Walking along Piccadilly Street with rainwater seeping through his shoes, Rabinowitz ran into the well-known actor and comedian Sid James, his best man at his wedding in 1944 and a former comrade from the South African army. James promptly brought Rabinowitz to the office of the bandleader and impresario Jack Hylton, where he told Hylton that Rabinowitz would “do anything you like musically.” Just like that, Rabinowitz found himself playing the piano for the BBC radio show Variety Band-Box, and performing as a session musician at EMI’s Abbey Road recording studios. His conducting work began shortly thereafter in 1950 with Philip Torre’s musical Golden City, set in the South African gold rush of 1886.
All Classical’s Edmund Stone on Rabinowitz’s encounter with Sid James:
“Once he told me he was out of work, broke and unable to get work in London. He was walking down a London street when he bumped into Sid James, then a famous comedy film actor and with whom Harry had served in the South African military. Sid immediately took Harry to see a management friend who arranged for Harry to get work conducting for the BBC. This illustrates that even someone as great as Harry, or perhaps WHY Harry is so great, is that he remembers the acts of kindness and knows they are never wasted: he is living proof of that. It is a great, if understated tale, of how one person can make such a huge difference in not only another human’s life but in all our lives due to the ripple effects it has. Harry’s friend reached out to one person, but Harry, through that seminal act of one kindness, reached the whole world.”
Of course, Rabinowitz’s first gigs weren’t all just luck. In a 2015 interview, Rabinowitz credits much of his success to learning to read music “very quickly and very accurately” at an early age. “A score which would normally take somebody 20 minutes to put right,” he noted, “…I reckon I can do it in seven-and-a-half minutes.” This skill would become especially useful in 1953, when Rabinowitz became a conductor of the BBC Revue Orchestra. The Revue Orchestra was a house band for BBC’s “Light Programme,” a radio station which streamed light entertainment and music from 1945 to 1967. The orchestra also played for TV shows such as Hancock’s Half Hour and The Goon Show: this was during a time when variety and comedy shows were often backed by a live orchestral accompaniment. In the meantime, Rabinowitz remained active as a pianist, playing on Midday Music Hall and Piano Playtime.
Rabinowitz moved through several different posts through the 1960 and ‘70s. In 1960, he became the head of music for BBC TV Light Entertainment, conducting the orchestra for shows including the Val Doonican Show, Peter Cook, and Dudley Moore’s Not Only… But Also. Rabinowitz composed the music for several shows as well, including The Frost Report (1966). During this period, Rabinowitz had the opportunity to conduct the United Kingdom’s Eurovision Song Contest entries on two occasions, in the years 1964 and 1966. Eurovision is an annual TV song competition where each participating country submits an original song to be performed live, with viewers casting votes to determine the winner (akin to an international version of shows like American Idol or The Voice).
Rabinowitz struck out as a freelancer in 1977, the same year he was awarded the title of Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) for his services to music. Rabinowitz began venturing beyond his reputation as a conductor and arranger of light and popular music to pursuing directing and composing opportunities in theatre, films, and broadcasting. He served as the music director for several West End musicals, including the first-ever run of the Andrew Lloyd Weber and TS Eliot musical Cats (1981) and Don Black and Lloyd Weber’s Song and Dance (1982). In the composing realm, Rabinowitz wrote the music for the TV series the Agatha Christie Hour (1982) and Reilly: Ace of Spies (1983), and his theme music for Love for Lydia (1977) was nominated for an Ivor Novello award.
Where Rabinowitz was arguably in the greatest demand, however, was for his film scores. (In one year, 1991, he recorded the music for nine movies!) Some of his best-known scores include Chariots of Fire (1981), Return to Oz (1985), The Remains of the Day (1993), The English Patient (1996), and The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999). Rabinowitz’s final film score assignment, at the age of 87, was Cold Mountain (2003).
