Making a big deal of Minimalism

MINIMALISM is the elevation of tidiness, of less is more, of hip reserve, to art (to say nothing of advertising and kitchen decor). The Los Angeles Philharmonic’s flier for its “Minimalist Jukebox” festival, which begins next weekend, has a dark gray background and ultra-clean symmetrical type -- the classic nothing-out-of-place format.

But I learned fairly early on what a mess musical Minimalism -- for all its no-muss, no-fuss mentality -- was capable of making. This emotionally cool approach, I discovered, could be as effective at raising tempers as at raising consciousness.

It happened in 1969 at Berkeley. The campus was roiled by the Vietnam era’s antiwar unrest, but that made little difference in my anti-counterculture counterpoint and fugue class. Even if we walked in coughing from the tear gas canisters that the National Guard had exploded outside to disperse demonstrators on Sproul Plaza, the atmosphere in the music building was monkishly directed toward another time and place.

The textbook we used was “Treatise on the Fugue” by Andre Gedalge, who had taught at the Paris Conservatory in the early 20th century. Absorb it all and you too could write like 19th century French opera composer Gounod. Our professor had been glazing over the eyes of uninterested little Gounods with the confining rules of species counterpoint for far too many years. We knew enough to take classes from him in the afternoon, after he had had a leisurely lunch at the local watering hole.

Then one day I walked into class ostentatiously carrying the new Columbia LP of Terry Riley’s “In C.” The jacket opened up to reveal the score of 53 short, melodic modules meant to be freely repeated against a continual pulse, defying every law of counterpoint ever concocted. When I showed that to the genially aristocratic professor, he went uncharacteristically ballistic.

Riley had studied in the department a decade earlier, and it was there that he and his classmate La Monte Young first began exploring the conceptual ideas that led to the rebellious, repetitive, nondirectional music that would ultimately be dubbed -- because of what it seemed to have in common with the art movement of the ‘60s -- Minimalism. Three years after Riley got his master’s in composition from Berkeley in 1961, he put Minimalism on the musical map when he premiered “In C” in San Francisco.

“He betrayed Berkeley,” my red-faced professor shouted. “He betrayed music. He betrayed Gedalge. He betrayed everything this department stands for. I will not allow that album to be brought into my classroom. This has nothing to do with Vietnam. It is about preserving civilization.”

Once he calmed down and an avuncular twinkle had returned to his eye, the professor fondly recalled Riley’s talent for counterpoint. But an old-school traditionalist did have cause for concern. The headline above the San Francisco Chronicle’s review of the “In C” premiere had been “Music Like None Other on Earth.” The liner notes on the record jacket I held in my hand, by architect and new music patron Paul Williams, began: “I’m not here to justify this record, or to explain it, or to in any way connect it with anything else that already exists on the face of this earth.” Revolution was in the air, and nothing was safe.

Music and Berkeley’s music department have survived Minimalism’s onslaught just fine. By now, the movement has long been part of the mainstream, from popular culture to academia. Its most famous composers are celebrities. Philip Glass is a household name. More than once, Steve Reich has been hailed as America’s greatest living composer. Richard Taruskin, the musicological star of Berkeley’s music department today, put on the cover of the fifth volume of his extraordinarily erudite “Oxford History of Western Music” a photograph from Glass’ “The Voyage,” which the ultraconservative Metropolitan Opera had commissioned.

Not everything has changed, though. In the April issue of Gramophone magazine, Glass, who has written numerous operas, symphonies, concertos and string quartets, announces that Minimalism has been over for 20 years. But it hasn’t been. However much his style has evolved, Glass is as repetitive and controversial as ever. Orchestras, and especially American orchestras, hate playing repetitive music. They do so as little as they possibly can and often against objections from players who fear repetitive stress injuries could result from fingering the same fast rhythmic figures over and over.

Now, as “In C” helps launch the Philharmonic’s two-week festival -- which is being curated by second-generation sometime Minimalist John Adams -- the whole phenomenon should seem awfully old hat. Instead, the Philharmonic is the first major American orchestra to attempt any kind of Minimalism survey.

