American Text-Sound composition emerged and
began to flourish in the mid-1960s and early 1970s, a fertile period
of experimentation in American arts. This is the era of Fluxus, Conceptual
Art, and Minimalism in music, the visual arts, dance, cinema and other
artistic disciplines, including Text-Sound composition.
A significant number of acknowledged American Text-Sound masterpieces
have been created by composers who consider their work to be primarily
musical. Among them are John Cage, Steve Reich, Alvin Lucier, Robert
Ashley, Joan La Barbara, Pauline Oliveros, Charles Dodge and Paul
Lansky. Many of these are most often thought of as Minimalists or
they may use Minimalist techniques. Others, including Laurie Anderson,
John Giorno, and Brion Gysin, think of themselves primarily as Sound
Poets or Performance Artists, but also use techniques which derive
from or parallel those of Minimal music. Charles Amirkhanian and Anna
Homler established their reputations as a Sound Poet and Performance
Artist, respectively, but both also consider themselves to be composers
of music. With the possible exception of Cage, Dodge, and Oliveros,
all have composed Minimalist Text-Sound compositions.
Minimalism is typically characterized by the following elements:
1. A minimum of means. In paintings, this may be characterized by
a monochromatic canvas; in music, brief motifs with a very limited
number of pitches and fixed dynamics; and in sound poetry, a few words
or limited utterances.
2. The work is static or immediate by way of extensive repetition
or a single image, gesture or gestalt.
3. The avoidance of complexity. In music, the works tend to be tonal
or modal rather than dissonant, rhythms and pulse are regular, even
mechanical. In the visual arts, colors are pure and unmodulated, forms
are symmetrical or otherwise regular.
Minimal art remains relevant, influential, even profound because of
its aesthetic content which is often characterized by the following:
1. A readily perceived, gradually unfolding
process or system.
2. Non-narrative, sometimes non-linear content and
3. An altered or unorthodox time frame. These three will be discussed
in order.
Gradually Unfolding Process
Reich, in his essay "Music as a Gradual Process," has succinctly
elucidated his aesthetic, which is based on a gradually unfolding
and audibly perceptible process in his work. A portion of Reich's
essay reads thus.
I do not mean the process of composition, but rather pieces of music
that are, literally, processes.
I am interested in perceptible processes. I want to be able to hear
the process happening throughout the sounding music. To facilitate
close detailed listening, a musical process should happen extremely
gradually...
Though I may have the pleasure of discovering musical processes and
composing the musical material to run through them, once the process
is set up and loaded, it runs by itself . . . By running this material
through this process, I completely control all that results, but [I]
also . . . accept all that results without changes. What I'm interested
in is a compositional process and a sounding music that are one and
the same thing. The use of hidden structural devices in music never
appealed to me. Even when . . . everyone hears what is gradually happening
in a musical process, there are still enough mysteries to satisfy
all. These mysteries are the impersonal, unintended, psycho-acoustic
by-products of the intended process. . . I begin to perceive . . .
minute details when I can sustain close attention and a gradual process
invites my sustained attention. By "gradual" I mean extremely
gradual; a process happening so slowly and gradually that listening
to it resembles watching a minute hand on a watch . . .
One of the most important characteristic features of the Minimalist
arts is their unification of form and content. In many Minimalist
pieces, it is the process which dictates the form, the structure of
the work. The processes employed tend to be simple, such that their
unfolding can be readily perceived. The process is thrust into the
foreground by virtue of the simplicity of the materials which make
it more easily perceived. Thus, it is the process and its unfolding
which become the focal point of such works. Form and content become
one and the same. Minimalist arts do not take a dialectic approach,
in which materials are forced into a pre-fabricated structure or form.
Indeed, form and content need not be resolved or synthesized, for
they are one and the same.
The simplicity of the materials and processes in Minimalist works,
however, is deceptive. In fact, the works are rich intellectually
and on a perceptual level. Not everything about a piece of Minimalist
art can be anticipated ahead of its realization. The actual work contains
elements, whether manifest or implied, which cannot be conceived without
its realization. Donald Judd says, "Even if you plan the thing
completely ahead of time, you still don't know what it looks like
until it's right there."
