by Alex Ross
Young wrote his first long-tone work, for Brass, in June 1957. The following summer, at Berkeley, he wrote a Trio for Strings, which has all the headlong momentum of continental drift. In a 1989 performance timed by Edward Strickland, the viola began with a sustained C-sharp and was joined fifty-one seconds later by a violin playing E-flat. The whole-tone interval lasted for more than a minute before the cello entered with a D. The three notes clashed for one minute and forty-two seconds before the instruments began dropping out at the same glacial pace.
To hear the piece is to enter into the same kind of waking dream state that is encouraged by Feldman’s later music. Events move so slowly that you can no longer detect the twelve-tone motion of the piece, or even the identities of the tones themselves. You become accustomed to the rapid beats of clashing frequencies. And you wait for the revelatory moments when the composer rediscovers clear intervals such as the fourth and the fifth. The Trio ends with a C and a G on the cello, sounding for minutes on end and then dying away ppppp. That glowing open fifth points the way to minimalist tonality.
When Young presented his Trio to his Berkeley colleagues, they reacted with disbelief, although two of the younger composers, Terry Jennings and Dennis Johnson, picked up on the long-tone concept. In 1959 Young ventured to Stockhausen’s composition seminar in Darmstadt, where he made contact with many kindred spirits, notably John Cage. Under Cage’s influence Young veered toward conceptual art: works that involved furniture being dragged across floors, garbage cans thrown down stairwells, butterflies released in the performance space, and fires built onstage. Here are three scores in their entirety:
Composition 1960 #10: Draw a straight line and follow it.
Composition 1960 #15: This piece is little whirlpools out in the middle of the ocean.
Piano Piece for David Tudor #3: Most of them were very old grasshoppers.
As these works were being written, the Berkeley music department awarded Young a travel fellowship—according to legend, to get him out of town. Downtown New York welcomed him. With the electronic composer Richard Maxfield, Young curated a series of concerts at the downtown loft of the expatriate Japanese artist Yoko Ono, who, at that time, was married to the avant-garde composer Toshi Ichiyanagi.
In a few short years Young went from being a Webern disciple to a sort of musical shaman. For some time he had been experimenting with drugs, especially mescaline; an Andy Warhol associate later described him as “the best drug connection in New York.” But Young claimed that he would have followed the same path even if he had never dabbled in psychedelics. Just as important was his exploration of Indian music, in which the tambura drones the tonic note as the rest of the ensemble plays. (His guru in later years was the North Indian classical singer Pandit Pran Nath.) The drone took center stage in Composition 1960 #7, which takes off where Trio for Strings left off, with the sound of an open fifth. The score consists of the notes B and F-sharp, below which is the instruction “To be held for a long time.”
By the early sixties Young had dropped notated composition in favor of evening-length ritual improvisations, which he dubbed the Theatre of Eternal Music. The first Eternal Music event happened in 1963, on a New Jersey farm, and in tribute to Young’s childhood fascination with the sounds of power plants it was called The Second Dream of the High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer. This led to a tetralogy called The Four Dreams of China, each part of which was based on different arrangements of the pitches C, F-natural, F-sharp, and G. The performers were Young, who played sopranino saxophone; Young’s companion Marian Zazeela, who sang or intoned; the musician-poet Angus MacLise, who beat African rhythms on bongos; and, particularly critical in the evolution of the sound, the violinist-composer Tony Conrad, who had studied up on the just-intonation music of Harry Partch, Lou Harrison, and Ben Johnston. Later in 1963 the group took in the young Welsh composer John Cale, who strung a viola with electric-guitar strings and let loose drones of incomparable roaring power. Nothing like this had been heard in notated music, because there was no way to notate it. Nothing like it had been heard in jazz, either, although the free jazz of Sun Ra and Albert Ayler came close. Young had reached the outer limits, and he remains there still, presiding in guru style over musical rituals in his Church Street loft.
