Last week was somewhat heady for me. As I mentioned a few days ago, I saw Inception at a midnight screening. I also watched Waking Life for the first time a few days before that. I also had a metaphysical encounter of a different sort that week, one of the most interesting reading experiences I have had in a while in Cloud Atlas, a novel by David Mitchell*. I was intrigued by the description of the novel’s structure included (without proper spoiler warnings!) in a New York Times Magazine profile of the author.
[Spoilers below. It’s not the end of the world to be spoiled on the structure of the novel, but I’m certain that it will change the reading experience.]
Michael Torke’s The Yellow Pages (1985) is a movement from a three-piece work called Telephone Book. It takes a simple, upbeat musical phrase and develops it slowly, modulating and employing variations on the phrase. Torke’s music falls somewhere in the grey area between Minimalism and Post-Minimalism; he began composing when Minimalism was beginning to gain credibility in classical music circles. It befits our strange postmodern culture that a movement and a post-movement can arise simultaneously. Torke embraces the superficial characteristics of minimalism–the short repeated phrases, the minute variations–and combines them with both poppy, jazzy musical phrases and idioms, and a tonal and developmental scheme that falls comfortably within traditional harmony. In a way, his music is similar to John Adams’, unafraid to engage with both minimalism and traditional harmony at the same time. However, whereas Adams uses minimalistic processes to compose music that draws from both American themes and post-tonal harmony, Torke’s music owes as much to the orchestral pop of the 40’s-60’s as it does to the European classical tradition.
This brings up a serious reservation I have with Torke’s music. There’s a big difference between the post-tonal sources that Adams uses in his pieces and the tonal, commercial sounds that Torke uses in his: the former is much harder to listen to, less accessible, than the latter (It’s no accident that Torke’s music is commercially sucessful [for a classical composer]). That’s not necessarily a demerit, and I should say that I enjoy Torke’s music very much, however other aspects of his music give cause to doubt its real merit. Torke’s Wikipedia page* categorizes his music as influenced by minimalism and jazz, but when you listen to his music, there’s not much jazz. There a lot of stuff that’s jazzy, but it’s the jazz of commercial jingles and the A.M. radio of a bygone era. An uncharitable reading of Torke’s music might find it to be pretty, empty phrases rearranged in a watered-down minimalist scheme.
I still haven’t decided which side I come down on. I’m not a fan of his source material; I despise the vacuousness of the idioms that he imitates. On the other hand, sometimes I feel like the compositional processes he employs are interesting enough that I don’t care (part of the reason I like The Yellow Pages so much is that it has really fine counterpoint. And believe me, I’m not usually the type to be excited about anything for counterpoint). It’s also just fun to listen to.
There’s a couple of good recordings out there, but if anybody is interested in hearing more Torke (I particularly recommend Adjustable Wrench), he has a 6-CD box set called Ecstatic Collection that contains most of his major pieces.
*I recognize that nobody is responsible for their own Wikipedia page, but these pages are often an indicator of general consensus about how musicians and composers are categorized.
Sometime when I was away (for some reason, the more free time I have, the less consistent about blogging I am), Mouth of the Beast passed the 10,000 pageviews milestone. Thanks for reading!
I saw Inception at a midnight showing, and really liked it. I really enjoy the way that Christopher Nolan puts together a script as a writer, and the way that he emphasizes narrative structure as a director. He’s very good at creating stylized realities, whether that’s the grimy 19th century cities of The Prestige, the run down bleakness of Nowheresville, CA in Memento, or the logical unconscious of Inception. Rarely do the conflicts of the characters make his movies compelling to me; I’m much more hooked by the construction of the plot and the puzzle.
That perspective has made the critical dialogue around Inception very interesting to me. Two of the reviews that are drawing a lot of attention are David Edelstein’s review for NPR and A.O. Scott’s for the NYT. Edelstein is directly negative, calling it “lumbering and humorless and pretentious, with a drag of a hero.” Scott’s review is not negative, but makes a distinction between Nolan’s blockbusters and the arthouse movies that they get confused with.
I’m with Scott on this one. A movie that I’ve been mulling over recently is Tarkovsky’s Solaris. It was filmed before there were such things as blockbusters, but it was a big budget movie that matched interesting visual effects with heady dialogue, and presumed a curious and adult audience. Solaris and Inception couldn’t be more different. Solaris is not so ideological that any one character clearly speaks for the filmmaker, however ideas are given a gravity that conveys to the audience that they are important, and they are spoken with conviction. Inception has the trappings of an ideas movie–what could be more high concept than questioning the nature of reality itself?–but really just uses these as dressings for a much more conventional and familiar story.
This is not a bad thing. Christopher Nolan’s films are extremely well crafted, and he knows how to manipulate an audience into having a good time. He’s managed the trick of having a mainstream career with arthouse cred.
Not every movie needs to have a “message,” and not every director needs to work with big ideas. But I would like to see a Christopher Nolan movie with an idea or a perspective to match his strengths in plotting and production design. I don’t need for movies to be ideological, but I do like to get a sense for what the director or screenwriter thinks are important issues or how they see the world. Nolan has made many good movies, but he’s a cipher. He’s proven that he can fluidly transmit complex settings and situations, and he’s proven that he can work with big themes in a way that adds to a plot without obstructing it. Now I’d like for him to use those talents to say something.
I’ve been putting together a mix CD for a person that asked me to give them some classical music. Because I’m a music nerd, I’m putting together a listening guide as well with historical context, a little information on the composer, and some things to listen for. I don’t want it to be too technical, so I’m finding myself with extra insights that I’m going to channel here over the next few days.
Nagoya Marimbas was written in 1996, thirty years after Piano Phase (see my post on Piano Phase), but I see a direct connection between the two pieces.
Piano Phase was written to try and emulate with instruments a mechanical phenomenon: identical tape loops playing at different speeds and becoming out of sync. It accomplished this by having identical musical phrases played by two pianists at different speeds. It’s still phasing, but achieved by a different method. Once you become familiar with the way that phasing sounds and behaves, acoustical phenomena become apparent. These are the “events” you hear in Piano Phase–the way that the music behaves when the pianists sync up at a lag of the eighth note, or the sudden resolution when the pianists play note against note. There are also rhythmical patterns that emerge; depending on the content that’s being phased, individual tones become isolated and create their own identifiable rhythmic patterns that may not be contained in the phased material.
I think pieces like Music for 18 Musicians, Drumming,and Nagoya Marimbas representing Reich taking the experiment of phasing a step further. Works like Piano Phase and Violin Phase established the phenomena possible in phasing, which Reich isolated and manipulated in new works that left the phasing framework behind. If you listen closely to Nagoya Marimbas, events, moments occur that remind one of events in a phasing piece, however the means used to make the music is completely different in conception.
Another thing that I’ve been thinking about while writing about this piece of music is the prominent place that the marimba has taken in minimalist and contemporary classical music. I think this partly due to stylistic determinism (corresponding to linguistic determinism). Whereas earlier styles of instrumental music emphasized different values that lead to the strings, for example, occupying the primary place in an orchestra, the leaner, generally (in the early years) chamber-sized, rhythmically oriented minimalist music valued the marimba for its advantages: it’s tuned, has a moderate sustain, percussive, and can switch patterns more quickly than many instruments. It’s a reminder that the fortunes of instruments rise and fall with the times, and that instruments that aren’t considered particularly useful now may have unique qualities that may be valued in the music of the future.
hammer & jack 