Through repetition and extended durations, one is afforded the time
to inspect details in a way that is impossible in even modestly complex
work. Thus, the introduction of a new melodic figure, however similar
to preceding or following figures, becomes a monumental event in one
of Glass's additive pieces. A series of identical metal boxes by Judd
stacked at regular intervals on a wall create endlessly complex relationships
with one another, the wall and the matrix of shadows they cast on
the wall and floor. The repeated words in a sound poem by Amirkhanian
develop their own meaning and relationships as new words are introduced
and layered upon one another. The intellectual and aesthetic content
of a Stripe Painting by Frank Stella is as sophisticated and elegant
as that of a Bach fugue.
Non-narrative, non-linear content
Non-narrative work is not "about" anything. It does not
portray an image or tell a story. It has no climax or denouement,
it is not built upon an antecedent-consequent structure.
In his book Music, the Arts, and Ideas, Leonard Meyer contrasts music
of the avant-garde music with earlier music. He describes experimental
music, which would include Minimal music, as being "anti-teleological"
or non-goal oriented, as opposed to the "teleological" or
narrative rhetoric of most other Western art music. Teleology is the
philosophical study of manifestations of design or purpose. It assumes
that such designs or purposes are not determined by a mechanical process,
but are part of a unified, overall natural design. Meyer states: .
. . [M]usic of the avant-garde directs us toward no points of culmination-establishes
no goals toward which to move. It arouses no expectations, except
presumably that it will stop. . . . It is simply there. Such directionless
art . . . I shall call anti-teleological art.
It is important to recognize that work which is "anti-teleological"
is not necessarily tautological or needlessly repetitive or redundant.
Even in a work which is based solely on repetition, such as Erik Satie's
"Vexations," a two-page piano piece which is to be repeated
840 times, taking some 18 hours to perform, changes dramatically as
it unfolds and the cumulative effect can be profound. As Cage wrote
in his book, Silence: In Zen they say: If something is boring after
two minutes try it for four. It still boring, try it for eight, sixteen,
thirty-two, and so on. Eventually one discovers that it's not boring
at all but very interesting. Dick Higgins and Cage experienced an
epiphany that bordered on the during the premiere performance of "Vexations."
The precise mechanics of such an experience, aside from the virtually
endless repetition, however, are an enigma. What is certain is that
this is a result of the work's non-narrative content.
As with Higgins's and Cage's experience with Vexations, one may experience
several different responses ranging from amusement, to anger, to ecstasy.
This diversity stems from a very focused listening experience which
is usually not the domain of Western classical music, which is narrative,
discursive, and linear. Higgins refers to experimental music, including
Minimal music, as "music without catharsis" or a music which
does not contain the narrative antecedent-consequent or tension-resolution
dialectic. He states: In an art which employs catharsis, Aristotle
says in his Poetics, the purpose is to purge the spectator of harmful
passions; if one consciously avoids catharsis as an aim, what is left?
[The] raison d'être which is . . . to share a vision of reality,
to the end of, even if for only a moment, trying to reduce alienation
and stimulating the best that is in the heads, the experience and
the potentials of the members of the audience.
Altered Time Frame
The element of time is treated in a very new and different way in
time-bound Minimalist works which I will call an altered time frame.
Durations tend to be relatively long, compounding the problems encountered
by those unaccustomed to extensive repetition. Because of the simplicity
and constancy of the other elements, the extended time factor can
allow for a more intense focus on the structure of the work, or it
may have a stultifying, mesmerizing effect. For those used to experiencing
time-bound arts with a greater frequency of change, Minimalist work
may tax the listener's or viewer's attention. The artist's intention
is to allow time to perceive and follow the unfolding structure of
the work. Invariably, the perception of the passage of time is affected.
