The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century

by Alex Ross

  Reich now had another brainstorm: he decided to transpose the going-out-of-phase effect to instrumental music. He made an early attempt in the score to Robert Nelson’s short film Oh Dem Watermelons, part of the Mime Troupe’s Minstrel Show spectacle of 1965; that work, incidentally, makes ironic use of the Stephen Foster tune “Massa’s in de Cold Ground,” which figures hauntingly in the music of Charles Ives. Far more convincing was Piano Phase (1966–67), a twenty-minute work generated from various permutations of the first six notes of the A-major scale. As two pianists move in and out of sync with each other, an eventful narrative ensues, replete with modulations, transitions, and climaxes. The opening section uses only the notes E, F-sharp, B, C-sharp, and D, which, when run together in rapid patterns, suggest the key of B minor. Halfway in, the note A is added, nudging the harmony toward A major. As in It’s Gonna Rain and Come Out, a cool process stealthily takes on emotion: when that A enters, it never fails to have a brightening, energizing, gladdening impact on the mind.

  In 1968 Reich spelled out his new aesthetic in a terse essay titled “Music as a Gradual Process.” “I am interested in perceptible processes,” he wrote. “I want to be able to hear the process happening throughout the sounding music.”

  This philosophy differs starkly from the thinking inherent in Boulez’s total serialism and Cage’s I Ching pieces, where process works behind the scenes, like a spy network employing front organizations. Reich’s music transpires in the open air, every move audible to the naked ear. Recognizable in it are multiple traces of the creator’s world: modal jazz, psychedelic trance, the lyrical rage of African-American protest, the sexy bounce of rock ’n’ roll. But there’s no pretense of authenticity, no longing for the “real.” Instead, sounds from a variety of sources are mediated by technology, broken down by repetition, folded into the composer’s personal voice. As Reich once said, in an ingenious aphorism, “All music turns out to be ethnic music.” The composer becomes an antenna receiving signals, a satellite gathering messages from around the globe.

  In 1968 and 1969, the culture tilted toward chaos and madness. Violence filled the news—the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, the massacre at My Lai in Vietnam, riots on university campuses and in inner cities. Harry Partch’s onetime lover Ramon Novarro was tortured to death by a hustler intent on finding money hidden in his home. Richard Maxfield, whose 1960 tape piece Amazing Grace anticipated minimalism in its use of intersecting loops, flung himself out of a San Francisco window, his mind undone by drugs. And, in August 1969, Charles Manson directed his followers to commit grisly murders in the canyons of Los Angeles, citing the Beatles’ White Album as inspiration.

  That same month Reich conceived Four Organs, in its own way a cruel, end-of-the-world piece. When the electric organs of the title are amplified at full volume, they become a crushing mass. Yet it seems that a musical center, if not a social one, can still hold. The piece is rooted in a set of six notes that sound like a big dominant-eleventh chord on E, one that longs for resolution to the key of A. As maracas provide a steady pulse in 11/8 meter, the notes of the chord are prolonged by degrees and the harmony rotates this way and that. After many changes, it comes to rest on E and A. As Reich commented to Edward Strickland, the ending of the piece is contained within the opening chord, so that it is a matter not of traveling from one place to another but of uncovering the destination inside the point of departure.

  In the last years of the twentieth century, minimalism acquired a degree of popularity with mainstream audiences, saturating American music with its influence. But in the early years it caused a fair amount of distress. When Four Organs was played at Carnegie Hall in 1973—at a concert by the Boston Symphony under the direction of Michael Tilson Thomas—an elderly woman went to the front of the hall and repeatedly struck the edge of the stage with her shoe, demanding that the performance stop. Someone else shouted, “All right, I’ll confess!”

  Since the Schoenberg revolution began, audiences had been pleading for contemporary composers to return to the plain old major and minor chords. Now the minimalists were giving them more tonality than they could handle. Reich, a meticulous man with no urge to provoke, had the honor of setting off the last great scandal concert of the century.

