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Systems MusicArticle from One Two Testing, July/August 1986 |
Musical mathematics made easy
La Monte Young was a pioneering influence on a young Terry Riley who studied formal composition in California who also fell under the visionary spell of Coltrane at the same time as Young. Riley's first major score, "In C" was subsequently regarded as the crystallising of the ragged melting pot of influences that Systems utilised on it's way to it's established format; the 'New World' classicism, as it were. "The global village's first ritual symphonic piece" exclaimed one media observer." "Even if he wrote nothing else but 'In C'" said Reich, "We'd all owe him a great deal of gratitude... the piece clarified the mix of John Coltrane, Junior Walker, rock 'n' roll, African music and tape loops."
Again rock 'n' roll was showing parallel signs of repetition; Junior Walker, according to Reich, "was basically repeating one bass line on A Flat for the whole side of the record. So between jazz and rock, non-Western music and electronics, there was a move toward repetition, a constancy, a key centre for a long period of time. Then 'In C' cemented it all for me."
Riley's contribution and influence has tended to be overshadowed by those or Reich and Glass, not least because Riley chose not to develop into what you could call the classical minimalist, exploring phrase and repetition patterns. He chose instead to follow his own nose into keyboard improvisation and virtuoso expression as well as overdubbing all reed and keyboard parts and performing live with tape delay systems. Riley had also been a disciple of the Indian musician Pandit Pran Nath (as was La Monte Young) and from the late '60's onwards, devoted himself to the traditions of North Indian vocal music, leading to such pieces as "Persian Surgery Dervishes" in 1971 and later, "The Ten Voices Of The Two Prophets" in 1982. History has seen Riley relegated to the brown-rice-set-meal-for-five-thousand school of appreciation but as his recent return to London after over ten years showed, his music still shows a marked progression of musical ideas. The 50 minute solo piano "Harp Of The New Albion" encompassed flowing classical patterns, Gamelan and jazz, with a constant rhythmic vitality, all set to a Just Intonation tuning which lent an Oriental/Eastern nuance. Forth World Music.
Riley's often dreamlike repetition of old, massing 'cells' of musical incidents, can be heard descending into the deep progressive shades of the likes of Pink Floyd and Tangerine Dream.
A famous rock group even took their name from Riley's "A Rainbow In Curved Air" (can you guess? — Bamber Gasgoine).
Riley's star reached it's ascendant with the rock cognoscenti when he collaborated with John Cale on 1970's "Church Of Anthrax" - trés hip for all concerned but Riley never followed the Credibility Trail, leaving the Hip Crossover Systems Artist Of The New World to Philip Glass.
Glass would dispute that 'crossover' claim. "The record companies are crossing over" he said in a recent interview, "and the audience no longer assume strong and exclusive allegiances to one musical style. The significant thing isn't what's happening to me, it's what's happening to audiences."
Glass formed his own record label, Chatham Square to release early pieces such as "Music In Similar Motion" and "Music With Changing Parts" but it wasn't until Virgin — then a wonderful risk-taker of record companies took an interest and released 1974's "Music In 12 Parts' and the film score "North Star".
Glass's aim, if it can be boiled down to just one, is to narrow the gap between concert music and the popular audience — back to the time of, say, Mozart, when cafes would be full of people singing arias from "The Marriage Of Figaro". "For a long while we had this very small band of practitioners of modern music who described themselves as mathematicians, doing theoretical work that would someday be understood. I don't think anybody takes that very seriously anymore."
Whether you would see Glass's work within the field of theatre, opera and film (he wrote the soundtracks for "Koyaanisqatsi" and "Mishima") as popularist compromising in the face of dealing with the real serious art of composition, or a modern composer threading radical styles through all of the arts and so offering it to all as accessibly as possible, is dependent on your love for his work and theory. To argue that no serious composer could possibly be so popular is facile; Mozart was a superstar — go ask Amadeus.