Unquestionably, the way time is structured and perceived in Minimalist
work differs from art of the past. In The Poetics of Music, Stravinsky
speaks of the chronos of music, or musical time, which he defines
as a combination of ontological, or real time, and psychological time
which proceeds at a pace which may be either faster or slower than
ontological time. He states: "Music that is based on ontological
time is generally dominated by the principle of similarity. The music
that adheres to psychological time likes to proceed by contrast."
Karlheinz Stockhausen says, "the more surprising events take
place, the quicker time passes; the more repetitions there are, the
slower time passes."
For many, the way the passage of time is perceived in Minimalist work,
which is "dominated by the principle of similarity," does
not adhere to Stravinsky's concept of ontological time. Instead, it
falls within the realm of psychological time. However, it is not necessarily
the type of psychological time defined by Stockhausen ("the more
repetitions there are, the slower time passes"), rather it falls
within yet a different time realm. The repetition in Minimalist art
alters one's perception of the passage of time. Certainly, some will
find the repetitive nature of Minimalist art to be simply boring,
in which case, Stockhausen is correct; the passage of time will seem
slower. However, for others, time is suspended or expanded, not related
to clock time, neither is it accelerated or decelerated. Otherwise,
long pieces such as Philip Glass's and Robert Wilson's Einstein on
the Beach or Warhol's Sleep (incidentally, John Giorno is the man
sleeping in the film) might seem interminable (which they certainly
do for some, though by no means for all) and beyond the stamina of
the listeners or viewers.
Concerning experimental music, Christian Wolff writes: Notable qualities
of this music . . . are monotony and the irritation that accompanies
it. The monotony may lie in simplicity or delicacy, strength or complexity.
. . . The music has a static character. It goes in no particular direction.
There is no necessary concern with time as a measure of distance from
a point in the past to a point in the future, with linear continuity
alone. It is not a question of getting anywhere, of making progress,
or having come from anywhere in particular, of tradition or futurism.
There is neither nostalgia nor anticipation.
Glass discusses his approach to time: The music has been placed outside
the usual time scale, substituting a non-narrative and extended time
sense in its place. It may happen that some listeners, missing the
usual musical structures (or landmarks) by which they are used to
orient themselves may experience some initial difficulties in actually
perceiving the music. However, when it becomes apparent that nothing
"happens" in the usual sense, but that, instead, the gradual
accretion of musical material can and does serve as the basis of the
listener's attention, then he can perhaps discover another mode of
listening--one in which neither memory nor anticipation . . . have
a place in sustaining the texture, quality or reality of the musical
experience. It is hoped that one would then be able to perceive the
music as a "presence," freed of dramatic structure, a pure
medium of sound.
Those approaching Minimalist work with the same expectations that
one has in approaching more conventional art are often baffled. Glass
explains what he perceives as the reasons for the negative reactions
against Minimal music:
One of the things that happens, when you take those structures out
of the music, let's say thematic developmental structures, the normal
ways of relating to the overall time of a piece are simply not there.
In other words, they are like sign posts. They are not there and what
happens is that for many people when they first hear my music, they
say it all sounds the same. What they are really saying is they have
no way of relating to this material. In fact, I think they are actually
reporting accurately what they are hearing, or what they are experiencing
or perceiving. In fact, they are not able to perceive it any other
way. They say it sounds like the needle is stuck in the groove and
that's all that's happening.
Of course, anyone who has heard the music and can perceive it knows
that no two measures are alike. The rate of change and the kind of
detail that goes on in the music is extraordinary, especially in the
long pieces.
They simply don't perceive it, and I think the reason they don't perceive
it is that [they're stuck with a] dialectic method . . . The narrative
processes and the dialectic process are very much tied together and
they are very much tied together with the sense of time. When we talk
about extended time pieces . . . in fact the pieces aren't really
that much longer. For example the pieces from The Photographer are
only about twenty, twenty-five minutes each; the size of a Mozart
symphony. But these pieces seem interminable to someone who's lost
in them.