Young has never written anything resembling conventional tonal music. For some reason, his ears have a strong aversion to the fifth partial of the harmonic series, which is tied to the interval of the major third. Without the major third, triads are impossible. Terry Riley’s contribution was to add the sweet sound of triads to the long-tone process. This move completed the minimalist metamorphosis.
An easygoing character of the rural-hippie type, Riley grew up in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. He met Young in 1958 while studying at Berkeley. “What La Monte introduced me to,” Riley said, “was this concept of not having to press ahead to create interest.” Young also introduced Riley to the postserialist tendencies of marijuana and mescaline. Feeling the pull of Young’s shamanistic world, Riley wrote his own long-tone String Trio. In it the viola drones the notes A and C-sharp—the major third that Young preferred to avoid.
While working at the San Francisco Tape Music Center alongside Subotnick and Oliveros, Riley strung loops of tape between the reels of one or more tape recorders, elabroating techniques that Stockhausen had used in Kontakte. Riley’s first tape-loop work was called Mescalin Mix. In 1962 he went to France, where he made a living playing lounge piano at Strategic Air Command bases; in the off-hours he kept on tinkering with tape. One day in a French radio studio he said to the engineer, “I want this kind of long, repeated loop.” The engineer—“a very straight guy in a white coat,” Riley recalled—ran a piece of tape through two machines and set one on record and the other on play. When a sound was fed into this extended loop, it would replicate itself, building into a layered blur of beats and textures. Riley called the effect “time-lag accumulation technique” and he decided to mix it with live performance. He hooked up with the jazz trumpeter Chet Baker, who had just served time in jail for heroin possession. Riley, Baker, and others improvised an accompaniment to Ken Dewey’s play The Gift. The tune they jammed on was, naturally, Miles Davis’s “So What.”
On returning to America in February 1964, Riley heard the Theatre of Eternal Music in New York and likened it to “the sun coming up over the Ganges.” He then set to work on an instrumental piece that would unite static drones and busy loops, that would somehow move quickly and slowly at the same time. The score took the form of a chart of fifty-three “modules,” or brief motivic figures. Each player in the ensemble is instructed to proceed from one module to the next at his or her own pace, tailoring the music to the needs of the instrument and the desires of the moment. The modules derive from the seven notes of the C-major scale, with a few F-sharps and B-flats thrown in for good measure. No matter what choices are made in performance, the harmony tends to move into E minor in the middle and into G major (the dominant of C) toward the end, with the B-flats supplying a touch of blues at the close. Tying the whole thing together is a pair of high Cs on the piano, pulsing without variation from beginning to end. Hence the title: In C.
The premiere took place on November 4, 1964. Alfred Frankenstein, the broad-minded critic of the San Francisco Chronicle, wrote a review that remains the best description of the piece: “Climaxes of great sonority and high complexity appear and are dissolved in the endlessness. At times you feel you have never done anything all your life long but listen to this music and as if that is all there is or ever will be.”
Playing electric piano that night was the twenty-eight-year-old Steve Reich. He’d moved to northern California in 1961 and met Riley in the spring of 1964. It was Reich’s idea to introduce the chiming Cs and thus to organize the piece around a crisp, unvarying pulse. The aesthetic tension at the heart of In C—between Riley’s lust for liberation and Reich’s liking for order—anticipated the divergent trajectories of the two composers
in coming years. Riley threw himself into hippie culture, attracting throngs of tie-dyed fans with all-night improvisations on electronically enhanced saxophone and organ. Liner notes for his 1969 album A Rainbow in Curved Air look forward to the lamentably still unrealized moment when “the Pentagon was turned on its side and painted purple, yellow & green…The concept of work was forgotten.” Reich, on the other hand, cast off psychedelic trappings and made minimalism a rapid-fire urban discourse. The endless highway led back to New York.
