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WD_413/ 2008
(  Satoshi Kinoshita )
| Series: | Works on paper: Drawings 5 | | Medium: | oilstick on paper | | Size (inches): | 25.6 x 17.9 | | Size (mm): | 650 x 455 | | Catalog #: | WD_0413 | | Description: | Signed, date and copyright in pencil on the reverse.
Minimal Music, Maximal Impact - Minimalism as It Was
By Kyle Gann
At first—for those of us living outside New York City, anyway—minimalism seemed to be summed up in the names Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and Philip Glass. I soon found out about La Monte Young, the movement's so-called "Granddaddy," and I looked everywhere for his music, never hearing a note until 1987, when (due to a drop in his funding) he went public with new performances and a recording of The Well-Tuned Piano. Gradually through the 1990s, scholarship and critical writings have revealed that early minimalism was originally a far-flung movement involving both coasts, and a large cast of characters - a much feistier, more complex, more varied movement than ever appeared from its public face.
For - rather ironically - Reich and Glass were actually sort of the Johnnie-come-latelies of the movement. According to the well-known Glass/Reich image, minimalism is a pretty, soothing style, but its origins were more often deafeningly loud and noisy, pushing the limits of audience tolerance. Also, Glass's and Reich's music uses the normal equal-tempered tuning of conventional instruments, but a lot of early minimalism was microtonal and very harmonically innovative.
To see minimalism as it originally saw itself, we have to look at a large number of figures who seem obscure today, and some who have been pretty much forgotten altogether. There seems, in fact, almost to have been a curse on minimalism, in that so many of its innovative early figures either died or dropped out of music. Let's look first at the 1960s New York scene around Young and his ensemble Theater of Eternal Music:
In 1960, electronic pioneer Richard Maxfield, along with Young, co-curated the early Fluxus concerts at Yoko Ono's loft: the first Downtown concerts. Maxfield made a number of mesmerizing, though gritty, electronic minimalist pieces, a few of which have made it to commercial recording. He blew his mind on drugs, however, and ended his life by jumping out of a window at 42.
Terry Jennings was a child prodigy, a saxophonist and composer of some of the first extremely long instrumental works, a couple of which were published in La Monte Young's groundbreaking Anthology of 1961. Brilliant but never well-adjusted, Jennings was killed at 41 in a drug deal gone sour.
Angus MacLise was the drummer for Young's Theater of Eternal Music, a reputedly phenomenal percussionist who could make drums sound like various nuances of falling rain or water. He traveled to Kathmandu and died there, apparently from drug-related problems, in 1979.
Tony Conrad was the violinist in the Theater of Eternal Music who introduced drones and mathematically pure tunings into minimalism; La Monte Young credits him with having taught him how to specify pitches as fractions in relation to a drone. Conrad and John Cale (below) had a big rift with Young in the 1970s over whether the Theater of Eternal Music work was collaborative improvisation or whether the works had been composed in a traditional sense by Young. This led to copyright disputes and threats of litigation that have kept that music out of public access for decades now. In response, Conrad got out of music and made groundbreaking structuralist films, the best known being an abstract alternation of black and white frames called Flicker. Starting in the late 1980s, he has made a dramatic comeback through a series on recordings called Early Minimalism on the Table of the Elements label.
Charlemagne Palestine once rivaled Young as being the most dynamic and compelling early minimalist figure, a legend for giving night-long performances frenetically strumming pianos and organs. However, like Conrad he disappeared into the visual art world and also moved to Holland. For two decades he was a lost legend, his music unknown and almost forgotten, until the Barooni and New Tone CD labels began releasing some of his early (and more recent) performances in the mid-1990s.
Dennis Johnson was a friend of Young's who wrote lengthy piano works which, as Young acknowledges, anticipated and influenced Young's The Well-Tuned Piano. However, Johnson couldn't stomach the dirty and dangerous world of the music business, and turned his number interests toward computer science.
John Cale played viola in the Theater of Eternal Music, but veered off into rock, and did a nice business with a little group called the Velvet Underground. During the '60s he was practicing with Young in the afternoon and with the Velvet Underground at night. In early discs like The Velvet Underground and Nico you can hear, especially in the song "Venus in Furs," the influence of Young's drones on the history of rock.
In addition, there were a lot of other minimalists who have contributed their own streams of influence, nuancing the eventual history of the field in ways that have hardly been noticed publicly:
Pauline Oliveros has delved into many musical fields including free improvisation and conceptual music, but her early drone pieces, especially the electronic sine-tone pieces like I of IV (1966) and accordion-and-voice pieces like Horse Sings from Cloud (1977), made signal contributions to minimalism's direction.
