Chapter 14: Beethoven Was Wrong

Part of the Rest Is Noise Audio Guide

Panamint Valley, California. Photograph by Alex Ross.

Note: The first page number is for the hardback edition, the second number is for the paperback.

In the nineteen-sixties, the avant-garde went pop. The Beatles, the biggest phenomenon in pop-music history, started out as a straight-ahead rock band, but, in their later years, they absorbed ideas from composers such as Cage, Xenakis, and Stockhausen (fifth from left in the top row on the cover of Sgt. Pepper's), not to mention Jean Sibelius (see pp. 473-74 / pp. 515-16 of The Rest is Noise):

From "A Day in the Life" (Sgt. Pepper's) and "Revolution 9" (The White Album).

Compare Xenakis's Metastasis:

Hans Rosbaud conducting the Southwest Radio Symphony at the Donaueschingen Musiktage, Oct. 16, 1955 (world premiere); col legno AU-031800.

Composers who came of age in the fifties and sixties grew up with American popular music, especially bebop, R&B, and early rock 'n' roll, and absorbed ideas in turn. The composers who later became minimalists were often attracted to music that became fixed on one or two chords or on a droning tone while voices and instruments traced patterns in the air. Here are some sounds that were ringing in the ears of the young Steve Reich:

Miles Davis, "So What"; John Coltrane, "Africa"; Bob Dylan, "Subterranean Homesick Blues."

WEST COAST MUSIC

American composers resident on the West Coast have long followed their own path. The story of that maverick anti-European tradition, which reaches its climax with the phenomenon of minimalism in the 1960s, properly begins with experimental pieces by Henry Cowell (pp. 478-79 / pp. 521-22) from the second and third decades of the century. You can hear excerpts from his early piano works at Smithsonian Folkways and also at Art of the States. Folkways also has various recordings of world music that Cowell produced or co-produced. Here are excerpts from The Tides of Manaunaun, with its dense "cluster" chords, and Aeolian Harp and Sinister Resonance, where the player strums and plucks the strings of the piano:

Henry Cowell, piano; Smithsonian Folkways SFW40801.

Conlon Nancarrow's Study 40b for player piano (see pp. 479-80 / p. 522). For more sound samples, see Minnesota Public Radio's page about the composer. For even more, see Kyle Gann's Nancarrow page.

Harry Partch, the legendary "hobo composer," is richly documented online. Visit the Corporeal Meadows site, the Partch Information Center, and the American Mavericks Partch page. Kyle Gann does the math on just intonation, the tuning system that underlies Partch's music. Here is Partch singing By the Waters of Babylon and accompanying himself on Adapted Viola (p. 481 / pp. 523-24):

From Harry Partch: Enclosure 2, Historic Speech-Music Recordings, Innova 401 (via PromoNet).

Art of the States offers selections from the blissfully otherworldly music of Lou Harrison (pp. 482-83 / p. 525). Other Minds has a recording of Harrison's Chaconne. Much more about the same composer can be found at the Harrison Documentary site: clips of interviews with those who knew him, photos of the straw-bale studio that Harrison built on the edge of Joshua Tree National Park. The University of California, Santa Cruz holds the Harrison Archive; American Mavericks has an interview with him. Here is Concerto in Slendro, which adapts the five-note slendro scale of Indonesian gamelan music:

Barry Jekowsky conducting the California Symphony, with Maria Bachmann, violin; Decca 455590.

In this tape from the Other Minds Archive, Lou Harrison discusses his love of the gamelan:

Another side of John Cage, pointing toward the minimalism of the late twentieth century — the String Quartet in Four Parts:

Arditti Quartet, Mode 27.

Here's the retinue of performers for the first "complete" performance of Erik Satie's Vexations, as arranged by John Cage in 1963 (pp. 483-84 / pp. 526-27). Among the participants was John Cale, the future violist of the Velvet Underground. Cale later appeared on the quiz show I've Got a Secret with Karl Schenzer, the only person who sat through the entire eighteen-hour-forty-minute marathon:

In 1993 I reviewed a 1993 performance of Vexations.

The great New York composer Morton Feldman (pp. 484-88 / pp. 527-31) had almost nothing to do with the West Coast, but the spareness and softness of his work had something in common with the aesthetic often found among California composers. Chris Villars, author of the collection Morton Feldman Says, offers a huge collection of online Feldman material. The University of Buffalo's Feldman archive. Other Minds has a tape of Cage and Feldman in conversation. Here is Feldman's Madame Press Died Last Week at Ninety, among his gentlest and shortest creations:

John Adams conducting the Orchestra of St. Luke's, Nonesuch 79249. By kind permission of Nonesuch.

