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INART 55
History of Electroacoustic Music
Minimalism
Music history has often swung from complex to simple, from a position of attempting to elevate its listeners by challenging them to a position of simplifying music that has become too complex for its own good. Theorist Leonard Meyer has stated that "styles have generally moved in the direction of reduced redundancy," stating that the perceived information remains constant: new styles present ideas in new, nascent ways; and works gradually become more complex as listeners become accustomed to the style.
 Barnett Newman (1905-1970) Canto II (1963-64) |
 Ellsworth Kelly (1923-) Red, Blue, Green (1963) |
 Ad Reinhard (1913-1967) Abstract Painting, Blue (1952) |
 Sol Lewitt (1928-) Open Modular Cube (1966) |
Minimalism, named after the trend in visual art characterized by spare and simple images, asks the question, "Can less be more?" In its attempt to re-introduce subjectivity into music, minimalists started with the basics -- the nature of sound, and the potential for sonic events to affect mood and the nervous system. Their music relies on repetition of simple elements to create a meditative state in which listeners ultimately transcend the superficial simplicity of the material and are brought to an awareness of underlying layers of information, and a heightened -- even religious -- state of mind and spirit.
La Monte Young (1935-)
Raised in a log cabin in a small Idaho town, Young cites his earliest musical influences as the sound of the wind blowing through a chink in the cabin and the buzzing of a power line outside.
After training as a jazz saxophonist, Young became a twelve tone composer, and visited the seminar at Darmstadt in the mid 1950s. After this, he began to write pieces for strings that involved notes that were to be held for several minutes at a time. In 1960 he went to New York, where he joined the Fluxus movement. Three of his pieces from 1960 are often called the first minimalist works:
Young founded the performance group The Theater of Eternal Music. Many of this group eventually went on to form the rock group The Velvet Underground. Young began to examine the mathematical nature of tuning, working with tones that were integer multiples of a fundamental frequency. With tones that extended over a period of minutes, listeners could be brought to a state of analytic listening, in which they were conscious of the interplay of individual overtones. In 1964, Young introduced a piece that over the next 20 years grew into The Well-Tuned Piano, a series of improvisations on a piano tuned to maintain a series of perfect fifths (3:2 frequency ratios), and a set of over fifty themes that were the subject of a series of improvisations. Performances of the piece last up to six hours, intended to permeate a listener's life for that period of time, rather than be passing songs.
A continuing project of Young's is Dream House, in New York, which consists of sine tones played in ratios calculated to affect the nervous system, accompanied by lighting designed by his wife, visual artist Marian Zazeela. Initially conceived as a seven year project, it has been extended repeatedly. The musical component has the imposing, but perfectly descriptive title The Base 9:7:4 Symmetry in Prime Time When Centered Above and Below the Lowest Term Primes in the Range of 288 to 224 with the Addition of 279 and 261 in Which the Half of The Symmetric Division Mapped Above and Including 288 Consists of the Powers of 2 Multiplied by the Primes Within the Ranges of 144 to 128, 72 to 64, and 36 to 32 Which Are Symmetrical to Those Primes in Lowest Terms in the Half of the Symmetric Division Mapped Below and Including 224 within the Ranges 126 to 112, 63 to 56, and 31.5 to 28 with the Addition of 119.
Kyle Gann wrote the following description of the piece:
Walk into The Base 9:7:4 Symmetry and you'll hear a whirlwind of pitches swirl around you. Stand still, and the tones suddenly freeze in place. Within the room, every pitch finds its own little niche where it resonates, and with all those close-but-no-cigar intervals competing in one space (not to mention their elegantly calculated sum- and difference-tones), you can alter the harmony you perceive simply by pulling on your earlobe. . . . Moving your head makes those tones leap from high to low and back, while that cluster in the seventh octave, with its wild prime ratios like 269:271, fizzes in and out...
Inspired by teacher Pandit Pran Nath, who taught him about intonation and also stated that people can have out-of-body experiences when singing perfectly in tune, Young has stated that "if one doesn't feel swept away to Heaven [by his music], it has failed."
Terry Riley (1935-)
Riley was one of the first composers to be influenced directly by Young. The two teamed up in the late 1950s, creating performances that involved actions such as mowing the lawn, playing catch, or dragging trash cans around a concert hall. In 1960, Riley created the piece Mescaline Mix, involving tape loops. He recalls:
I think I was noticing that things didn't sound the same when you heard them more than once. And the more you heard them, the more different they did sound. ...In those days the first psychedelic experiences were starting to happen in America, and that was changing our concept of how time passes. ...
In 1964, Riley's first classic, In C, was performed at the San Francisco Tape Music Center. Written for an ensemble of any size and played on any group of instruments, the piece consists of fifty-three short melodies that each performer is to play in order, repeating each melody until s/he decides to move on to the next. A pulse of two high C notes on a piano acts as a time keeper.
Steve Reich (1936-)
Raised in New York and initially trained at Juilliard, Reich was attracted to the counterculture movement in San Francisco in the 1960s. He moved there to study with Luciano Berio at Mills College in Oakland. Berio became frustrated at Reich's handling of twelve tone rows, as he would repeat rows over and over without transposing them. Berio finally asked him, "If you want to write tonal music, why don't you write tonal music?"
Reich's exploration of tonality involved the use of tape loops. It's Gonna Rain (1965) was a tape loop of an impassioned street preacher that Reich recorded in San Francisco. He found that when he played the tape loop on two tape players, they would gradually go out of phase due to slight differences in the speeds of the tape players. Reich's next piece was Come Out (1966), taken from an interview Reich made in New York with a suspected murderer (later acquitted) who was beaten while in police custody, who said "I had to, like, let some of the bruise blood come out to show them." (He would not be taken to a hospital unless he were bleeding). In this piece, Reich used four tape players, and as they go increasingly out of phase, the loop loses all intelligibility and takes on melodic and rhythmic qualities.
These pieces began Reich's lifelong exploration with "process music" in which slowly changing processes are meant to offer an engaging and hypnotic listening experience. Reich soon found that he preferred working with acoustic instruments to tape, and later works such as Drumming (1973) have become highly successful.
Alvin Lucier
Lucier's most famous work, I Am Sitting in a Room (1971), takes the minimalist use of tape loops to an acoustic exploration. The piece consisted of a recording of Lucier reading the following text:
I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice and I am going to play it back into the room again and again until the resonant frequencies of the room reinforce themselves so that any semblance of my speech, with perhaps the exception of rhythm, is destroyed. What you will hear, then, are the natural resonant frequencies of the room articulated by speech. I regard this activity not so much as a demonstration of a physical fact, but more as a way to smooth out any irregularities my speech might have.
The piece consisted of a recording of this passage being played thirty-two times in the same room. Lucier read the passage in the room. He then played the tape back, recording the playback on a second tape recorder. He then played this new recording back, re-recording it in the same way. As the passage is repeated, the text becomes less and less intelligible, becoming submerged in the resonant frequencies of the room. Thus, the room itself becomes a musical instrument. The text loses all meaning, as all that remains is its rhythmic qualities. The rhythms were highlighted further by Lucier's stutter, which becomes no longer a speech impediment, but more akin to a percussive element.
SOURCES:
Nicolas Collins, liner notes to the CD I am sitting in a room. 1990, Lovely Music, Ltd.
Kyle Gann, American Music in the Twentieth Century, Schirmer Books, 1997.
Halana.com: An Interview with La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela