A place for instrumental minimalism

Steve Reich: Phases, Patterns and Tapes

2013-05-19T18:10:00.001+02:00

Steve Reich was born in New York on October 1936 and is one of the pioneering composers of American minimalist music along with La Monte Young, Terry Riley and Philip Glass. His work has influenced many composers, artists and music producers. His music often features a steady pulse and the repetition of a relatively small amount of melodic material. Some of his works have been remixed by electronic musicians.

After having studied music and composition, Reich worked with the San Francisco Tape Music Center, a group founded in 1962 to study and perform with tape music, with Terry Riley and Pauline Oliveros among others. Reich was also involved with the premiere of Riley's work In C, and suggested the use of the eighth note pulse, which is now standard in performances of this piece.

Reich used tape loops to create phasing patterns. His early composition It's Gonna Rain (1965) used a fragment of a sermon by a street preacher with multiple tape loops moving out of phase with one another. Come out (1966) used a spoken phrase on two channels initially played in unison, going out of sync, then splitting into four voices, then eight, until the words become unintelligible, remaining just the rhythmic and tonal patterns.

In 1967 Steve Reich translated this technique from recorded tape to performance with Piano Phase, a work for two pianos with only six pitches, repeating two melodic phrases, initially in unison, then at a slightly different speed to slowly shift out of phase with each other, until the two parts line up again, but one sixteenth note apart. The second player then resumes the previous tempo. This cycle of speeding up and then locking in continues throughout the piece several times. Violin Phase, also written in 1967, was built on a similar way, but here Reich introduced what he called resulting patterns: the interlocking of several shifted parts, all playing the same pattern, creates new patterns, taking the listener to an aural experience where he decides what he wants to hear each moment.

Pendulum Music was composed in 1968 and revised in 1973. This piece is the result of the process of three or more microphones swinging back and forth as pendulums, suspended above the speakers by a cable. Feedback tones are created by a microphone nearing a speaker, and different lengths of cable swing at different speeds, producing phasing feedback tones.

Four Organs (1970) was made for four electronic organs and maraca, as a process of augmentation of an eleventh chord which increases in duration from an eighth note at the beginning to 200 beats at the end. First some notes are sustained after the chord, then some notes anticipate, until all the tones sound almost in sequence.

Drumming (1970-71), for percussion ensemble with female voices and piccolo, was composed by Reich after a visit to Ghana where he learned from the master drummer Gideon Alorwoyie. This work combines the phasing technique with rhythmic reductions (substituting beats for rests) and rhythmic constructions (substituting rests for beats), and resulting patterns can also be heard as a result of the combination of the phased patterns.

Clapping Music (1972) was written for two performers, one clapping a basic rhythm, a 12 eighth-note long phrase, all the time, and the other clapping the same pattern but shifting by one eight note every 12 bars, until both players are back in unison after 144 bars.

In Six Pianos (1973), we can find different melodic phrases played in unison with the same rhythmic pattern, then some phrases are shifted two beats out of phase, and different patterns slowly fade in and out throughout the piece. Some years later Reich composed a variation for marimbas, Six Marimbas (1986).

Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices and Organ (1973) returns to the augmentation process of repeated chord cadences of organ and voices singing vowel sounds, over a pattern of marimbas and glockenspiels.

Increasing the number of instruments and performers led to harmonically richer pieces in Music for 18 Musicians (1974-76), Music for a Large Ensemble (1978) and Octet (1979). These works often show the augmentation of harmonies and melodies of larger ensembles over a pulsing note, growing in acoustic effects and harmonic movement. Octet was later rescored as Eight Lines (1983), adding a string quartet to make the performance easier.

Tehillim ("Psalms", 1981), scored for voices, strings, winds and percussion, contrasts with his previous works, using formal counterpoint and functional harmony.

Other relevant works from these years include Desert Music (1983) for orchestra and chorus, Sextet (1984) for 4 percussionists and 2 keyboardists, and Electric Counterpoint (1987) for electric guitar and tape. The first recording of Electric Counterpoint was performed by Pat Metheny, and later it has been played by Radiohead.