The other confusing thing--and this happened[in the 70s] when people
heard this kind of music--they perceived that it was taking place
in a non-ordinary time, an extended time, and many people thought
that it, therefore, was like all of the other things that took place
in non-ordinary time. In other words, they thought it was like being
drugged, or meditation, or they thought it was a trance. But, in fact,
all of these times experiences are very, very different. What they
have in common is that they are not like colloquial time.
The thing that is important to remember about this, though we are
talking about this from a psychological point of view, but in fact,
this happens because of musical or structural reasons . . . It's not
a question of adopting some kind of hippie philosophy--that was an
idea that was current in the early 70s about this music . . .
If you take a piece like [my] Music in Similar Motion or [Reich's]
Four Organs, the thing about those early Minimal pieces, is that they
are very monothematic. If you heard the first measure, all of the
material is in the first measure. There are no dialectical processes
involved. There are "additive processes," or in Steve [Reich]'s
pieces, there were "phase processes," or extending processes.
There weren't any of the procedures that . . . Brahms or Saint Saens
would use . . . The ways of getting from point A to point B were very
different.
Thus, the experience in time is not moment-to-moment, rather moment-by-moment.
In other words, one moment does not lead to the next, rather one moment
is simply followed by the next.
Repetition has been used as a means of extending, compressing and
otherwise altering time. As Michael Nyman observed: "Persistent
repetition is both a method of amplification of "hidden"
details in short figures, and also a method of seemingly "freezing"
time, making sound as tactile and object-like as it has ever been
in the history of music. While aperiodicity and abstraction were the
means, and to a degree, the ends of much work before World War II
and a substantial portion of work to the early to mid-60s and beyond,
repetition and stasis became a reactionary technique used by artists
at the vanguard.
Jean Perrault has responded to some of the criticisms leveled against
Minimal Art. He writes: The term "Minimal" seems to imply
that what is minimal in Minimal Art is the art. This is far from the
case. There is nothing minimal about the "art" (craftsmanship,
inspiration, or aesthetic stimulation) in Minimal Art. If anything,
in the best works being done, it is maximal. What is minimal about
Minimal Art, or appears to be when contrasted with Abstract Expressionism
or Pop Art, is the means, not the end.
Minimal Art is really not as cold, boring, and inhuman as its opponents
claim. Minimal Art is only cold if by "cold" we mean a minimum
degree of self-expression. But it should be remembered that "self-expression"
is often merely a cover-up term for self-indulgence. . .
Minimal Art, in spite of the polemics, is emotional, but the emotions
and the experiences involved are new and unexpected. It must be remembered
that the rational and the conceptual are also capable of evoking emotion.
There is also the emotion and the aesthetic pleasure of efficiency
and of surprising proportions.
Some art called Minimal Art is boring and it is bad art. But a great
deal of the boredom associated with Minimal Art is in the mind of
the beholder. The viewer will be bored if he does not know what to
look for or if he expects something that is not there. If repetition
is the primary hallmark of Minimalist art, one can find numerous examples
in the Sound Poetry by Americans. Despite the fact that a significant
portion of the current generation of Text-Sound composers embraces
Minimalist techniques and aesthetics, their aims and goals can be
quite varied.
A number of Minimalist sound poems focus primarily on repetition of
a single phrase or word. One of the best known examples is Robert
Ashley's "She Was a Visitor," the epilogue from his opera
That Morning Thing (1966-67). After experiencing the death of three
friends (all of them suicides and all of them women), Ashley "felt
a need to express something, without trying to 'say something' about
suicide." According to the composer, "It is obviously another
form of description. It is intended to be understood in the form of
a rumor," though it is not clear how this is so. A solo speaker
repeats the title of the work throughout while a chorus, divided into
groups each with a pre-determined leader, chooses phonemes which are
sustained softly for the duration of one breath. Upon listening to
the recording, the deadpan delivery of the text (not unlike Ashley's
own readings) and the droning, almost ambient undergirding provided
by the softly enunciated phonemes creates an almost otherworldly setting
for the text which is rhythmically stated. The content of the piece
might be interpreted as anything but a rumor, almost becoming devoid
of meaning and perceived as being nearly abstract. However, for those
who look for meaning or semantic content, even in light of Ahsley's
intent, the meaning is evanescent, obscure, equivocal, enigmatic.