Additionally, during this period Rabinowitz collaborated with London Symphony Orchestra in the recording of over twenty film soundtrack and studio session recordings. As his reputation as a conductor of light and popular music spread to the U.S., Rabinowitz spent seven seasons as a guest conductor with the Boston Pops Orchestra (1985-1992), and appeared at the Hollywood Bowl with the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra in the 1980s. Rabinowitz was certainly a busy man, and he was regarded as a popular and highly professional conductor among his colleagues. Not wasting his colleague’s time by over-rehearsing was an important value for Rabinowitz as a conductor, and he once said in an interview that “In almost all the sessions I’ve conducted the musicians have left smiling.”
Edmund Stone gives us another story of Rabinowitz, this time with the London Symphony:
“When Harry was 94 he was scheduled to conduct the London Symphony in a film music concert. He asked if I would produce a CD of the program for him to follow along with the scores. Later I learned the concert was a huge success and there had been an unscripted piece of entertainment. During a particularly vigorous upbeat Harry’s baton broke in two on the music stand, with the top half of his baton flying over his shoulder into the audience. Without missing a beat Harry continued conducting with what was left of his baton. The other half was caught by an audience member who then passed it along until it reached the front row. With the Maestro still conducting the baton stub was then given to a bass player who passed it, section-by-section, until it reached the concertmaster who waited until the music was over before handing it to Harry. The conductor immediately asked the lead violinist to kneel, and knighted him on the spot.”
Even after retiring for good at the tender age of 94, Rabinowitz continued to involve himself in the arts and tried his best to play the piano every day. In his later years, he divided his time between his home in Provence, France, and Portland, Oregon, where he stayed from November to April. Portland is where his second wife, Mitzi Scott, was from, whom he had met in France. Together, they were active participants in the arts community, regularly attending the Oregon Symphony, Portland Opera, chamber music concerts, and theater productions.
Rabinowitz made friends with people from all over town, and was adored by many for his amiable and witty personality. He met former All Classical Senior Announcer Robert McBride in 2007, when he and his wife Mitzi joined All Classical Portland on a trip to Russia. “I loved them both immediately and we remained friends,” Robert later remarked to an Oregonian reporter. Harry and his wife were long-time supporters of All Classical, even calling in from France to donate to All Classical’s annual fundraiser. On his program The Score, Edmund Stone worked with Harry as a guest several times (and once even filled in for Edmund as host!)
Edmund Stone recounts his time with Rabinowitz on The Score:
“Harry was my co-host several times on The Score but our best moments were after the recordings when we visited a local pub. His anecdotes were legendary, like the time he was conducting a film music recording session in London. There was a power outage and together with the engineer Harry asked musicians who had driven to the session to quickly get their car batteries. By connecting these they were able to complete the recording session. This may be the only time 20-30 vehicles were involved in a recording as much as the musicians.”
Rabinowitz died at his house in France in June of 2016, only three months after his 100th birthday. He is survived by his wife Mitzi Scott, his three children, Karen, Simon and Lisa, from his first marriage to Lorna Anderson, and four grandchildren.
Click the “read more” button below to explore a photo gallery featuring Harry Rabinowitz (thanks goes to Mitzi Scott for providing these wonderful images).
“Harry Rabinowitz – Chariots of Fire, The Remains of the Day, The English Patient, The Talented Mr Ripley – is 100 today.” Classical Source. 26 March 2018. Web. Accessed 3 April 2018. http://www.classicalsource.com/db_control/db_news.php?id=3630
Violinist Tomas Cotik, Assistant Violin Professor at Portland State University, is also an internationally-renowned concert and recording artist. He has done extensive study of fellow Argentine Astor Piazzolla, in several acclaimed recordings (Naxos); a complete series of Schubert’s violin works (Centaur); and now the violin sonatas of Mozart.
Mr. Cotik has been a guest in All Classical Portland’s studios on a number of occasions, including live performances on Thursdays at Three, and he’s a welcome and familiar face here at the radio station. In my chat with Tomas (click on player, above), we talk about his process of acquiring just the right edition of the score, to exploring Mozart’s development from the composer’s visit to Paris (1778, age 22), to his final years in Vienna. These violin sonatas reflect his audience’s tastes (in Paris, Mannheim and Vienna), and his own stylistic growth and maturity. Mr. Cotik, along with longtime piano partner Tao Lin, carry us through Mozart’s life in these works with great sensitivity, verve and expression.