  Having invented a new kind of music, Reich needed to find a new breed of performers to play it, a new kind of space in which to present it, and, not least, a new audience to hear it. He elected to form his own ensemble, which came to be called Steve Reich and Musicians, and put on performances in whatever venues accommodated him—art galleries, warehouses, rock clubs, even discos. The group acted more like a jazz combo than a purebred classical ensemble. Like his hero Coltrane, Reich could rent a space, perform, pack up, and walk into the night.

  The downtown New York arts scene embraced this new sound from the start, as it had Cage’s and Feldman’s music some years before. In March 1967 Reich put together a series of concerts at Paula Cooper’s Park Place cooperative on West Broadway, and in 1969 he performed at the Whitney Museum as part of a multimedia show called Anti-Illusion. Practitioners of so-called minimal art—in particular, the conceptual artist Sol LeWitt and the sculptors Richard Serra and Donald Judd—responded instinctively to what Reich was doing. Perceived affinities between Reich’s geometric arrays of musical modules, LeWitt’s geometric arrays of white cubes, and Serra’s geometric arrays of plates and rods brought the term “minimalism” into musical circulation.

  As with most A-B comparisons between music and other arts, the linkage is partly a matter of intellectual convenience. Minimalist painting and sculpture remained arts of abstraction. Minimalist music, with its restoration of tonality, rejected abstraction and often came closer to the spirit of the Pop Art of Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein, and Andy Warhol. That resemblance was especially strong in the music of Philip Glass, which gives off a kind of Times Square neon glow.

  Glass attended one of Reich’s Park Place concerts and talked to his old schoolmate afterward. He, too, had been seeking his “way outside.” He had absorbed neoclassical technique at Juilliard, taken Darius Milhaud’s summer class in Aspen in 1960, and studied in Paris with Nadia Boulanger, who had taught Copland almost forty years earlier.

  The European avant-garde did nothing for Glass. He later called it “a wasteland, dominated by these maniacs, these creeps, who were trying to make everyone write this crazy creepy music.” Instead, he was drawn to the usual array of non-Western musics, and in particular to Indian music. After working with the sitarist Ravi Shankar on a score for a hallucinogenic film titled Chappaqua, he began to think, as Indian improvisers do, in terms of recurring cycles of tones, of rhythmic pulses added and subtracted. His String Quartet of 1966 shows him working with drastically reduced means, often with motivic strands made up of only two notes.

  Only when Glass encountered Reich’s music, however, did his new style come into focus. His 1968 piece Two Pages for Steve Reich owes an obvious debt to Piano Phase: where the latter took off from the first six notes of the A-major scale, the former is based on rapid rearrangements of the first five notes of the C-minor scale. But Glass developed his own technique of variation: in place of patterns shifting in and out of phase, Glass introduced constant rhythmic change, adding or subtracting notes in the style of Indian music. Segments of a phrase would also repeat themselves by rising multiples—three times, four times, five times, six times—before contracting toward a more manageable size.

  Like Reich, Glass made his living outside academia, driving taxis and doing odd jobs. The two minimalists briefly formed a company called Chelsea Light Moving and eked out a wage carrying furniture up and down the narrow staircases of New York walk-ups. Glass also worked as a plumber, and one day installed a dishwasher in the apartment of the art critic Robert Hughes, who could not understand why SoHo’s composer laureate was crawling around the floor of his kitchen.

  After Glass found fame, his up-by-the-bootstraps image put him in goo
d stead with a wider public: there was nothing of the snob about him. If Steve Reich and Musicians had the detached cool of a bebop group, the Philip Glass Ensemble had the extrovert energy of a rock band. It traveled to art galleries, Upper East Side apartments, city parks, and nightclubs (the famous Max’s Kansas City, among others). On the strength of his operas and film scores, Glass eventually vaulted to a level of popular recognition that no modern composer since Stravinsky had enjoyed.

