Totalism

I think the only thing missing from Dennis Cleveland is a brawl between two of the cast members, Jerry Springer inspired. This is an interesting work. The audio on the video clip was poor, but the audio recording gave more insight into Rouse's work, though without the dramatic context. In Soul Train, I can hear Glass's rumbling organ bass lurking beneath the pop-techno veneer. I am glad that composers have sought new interaction with contemporary culture, and this work seems a predecessor to Anna Nicole: The opera by Mark-Anthony Turnage.

Although this work seems to shamelessly use sex as a promotional tool, it seems worthwhile with appealing music and a compelling story that people can relate to. Turnage has a huge output of jazz-influenced works which are very interesting.
  In Listen to This, Alex Ross has a wonderful essay on John Luther Adams. I enjoy the quiet reflection and natural ethos of Dream in White on White. Just as Reich and John (the other) Adams progressed from strict application of minimalist theory into something more Romantic and emotionally affective, Luther Adams seems to be a more evolved and emotionally attached Feldman. Luther Adams takes Feldman's sparse, pensive, and reflective textures but adds elements of rhythm, nature, and snowy landscapes. Although Gann is right that Luther Adams does not match Feldman's mystery or subtlety, his music is much more listenable.

Along the lines of Rouse and Turnage pursuing an interface with popular culture is Michael Daugherty whom is shunned by Gann. Like Andy Warhol, Daugherty has been especially successful at using popular icons as source material, although his work is certainly more accessible than Warhol's.

Daugherty gets a bad rap for selling out, being too basic, or whathaveyou, but the sold out crowd in Nashville means something. In the same vein, Mark-Anthony Turnage's Hammer a Ring on it is literally a Beyonce remix:

David Lang's music is pretty interesting, rhythmically puchy, edgy, often a bit uncomfortable. I especially like Are You Experienced for electric tuba and (mostly wind) ensemble:

Also interesting is the quasi-minimal Increase for mixed ensemble.

Postminimalism

Again we become mired in discussing lables, which are occasionally convenient but always messy. Gann correctly discredits postminimalism definition of as "the amount of intervention the composer makes in the process" as problematic. But his own definition involving audible structure is also troublesome, for in the new works of Glass, which are probably "minimal," the process is increasingly obscured. I think the minimalist school has progressed, like others, from strict expression of youth rebellion toward more complexity. Each composer develops his own techniques which are shaped from his philosophy and musical influences. I see no need for a strict definition of "postminimalism" because everyone after Riley, Glass, and Reich explored new realms opened by their predecessors.
  As a pianist, I knew Duckworth's Tango Dances as an amazing and lively fusion of bluegrass heritage with modernist constructions.Otherwise, this was my first exposure to his music. His works are at once deeply meditative and harmonically stable but more rhythmic than Part. Its lively syncopations and bluesy harmonies are also appealing features to me.
Om Shanti presents many interesting textures within a genuine and powerful work. Giteck's writing is quiet and reflective, making her work more like Arvo Pärt than any other we have studied.
  In The Crack in the Bell one can hear many of Glass's burbling arpeggios and insistently repeating chords with Lentz's very original ideas piled on top. I wish there were a recording with real instruments and quality synthesizers instead of the used car commercial brass section.

  After Duckworth, the rest of the music covered in this chapter is very obscure. Where is Adams!? Adams is THE post-minimalist. Growing directly out of the minimalist tradition, John Adams has developed a Romantic style that continues to evolve.

Gann discusses Adams up to Grand Pianola Music; thereafter Adams went his own way, and it is here that I think things really get interesting . Adams' The Dharma at Big Sur is a fascinating modern study in just tuning and tribute to California (and West coast composers Lou Harrison and Terry Riley). At his program note on the work, Adams discusses his decision to explore just tuning, Jimi Hendrix, and Johnny Hodges, and the blue note.




Adams creatively explores all kinds of minimal techniques (repetition, electronic manipulation) which Tracy Silverman clearly:

  Apart from Adams, I wish Gann would devote time to composers who are very influential, popular, AND were interesting who, though less directly relating to minimalism were discussed only very cursorily: Corigliano, Tower, Rouse (short paragraph), Harbison, Higdon (not mentioned), Daugherty (not mentioned), Zwillich (got a paragraph), etc. He seems to be deliberately avoiding the mainstream/popular.