The 100th anniversary of Debussy’s death was this past March 25th. Debussy’s adventurous uses of harmony and orchestration would come to impact nearly every distinguished composer of the early and middle twentieth century. His music leaves behind classical structures and agendas and moves toward beauty for beauty’s sake. One experiences a profound sense of dreamlike improvisation and wandering when listening to Debussy’s music.
How did Debussy come to reach these new territories of sound? Enter Europe at the end of the 19th century. In the world of classical music, it was rapidly becoming more difficult for composers to have their new music performed. For the first time, classical music was experiencing the rise of a permanent repertoire of older works by eminent figures such as Mozart and Beethoven. Concert programs, filled with repeat performances of staple classics, left less room for contemporary pieces.
Living composers, struggling to secure a place in this crowded repertoire, faced the challenge of writing works that could offer something new, yet would still be considered worthy of being played alongside the established canon. This challenge, a paradox of creating new sounds while still respecting the classics, became the defining feature of modernist music at the fin de siècle.
Each composer found their own individual solutions to this challenge, leading to a proliferation of diverse styles and approaches in classical music. Some composers, such as Mahler and Strauss, extended the romantic harmony of Wagner. Others went on to explore new “post-tonal” ways of organizing pitch, eventually leading to practices such as atonality (music that lacks a key or tonal center) and serialism (music based on formulaic orderings of the twelve notes of the chromatic scale).
One composer often considered a leading “founder” of this new modernist movement was Claude Debussy (1862-1918). Common for all modernist composers was the act of defying traditional aspects of the language of classical music. Debussy, however, arguably challenged not only the language, but the whole way of conceptualizing and listening to classical music.
Portrait of Claude Debussy from 1909.
The son of a civil servant, Debussy was born in France and studied at the Paris Conservatory. Debussy’s music, however, breaks away from his traditional training, indulging in sound for sound’s sake and in the simple pursuit of pleasure and beauty. Unlike established practices in Western music which create a sense of tension and resolution through goal-oriented motion towards a tonic key, Debussy’s music undermines the need to resolve entirely. Instead, in Debussy’s music, the listener is invited to enjoy each moment as it comes. While there are still definable keys in Debussy’s music, he moves through them via non-goal oriented processes: one sound world merges and melds into another. Debussy’s music often consists of juxtaposed images, which he creates out of motives, harmony, exotic scales, or tone colors.
Debussy found new ideas from a multitude of diverse sound worlds: Russian composers such as Rimsky-Korsakov and Musorgsky, medieval music, and music from Asia, including Chinese melodies Javanese gamelan music. Debussy also heavily drew from non-musical sources, including Impressionist painting and Symbolist poetry. Debussy’s music focuses more on color and texture, rather than form and harmony. In his orchestral works, Debussy centered on the employment of different instrumental timbres. Oftentimes one instrument will be associated with a particular motive. In this way, the shape and structure of Debussy’s works are defined more by contrasts of timbre and texture rather than tonal function or other traditional formal devices.
Debussy and Impressionist Painting: Trois Nocturnes
Claude Monet’s impressionist painting Charing Cross Bridge, 1903
A term that is often heard in conjunction with Debussy’s name is “Impressionism,” a style of painting centered in Paris that concentrated on depicting the effects of light and color of a scene rather than clear and exact detail. (Artists from the original Impressionist circle of the 1860s and 70s included Pissarro, Monet, Degas, Renoir, and Sisley, but Debussy was actually a contemporary of later painters such as Paul Gauguin and Vincent Van Gogh, known now as the Post-Impressionists). Similar to Impressionism, Debussy’s works typically suggest a mood or atmosphere, rather than expressing a strong emotion or depicting a narrative or story.
Debussy’s Nocturnes for orchestra, a suite of symphonic poems, is an apt example of the influence of Impressionist paintings on Debussy’s work. Composed during 1897-99, Debussy borrowed the title not from the music genre of the same name, but of a series of Impressionist paintings by the American artist James McNeill Whistler. The three movements of Debussy’s Nocturnes are shrouded in shadow, like the way Whistler’s paintings evoke hazy scenes in the absence of direct light.