"Look, if what they do is serious music," Glass says in reply to some of his fiercest critics, some of his fellow composers, "then I guess I don't like it. But the words serious music (his italics) no longer convey what they're suposed to convey. If I'm not serious, then what do you call 'Einstein' - a pop song?"
"Einstein On The Beach" is Glass's most ambitious, realised, conceptual score, a nearly five-hour opera with sung and spoken text, dance theatre and minimalist practice all bound up, "a mixture of mathematical clarity and mystical allure" as one critic put it. From pure rhythmic structure as the complete subject of his earlier works, "Einstein" linked rhythm with harmony to write a newer language of texture and colour-rhythm.
His detractors have disliked what they call Glass's simplistic, trendy music, "Schlocky muzak versions" of his earlier ideas, as well as his championing of the synthesiser. Knives will most probably be drawn when "Liquid Days" hits the album charts. The album is a collaborative venture into The Song, enlisting the lyrical and vocal assistance of Paul Simon, David Byrne, Laurie Anderson and Suzanne Vega (verbals) and Linda Ronstadt, The Roches, Bernard Fowler (ex-Material, Peech Boys and last heard on Herbie Hancock's most recent platter) and Douglas Perry (the only 'classical'/opera singer) on voices. "There aren't any electric basses, guitars or drums on the record" says Glass "but already people are calling it a pop record."
"Liquid Days" is specifically a song cycle — songs relate harmonically, with more than one song sharing musical material. "It's full of ideas about songs, about lyrics, about instrumentation, about the harmonic relations between one song and another, about the distance between songs on the record." I can't say I'm sure 70% of the probable purchasers will grab this the moment they slam "Liquid Days" on the deck but it would be a nice thought if they did. Meanwhile, spare a thought for Britain's finest Systems composer, Michael Nyman, who due to a cultural bias not of his own making, has suffered to the point of having to write jingle music for Milton Keynes propaganda ads!
This is cruel but fair — Nyman neither receives the requests for commission like his American contemporaries or any Arts Council grants — his success with the film soundtracks for the excellent arthouse "Draughtsman's Contract" and "Zed and Two Noughts" has elevated him above the stagnant Arts Council-funded world of unknown, unsuccessful composers.
"There seems to be a stigma about English composers being popular" says Nyman. "I find it culturally interesting, and great, that Reich should have his Prom and Glass his opera and Reich should be doing an Arts Council contemporary music network tour, but where are the English groups doing these things? Where are the English so-called systems composers or minimalists being commissioned by the Sinfonietta or having a Prom?"
Nyman dislikes being regarded as one of the systems mafia — "some of the music is rigourously systems but so what" he defends. "No-one cares how it's written or why it's written. You either sit and enjoy it or you don't. You don't call rock music systems because it uses ony three or four chords." Listening to Nyman's broad canvas of musical work, from 1976's pre-Ambient "Decay Music" (on Eno's Obscure Label) to last year's "The Kiss And Other Movements", a raucous mix of see-sawing strings, thumped (in the nicest possible way) grand piano and electric bass, the academic and emotional angles of systems are present — pray tell somebody that there is a quality present in Britain as well.
Just in case you still think Systems is one, boring, two, unintelligible, and three, still not hip enough for that Copperware party, get hold of this — SYSTEMS MUSIC WAS HEAVILY INFLUENCED BY THIRD WORLD MUSIC. Now if that doesn't get the little trendies running, then they must have disposed with all their ethnic collections.
A telephone conversation from darkest tropical Oxford with Steve Reich on the penultimate date of his recent tour was an illuminating guide through the origins of Systems. Witty, urbane, reassuring and full of the same preciseness of his systematised work, Reich parallels the non-Western composing styles of African and Indian music alongside that of jazz (and remember jazz's origins, from the same African source), both built on the same blocks of repeating patterns, impervious to the frequent chord changes of Western music.