Since the release of that first “In C” recording, however, Minimalism has been central to my life in music. I began writing about music in 1976 -- the year of Glass’ “Einstein on the Beach” and Reich’s “Music for 18 Musicians” -- in large part because that music excited me. Yet I have sympathy for those who resist any kind of mechanistic groove. I too was slow to jump on the Minimalist bandwagon.

From the start, Riley struck me as one of the finest musicians America has ever produced (he still does), but I couldn’t stomach Glass and Reich in the early years. My objection wasn’t that Minimalism threatened the way we are traditionally taught to listen. The avant-garde had pretty well taken care of that. Whether it was John Cage using chance procedures in his composition or Europeans creating music so mathematically complex that the ear could not perceive structure, music no longer required a narrative. Imaginative musicians from all genres -- including John Coltrane in jazz and Jimi Hendrix in pop -- were exploring the outer boundaries of sonic experience, and our ears seemed to be growing.

Something else bothered me. Being forced into Glass’ and Reich’s lock-step repetitions felt downright fascistic. Plus the music was often way too loud.

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A century of progress

LA MONTE YOUNG is generally credited as the founder of Minimalism in music, although he was hardly the first to try to reduce his scores to very basic building blocks or to display a fetish for repetition. In 1893, the French composer Erik Satie put a repeat sign after a one-page piece, “Vexations,” and asked for it to be followed 840 times -- a complete performance can last 24 hours or more.

At Berkeley, Young became interested in the phenomenon of long tones -- very, very long tones -- lasting hours, even days. Riley, who was a talented jazz pianist with a questing mind, picked that up from him but also began fooling around with tape recorders and exploring the psychedelic effects created by short phrases played out of phase. The innovation of “In C” was the addition of a beat and a rethinking of tonality, which shocked the avant-garde.

Reich and Glass are also classically trained, both Juilliard graduates. Reich studied as well with the French composer and Satie buddy Darius Milhaud at Mills College in Oakland and performed in the “In C” premiere. Glass followed in Aaron Copland’s footsteps to be tutored by the famed pedagogue and Stravinskyite Nadia Boulanger in Paris.

All of this gave Glass and Reich, who once shared an ensemble but later parted company, plenty of new-music street credibility in the early ‘70s, as did their connections to world music. (Glass worked with sitarist Ravi Shankar; Reich studied drumming in Ghana and gamelan in Indonesia.) But I found classic Minimalism -- in which phrases are expanded or contracted note by laborious note, in which conventional harmonies move at a brain-numbing pace -- stiflingly doctrinaire.

Even so, Minimalism couldn’t be ignored. It didn’t stand as still as the format might suggest it would have to. Young became increasingly an outsider artist, his rapt attention focused on acoustical phenomena. Riley went to India, and his music became more raga-like and multistylistic. Reich and especially Glass slowly (everything in Minimalism is slow, even when the tempos are fast) moved toward the mainstream.

In the first half of the ‘70s, Minimalism started letting loose. Glass’ music became magical when it served theater, sponge-like in its absorption of the emotion onstage. Reich demonstrated a genius for structure in the African-inspired “Drumming” and an ear for entrancing color in Indonesian-inspired works. Inexplicably, this music started to make me feel good.

Then came 1976, the year of Minimalism’s revelation, when Glass and Reich produced their first masterpieces.

“Einstein on the Beach,” a five-hour operatic collaboration between Glass and Robert Wilson first staged in Avignon, France, contained what I thought the most delirious, engrossing stage images and use of light I had ever experienced. Glass’ music, in this context, felt fresh and newly ecstatic. One extended scene contained only light and process music. Sections of the libretto consisted of nothing more than counting out rhythms. If the work didn’t make much sense, it didn’t need to. The total experience was more than the sum of its parts, and the parts were altogether joyous. Like many people I knew, I became hooked on the recording.