Arrangement in Grey: Portrait of the Painter, 1872 by James McNeill Whistler.
For the first movement Nuages (Clouds), Debussy wrote that he sought to capture “the unchanging appearance of the sky with the slow and melancholy progress of the clouds, ending in a gray dissolution gently tinged with white,” and he commented to a friend that he was thinking of the play of clouds over the Seine in Paris. In Nuages, we hear Debussy’s use of “images” come to the fore. These images – characterized by factors like motive, rhythm, and pitch collection, are repeated, altered, and layered throughout the piece, creating an almost visual kaleidoscopic experience that moves beyond the typical method of presenting, developing, and recapitulating themes.
The first image of Nuages emerges in the opening theme, a pattern of alternating fifths and thirds. These alternating intervals suggest movement without a clear sense of direction, akin to drifting clouds. Throughout the movement, this image repeats itself, but is slightly shifted each time, with winds replacing the strings, new intervals such as full triads and seventh chords replacing the original thirds and fifths.
Debussy’s Nocturnes is comprised of three movements: Nuages (Clouds), Fêtes (Festivals), and Sirènes (Sirens).
Superimposed upon this first image is a second idea, a motive in the English horn that rises and descends in a different time meter than the other instruments (4/4 time against 6/4 time). Unlike the first oscillating idea, this second image remains relatively intact each time it appears, and is always played by the English horn.
Interspersed between the two images are several contrasting episodes, including a chordal idea in the strings and a unison melody that gradually intensifies. Later, a calmer-sounding section recalls Asian influences, with sustained strings underpinning a pentatonic melody in the flute and harp, possibly in reference to a Japanese flute melody or Javanese gamelan music. Debussy likely encountered pentatonic scales during at the Paris Exposition, ancient five-note scales that can be heard in folk traditions from around the world.
Whistler’s painting Nocturne: Blue and Gold—Southampton Water, 1872
The interplay between the two “images” and the contrasting episodes in Nuages are set apart by contrasting keys. The oscillating cloud image encompasses a B-minor scale, contrasting with an octatonic scale outlining a tritone in the second English horn image. The episodes take on other tonal worlds, such as the pentatonic melody centered on a D# Dorian scale. These key areas, however, don’t necessarily lead from one to another in a pattern of tension and release. Rather, Debussy uses different pitch collections to distinguish different blocks of sound that aimlessly merge from one to another, like drifting clouds on a gray day.
Debussy and Symbolist Poetry: Prélude à “L’apres-midi d’un faune” (Prelude to “The Afternoon of a Faun”)
Debussy was also significantly influenced by the writers of the French Symbolist poetry movement. Symbolism sprang from literary roots, gaining inspiration from writers including Charles Baudelaire and Edgar Allan Poe. Symbolist poets rejected previous artistic leanings towards naturalism and realism, instead favoring dreams, visions, and the power of the imagination.
Symbolists were interested not in representing or describing reality, but in exploring the intangible and inexpressible truths hiding behind external appearances. Symbolist poetry is typically introspective and suggestive, leaving meanings open-ended – much like the tonal and structural ambiguity of Debussy’s music. In fact, for the Symbolist movement, music represented the ideal medium for expressing realm of the intangible, capable of suggesting multiple possible meanings and psychological states rather than spelling out specific concepts or narratives.
Stéphane Mallarmé around 1890.
Debussy himself was closely tied with the Symbolist circle in Paris. In the early 1890s, Debussy regularly attended the influential mardis (Tuesday) gatherings of the poet Stéphane Mallarmé, along with poets Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, and other painters and intellectuals. Just as music was a source of inspiration for Symbolist poetry, Symbolist poetry was an exxential source of inspiration for Debussy’s music. One of Debussy’s most celebrated orchestral works, Prélude à “L’apres-midi d’un faune” (Prelude to “The Afternoon of a Faun”) is based on Mallarmé’s prose poem “L’après-midi d’un faune.” (Mallarmé was reluctant to have anyone else set his poetry to music, but was ultimately impressed with the Prelude when Debussy invited him to the premiere in 1894).