Erasure in the Cultural Avant Garde

I applaud Witesell's treading into dangerous waters in is insightful essay White Noise: Race and Erasure in the Cultural Avant-Garde. This is obviously a topic fraught with issues and he generally handled it well. He made statements of gross overgeneralizing which made me uncomfortable, but there was always some truth contained within. Overall, I found it an extremely engaging and interesting work.
There is a lot of provocative content here and I will present some of my reactions.

Whitesell does not completely deal with the issue of European cultural colonization which I wish he would have fleshed out more fully. Western music, like our historical military exploits, does seek to appropriate foreign cultures and annex them into our cultural fabric. Though America is typically viewed as the "melting pot," America is hardly the only country to look elsewhere for inspiration and material, and I view this practice, of which Whitesell implies criticism, as healthy and emblematic of the greater globilization taking place right now.  And this regeneration by looking out is what we do. It keeps things fresh. Perhaps not back to the Medieval ages, but since the modern era composers have looked outside their natural surroundings, whether to folk song or to foreign lands. This is part of what makes the tradition so great. Yes, in It's Gonna Rain, black is subsumed into white, but composers have always taken source materials and given them interface with their own cultural traditions. It might have less value and relevance if Reich had taken something white and somehow made it black.

This fascination with nothingness keeps reoccurring throughout the movement and is philosophically troubling to me. Clearly a reaction against the horrors of war, I wonder what the ultimate emotional effect is of removing all the cultural relations that give meaning to art. If you are constantly rejecting and invalidating, what are you building? How is your art helping people, or revealing beauty, or healing, if all it seeks is the desolate wasteland of emptiness?
  The author could have pointed out the mininalists' rejection of the fully textured and nuanced orchestral palate in favor of the "whiteness" of the minimalist ensemble.

I like the author's focus on the minimalists' rejection of decadence in search of purity. This seems to echo Schoenberg, who also reacted against corruption and harmonic degeneration (of the diminished seventh) chord by exploring serialism; instead of searching for a transcendent meaning or spiritual transparency, Schoenberg found a rich and logical progression from Romanticism. Schoenberg was concerned with improvement, the very concept of which Cage and the minimalists rejected.

With the minimalists' rejection of content, doesn't the process become the content? So it's impossible to have art without content? Even Cage's random processes seem to fill a void by their strict procedures.

Musically, Whitesell focuses on the work of Reich and Glass who are the most popular minimalists. Perhaps these two composers were the most popular and successful of the school because they exploited momentum. Those that rejected rhythmic momentum seem tedious to me. Thus, Reich and Glass include temporal goals (despite a glacial speed), but without the hierarchical structure of Romanticism (Schenker).


 I was particularly troubled by the author's extended discussion on the premise of aspiration as a deep-seated trait that characterizes people of European heritage. While I see what Richard Dyer is getting at, this is an impossibly complex, over-generalized, and unfair statement. It is insulting (and racist?) to claim that Africans are inherently not concerned with striving for betterment. Perhaps the European tradition has taken this characteristic to an extreme? If one were to play along with this clain, where does this leave the Tiger Mom and the stereotype of hyper-competition of Asian-Americans? While Americans descending from slaves surely carry some legacy of subjugation, this postulation of aspiration as white is insulting and cannot possibly hold up under any objective scrutiny.
  Unfortunately though, in current American cultural stereotypes, whiteness probably can be equated with driven aspiration. This is deeply troubling, and one is pressed to ask, why is this? Are all humans equally programmed to be driven toward aspiration and the Europeans simply progressed to the stage of military and cultural imperialism soonest? For a fascinating discussion on cultural progression of civilizations, check out Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond.

The author mentions "the emergence of a new kind of flatness..." which makes me think of Thomas Friedman's epic reading of the modern age. Watch him discussing political flatness here: http://mit.tv/zBz6IQ.
     Whitesell's essay was written in 2001, on the brink of what I consider to be the age of the internet, a post-postmodern age. I wondered if the author would have any update on his essay given the current trends of increasing impersonality in an online world.
    All this talk of white and black leaves me wondering where has grey gone? In the age of "You're with us or you're against us," nuance and compromise (any grey are) seem to be increasingly overlooked in favor of simple and convenient answers. The internet has been incredibly empowering to the world's powerless, but when everyone has a loudspeaker, one must really shout to be heard and provoke to be remembered.