Listening to Reich’s very different “Music for 18 Musicians” also filled me with ineffable joy, though of more a Bach-ian kind. Working off a continuous pulse lasting well over an hour, the score is an intricate, abstract fabric of intertwining melodic and rhythmic lines that I suspect can release endorphins in the brain of susceptible listeners.

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Revitalized by a change in venue

THIS might have turned out to be the zenith of classic Minimalism. Keith Potter concludes his penetrating study, “Four Musical Minimalists,” at this point, since Reich and Glass began incorporating more traditional elements into their styles, Riley turned ever more maximalist, and Young followed his own bliss (including forming a rowdy micro-tonal blues band a dozen years ago that really rocks).

But around the same time, Minimalism traveled to Europe. In London, Michael Nyman, often credited with being the one to make the term stick, found that Minimalism could be the glue that tied together his background in the Baroque and modern experimental music, while Gavin Bryars mastered mellow and hypnotic Minimalism. In Amsterdam, Louis Andriessen wrote strong Minimalist pieces with a hard metallic edge and stinging political bite. Softer-edged, less-substantial Italian and Belgian Minimalists came and went.

Then Adams appeared. No purist, he began treating Minimalism more as a tool than a way of life. In his first great orchestral piece, “Harmonielehre,” composed 20 years after “In C,” he both tolled a death knell for Minimalism and gave it a new viability. Allowed to coexist with other styles (“Harmonielehre” fools around with early 20th century harmonies), repetition became in Adams’ hands like a wonderful spice, able to improve the flavor of whatever it came in contact with.

In fact, nothing, it seems, can kill Minimalism. It has now influenced a third generation, some members of which, such as Michael Torke and Michael Gordon, have been called post-Minimalists. But that term has not had much currency. In composition today, any and every thing goes, as long as a composer can find an inventive way to put it all together, and Minimalism remains as good a glue as ever.

That Minimalism continues to fascinate is evident from the interest in the Philharmonic’s festival and from the acknowledgment, however reluctant, by establishment institutions that Glass and Reich are major figures. Glass has been commissioned by the Pacific Symphony to write a work to open its new concert hall in Costa Mesa in the fall; Reich’s 70th birthday will be celebrated by Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall next season.

“Repeating Ourselves,” a riveting new account of Minimalism as cultural practice by UCLA musicologist Robert Fink, reveals the movement’s connections to disco music, to consumer culture, ambient music and even the repetitive techniques of the Suzuki method for teaching schoolchildren to play instruments. Fink’s arguments are ingenious and persuasive, but they certainly don’t explain why I care about Minimalism.

Instead, an astonishingly prophetic sentence leaps out from the liner notes of the original “In C” LP. I don’t remember reading it when I first bought the album, but now I see that it explains Minimalism’s great glory and my own identification with it.

“A music critic, if there can be such a thing,” Williams wrote in explaining how listening to music can make us feel whole, “must be more concerned with men than notes.”

In the plastic arts, Minimalism lasted at most a decade and is now a historical period, like Impressionism. Minimalism in film and literature had its moment, also brief. Consumer culture has made Minimalism a cliche.

Yet in music, those mantra-like, possibly stress-inducing repetitions retain, 40 years on and counting, their shamanistic power. Even something mystical may be released through all the reiterations of elemental harmonies and rhythms, pulsing, pulsing, pulsing from otherwise abstract notes. I don’t know what it is exactly, but I do know that it is addictive and unlikely to go away soon.

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‘Minimalist Jukebox’

Where: Most concerts, including those listed below, are at Walt Disney Concert Hall, 111 S. Grand Ave., L.A.

When: Saturday through April 2

Price: $15 to $129

Contact: (323) 850-2000 or www.laphil.com

Highlights

March 24 to 25: Program includes works by Louis Andriessen and Arvo Part

March 25 to 26: Three Steve Reich works

March 29: Glenn Branca’s Symphony No. 13 for 100 electric guitars is the centerpiece

March 31 to April 2: John Adams’ “Harmonielehre” and excerpts from Philip Glass’ opera “Akhnaten”

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Contact Mark Swed at calendar.letters@latimes .com.