Phill Niblock has been one of minimalism's most potent underground influences and remains so today. Not musically trained, he has worked out his compositions of long, slowly changing drones in terms of exact pitch frequencies, developing a tendency toward often amazing acoustic effects of gradual dissonance and mind-bendingly slow resolution.
Harold Budd is the minimalist whose influence was confined to the West Coast, where it was intense. He has written perhaps the prettiest minimalist music, though often with a dark edge. Disdaining the avant-garde world, he has veered toward popular music and has had more recognition there, collaborating with groups like the Cocteau Twins.
Julius Eastman was another of the unlucky minimalists. He made quite a few amazing minimalist-based works, some of them for multiple pianos, and often with titles or programs that pushed his gay and African-American agendas. Dogged by poverty and drug problems, he passed away alone and unnoticed in a Buffalo hospital at the age of 49.
Tom Johnson is probably the only composer who has ever called himself a minimalist. His music tends to be rigorous in its logic, working out mathematically strict patterns. "I want to find the music, not make it," he has often said, although he has also written hilarious satires like his Four-Note Opera and joyous religious works like his Bonhoeffer Oratorium.
Daniel Goode, though a minimalist by generation, veered away from the movement early and wrote important postminimalist works, such as his Tunnel-Funnel for orchestra (see discography).
Barbara Benary is a minimalist greatly influenced by Indonesian gamelan music; an interest in geometric patterns and permutational processes is evident in her gamelan pieces such as Sleeping Braid (1979).
Jon Gibson, saxophonist and flutist, is the only musician to have worked with all four of the "main minimalists" - Young, Riley, Reich, and Glass. His early works made their own contribution to minimalism, somewhat like Tom Johnson's, by working out strict patterns among pitches such as traditional change-ringing permutations.
Meredith Monk would not want to be included in this list, and has always denied that her music is minimalist. However, she has certainly built many works along minimalist principles of repetition and additive structure, and was innovative in this area as early as 1966, the same time as Reich's early works. To not include her would be to deny her rightful historical place as a musical pioneer, though it may be emphasized that her most minimalist works tend to be freely expressive, not hard-edged and motoric like those of Glass and Reich.
This is a widely varied group of artistic personalities. Hopefully the list makes clear that minimalism is not just a four-person movement, nor an easily circumscribed style. What is clear is the sequence of creative events that brought it to public recognition. La Monte Young wrote the first slow, unchanging works in the late 1950s, starting with his Trio for Strings of 1958. Terry Riley has always acknowledged Young's influence, and added the element of repetition starting in 1963 with his tape works Mescalin Mix and The Gift. Steve Reich performed in Riley's In C in 1964, and made his own first minimalist work, It's Gonna Rain, in 1965. Philip Glass, in turn, played with Reich's earliest ensemble, and took a minimalist turn in his Strung Out of 1967.
Subsequently, Young argued with Conrad and Cale about the Theater of Eternal Music and tied up that music in litigation. Young, independently funded until 1987, stayed out of public view. Riley bailed out of a meteoric rise by not recording a note during the '70s, and his music since then has followed a baffling progression of styles. Most of the other minimalists either left music or died young. No wonder, when the smoke cleared, that Reich and Glass appeared to be the only minimalists left standing. But the movement has a richer and more diverse history and repertoire than those two figures alone could suggest.
From Minimal Music, Maximal Impact - Published: November 1, 2001
© 2001 NewMusicBox.
-www.newmusicbox.org/page.nmbx?id=31tp02
Richard Maxfield by William Dawes
Richard Maxfield was born in Seattle on February 2, 1927. He was musical at an early age, claiming, "I could read music before I could read words." He played piano and clarinet as a child, played clarinet in the Seattle All Youth Orchestra, and wrote a symphony when he was in high school. He enlisted in the Navy when he was 17 and continued to compose music during his one year in the service.
Maxfield attended Stanford University for one year, where he continued to compose, and his works were played on the University radio station. Upon hearing Roger Sessions' The Trial of Lucullus, premiered at Berkeley in April 1947, he decided to transfer to the University of California to study with Sessions. As an undergraduate at Berkeley he studied in the graduate composition seminar from 1947 to 1951. He was graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Berkeley in 1951 and was awarded the Hertz Prize.
The Hertz Prize allowed Maxfield to study for a summer with Ernst Krenek in Los Angeles and then to travel through Europe, where he met Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Luigi Nono, and where he probably first heard electronic music. He studied with Aaron Copland at Tanglewood in 1953. In 1954 and '55 he studied at Princeton with Sessions and Milton Babbitt, and received an MFA in 1955. He won a Fulbright Scholarship in 1955 and returned to Europe to study with Luigi Dallapiccola and Bruno Maderna in Italy. He remained in Europe through 1957, where, through Christian Wolff, he met John Cage and David Tudor.