  But the spirit of camaraderie that infused New York minimalism in the late sixties did not last. Glass and Reich quarreled over who had done what first and eventually stopped speaking. Reich took offense at the fact that Glass shortened the title Two Pages for Steve Reich to Two Pages, as if to deny Reich’s influence. Glass, for his part, seems to have resented Reich’s lofty intellectual reputation, the tendency of critics to identify Reich as the serious one and himself as the more commercial artist. In the early years Glass was as austere and severe as anyone. His amplified ensemble of winds and organs focused with almost maddening thoroughness on the basic mechanism of repetition, addition, and subtraction. Over the course of 1969, Glass added new components one by one. In Music in Fifths, two lines move exactly parallel to each other; in Music in Contrary Motion, two lines unfold as mirror images of each other, the mode indicating a key of A minor. In Music in Similar Motion, written at the end of 1969, four voices enter in staggered fashion, the arrival of the bass line four and a half minutes in triggering the sort of “Ah!” effect on which minimalism thrives. In Music with Changing Parts, from 1970, Glass and his ensemble stretched out to the spacey length of an hour, tracing limpid patterns around static harmonies.

  Over the next four years, Glass assembled the monumental cycle Music in Twelve Parts, which in some performances went on for as long as four hours. Here he summed up his various methods to date, explored some new rhythmic and harmonic fields, and, in the final two parts, switched to a music of relatively quick chord changes. As the critic Tim Page notes, there’s an inside joke in the final section of Part Twelve: a crazy creepy twelve-tone row snakes through the bass.

  The end point of Glass’s early phase was the theater event Einstein on the Beach, created in 1975 and 1976 in collaboration with the director Robert Wilson. It is opera without plot, a conceptual piece held together by recurring visual motifs and found-object texts. Singers chant numbers and “do re mi”; a Civil War–era locomotive inches across the stage; a cryptic courtroom scene features an elderly judge speaking poor French; an Einstein figure saws on a violin; a dancer soliloquizes about the “prematurely air-conditioned supermarket”; the lineup of the New York station WABC is recited; three of the four Beatles are named (no Ringo); a beam of light described as a bed tilts upward for twenty minutes; and some sort of spaceship arrives at the end. There are echoes of past musical styles, but from a cosmic distance: quasi-Bachian organ solos, nondenominational church choirs, Alberti bass accompaniments swirling around like lost pages of Mozart. Glass and Wilson discovered that minimal harmonic movement and minimal onstage action can together suggest a canyon of emotion behind the stage, a zone of nameless loss.

  Four centuries into the history of opera, Einstein engendered a new kind of theater. It had its premiere in Avignon in the summer of 1976, and in November of that year it played for two nights at the Metropolitan Opera, which had been rented for the occasion. The performances were sold out, but the composer emerged from the experience ninety thousand dollars in debt, and for a while he went back to driving his cab.

  Downtown music had entered a phase that might be called grand minimalism. Large-scale structures and modulatory schemes ascended toward moments of transcendence. Perhaps Beethoven wasn’t so wrong after all.

  In the summer of 1970 Reich went to Ghana to study with the master drummer Gideon Alorwoyie, who taught him to play the polyrhythms that he had read about in the writings of A. M. Jones. He returned to America with an urge to write a more spread-out kind of music for large ensemble, in which the participants could add their own energies to the action. The result was Drumming, a ninety-minute minimalist tour de force. Knowing that the phasing processes would not sustain a piece of such length, Reich added other devices to his armory, including a technique of setting up repeating patterns with alternating beats and rests and then slowly filling in the rests with beats. He also enriched his palette of timbres, supplementing an array of percussion with female voices and a piccolo. The drama of Drumming is the transfer of molten material from one group to another: the pummeling tones of bongo drums give way to the mesmerizing patter of marimbas, and then to the higher-pitched chiming of glockenspiels. In the final section, all come together in a blazing chorus, although the ending is admirably curt.

  In his next piece, Music for 18 Musicians, Reich added strings, winds, and pianos to create a fine-tuned minimalist orchestra. The premiere took place at New York’s Town Hall on April 24, 1976. Here the fascination of rhythm is joined to a comparably sophisticated drama of harmony: at the core of the piece is a cycle of eleven chords, each of which underpins a section from two to seven minutes in length. Early on, bass instruments touch repeatedly on a low D, giving the feeling that this is the work’s fundamental level. But in Section V, the midpoint of the structure, the bass clarinets and cello lower the floor from D to C-sharp—a crucial alteration in the physical space of the music. The harmony sinks toward F-sharp or C-sharp minor, and rugged six-note figures burrow in. A similar change in the weather darkens Section IX, which is almost expressionistic in its stabbing intensity. Only at the very end do bright D-and A-major-ish chords clear the air. As in Feldman’s Rothko Chapel, the seeming stasis of the sound encourages the listener to zero in on seemingly inconsequential details, so that the smallest changes have the force of seismic shocks and something as simple as a bass line going down a half step sends chills up the spine.