It is unclear who "she" is, where she is visiting from and
whom she is visiting. The intangible, enigmatic element fits in neatly
with the Minimalist aesthetic of the non-narrative.
Other purely repetitive works include "crickets" (1965)
by Aram Saroyan and "The Population Explosion" (1969) by
Anthony Gnazzo found on the record 10 + 2: 12 American Text Sound
Pieces edited by Charles Amirkhanian, which makes use of the wind-off
grooves of the phonograph record, a type of "lock groove,"
which is inherently repetitive as the phonograph stylus tracks indefinitely
in the looped groove at the end of the vinyl record. Both works are,
to a degree, whimsical. In Saroyan's piece, the word "crickets"
is perceived by the composer to be onomatopoeic, heightened by the
incidental equalization of his voice which is heard over a telephone.
"The Population Explosion" consists simply of the word "bang,"
which combines irony with whimsy. After several iterations of the
word "bang," a distorted "doppelgänger" alternates,
creating a new sonic image.
Another example is "Dog Eyes" (ca. 1982) by Customer Service,
a duo comprised of Steve Fisk and Steve Peters, which appeared on
Regional Zeal: Mouth Music from Olympia, Washington, a record anthology
borne out of the punk era and the so-called "D.I.Y." or
Do It Yourself ethic. Fisk and Peters were well aware of sound poetry,
especially Reich's Come Out and It's Gonna Rain, 10 + 2: 12 American
Text Sound Pieces and the Dial-A-Poem recordings edited by John Giorno,
as well as works by European sound poets such as Chopin and Heidsieck,
among others. It features a dark, Minimalist, quasi-industrial noise
synthesized musical foundation over which a partly whispered, partly
growled enunciation of the text "dog eyes" is repeated.
The imagery is horrific, angry and disturbing, as befits the punk
era and the ensuing industrial noise genre. "Dog Eyes" concludes
one side of the record and like "crickets" and "Population
Explosion," utilizes the wind-off groove for indefinite repetition
and according to Peters "was probably influenced by the Tony
Gnazzo . . . piece on the [10 + 2] compilation."
Charles Amirkhanian's "Just" (1972) uses the words "rainbow,"
"bandit," "chug," and "bomb." Selected
for their sound, rather than any semantic content--the poem is not
about rainbows, bandits, bombs or chugging--Amirkhanian subjects them
to ordering, then repetition, polyphonic, polypoetic layering, and
what appears to be a semi-regular, almost readable process. In fact,
the words are revealed in a regular and orderly fashion. A word "theme"
is thus created and becomes the subject of a canon. However, like
so-many second generation Minimalists, Amirkhanian's processes are
off-kilter, less then regular, injecting an element of surprise, even
intrigue and anticipation which is set up then foiled. By the entry
of the third voice, the "theme" has been altered. At the
same time, the contrapuntal layering of voices is not subject to the
strictures of musical counterpoint, in that the rhythmic pulses in
Amirkhanian's reading are not made to line up, thus creating a rhythmically
complex fabric. While the third and subsequent voices may serve as
counter-subjects of a sort, the listener is forced to listen on several
levels. On one level, the listener tries to find a system behind the
polypoetic structure, though the information is being dispensed at
a rate which makes this task impossible. Still, a common impulse is
to attempt to force the structure into regular word, polyphonic and
rhythmic configurations, although any attempt is utterly futile. The
listener might also listen to the polyphonic interaction of words
and rhythms. As phonemes and syllables collide with one another, new
textual images emerge, rather like Reich's so-called "resulting
patterns."