The amount of fodder in Whitesell's article for weeks of discussion is testament to the power of music. I am grateful to him for thoughtfully raising important questions presented in the music that are unfortunately sidestepped by people like Paul Simon seeking easy listening and easy feeling.

the movements age

I'd like to start this post with a paraphrase from the prologue to Listen to This by Alex Ross. He makes the very interesting point that all music becomes classical in the end. Jazz and rock have both progressed through similar stages in fast pace:
Phase 1: Youth rebellion. Satchmo, Duke, Jelly Roll Morton. I'll add Elvis and the like.
Phase 2: Romanticism. Bourgeois pomp of swing band. I would add Mingus as the apex of high Romanticism in jazz, Stadium rock.
Phase 3: Artists rebel against bourgeois image, echoing classical modernism. Stravinsky, Charlie Parker, punk rock.
Phase 4: a vanguard loses touch with the masses and becomes a self-contained avant garde. Babbitt, free jazz, Zappa.
Phase 5: Retrenchment. Wynton, del Tredici, Barber launch a neo-Romantic idealization of the past, but efforts are too late to restore the art to the mainstream. Countless rock bands from the 60s and 70s continue to tour and fill arenas, reminiscing in lost moments of the audience's youth.

I have found all this very illuminating.


One of Zappa's last concerts, on tour in Barcelona. Full concert:

In the remainder of this post I would like to share some more experimental songs.
Rush's Cygnus X-1 features many unusual time signatures

There is a huge and flourishing experimental indie rock scene, of which I know basically nothing. The very interesting band Neptune is doing some unusual experimentation with soundscapes and invented instruments. Check it out!!



Taken from their website, Neptune writes:
"Neptune's origins trace to 1994 as a sculpture project by Boston artist/musician Jason Sanford, who forged the band's haphazard guitars and reluctant drums from scrap steel and found objects.  Seven lineups, twenty-three releases and hundreds of instruments later, the band continues to wrench its sound spatter on self-built instruments to often confounded audiences around the world."

Moving to the totally mainstream, I particularly enjoy Dave Matthews Band for its intelligent construction and complicated structures."
Dreaming Tree is in 7/8,

#34 is a really off-balance 9/8

What meter is Let You Down?

Saucers by Ozric Tentacles is also extremely metrically irregular.

Dream Theatre did some very experimental works. The Dance of Eternity is a true tone poem, orchestrally scored, with significant motivic development within a creative soundscape.

dialogues with jazz and pop

I have known Mingus' work for years. Though considering it too rambunctious for my daily listening pleasure, I've always recognized his genius. Mingus' music is always powerful, brilliantly constructed (even as jazz). The work I have most associated with him is Pithecanthropus Erectus:

My favorite part from Black Saint is the Track C Group Dancers. There is an incredibly mournful wailing as passionate and affecting as anything.
  Although I have always been aware of Brian Eno, this was my first opportunity to spend some time with his music.

In Dark Trees could have been composed by Reich. Slow moving harmonies, repeated motives, subtle color shifts.

Music for Airports is totally ambient, owes lots of slowly shifting textures to LaMonte Young and paving the way for trendy clothing stores at the mall.
Interesting that rock has ascended high maturity of appealing to intellect and begun to descend again as the movement loses electricity of its youth.

In Laurie Anderson (especially Superman) I hear contemporary rage Imogen Heap-- voice encoder, soft lyricism, creative textures.

In Guitar Trio, I hear rockers writing minimalism. I wonder what Steve Reich thinks? This music lacks coherent structure perceivable in Reich and Glass, but is somewhat interesting nonetheless.

Drastic Classicism might be the better work, more timbral contrast. This work also seems to possess a more coherent form than the Guitar Trio.
Angel Moves too fast to See fascinating video documenting some of its production. I can hear so many of Terry Riley's procedures wedded to infectious beat and freedom of rock.