"When I was a child, I had what you would call middle-class piano lessons, simplified versions of the classics, Mozart, Haydn and so on. It wasn't until I was 14 that I heard any music prior to that period, ie any Bach or Baroque, or any music past that period, ie any Stravinsky or any jazz, which at that point was Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Kenny Clarke, people like that. So I started studying Western drumming with an idea to become a jazz, not a classical drummer.
"At music school, the omnipresent style in those days was serialism. For someone who loved Bach, Stravinsky and Jazz, it would be unusual for him to enjoy music that had no tonal centre and no pulse, so it was hard for me to tow the academic line. The days were spent like this and the nights spent listening to Coltrane.
Also at that point I discovered African music, not by listening but by a book of African music scores. It was recommended to me by an American composer who wanted to show what black people had done before they came, ie what was West African music. What the book showed me was basically repeating patterns of what we call groups of 12 beats, superimposed so that their downbeats do not coincide, and that is a radically different way of making music. Another thing I was experimenting with was tape loops, bits of tape that are spliced together so that they go round and round and round. They began to look like little mechanised Africans if you will, in the light of what I was studying.
"Traditional African music" Reich added, "is not written down, nor is it improvised. It is learned by repetition."
Reich spent the summer of 1970 in Ghana, studying drumming, before going on to study Gamelan and then traditional forms of Cantillation (chanting) of the Hebrew scriptures. Moving away from the phased patterns of 1965's "It's Gonna Rain" and "Come Out", tape loops of found voices that had a profound influence on albums like Byrne and Eno's "My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts", Reich has opted for larger ensembles, more diverse instrumentation and finally, orchestras. 1971's "Drumming" was scored for three glockenspiels and a piccolo; 1982's "Vermont Counterpoint" for eleven flutes, ten of them re-recorded; 1984's "Sextet" for four percussionists, two keyboard players, including three marimbas, two vibraphones, two bass drums, crotales, sticks tam-tam, two pianos and two synthesisers. Phew.
As we already know, Terry Riley — and again, La Monte Young and his drone studies — was heavily influenced by Indian music, and similarly, Philip Glass initially studied the tabla and through that, met Ravi Shankar, he of the sumptous sitar. Travels to Morocco and contact with the geometric repetitions of Islamic art followed as Glass developed a further interest in South Indian music and West African drumming.
At the same time, Indian music was seeping into the rock culture. Does anybody remember The Beatles?
It's now 1986 and Glass has his "Liquid Days" while Reich has "The Desert Music", a score for a full orchestra of 89 and a full choir of 27, a vast, lush, explorative array of tempo, harmony and tonal change. Hardly minimal, you might rightly murmur. Reich's consistent writing for his ensemble and for orchestras with the added ingredient of text, lays doubts as to the ongoing validity of this tag, so this is the point where we must take systems out of the box and allow it to run wild and free over whatever boundaries it wishes to. "It ain't what you do but the way that you do it" Reich says a touch flippantly. "If a piece works, nobody worries about stylistic categories."
An immediate future project is a piece for multiple electric guitars and basses for Pat Metheny, so you can see Reich is not duty-bound to any one expression. But the simplistic Third World primativism — one that proved to be highly sophisticated while Western complexity was often masking a banality or simplemindedness — has undoubtedly given way to a more Western 'complexity' and intricacy. That said, both Reich's and Riley's concerts here this year have been intuitively organic and humanistic, acoustic music played by people which is rumoured to be an intellectual, academic exercise. The only superhuman activity called for is one of attention/concentration.
Any tips for a rock audience who don't know who the hell Steve Reich is? "I would just tell them that in order to be prepared to listen to my music, they have to do a number of very, very difficult things. The first is to either put the record on the phonograph, lift the needle and start it in the groove, or to buy their ticket and come in and sit in the concert hall. If it doesn't seem to work then they should not buy further tickets and they should take the record off."
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