In "I Don't Need It, I Don't Want It
and You Cheated Me Out of It" (1981), John Giorno uses techniques
of repetition and polyphony, as well as intense delivery full of bile,
anger, and vile bitterness. The title, itself bursting with contradiction,
is made all the more contradictory through repetition and the polyphonic
layering by way of pre-recorded tapes
and electronic delays. In Robert Schumann's setting of Heinrich Heine's
poem, "Ich grolle nicht" ("I bear no grudge")
from the song cycle Dichterliebe , the simple reiteration of the statement
"Ich grolle nicht" betrays the character's true feelings.
The fact that he does indeed bear a grudge is underscored by Schumann's
musical setting with emphatic, pounding block chords. Giorno takes
Schumann's techniques several steps beyond, though rather than using
subtlety, Giorno's text and delivery are blatant and intense. Despite
the vitriolic nature of the poem, it also has an ecstatic element--yet
another self-contained contradiction--a result of repetition, polypoetical
layering and Giorno's impassioned delivery. The intensity of emotion,
however negative, especially in the polypoetical context, elicits
a sense of exhilaration, even ecstasy, as made evident from the response
of the audience in the Giorno's live recording of the work.
Even some of Brion Gysin's work bears the
imprint of Minimalism, though he is of an older generation and a clearly
different aesthetic, however experimental. In a work such as "No
Poets Don't Own Words" for John Giorno (1960) Gysin subjects
the words of the title to a process of a gradually unfolding permutation,
re-ordering the five words in a very systematic, methodical and mathematical
way (rather like Sol LeWitt's "Incomplete Open Cubes). There
is, however, a clear element of disorder (the semantic content changes
significantly, sometime becoming entirely inchoate) and other words
and phrases are injected into the piece in a way that is entirely
unrelated to the re-ordering process. Still, this is a far cry from
the chance operations used in his cut-up poems.
Robert Wilson's and Philip Glass's ground breaking opera, Einstein
on the Beach (1975) is a portrait opera which centers around the character
of Einstein, yet it is not about Einstein. Glass explains: In a sense,
we didn't need to tell an Einstein story because everybody who eventually
saw our Einstein brought their own story with them. . . . [W]e had
many occasions to meet with our audiences, and . . . often people
told us what it meant to them . . . The point about Einstein was clearly
not what it "meant" but that it was meaningful."
Lucinda Childs, who made her mark as a Minimalist dancer and choreographer,
provided the text Supermarket" for Act III, Scene 1. In the opera,
texts are not associated with advancing the plot or providing a conventional
story line. The libretto (i.e. those portions which are sung) was
written by Glass, and simply consists of numbers and solfege syllables
(do, re, mi) which are manifestations of the rhythmic or metric structure
of his music. Other texts were provided by various contributors, including
Childs. These texts simply exist for their own sake. Read only if
no cassette player:
Child's text read: "I was in this prematurely
air-conditioned supermarket and there were all of these aisles and
there were these bathing caps you could buy that had these kind of
Fourth of July plumes on them that were red and yellow and blue and
I wasn't tempted to buy one but I was reminded of the fact that I
ad been avoiding the beach."
In the 1980s, Anna Homler developed an invented
language which she would sing. The language which has never been written
down--Homler prefers to work with cassette recordings--has a vocabulary,
of sorts, and certainly, specific "words" can be identified
and are repeated in her songs. She also says that this invented language
"is a primal root language." However, she also says: "It
is not a language where you could tell someone how to go to the airport,
but you could describe the flight. I like to leave it open and invite
the listener to imagine."
As Homler's text is invented and has no specific or even general meaning,
and as she "invites the listener to imagine," her work is
non-narrative. This invitation for the auditor to imagine is at the
same time a demand that the listener participate in the aesthetic
experience and the completion of the work, to become participant in
the creation of the work, which is part of some Minimalist's aesthetic.
Homler also sings with a kind of accent that sounds foreign. She mentions:
"In the beginning it sounded more Serbo-Croatian, but it goes
through different phases. Now it seems like a cross between Japanese
and Spanish." These accents provide the work with an exotic flair
that underscores the foreigness or alien-ness of the work and adding
to the mystique and mystery.