In Mallarmé’s poem, a faun (a man with the legs of a goat) contemplates a memory, or possibly a dream, he has of two nymphs he encountered in the forest on a warm, lazy afternoon. The faun plays his pan-pipes, but, upon realizing that his music fails to capture the viscerality of his experience with the nymphs, he abandons his pursuits to a sleep filled with dreams and visions.
The Prelude to “The Afternoon of a Faun” is considered by many as the beginning of modern music. The piece requires a different way of listening – as you follow where the sounds take you, and enter a dream-like state much like the faun himself. Like Mallarmé’s poem, Debussy’s Prelude is fluid and mysterious. A defining feature of both the poem and the musical piece is a lack of discrete sections, seamlessly flowing the listener through one idea into the next.
The piece begins with the music the faun plays in the poem, a lugubrious melody on the flute that descends a tritone (an interval equivalent of a diminished fifth or augmented fourth) before rising back up. This tritone becomes a sort of unifying element of the piece, and it is also notable in that it outlines a whole-tone scale. A whole tone scale is a six-note scale made up entirely of whole-step intervals (i.e., starting from C on a piano, three white keys followed by three black keys). The whole-tone scale contributes to the hazy, mysterious quality of the piece because it doesn’t belong to any particular key and thus lifts the urgency for the harmony to resolve anywhere. This opening theme in the flute reappears throughout the piece in many forms, re-harmonized, re-orchestrated, and sometimes even incorporated into other melodies. In a way, the variations of the melody could be said to represent the faun, cycling through different conjectures about the nymphs: Were they real? Were they a dream? Were they but a creation of his own desire?
Programme illustration by Léon Bakst for Vaslav Nijinsky’s 1912 ballet Afternoon of a Faun, set to Debussy’s music.
Near the middle of the Prelude, Debussy slides the listener into a B section that introduces a lyrical tune in D-flat major, reminiscent of a more traditional French operatic interlude. Throughout the piece and especially at the end when the opening flute melody returns again, there are hints of E major being the tonic or home key. However, an intentional ambiguity remains through Debussy’s insistent use of the tritone interval, unresolved seventh chords, and obscured boundaries between different tonal areas. Just like Mallarmé’s poem, where the normal meanings of words are clouded which vague metaphors and simultaneous references, Debussy’s Prelude is like an ambiguous dream barely out of reach.
Debussy’s legacy on classical composers still looms large to this day. His focus on the potential of sound itself encouraged further explorations in experimental music by Varèse, Cage, Crumb, Penderecki, and others. Debussy broke the rules, and he was very aware of it. In a conversation from around 1890 with his former teacher at the Paris Conservatoire, Ernest Guiraud, Debussy was said to have remarked “There is no theory. You merely have to listen. Pleasure is the law.” For Debussy, music was, above all, an art of sound.
Burkholder, J. Peter, Grout, Donald Jay, and Palisca, Claude V. A History of Western Music. 9th New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2014.
Burkholder, J. Peter, and Palisca, Claude V. Norton Anthology of Western Music. Volume Three: The Twentieth Century and After. 7th New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2014.
Hertz, David Michael. The Tuning of the Word: The Musico-Literary Poetics of the Symbolist Movement. Southern Illinois University Press. Carbondale and Edwardsville: 1987.
Roberts, Paul. Images: The Music of Claude Debussy. Amadeus Press. Portland, OR: 1996.
Ross, Alex. The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007.
As we wrap up Black History Month and open March with National Women’s History Month, we celebrate the life of Florence Beatrice Price (1887-1953), the first African-American woman to be recognized as a symphonic composer and to have a composition played by a major orchestra. However, to reach this achievement and become recognized for her distinct idiom, Price had to fight her way through substantial prejudices toward her gender and race throughout her lifetime. Even today, there remains a lack of recognition and appreciation for much of Price’s work, but gradually, more groups and individuals have begun to shed light on her rich and unique musical language.