  In the seventies the downtown Manhattan scene reached an apex of cool. Composers from around the country converged on the city to take part in it. Loft apartments were cheap, alternative performance spaces imposed no creative restrictions, audiences sat through the most far-out occurrences with an attitude of jaded calm. Phill Niblock worked with enormously amplified, slowly glissandoing electronic tones, which resonated with the surrounding acoustics to create soundscapes of mind-bending force. The singer-composer-dancer Meredith Monk manipulated the extremes of her voice to produce the illusion of an Ur–folk music, a ritual language of sensual chants. Frederic Rzewski wrote The People United Will Never Be Defeated!—a massive, hour-long sequence of variations on a Chilean revolutionary song, in heaven-storming, semi-Romantic, virtuoso style.

  John Rockwell remembers a magic night when Glass and his ensemble played in Donald Judd’s SoHo studio:

  The music danced and pulsed with a special life, its motoric rhythms, burbling, highly amplified figurations and mournful sustained notes booming out through the huge black windows and filling up the bleak industrial neighborhood. It was so loud that the dancers Douglas Dunn and Sara Rudner, who were strolling down Wooster Street, sat on a stoop and enjoyed the concert together from afar. A pack of teenagers kept up an ecstatic dance of their own. And across the street, silhouetted high up in a window, a lone saxophone player improvised in silent accompaniment like some faded postcard of fifties Greenwich Village Bohemia. It was a good night to be in New York City.

  Rock ’n’ Roll Minimalism

  Minimalism is the story not so much of a single sound as of a chain of connections. Schoenberg invented the twelve-tone row; Webern found a secret stillness in its patterns; Cage and Feldman abandoned the row and accentuated the stillness; Young slowed down the row and rendered it hypnotic; Riley pulled the long tones toward tonality; Reich systematized the process and gave it depth of field; Glass gave it motorized momentum. The chain didn’t stop there. Starting in the late sixties, a small legion of popular artists, headed by the Velvet Underground, carried the minimalist idea toward the mainstream. As Reich later said, there
was “poetic justice” in this flipping of roles: just as he had once been transfixed by Miles Davis and Kenny Clarke, pop personalities in New York and London gawked at him in turn.

  On the eve of his gradual revolution, Reich had a lot of pop ringing in his ears. He listened not only to modern jazz but to rock and R&B. In an interview he singled out two sixties songs that make the minimalist gesture of locking on one chord: Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues” and Junior Walker’s “Shotgun.” It’s Gonna Rain has something in common with Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” which combines biblical prophecy and atomic-age anxiety into an anthem of imminent doom: “And it’s a hard, and it’s a hard, and it’s a hard, and it’s a hard, and it’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall.”

  The Velvet Underground essentially took the form of a musical conversation between Lou Reed, a poet turned songwriter with an achingly decadent voice, and John Cale, the droning violist of La Monte Young’s Theatre of Eternal Music. Cale’s early career gives a comprehensive tour of the late-twentieth-century musical horizon: he studied at Goldsmiths College in London with Humphrey Searle, a pupil of Webern’s; moved on to conceptual composition in the vein of Cage, Fluxus, and La Monte Young; arrived in America by way of a scholarship to Tanglewood; reduced Mme. Koussevitzky to tears by performing a work that required the smashing of a table with an ax; rode to New York with Xenakis; made his debut by playing in John Cage’s marathon performance of Satie’s Vexations; and, finally, joined Young’s ensemble. In his autobiography Cale states that one of his duties was to obtain drugs for Eternal Music performances. Transactions were allegedly conducted in musical code: “six bars of the sonata for oboe” meant “six ounces of opium.”