I enjoyed Gann's illuminating discussion of jazz vs. classical in which he boils the distinction down to the role of the performer. This is getting at a frequent lament of mine, that classical performances too often sound alike because the role of the individual is so subverted.

I find Braxton's compositions very interesting, especially 40B. Their jazzy nature seem to make them more accessible despite the dissonant and pointalistic textures. Unfortunately, I was not able to find a recording of the Composition no. 95 for two pianos.

Braxton talking about his 12 + 1tet. The diversity of his output is amazing, ranging from the freely avant garde (above) to hip standards like Body and Soul (below).

I don't think Schuller's music is poorly constructed, and I applaud his efforts to cross genres. However, I think there are better composers, and his work does not generally speak strongly to me. I think it's unfortunate that he had to write that essay to defend his work. There are certainly things to be learned from each side studying the other.

Electronic music goes high art

If Gann explores the early and middle periods of eletronic music, the genre seems to have reached a high point. Most of the music of Chapter 10 seems to be electronic music in the formative stages, twinkles of greatness, but lots of searching, like early symphonies of Sammartini.



I will dedicate this post mostly to exploration of the very popular young composer Mason Bates:
  Bates is a DJ/composer who seeks to replicate electronic sounds with acoustic instruments. He hit the scene big as composer for the Youtube Symphony. He has been in residence with San Fransisco Symphony and Chicago. His music builds on dance beats, his music shifts smoothly frequently and maintains interest, often exploring subtle colors. Often performing electronics on stage (in T shirt), he certainly represents electronic music reaching high brow.

His major splash, Mothership by the Youtube Symphony with star improvisations:


Bates talking (in his voice exactly like Owen Wilson) on technology and mass transmission:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=livy1_GDFzQ

Most interesting: A collaborative remix of the Ligeti sonata and groovy at Le Poisson Rouge with electronics.

A piece with some really interesting colors and textures performed by the Detroit Symphony:

Bates is not on stage, but you can easily imagine him in the back working on his laptop.


Finally, piece for DJ and band which is very frequently performed:

His music is really accessible and holds a broad appeal. Unless he continues to innovate, his music risks being to much alike. He has several pieces for band and electronics which are performed frequently. Of course, his music really is just beats with interesting colors... I still like it.

The New Romanticism?

Lots going on here tonight. How to begin to reflect on the colossal scope of this chapter? So much is lumped together but I should talk about Rzewski because I was only familiar with his piece for 8th Blackbird, Pocket Symphony.

Wow. I just spent the past hour listening to Rzewski's People United and am so glad I did, especially with the score available.

What an amazing piece. There is something here for everyone! I love the unified narrative structure that unfolds through various different idioms, jazz, atonal fragments, minimal, Romanticism. He is so creative, developing ideas satisfactorily then moving on at the perfect time, giving each variation a sense of closure within a larger hierarchical structure. The form makes total sense, and I feel various degrees of fulfillment as the work unfolds. I was skeptical during the very Les Mis-like theme (harmonies are like the standard All The Things You Are), but just as in Beethoven, the more comprehensible and memorable the theme, the greater flexibility afforded.

There is lots of Paganini and Rachmaninov in the Romantic virtuosity, but that helps make this work seem really accessible to a large concert-going public. Especially the piano recital crowd who does not expect to hear anything written after 1890. Given its length, this would require incredible stamina of the performer.
There is so much interesting music in this work! Dazzling colors, cool effects, driving rhythms that appeal on a physical level. Staggering beauty, savage brutality.
Maybe I just like it because it's simple enough for me to understand.

Interestingly, Rzewski seems to have uploaded many of his own scores to IMSLP. He has a piece, Satyrica, for jazz combo and band, but I can not find any information on it beyond a decent recording [here]. This work is over an hour and seems less interesting although I did not get all the way through.

I wonder, does a composer make his work stronger by including a political agenda? Or does this weaken the music, or distract from its power?

The Gann text is suddenly conversational, blatantly presenting his opinions along with bad jokes. 
I think the entire New Romanticism term is more problematic than even minimalism was. I think what Gann really means is Music That More People Like to Listen To era.