In addition, Homler has become, of necessity, a composer. Her works
are sung rather than spoken. Partially as a result of her coming to
this work in the 80s, partially a preference, her musical settings,
created by musical collaborators, are frequently examples of Minimal
music. She has chosen Steve Mosher as one of her primary musical collaborators
and his music is very much in the Minimalist vein. Homler is also
a member of Voices of Kwahn whose music falls loosely in the techno
dance genre, which is itself derivative of Brian Eno's Ambient Music
and 70s techno pop (Kraftwerk, Yellow Magic Orchestra, Tangerine Dream,
etc.) both of which are very much influenced by Minimal music.
Process pieces
Steve Reich's Reich's single most important tape piece is It's Gonna
Rain (1965), bearing all of the characteristic features of a true
Minimalist text-sound composition. Reich had been working extensively
with tape loops since 1963. One Sunday afternoon, Reich recorded Brother
Walter, a black Pentecostal preacher. Brother Walter's voice is highly
musical, and his sermon was almost chanted or sung. In seeking ways
to utilize the sound of Brother Walter's voice, Reich decided to make
two tape loops of the same material, reflecting his penchant for homogeneous
timbres.
After making the tape loops and attempting to synchronize them on
two tape recorders, Reich accidentally discovered what he later dubbed
the "phasing process." Due to small variations in motor
speed of the two tape recorders, one ran at a slightly different speed
than the other. As a result, the two tape loops began, very slowly,
to move out of synchrony or "out of phase" with one another.
In effect, one of the loops accelerates ahead of the other resulting
in a sliding or moving canon which begins in unison with the first
canonic voice continually moving further ahead of the second canonic
voice. In this work, the two tape loops move out of phase with one
another and as the phase process continues, they eventually return
back to the unison. The contrapuntal intricacies yielded a great richness:
multifarious cross rhythms and polyrhythms, secondary or sub-melodies
of various rhythmic contours (later dubbed "resulting patterns"),
changing harmonic content, and complex and shifting polyphonic textures.
The next phase piece was Come Out (1966) for tape. Though Come Out
has strong political overtones, Reich feels that the political content
was secondary to the musical content. Come Out begins with two channels,
each with an identical loop in unison which slowly moves out of phase.
After several minutes the two loops, now out of phase with one another,
are mixed down to a single loop containing both voices. The mixed
loop is duplicated, yielding a total of four voices, and these two
loops are used for further phasing. Finally, the same procedure is
repeated, yielding a total of eight voices, all out of phase with
one another. By the end of the piece, the text can no longer be discerned,
devolving into pure abstract sound that is almost divorced from the
human voice.
Alvin Lucier I Am Sitting in a Room (1970),
clearly under the influence of Reich's Come Out and It's Gonna Rain,
employs repetition, tape, and a gradually unfolding process that is
utterly manifest, as described in the text (which reads): I am sitting
in a room different from the one you are in now. I am recording the
sound of my speaking voice and I am going to play it back into the
room again and again until the resonant frequencies of the room reinforce
themselves so that any semblance of my speech, with perhaps the exception
of rhythm, is destroyed. What you will hear, then, are the natural
resonant frequencies of the room articulated by speech. I regard this
activity not so much as a demonstration of a physical fact, but more
as a way to smooth out any irregularity my speech might have.
Whereas Reich works with a musical process,
Lucier's process is dependent on an acoustical process which includes
the vagaries of the analog tape machines and the inherent distortion
and decay created in the making of recordings of recordings played
back through loud speakers, as well as the acoustic properties of
the space in which the recording is made. Lucier is also interested
in using his voice and his speech impediment (he stutters) and making
them more eloquent and aurally interesting. The process of making
recordings of recordings eventually distorts his voice such that it,
as in Reich's Come Out, devolves (or evolves?) into pure, abstract
sound that has no perceivable relationship to text or even the human
voice. Thus, Lucier's stuttering is obliterated and he is left with
pure sound.
