Tag: Minimalism

Michael Torke – The Yellow Pages

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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.

Steve Reich – Nagoya Marimbas

Matthew Eilar4 Comments

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.

Bang on a…Controller

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Via Life’s a Pitch, the news that Bang on a Can, the minimalist/electroacoustic ensemble, has released some of their music for Rock Band play. If the following video of Michael Gordon’s Yo! Shakespeare is anything to go by, minimalist compositions are about as fun as you would think they would be.

Arvo Pärt – Fratres

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Fratres for Violin and Piano.

Arvo Pärt (1935-) is an Estonian composer who developed his minimalist style and compositional methods in isolation behind the Iron Curtain. His music incorporates elements of Gregorian chant and modes; religious ideas; and minimalist textures. When he began composing, he experimented with neo-classical techniques, following Prokofiev, Bartók and Shostakovich. Dissatisfied with this approach, he turned to 12-tone composition. At that time, atonal composition was officially discouraged by the Soviet Union, and Pärt’s music was banned.

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5vO92REraUo]

Fratres for Cello and Piano

In the 1970’s, in search of inspiration, Pärt began to research the historical origins of Western music, looking at Gregorian chant, church modes, and early polyphony. The compositions that follow these investigations imagine a different path of musical development, almost an alternate-history version of Western music. Many of them are explicitly religious; today he composes mostly sacred choral music.

Fratres for Chamber Orchestra

Over the course of his career, Pärt has developed a proprietary compositional technique, called tintinnabuli (the name comes from the Latin tinnabulae: of bells [it’s also where we get the beautiful English word tintinnabulation]). This method, at its most basic, consists of two lines of music, one moving by step, the other playing the notes in a triad. It makes for simple, ethereal, and deeply moving music. A good example of this technique is Pärt’s 1976 piano work, “Für Alina:”

Für Alina

Fratres is either a collection of works, or a single work with many orchestrations. It is very simple music; it consists of a progression of chords that alternate with a percussive section. The changes and forward motion of the piece result from small changes in rhythm and dynamics. The first version, for string quartet, was composed in 1976. From 1976-1992, Pärt has made five other orchestrations: for strings and percussion; for solo violin and piano; for solo cello and piano*; for eight cellos; for violin, strings and percussion. Other arrangers have prepared versions for wind octet and percussion; guitar and violin; and chamber orchestra.

*This version was featured in the movie “There Will Be Blood.” This is for good reason. It’s my favorite.

Fratres for Violin, Strings and Percussion

All of these orchestrations provide different compositional challenges. For the orchestrations with solo instruments, because they cannot play block chords, they are replaced with light, very fast arpeggios. The orchestrations without percussion instruments have different solutions to the percussive sections that separate the chord progressions: in the string quartet they are played as strong pizzicato, in the versions for solo instrument and piano, the crashing piano provides the percussion. An arrangement for wind octet was prepared by B. Brinner; the octet is not nearly as homogeneous in sound as the string ensembles, requiring another kind of adjustment.

Fratres for Guitar and Violin. Part Two.

Fratres is deceptively simple. All of the musical ideas are laid out in the first thirty seconds of the recording of any one of the orchestrations, and yet in the six months or so since I first listened to it, I’ve found myself revisiting –and hearing new things– in the various recordings and arrangements. It seems like each one has its moment when the music becomes transcendental.

Fratres for Wind Octet

Wikipedia: Fratres; Arvo Pärt

Amazon: Fratres/Summa/Festiva Lente/Cantus in memory of Benjamin Britten

Steve Reich – “Piano Phase”

Matthew Eilar2 Comments

No matter how difficult it is to define Minimalism, it is undeniable that it is a very exciting time to be listening to and thinking about it. The very actions we take, listening to the music, buying CDs, writing about the music, reading about the composers, are still changing the history of the movement. All of the comfortable labels we have for historical movements were coined long after they were over, and it is possible that the greatest Minimalist composer is someone we’ve never heard of. Furthermore, there is great danger in establishing a narrative. It can cause us to reject composers, and their music for fear of upsetting a comfortable set of ideas that we have become invested in.

If there is a Minimalist canon, however, Piano Phase is in it. I want to look at three different facets of Steve Reich’s 1967 composition Piano Phase and explain how  Piano Phase’s roots in mechanical delay opened the door for experimentation in the difference between sound production and the final acoustic product, it pioneered the idea of musical process as iterated function, and it was the first acoustic work with shifting, yet not cleanly divided, sections. This particular composition contains the ideas that Reich has expanded upon in his instrumental music, as well as provided a new theoretical framework for experimental music.

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