Tag: Minimalism

Categories
Listening Log

Listening: John Luther Adams, Earth and the Great Weather

Composer: John Luther Adams
Piece: Earth and the Great Weather (1994)
Performer: John Luther Adams Ensemble
Where: Apple Music, Streamed
Score: ISSUU

I have been procrastinating for a week, avoiding working on my percussion composition assignment. Each time I have really attempted it, some sort of technology barrier has blocked my progress, or distracted me from even writing a few lines of music. Having only notated piano and keyboard instruments, my head swims with the technical issues of notating them in Dorico, and my sample libraries for percussion instruments seem quite limited. (Are there really only two temple block sounds? I thought five were standard. Not that I really thought that much about it before.)

I have been looking for pieces featuring, or even better, consisting entirely of untuned percussion. I have listened to Steve Reich’s Music for Pieces of Wood several times, but haven’t found much out there. Today I watched a performance of the piece “Drums of Winter” from Earth and the Great Weather, performed by Clocks in Motion. I have seen John Luther Adams’s name a number of times, in reference to minimalist composers, and was unsure if it was the full name of the John Adams who wrote Shaker Loops, and though I would give the full work a listen.

Several of the pieces are somewhat ambient, and a typical example, “The Circle of Sun and Moon” has Native American stating significant events and near simultaneous English translation (e.g., “the time when the caribou have their young”). The accompaniment is some fairly high-pitched strings, and the effect is somewhat unsettling, reminiscent of some works of György Ligeti. The instrumentation at time seems like a bellows-based instrument, like a slightly out-of-tune accordion, but it seems that this is more likely obtained by having emphasis on drawing back bows on the off-beats. (There are no exotic instruments listed in the players.) There isn’t a strong sense of melody here, more an ambient texture that slowly moves through the pieces.

Throughout are recordings or simulations of weather, including rain and thunder. While the first sounded like recordings, in the piece “Deep and Distant Thunder”, it is clear that at least some of the “natural” sounds are percussion instruments.

Several of the pieces are written for untuned percussion, including “Drums of Winter”, “Deep and Distant Thunder” and “Drums of Fire, Drums of Stone”. I struggle with how to think of these pieces. They are powerful, certainly, but are they engaging? In the last of these, it feels like there is some phasing or polyrhythmic effect, but it’s hard for me to tease out what’s going on. The piece does move from a very strong regular beat, to more and more chaotic sounds as the beats line up less. (I am really not sure if that’s what is happening here, or if I have been thinking too much of Steve Reich lately.)

On the whole, it feels earnest, and a bit too romantically or stereotypically associating Native voices and natural sounds. I don’t imagine coming back to it, except to understand better the accompaniment of “The Circle and the Moon”. On the other hard, I would like to explore more of Adams’ work, especially to see if his later work is slightly less experimental.

References

John Luther Adams, Earth and the Great Weather (1994), John Luther Adams Ensemble, Apple Music, Streamed

“Drums of Winter” by John Luther Adams performed by Clocks in Motion Percussion, YouTube

https://www.wisemusicclassical.com/work/57068/Earth-and-the-Great-Weather–John-Luther-Adams/

Categories
Film

Watching: Tones, Drones and Arpeggios

Director: Benjamin Whalley
Title: Tones, Drones and Arpeggios: The Magic of Minimalism (2018)
Where: YouTube, Streamed

Tones, Drones and Arpeggios is a two-part BBC documentary on the American minimalist movement, focussing on the “Big Four” composers: La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich and Philip Glass. The narrator and primary interviewer is the British composer Charles Hazlewood, who does have one-on-one interviews with all four.

Young, Riley and Glass have strong Indian influences in their work, although it seems indirect, especially in comparison to the more overt influences of, say, George Harrison. (Reich, in contrast, studied drumming in Ghana.) The instruments and orchestration used by all four seem to distance them from these influences, as their works primarily feature piano, synthesizers, tape loops, and they are not much associated with using instruments from their influencing cultures. That may be an overly broad generation, but I don’t know that I would have be aware of those influences without having read about them.

Both Young and Riley are focussed on spiritualism and are identified as Californian minimalists. (It’s not clear to me that Young has a California connection, but he and Riley do seem aligned with the hippie movement. In contrast, Steve Reich and Philip Glass are presented as New Yorkers effectively becoming the establishment, as the most successful composers today.

It is interesting to note that one of Reich’s most interesting techniques (phasing), arose by an accident with the tape loop that became one of his most powerful pieces, Come Out. (Gavin Bryars’s work Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet developed in a similar accident.) How often do such accidents arise where we are composing or playing music with intention. It does remind me how important it is to create enough to allow these sorts of opportunities.

In covering Glass’s educational background, the documentary omits his studies with Nadia Boulanger in Paris, to emphasize his work with Ravi Shankar, and states that he “turned his back on the classical music world”. My recollection from Glass in his Words Without Music is that he considered her as equal an influence as Shankar.

Musically, all four of their early works are very much built on repeated patterns. At one point it is suggested by Hazlewood that the minimalism is in the contrast between patterns, not that there is anything minimal about the patterns themselves, in contrast to minimalist visual arts.

Glass attributes the “minimalist” label to Tom Johnson, the American composer and Village Voice critic, while Reich believes it was coined by the British composer Michael Nyman.

Crossovers: Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells, and Brian Eno/David Bowie’s collaborations.

Works featured:

  • Young: The Well-Tuned Piano
  • Riley: In C
  • Reich: Come Out, Music for 18 Musicians
  • Glass: Music with Changing Parts, Einstein on the Beach

Other notes:

  • Young is identified as a student of Cage, and Glass was influenced by Cage’s writings
  • Both Young and Riley studied with Indian classical singer Pandit Pran Nath
  • The group of composers known as Bang on a Can (and member Julia Wolfe) are mentioned as a later influence
  • The presentation of the two halves Young/Riley and Glass/Reich is quite different. Was the former a dead end?
  • Why wasn’t John Adams mentioned?
  • Interesting quote: Terry Riley says of minimalism, “In all honesty, I haven’t kept up with it. Because it’s not my favourite music to listen to.”

References

Glass, P. (2015) Words without music: a memoir. First edition. New York: Liveright Publishing Company.