The tempo is fast. The length is determined by the player.

I've been rereading Keith Potter's Four Musical Minimalists—about La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and Philip Glass. The first time around I only read the sections on Young and Riley. While they both have written good and interesting music, I'm not that familiar with their works and have been disappointed by maybe half of what I've heard. Reading a couple hundred somewhat-dense pages about something I wasn't that interested in led me to stop halfway through. I picked it up again recently, started this time with the chapter on Reich, and found the book to be much better than I had remembered.

Minimalism is so often summed up as being Young, Riley, Reich, and Glass. In that order. Potter emphasizes the order: Young composed Trio for Strings (1958), kicking it all off. Riley was out on the west coast, drew from Young's long drawn out slow processes, and wrote pieces like In C (1964). Reich lived down the street from Riley out in SF, helped to organize the first performance of In C, performing in the group (along with two Mills classmates who go on to be in the Grateful Dead. wha?). Reich then wrote pieces like Piano Phase (1967). Reich moved to NYC. Glass moved to NYC. The two met, shared ideas, and formed an ensemble together. Glass then composed pieces like Music in 12 Parts (1971).

Potter is really into that. Surprisingly so, given the statements of the composers (Both Reich and Glass wrote books about their own music). Reich claims to have not heard any of Young's pieces before composing much of his taped phasing pieces. His ideas on phasing are way more important in the development of his music up to 1971/2 then what he may have taken from his interactions with Riley. He also says he can't remember whether he saw any of Young's scores when he was a student.

Glass says he never heard any of Young's music until he moved to NYC in the late 1960s. And what he did see, though impressing him a lot, was a piece from Young's Composition 1960 series which was more performance art than music. (The piece in particular was #7, "Draw a Straight Line and Follow It," which on that evening was Riley swinging a pendulum, waiting for it to stop and then drawing a line in chalk on the floor. It lasted over three hours.) He, like many, didn't hear Riley's In C until it came out on record in 1968. Glass had also already composed very simple minimalist pieces while he was living in Paris in the mid 60s. Pieces like his work for the staging of Becket's play Play, which was just a simple two note pattern played by soprano saxophone accompanied by a taped recording of the same. And when he returned to NYC he composed pieces like Strung Out (1967) probably before getting to know Reich. He also says that when they shared an ensemble, pieces were always finished before they were practiced, and idea swapping was not very important.

Of course, artists always want to take all the credit for innovations. Just look at Young and his assertions that the free improvised one-note drone pieces performed by a group of composers including himself, Tony Conrad, Angus Maclise and John Cale are entirely his intellectual property. Concerning true innovation in music, I tend to take the "it's in the air" view. It was just the time for these developments in music. While I do think these composers were all influenced by each other (once a community started to develop), I don't know if I'm so ready to believe all the connections Potter makes. He also leaves out so any composers. Focusing on those 4 ignores the large community of minimalist composers that existed.

Originally I thought I'd write about Reich and Glass in parallel installments in order to keep my entries shorter. I chose those two because I know almost all their works from the beginnings of their careers up to well beyond when they become established; because I know their biographies well; because they were the first two minimalist composers I listened to; and because I believe they are two of the most important (and best) composers of the 20th century. (They are also the two most famous late 20th century composers, aside from soundtrack composers like John Williams.) Maybe, though, I'll just write shorter entries on the pieces I'm listening to at the moment and the new ones I'm discovering as I do more reading into the history of Minimalism, Post-Minimalism, Totalism and Maximalism. I worry that doing that will cause this blag to become like the first one I wrote for, i.e. full of highly colloquial entries with not much compositional forethought (read: lots of "awesome"). Hopefully that won't happen.

In the last post, I wrote that one of the reasons I liked free jazz was because it involved a community similar to that of punk. The Minimalist community also has much in common with the punk community. Most people with the power to release records didn't "get" the new emerging style, and it was often a hard fight to get music out on record. David Behrman curated (and produced) a seminal series of releases for Columbia Records, Music of Our Time, which included Riley's In C, Reich's Come Out, the works of other great composers just getting recognized at that time (e.g. Oliveros, Maxfield, Ichiyanagi) and the works of some older more established composers (e.g. Cage, Feldman).

(One of the best records I ever jacked from my dad's collection turns out to be part of Behrman's series. It's a M.O.O.T. promotional 7" aimed at fans of psychedelic/outside rock. It juxtaposes excerpts from big hit psychedelic tunes with excerpts from Come Out, some Stockhausen, some Babbitt, and others. It has a great announcer talking between the excerpts about the exciting new times in music. I used to play bits of it all the time for transitions on my radio show and mixtapes.)

But that's the only effort by a large label that I know of. A lot of musicians pressed records themselves, like Glass did for his own Chatham Square label.

More importantly, shows ("performances," but c'mon that's such a pretentious term) were so often presented in people's apartments or in small art galleries. However, avant-garde academic music lacked the anti-establishment beliefs of both free jazz and punk, and composers took any chance they could to perform in established venues (a lot seem to happen in the Guggenheim and the Whitney, as well as at BAM) or get grants. But then, the free-jazzers and punks didn't turn down the big-time when it came knocking.

Here is a partial list of composers I've been listening to lately or reading about: Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Anthony Moore, Gavin Bryars, Wim Mertens, Phil Niblock, Michael Nyman, Charlemagne Palestine, Harold Budd, Richard Maxfield, John Adams, Philip Corner, John White, Rhys Chatham, Glenn Branca, Arnold Dreyblatt, Jon Gibson, Meredith Monk, Pauline Oliveros, Tom Johnson (also a good critic), Barbara Benary, William Duckworth, Ingram Marshall, Julius Eastmann. I'll hopefully tackle short posts on individual works or short time periods in the careers of these people.

If anyone has recommendations of more people for me to add to my list, please let me know—it's not that easy to find information on this movement in music yet. I've only found a handful of books that focus on it (Mertens and Niblock both wrote books in the 70s which look good, though I haven't read them yet); but that are some websites focused on small groups of composers or substyles, and most active composers maintain somewhat helpful websites (Niblock and Bryars come to mind right away).

Because I enjoy quoting, I leave you with the only light/humorous statement in Potter's book (though it could just be he's a dick): "Glass does not give a fully composed score [to 1+1, *(1968)]; instead, he offers just two basic 'rythmic units' (sic; like many musicians, Glass seemingly cannot spell 'rhythm') . . . ."