Feldman speaks to Heinz-Klaus Metzger about his relationship to Jewishness and the attitude of "mourning" in his music:

The final section of Feldman's Rothko Chapel (pp. 487-88 / p. 530):

Philip Brett conducting the UC Berkeley Chamber Chorus; with David Abel, viola, Karen Rosenak, celesta, and William Winant, percussion; New Albion NA039. By kind permission of New Albion.

For more information on the "downtown" scenes of the 1960s (pp. 491-92 / p. 534-36), see a NewMusicBox interview with James Tenney, the Fluxus Portal, Fluxus documents, Nam June Paik, Henry Flynt, Philip Corner, Gordon Mumma (and his history of the ONCE Festival), Robert Ashley (and a recording of The Wolfman), Alvin Lucier, Pauline Oliveros, and Morton Subotnick.

A performance of Paik's conceptual piece One for Violin Solo:

These samples show the transformation of Alvin Lucier's speaking voice over the course of the remarkable speech-sound composition I am sitting in a room (p. 492 / p. 535):

Alvin Lucier, composer and performer; Lovely Music 1013. 

MINIMALISM

Each of the major minimalist composers has an official website: La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and Philip Glass. See also such late-twentieth-century maverick thinkers as Joan La Barbara, Phill Niblock, Paul Lansky, Tony Conrad, Charlemagne Palestine, Frederic Rzewski, and Meredith Monk.

Recordings of La Monte Young's music (pp. 492-95 / pp. 536-39) are hard to come by; unfortunately, no recording of his enormously influential Trio for Strings is currently available. Courtesy of Other Minds comes this 1965 live recording of Young's Forty-two for Henry Flynt, with Peter Winkler on gong:

From the same year comes this snippet of a recording of Young's Theatre of Eternal Music, with John Cale on viola, Tony Conrad on violin, Angus MacLise on percussion, and Young and Marian Zazeela on vocals. Cale and MacLise went on to play in the first incarnation of the Velvet Underground.

Inside the Dream Syndicate, Vol. 1: Day of Niagara; Table of the Elements 74.

In his music for the film The Gift (p. 496 / p. 540), Terry Riley processed the trumpet playing of Chet Baker through his "time lag accumulator," stringing tape between two tape recorders and creating instant loops from live sound. These rapid repeating patterns helped to shape the minimalist aesthetic:

From Music for the Gift / Bird of Paradise / Mescalin Mix, organ of Corti 1.

The opening of Riley's epochal In C (p. 496 / p. 540):

In C: Twenty-fifth Anniversary Concert, New Albion NA071. By kind permission of the composer and New Albion.

From Riley's Rainbow in Curved Air (p. 497 / p. 541):

CBS 7315.

Steve Reich discovered his "phasing effect" — two identical musical strands moving gradually out of sync with each other and creating ever-changing rhythmic energies — while manipulating tape of a preacher orating in San Francisco's Union Square. In the following three extracts from It's Gonna Rain (pp. 498-99 / p. 543), you hear first the raw material, then the phasing process at two different points in the unfolding of the piece:

Steve Reich: Early Works, Nonesuch 79169. 

The same principle is applied to instruments in Piano Phase (p. 501 / p. 545). Again, three excerpts from the beginning and from two later stages of the piece:

Edmund Niemann and Nurit Tilles, pianos; Nonesuch 79169. 

The opening of Reich's Four Organs, with the four instruments slowing down at different rates (p. 502 / pp. 546-47):

James Preiss, Michael Gordon, Evan Ziporyn, Mark Stewart, Lisa Moore; Nonesuch 79481. 

On another recording from the Other Minds archive, you can hear Reich at the KPFA radio station in Berkeley in 1970, introducing a tape of Four Organs with Philip Glass on organ (the music starts at 9:40). The broadcast also includes a fascinating tape (thirty-seven minutes in) that Reich made of drummers in Ghana — a sound to be echoed in his next big work, Drumming.

Follow this link for video of the group So Percussion performing the first part of Drumming in 2007.

Generous excerpts from the work of Philip Glass (pp. 503-6 / pp. 548-51), including the monumental Einstein on the Beach, appear under "listen/watch" at the composer's website. Here is the beginning of "Knee Play 5" from Einstein:

Nonesuch 79323.

Melodies emerge from repetition in the almost symphonic expanse of Reich's Music for 18 Musicians (pp. 506-7 / pp. 551-52):

Steve Reich and Musicians, Nonesuch 79448. By kind permission of Boosey & Hawkes and Nonesuch.

Echoes and traces of minimalism in pop music of the late twentieth century — The Velvet Undergound's "Heroin," David Bowie's "Heroes," Public Enemy's "Welcome to the Terrordome," Missy Elliott's "Wake Up":

Go on to Chapter 15

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