While Joan La Barbara, like Reich and Lucier, thinks of herself as
a composer, her "Circle Song" (1975) crosses genres over
into text-sound composition. Having worked as a vocalist with both
Steve Reich and Musicians and the Philip Glass Ensemble, she was well
aware of Minimalist techniques and aesthetics. La Barbara is also
known are a virtuoso in the area of extended vocal techniques, techniques
which go beyond the orthodoxy of traditional vocal production and
singing. "Circle Song" is a straight-forward Minimalist
process piece. La Barbara sings a continually descending then ascending
glissando, a pitch continuum. She is able to sing continually without
pausing to take a breath as she uses the extended vocal technique
of singing while inhaling. The process involves varying the point
at which she inhales and exhales (all the while singing), doing so
at regular and proportional points along the ascent and descent. As
an example, she sings the first descent while exhaling and the first
ascent while inhaling. Later, she changes breath at the mid-point
of the descent and the mid-point of the ascent. The number of changes
of breath gradually , increases and then gradually decreases, returning
to a single exhaled descent and a single inhaled ascent. The process
is manifest. La Barbara adds other elements to "Circle Song"
(e.g. multiphonics in the central portion), but not so many as to
obfuscate the governing process. The work is very much a piece about
performance and dramatic theater. Lasting around eight minutes, "Circle
Song" is an exercise in stamina. The technique of continual singing
is so difficult that La Barbara feared passing out into unconsciousness
in her first performances, and the work always creates a palpable
tension for those in attendance, so obviously difficult is the work.
While Minimalism in American Sound poetry may not be pervasive, it
certainly has played an important, even defining role in much important
work. Even then, not all works that use Minimalist techniques subscribe
to all of the tenets of Minimalism. Would one call Giorno's "I
Don't Want It, I Don't Need It and You Cheated Me Out of It"
a Minimalist sound poem? Certainly most would not. In fact, works
by Philip Glass, such as his opera Einstein on the Beach, Steve Reich,
including his massive opus Music for Eighteen Musicians or his cantata
Tehillim, or Frank Stella with his protractor variations have been
referred to as Maximalist and the same term could easily be applied
to Giorno's sound poem. However, in each case, the work is informed
by Minimalist techniques and aesthetics. Indeed, it can be argued
that Minimalism is one of the most influential and profound styles
and aesthetics in post-modernism, including Text-Sound composition.
Dean Suzuki earned
his Ph. D. in Historical Musicology with an emphasis in contemporary
American music at the University of Southern California. He is an
Associate Professor in the Music Department at San Francisco State
University specializing in Twentieth Century music history, as well
as teaching courses in Rock History and Music Appreciation. Currently
on sabbatical, Dr. Suzuki is preparing a manuscript for a book based
on his dissertation "Minimal Music: Its Evolutions as Seen in
Works of Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Terry Riley and La Monte Young,
and Its Relation to the Visual Arts." Suzuki has a long and abiding
interest in sound poetry and has written articles and delivered papers
and lectures on American sound poetry. At SFSU, he has produced performances
by sound poets Enzo Minarelli, Jaap Blonk, Charles Amirkhanian, Anna
Homer, and Michael Peppe. With Enzo Minarelli, he co-edited Boabab,
the cassette journal of Sound Poetry. He toured Northern Italy in
1995, lecturing on American sound poetry and experimental music and
later delivered a paper on American text-sound composition at Strumenti
a Voce, the Symposium on Sound Poetry in Bologna in 1995. At KPFA-FM
in Berekely, California, he produces and hosts "Discreet Music,"
a weekly program of new, experimental, unusual and obscure music.
Special programs have been devoted to sound poetry as well as sound
sculpture. His guests in the studio for interviews have included Charles
Amirkhanian, Anna Homler and Michael Peppe. As a critic and journalist,
he writes for Wired, Pulse, Musicworks, CDnow, Goldmine, Audion, Expose,
Progression, and many other periodicals. |