Price composed for many types of musical forces, having written orchestral works (including four symphonies and several concertos), chamber works, art songs, works for violin, organ anthems, piano pieces, and spiritual arrangements. While Price was trained in European traditions, her compositions occupy a largely American idiom. Like fellow composers William Grant Still and William Levi Dawson, Price was known for exploring her Southern roots, commonly incorporating the Blues and melodies of black folk songs into her works. Being deeply religious, Price often used spirituals and African American church music as sources for her music, not only their text and melodies, but also their unique rhythms and syncopated style. Price went beyond simply quoting traditional African-American folk songs, instead integrating structural techniques of these songs, like pentatonicism and call and response, into the very core of her works. Price’s works attempt answer the question of how to create sounds that reflect both a past and present embodiment of the black experience in the United States.
Price’s 5 Folksongs in Counterpoint, performed by the Apollo String Quartet
Price’s Life
In 1893, during his time in the United States while composing his New World Symphony, composer Antonín Dvořák advised other American composers to study African American spirituals and other songs of African Americans and indigenous peoples as inspiration, going as far to proclaim that “an American art music should be built on African-American idioms.” Composers such as George Gershwin and Aaron Copland were later known for taking up this directive and exploring uniquely “American” idioms, but it is often disregarded that many African-American composers did this as well. Price might be considered the culmination of the initial group of African-American composers whose work followed Dvorak’s footsteps with the New World Symphony. How did Price navigate through hostile obstacles to come to this place? Let’s begin at the beginning, with Price’s early years in Arkansas.
Price was born in Little Rock to a well-respected mixed-race family, her father a dentist and her mother a music teacher. Price’s mother first introduced her to music, and Price’s music education continued at the integrated Allison Presbyterian Church in Little Rock, where she was regularly exposed to the sacred works of Bach, Mendelssohn and Vaughan Williams. Price gave her first piano performance at age four and publishing her first composition by the age of 11, graduating high school at the top of her class at the age of 14. Price then went on to study music at the New England Conservatory of Music, where she majored in piano and organ. While there, Price studied with renowned composers including George Chadwick and Frederick Converse. During this time, however, her mother pushed her to conceal her race to avoid prejudice held toward African Americans, her graduation program listing her hometown as “Pueblo, Mexico.”
Florence Price at the piano, 1941.
After graduating, Price devoted much of her time to teaching and raising a family in Arkansas, and in 1910, Price became the head of Clark Atlanta University’s music department. She also provided private instruction in organ, piano and violin. Despite her qualifications, Price application for membership of the Arkansas State Music Teachers Association was rejected because of the color of her skin. Price persisted, however, by going her own way, founding the Little Rock Club of Musicians and thereby enabling herself to program and perform her own compositions.
In 1927, Price moved to Chicago with her family, driven to leave Arkansas due to several cases of lynchings and escalating racial tensions. In Chicago, Price was able to study composition with numerous teachers and was also enrolled in various times at the Chicago Musical College, Chicago Teacher’s College, University of Chicago, and American Conservatory of music, where she studied languages and liberal arts studies in addition to music.
Margaret Bonds at the piano
Price divorced her husband in 1931 due to abuse and financial issues. Now a single mother, Price supported her two daughters by working as an organist for silent film recordings and composing songs for radio ads under a pen name. Price moved in with her student and friend Margaret Bonds, also a black pianist and composer. Her friendship with Bonds led to valuable connections with influential figures in the artistic world and among African-American intelligentsia. Price corresponded with W.E.B. Dubois, and set several of her pieces to poems by Langston Hughes and Paul Laurence Dunbar. Price also developed a relationship with the eminent contralto Marian Anderson. Anderson performed several of Price’s spiritual arrangements on a regular basis, and closed her historic 1939 concert at the Lincoln Memorial with Price’s arrangement of “My Soul’s Been Anchored in De Lord.”