In New York in 1958, Maxfield attended John Cage's course at the New School and in 1959 replaced Cage as the instructor. He taught the techniques of creating electronic music from purely electronic sources, without microphones, and it was because of this course that the New Grove's Dictionary of Music acknowledges him as "the first teacher of electronic music techniques in the U.S."
Maxfield's earliest preserved electronic work, Sine Music, was composed in 1959. His most productive years were from 1959 to 1964, during which he completed at least twenty-four compositions. He worked as a free-lance audio engineer and as a full-time recording engineer for Westminster Records from 1960 through '62.
On his way to Darmstadt in the summer of 1959, La Monte Young met Maxfield in New York City. On returning to Berkeley, Young presented Maxfield's electronic music in concerts in the Bay Area and in 1960, after completing two years of graduate study at Berkeley, Young also won the Hertz traveling fellowship and went to New York to study electronic music with Maxfield at the New School. Young was Maxfield's teaching assistant and became one of the principal performers of Maxfield's work. Through working closely with Maxfield in 1960 and '61, Young has observed that, "much of Maxfield's tape music was created through a technique which included pre-recording and electronically manipulating sound sources of various duration, then cutting lengths of tape containing these sounds and putting them in large glass mixing bowls. He would randomly draw pieces of tape from the bowls and splice them together placing blank tape of various durations between each of the pre-recorded sounds. What was interesting was that although this was theoretically a Cageian aleatorical approach, Maxfield reserved the right to put back any sounds he did not like and continue to draw new sounds until he found the piece sounding in a way that inspired him. Sometimes several of these reels of spliced together sounds and silences, called inter-masters, were played simultaneously on separate tape decks in concert or mixed together to form a new stereo or mono original master. His compositions were extremely well-crafted, using a sparse, static form and exhibiting a wry humor and unusual sophistication." Young points out that Maxfield was the first American composer to build his own equipment for the purpose of generating electronic tape music and was possibly the first American to compose purely electronic music as distinct from "musique concrete" composed of non-electronic pre-recorded sounds.
The tape elements of Maxfield's compositions, which included both concrete and electronically generated materials, were all produced in his own studio in New York. His equipment was rudimentary: several kit-built, sine-square wave generators, two tape recorders, a homemade mixer and a homemade turntable, microphones, a "Dynamic Spacexpander" (a kind of reverberation device), possibly some filters, and inexpensive switches, amplifiers and speakers. In 1962 Maxfield said about his work, speaking of himself in the third person, "Much of his music has as its source material recorded sounds of the instrumentalists who in performance improvise with electronic tape (which is playing their earlier recorded sounds, now distorted by electronic manipulation).... He is generally quite selective about his raw material and its alteration, but quite free with regard to placement (organization) of the finished product and the improvisation going on simultaneously."
Maxfield performed his works in New York in the late 50's and early 60's at both uptown halls and downtown lofts and performance spaces. In what was historically New York's first loft concert series, directed by La Monte Young at Yoko Ono's studio in 1960-61, Young presented two evenings of the work of Maxfield as well as concerts of the work of Jennings and other artists who were creating new and radical work at that time. David Tudor, Terry Riley, Terry Jennings, Dick Higgins and George Maciunas were some of the other artists with whom Maxfield worked. He was Musical Director of the James Waring Dance Company and his work was performed regularly in major concert series, at the Living Theatre, and for dances by Aileen Passloff and Paul Taylor.
In 1967 Maxfield left his tape music, scores and equipment in the care of Walter De Maria. He moved to San Francisco, where he taught at San Francisco State College in 1966 and '67. He moved to Los Angeles in 1968. In 1969 Richard took his own life.
* * *
De Maria kept the cartons containing Maxfield's belongings until 1975, when he asked the Dia Art Foundation to take over responsibility for their care. At that time, William Dawes took all the materials to his studio where he began the work of cataloguing and archiving Maxfield's music. Working with La Monte Young and funded by the Dia Art Foundation, Dawes produced two concerts of Maxfield's music as part of the Dream Festival, a large concert series curated by Young and Marian Zazeela in the Spring of 1975. Continuing under the auspices of the Harrison Street Dream House Project of the Dia Art Foundation, Dawes later organized and catalogued all of the Maxfield materials. The tape works, scores and equipment have been cared for and kept in storage by MELA Foundation since 1985.
Copyright (c) William Dawes 1989.
-www.melafoundation.org/rm01.htm
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