The Rest Is Noise Series: Beethoven Was Wrong

Bop, Rock, and the Minimalists

Alex Ross

• Publisher: Fourth Estate
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9780007522156
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

This is a chapter from Alex Ross’s groundbreaking history of twentieth-century classical music, ‘The Rest is Noise’. Further extracts are available as digital shorts, accompanying the London Southbank festival programme.

14

BEETHOVEN WAS WRONG

Bop, Rock, and the Minimalists

One night in 1967, György Ligeti was sitting with several colleagues at the Darmstadt Schlosskeller, the favorite late-night hangout of teachers and students at the Summer Courses for New Music, when Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, a new album by the Beatles, started playing over the loudspeakers. Some of the sounds on the record bore a surprising resemblance to the Darmstadters’ latest and most advanced experiments. The song “A Day in the Life” included two spells of ad libitum playing, the second of them leading into a gorgeously strange E-major chord played by three pianos and a harmonium. Players were given a score indicating what register they should have reached in any given bar. The last chord was executed in musique concrète fashion, the attack cut off and the decay amplified over a long duration.

The Beatles had first dipped into the Darmstadt sound in March of the previous year, while working on the album Revolver. Paul McCartney had been checking out Stockhausen’s Gesang der Jünglinge, with its electronic layering of voices, and Kontakte, with its swirling tape-loop patterns. At his request, engineers at Abbey Road Studios inserted similar effects into the song “Tomorrow Never Knows.” By way of thanks, the Beatles put Stockhausen’s face on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, in and among cutout pictures of other mavericks and countercultural heroes. The following year, for the White Album, John Lennon and Yoko Ono created the tape collage “Revolution 9,” where, for a split second, the final chords of Sibelius’s Seventh Symphony can be heard. Adventurous rock bands on the West Coast also paid heed to the classical avant-garde. Members of both the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane attended Stockhausen’s lectures in Los Angeles in 1966 and 1967, while the maverick rock star Frank Zappa spoke of his teenage love for the music of Edgard Varèse, whom he once looked up in the phone book and called out of the blue.

Even the most jaded veteran of twentieth-century musical upheaval must have been startled to find that the postwar avant-garde was now serving as mood music for the psychedelic generation. The wall separating classical music from neighboring genres appeared ready to crumble, as it had momentarily in the twenties and thirties, when Copland, Gershwin, and Ellington crossed paths at Carnegie Hall. Classical record labels made amusing attempts to capitalize on the phenomenon by marketing abstruse modern repertory to kids on LSD. An LP of Bengt Hambraeus’s Constellations II and Interferences on the Limelight label carried this text on the jacket: “Listening to Bengt Hambraeus’s fantastic sound—it’s [sic] magnificent electronic and organ-organized electronic total sound experience should involve you as much as any music that you are capable of loving … be it the sound of The Beatles, Bach, Beethoven, Boulez, Beach Boys, or Belefonte [sic], Barbra Streisand, Pearl Bailey, Blue Cheer, or whatever. Hambraeus is really tuned in. Smashing!”

Even as Stockhausen and Ligeti brushed against the counterculture, several younger Americans—Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and Philip Glass—made a different kind of breakthrough. They simplified their harmonic language and rediscovered the pleasure of a steady pulse, devising a modern tonality that had nothing nostalgic about it. What Weill said in the twenties held true again: “Once musicians obtained everything they had imagined in their most daring dreams, they started again from scratch.”

Riley, Reich, and Glass came to be called minimalists, although they are better understood as the continuation of a circuitous, difficult-to-name development in American music that dated back to the early years of the century, and more often than not took root on the West Coast. This alternative canon includes Henry Cowell and Lou Harrison, who drew on non-Western traditions and built up a hypnotic atmosphere through insistent repetition; Morton Feldman, who distributed minimal parcels of sound over long durations; and La Monte Young, who made music from long, buzzing drones. All of them in one way or another set aside a premise that had governed classical composition for centuries—the conception of a musical work as a self-contained linguistic activity that develops relationships among discrete thematic characters over a well-marked period of time. This music was, by contrast, open-ended, potentially limitless.

It was a purely American art, free of modernist anxiety and inflected with pop optimism. Reich said: “Schoenberg gives a very honest musical portrayal of his times. I salute him—but I don’t want to write like him. Stockhausen, Berio, and Boulez were portraying in very honest terms what it was like to pick up the pieces of a bombed-out continent after World War II. But for some American in 1948 or 1958 or 1968—in the real context of tail fins, Chuck Berry, and millions of burgers sold—to pretend that instead we’re really going to have the dark-brown Angst of Vienna is a lie, a musical lie …” Reich and his colleagues borrowed from popular music, especially from bebop and modern jazz, and they affected pop music in turn. The Velvet Underground adopted Young’s drone aesthetic. Art rockers such as David Bowie and Brian Eno showed up at Reich’s and Glass’s shows. Minimalist influence radiated outward in the eighties and nineties, to the point where you could walk into any hip boutique or hotel lounge and sooner or later hear some distant, burbling cousin of Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians.