New York Minimalism
Circa 2000, you could ride the subway to the lower end of Manhattan, emerge onto a street within sight of the Brooklyn Bridge, walk for a minute or two, press a buzzer marked REICH, and hear a crisp voice say, “Come on up.” The composer does not look the part of a musical revolutionist. Within his black button-down shirts and signature baseball cap, he fits the image of an independent film director, a cultural-studies professor, or some other out-in-the-world intellectual. Once he starts speaking, you feel the peculiar velocity of his mind. He is as much a listener as a talker, although he talks at blistering speed. He reacts swiftly to slight sounds in his midst—the soft buzz of a cell phone, a siren on the street outside, the whistle of a teakettle. Each sound contains information. The 1995 work City Life conveys what it would be like to experience the world through Reich’s ears: the hidden melodies of overheard conversations and the rhythms of pile drivers melt together into a smoothly flowing five-movement composition, a digital symphony of the street.
Reich was born one year after Young and Riley, in 1936. His parents, of Eastern European and German-Jewish descent, separated when he was still a baby, and he spent much of his childhood riding trains between New York and Los Angeles, where his mother moved to pursue a career as singer and lyricist. He later said that the clickety-clack of wheels on rails helped shape his rhythmic sense. And he offered a melancholy reflection: “If I had been in Europe during this period, as a Jew I would have had to ride on very different trains.” In one of his finest later works, Different Trains, he combined the voices of Pullman porters with those of Holocaust survivors over a nervously mournful string-quartet accompaniment, joining American idyll to European horror.
Like many American teenagers of the fifties, Reich grew up listening to music on recordings. Bach’s Fifth Brandenburg Concerto, Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, and bebop records featuring Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, and Kenny Clarke played nonstop on his turntable. After majoring in philosophy at Cornell, Reich switched to music and studied composition at Juilliard, where one of his fellow students was Philip Glass. Feeling the call of West Coast freedom, he moved to San Francisco and enrolled in the music school at Mills College. Although Darius Milhaud was then the dominant presence on the Mills faculty, the principal attraction for a jumpy young composer such as Reich was Luciano Berio, who was a visiting professor in the early sixties. Impressed by the intellectual force in the twelve-tone method, Reich spent his days analyzing Webern scores under Berio’s tutelage. Yet tonal harmonies kept cropping up in his works, prompting the undogmatic Berio to say to him, “If you want to write tonal music, why don’t you write tonal music?”
At night Reich haunted the jazz clubs, seeing John Coltrane at least fifty times. He also wore out 78-rpm recordings of polyrhythmic African drumming and studied A. M. Jones’s classic treatise on African rhythm, which provided a blueprint for a music of multiple interlocking patterns. San Francisco prankster culture beckoned; starting in 1963, Reich was the house composer for various mess-with-your-head productions by the San Francisco Mime Troupe, the most notorious of which was a satire of racial stereotypes titled Minstrel Show. With two other Berio students, Phil Lesh and Tom Constanten, Reich formed an improvisation group of uncertain classification. He and Lesh also presented Event III/Coffee Break, blending live and tape music, street theater by the Mime Troupe, and a light show (the spirit of ONCE gone west). Having completed his master’s at Mills, Reich bowed out of academic life and never looked back. Rather than seek a Guggenheim or an assistant professorship, he drove a taxi and worked at the post office.
In the fall of 1964, while the Free Speech Movement was flaring up on the Berkeley campus, Reich was pursuing his own tape-loop experiments. In San Francisco’s Union Square, he recorded a Pentecostal preacher named Brother Walter, who was sermonizing on the subject of Noah and the Flood. The tape included the words: “[God] began to warn the people. He said, ‘After a while, it’s gonna rain, after a while, for forty days and for forty nights.’ And the people didn’t believe him, and they began to laugh at him, and they began to mock him, and they began to say, ‘It ain’t gonna rain!’”
At the time, Reich was suffering through a painful divorce, and, along with the rest of the country, he felt spiritually battered by the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 and the Kennedy assassination of 1963. Brother Walter’s anguished prophecy of “It’s gonna rain!” articulated his free-floating feelings of panic and fear.