Price’s arrangement of the spiritual “My Soul’s Been Anchored in de Lord,” performed by Marian Anderson
Price soon began receiving national recognition for her compositions and performances. In 1932, Price received Wanamaker Foundation Awards for her Sonata in E Minor for solo piano and her Symphony in E minor. The Wanamaker family is one example of the numerous musical patrons in Chicago that empowered suppressed communities and shared the belief that advancing the artistic achievements of black men and women could help dismantle white supremacy. As Micela Baranello described in a recent article from The New York Times, Price’s musical style was both mainstream and idiosyncratic at the same time. Pieces such as her Sonata in E Minor and Symphony in E minor are steeped in 19th century harmony and orchestration akin to Tchaikovsky. Price’s beautiful lyricism, however, also gives way to her use of traditional African-American folk material, as well as modern chromatic harmonies. Price’s Sonata in E Minor is a clear example of this infusion of classical roots with vernacular idioms. The three-movement work represents a collage of influences, with thick chordal textures and dotted rhythms reminiscent of Beethoven in the opening of the first movement contrasting with several melodic themes carried throughout the piece that recall the form and meter of plantation songs.
Movement I (Andante-Allegro) of Price’s Sonata in E Minor for solo piano, performed by Samantha Ege
Price’s Symphony No. 1, too, joins together different musical worlds. An extended percussion section throughout the symphony alludes to the sounds of spirituals, with Price employing non-conventional instruments including African drums, wind whistles, and cathedral chimes. In the first movement, “Allegro ma non troppo,” both the primary and secondary themes are built from a pentatonic scale, with syncopated rhythms common to African-American folk music. Price’s second movement, “Largo, maestoso,” revolves around an original hymn tune played by brass choir, and the use of overtones creates a solemn religious atmosphere. The third movement, “Juba Dance,” recalls plantation life, with imitations of fiddles, banjos and “patting” rhythms. And while the “Finale” sounds the most conventional of the movements, it too incorporates call and response procedures with syncopatation over a jaunting triplet figure in 2/4 time.
Shortly after Price received the Wanamaker prize for her Symphony No. 1, she was approached by German composer and conductor Frederick Stock, the music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Stock was on the watch for new pieces to perform the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair, and Price’s Symphony No. 1 caught his attention. In 1933, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra premiered the symphony, making Price’s piece the first composition by an African American woman to be played by a major orchestra. During this time, Price also had several other orchestral works played by the WPA Symphony Orchestra of Detroit and the Chicago Women’s Symphony, and in 1940, Price was inducted into the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers.
Price’s Symphony No. 1 in E Minor, performed by the New Black Repertory Ensemble
Price died from a stroke in 1953, but she was composing music up to the end of her life, ultimately accumulating hundreds of unpublished manuscripts. Unfortunately, however, much of Price’s work became overshadowed by changing tastes in musical styles after her death. Consequently, Price was largely kept out of, along with other under-recognized women composers, a canon dominated by white men. Some of her works were even lost. Fortunately, in 2009 a substantial collection of her works were rediscovered in a dilapidated house on the outskirts of St. Anne, Illinois, apparently a former summer home. Within this collection were dozens of scores, including her fourth symphony and two violin concertos. As Alex Ross stated in a February 2018 article in The New Yorker, “not only did Price fail to enter the canon; a large quantity of her music came perilously close to obliteration. That run-down house in St. Anne is a potent symbol of how a country can forget its cultural history.”Frankly, Price’s work deserves greater exposure. Price herself was proud of her accomplishments but was indubitably aware that her race and gender were major obstacles to the reception of her music. Individuals such as Frederick Stock served as a champion of Price’s work during her lifetime, but she otherwise found difficulty making headway into the classical music culture.
However, we are beginning to remember Price, and her works have been slowly gaining renewed attention. Price’s discovered manuscripts are now safely kept in the University of Arkansas library, mostly complete and read to be performed. The Fort Smith Symphony in Arkansas has begun a recording project for her four symphonies under the Naxos label, based on editions prepared by the composer James Greeson (the Fourth Symphony being one of her recently discovered works). Additionally, the first recording of Price’s two violin concertos has been released last month by Albany (see below). By continuing the efforts of these groups and committing ourselves – as listeners, performers, and patrons – to more diversified narratives and backgrounds, we can begin to give under-recognized composers such as Florence Price platforms for greater access and appreciation within a culture that once excluded these voices.
Listed below are recommended recordings of some of Florence Price’s most popular works:
Ege, Samantha. “Florence Price and the Politics of her Existence.” The Kapralova Society Journal. 16, no. 1 (Spring 2018): 1–10. http://www.kapralova.org/journal30.pdf