Eno once summarized minimalism as “a drift away from narrative and towards landscape, from performed event to sonic space.” Riley, Reich, and Glass spent their formative years in the urban wilds of New York and San Francisco, but their works have spiritual links to the capacious West. Unlike Copland’s sepia-toned prairie, minimalist vistas are filtered through new ways of seeing and hearing that relate to the technology of speed. They evoke the experience of driving in a car across empty desert, the layered repetitions in the music mirroring the changes that the eye perceives—road signs flashing by, a mountain range shifting on the horizon, a pedal point of asphalt underneath.

Bebop

During the two-decade stretch from 1945 to 1965, when the minimalist composers were growing from childhood to maturity, American popular music exploded with creative energy. Jazz, blues, country, and gospel evolved into rhythm and blues, rock ’n’ roll, soul, and funk. Hank Williams, a white singer with an ear for the blues, crafted country songs of gem-like beauty; Ray Charles and James Brown fused gospel elation with blues sensuality; Chuck Berry let loose the stripped-down anarchy of rock ’n’ roll; Elvis Presley and the Beatles repackaged rock for a huge youth public.

For young American composers with open ears, the Cold War decades were, above all, the age of bebop and modern jazz. Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Charles Mingus burst through the formal confines of swing and made music of ricocheting freedom and imperturbable cool. At the height of bop, electric strings of notes lashed around like downed power lines on wet pavement. Two sounds caught the ear of the fourteen-year-old Steve Reich: the punch-drunk rhythm of The Rite of Spring and the blindsiding beat of Kenny Clarke. Terry Riley was a bebop kid who later mastered ragtime piano. La Monte Young played excellent alto sax in his youth and probably could have had a major jazz career if he had wanted one. (When Young auditioned for a place in the top-notch Los Angeles City College jazz band, he beat out Eric Dolphy.) Philip Glass never played jazz, but listened avidly. The history of minimalism can’t be written without a cursory look at postwar jazz.

It was at the end of the Second World War that many young jazz players began to think of themselves as “serious musicians,” to quote Amiri Baraka’s classic book Blues People. Bebop, the poet said, articulated the self-esteem felt by hundreds of thousands of black soldiers as they returned home from the Second World War. When Parker inserted the opening notes of The Rite of Spring into “Salt Peanuts,” he was paying his respects while also declaring his freedom with a somewhat impudent air. You couldn’t dance to “Koko”; you had to sit back and listen as Parker scribbled lightning in the air. Monk threw in angular lines and dissonant chords, softening them with the elegance of his touch. Coltrane relished Bartók’s chords of fourths in the Concerto for Orchestra. “We had some fundamental background training in European harmony and music theory superimposed on our own knowledge from Afro-American musical tradition,” Gillespie wrote. “We invented our own way of getting from one place to the next.”

Ellington, in the twenties, had capitalized on the timbral possibilities of electrical recording. Bebop players took advantage of the next big advance, the long-playing record. The LP side allowed for the creation of half-composed, half-improvised works of mesmerizing breadth, the logical descendants of Black, Brown and Beige. In March 1959, Miles Davis released Kind of Blue, which put the brakes on bop’s forward drive. “So What,” the nine-minute opening track, is a proto-minimalist piece, defined by the dreamlike slowness of the harmonic rhythm. As the melodies drift by and change color, the underlying harmony stays fixed on a D-minor seventh chord, with periodic sidesteps into E-flat minor. Mingus, Coltrane, and Ornette Coleman also abandoned standard progressions in favor of a more open-ended tonal language. Their writing had much in common with the expanded tonality of Debussy, Stravinsky, and Messiaen. When Mingus explicated his “pedal point” style in the notes to his 1963 album The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady, he could have been paraphrasing Messiaen’s Technique of My Musical Language, with its schemes of multiple modes.

Jazz had entered its high-modern era, and assumed a modernist contempt for convention. Monk set the tone: “You play what you want, and let the public pick up what you are doing—even if it does take them fifteen, twenty years.” Miles Davis, in performance, turned his back to the crowd in Schoenbergian fashion. Bebop and dissonant composition drew close enough that there was talk of a merger. In the early sixties the composer and scholar Gunther Schuller propagated the idea of “Third Stream,” a confluence of jazz and classical energies. “It is a way of making music,” Schuller later wrote, “which holds that all musics are created equal, coexisting in a beautiful brother-hood/sisterhood of musics that complement and fructify each other.” Schuller brought in the likes of Coleman and Eric Dolphy to perform his brawny twelve-tone compositions, while Coleman asked Schuller for advice, notably while planning his epoch-making 1960 album Free Jazz. Anthony Braxton and Cecil Taylor, two other pioneers of free jazz, sounded like atonal composers in exile.

Even in its arcane phase, modern jazz hung on to its dynamism, its physical energy. That spirit proved irresistible to younger classical composers looking for a way out of Schoenberg’s maze. Jazz was intuitive, intimate, collaborative; it was serious in thought but playful in execution. Steve Reich remembers attending composition classes where students showed off byzantine scores whose intellectual underpinnings could be discussed ad nauseam. Then he’d go to see Coltrane play with his quartet. He liked the idea that Coltrane could walk out with a saxophone, play freewheeling improvisations on just one or two harmonies, and then disappear into the night. “The music just comes out,” Reich later said. “There’s no ar...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Beethoven Was Wrong
• Notes
• Suggested Listening and Reading
• Copyright
• About the Publisher