One day in January 1965, Reich was sitting in front of two tape decks with the words “It’s gonna rain” cued up on each. His intention was to cut quickly from “It’s gonna” on one machine to “rain” on the other. But he had lined up the tapes wrong, and when he hit play, they sounded in unison: “It’s gonna rain! It’s gonna rain! It’s gonna rain!” He was reaching to shut them off when he became aware of an interesting phenomenon. One tape was playing slightly faster than the other, so that the unison began to break up into a phasing pattern: “It’s-s gonna-a rain-n! It’s-’s gonnnna rai-in! It’s-t’s gonna-onna rai-ain! It’s-it’s gonna-gonna rain-rain!” Listening on stereo headphones, with one ear tuned to the left machine and the other to the right, Reich had a physical reaction to the sound. “It’s an acoustical reality that if you hear one sound a fraction of a second after another it appears to be directional,” he later said. “The feeling here was that the sound was going over to my left ear and coming down my left shoulder and down my leg and out on to the floor.”
The remarkable thing about the tape piece It’s Gonna Rain is not just the intricacy of the rhythmic patterns but the almost operatic power of the voice itself. Reich doesn’t reduce Brother Walter’s sermon to a found object in a collage; instead, he magnifies the emotion inherent in the voice to an almost unbearable degree. In 1964, that outsider black preacher probably caused passersby to wince and walk faster. Now his warning will ring out forever, or as long as recordings last.
By the summer of 1965, psychedelia was in full swing. The surreal provocations of the Mime Troupe gave way to Acid Tests, radical demonstrations, parties curated by the Hells Angels. Bill Graham, the business manager of the Mime Troupe, saw the commercial possibilities of new bands like Jefferson Airplane, the Warlocks, and the Mothers of Invention. Later that year he opened the Fillmore, which became the epicenter of the scene. Phil Lesh, his mind forever altered by a night during which he had tripped on LSD while listening to Mahler’s Sixth Symphony at high volume, abandoned composition to play bass for the Warlocks, who later became the Grateful Dead.
Reich grew uneasy with the scene. Sidestepping a question about drugs, he told the writer Keith Potter: “In the group of people I seemed to form a contact with, I did not feel on solid psychic footing.” In September 1965 he returned to New York, taking with him the sublime accident of It’s Gonna Rain.
For most of 1966 Reich contemplated the mechanics of his phasing procedure. In one sense, all he’d done was to isolate a technological quirk: the machines essentially wrote It’s Gonna Rain by themselves, and he was simply smart enough not to stop them. Many radical American works of the sixties and seventies were created this way, with the composer setting up a musical situation and sitting back to observe the outcome; it was an attitude that originated with Cage, the master of coordinated accidents. The English composer Michael Nyman, in his book Experimental Music, dubbed minimalism a subspecies of “process” music, classifying it alongside the chance processes of Cage, the “people processes” of Frede
ric Rzewski (players going through their parts at their own speeds), and the electronic processes of Lucier and Ashley. But minimalism was a different kind of process from the start. Composers immediately grasped all kinds of opportunities—temptations, the pure Cagean might say—to interfere with the playing out of the process, to bend it toward a more personal mode of expression.
In his next tape piece, Come Out, Reich made use of another angry African-American voice, that of Daniel Hamm, one of six African-American boys who were beaten up in a Harlem police precinct house in 1964. “I had to, like, open the bruise up and let some of the bruise blood come out to show them,” Hamm said on tape.
Reich isolated the phrase “come out to show them.” Again, the loops go out of phase, splitting onto four channels and then onto eight. After a while the words become unintelligible, although the pitches inherent in them—E-flat, C, D, C—persist. You are essentially listening to an electronic canon for eight seething voices in the key of C minor. Reich later extended this technique of generating pitch from speaking voices in Different Trains, and also in the “video operas” The Cave and Three Tales, co-created with Beryl Korot.