Reich made use of recorded speech again in the award-winning piece Different Trains (1988), for string quartet and tape, and later in City Life (1994), which uses digital samplers among the orchestral instruments, playing recorded speech and sounds from the streets of New York, like car horns, door slams, air brakes, car alarms and others. These works transfer intonation from recorded speech to instrumental melody, with speech samples often doubled with instruments. Different Trains was originally performed by Kronos Quartet.

Reich made two musical collaborations with his wife, the video artist Beryl Korot, making the music for her video operas The Cave (1993) and Three Tales (2002).

Reich's music has gradually evolved through the years from the early minimalist approach to more melodic developments, suitable for wider audiences. Latest popular works include You Are - Variations (2004), for voices and ensemble, and Double Sextet (2007), scored for two sextets of flute, clarinet, violin, cello, vibraphone and piano, where the two pianos interlock and create the effect of constant eighth-note chords. This piece won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Music.

The piece 2x5 (2008) is similar to Sextet, but for rock instruments. It is scored for five musicians and pre-recorded tape, or two identical rock quintets: 2 drum sets, 2 pianos, 4 electric guitars and 2 bass guitars.

Radio Rewrite (2012) was inspired by two Radiohead songs, "Jigsaw Falling into Place" and "Everything in Its Right Place". It is scored for clarinet, flute, two violins, viola, cello, two vibraphones, two pianos and electric bass guitar.

The music of Steve Reich has inspired works by Björk, David Bowie, Brian Eno, Mike Oldfield and Talking Heads among others, and many have remixed his work. Reich published a book about his philosophy and aesthetics in music, "Writings About Music" (1974), later updated and re-edited as "Writings On Music" (2002).

More information on Steve Reich can be found on his official website: http://www.stevereich.com/

If you liked this article you may wish to read my series on minimalist music: American minimalist music, European music connected with minimalism and Precursors of minimalist music.

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The introspective sound of Ludovico Einaudi

2013-02-03T17:53:00.001+01:00

Pianist and composer Ludovico Einaudi was born on 1955 in Turin, Italy. His music is mainly contemporary classical, with elements derived from popular music, and has been described as minimalist, ambient, introspective and meditative. He has released several albums and has composed music for ballet, opera and films.

The album Le onde (1996) was his first real work as a soloist, where Einaudi performed a cycle of ballades on piano, inspired by Virginia Woolf's novel The Waves. Some pieces from this album were included in the movie Aprile (1998) by Nanni Moretti.

In Eden Roc (1999) Einaudi shows some of his popular roots, collaborating with the Armenian Djivan Gasparijan, a past master of the duduk (a kind of small oboe).

I Giorni (2001) is a solo piano album inspired by Einaudi's travels in Africa.

Una Mattina (2004) was recorded for piano and cello.

In 2006 Einaudi released Divenire, for piano and orchestra. This album includes the popular track Primavera.

Nightbook (2009) was made with piano and synthesized sounds.

In A Time Lapse (2013) has just been released and is his latest work. On Saturday the 19th of January 2013 at 9pm (Rome GTM) Einaudi played from his home some of the music from this new album:

More information on Ludovico Einaudi on his website:
http://www.einaudiwebsite.com/

If you liked this article you may wish to read my series on minimalist music: American minimalist music, European music connected with minimalism and Precursors of minimalist music.

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The spiritual minimalism of Terry Riley

2012-11-18T21:44:00.000+01:00

Terry Riley was born in California on June 1935 and was a pioneer of the American minimalist music movement in the 1960s. He was influenced by the music of John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen, and also by jazz musicians like John Coltrane and Miles Davis, but his most influential teacher was the Indian vocal master Pandit Pran Nath, who also taught La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela.

Riley was involved in the experimental San Francisco Tape Music Center, a group founded in 1962 to study and perform with tape music, working with Steve Reich among others. The Gift (1963) was an early tape loop piece featuring the trumpet playing of Chet Baker.

In 1964 Riley composed In C, a work based on interlocking repetitive patterns and scored for any group of instruments. The piece consists of 53 separate modules, each with a simple musical pattern in the key of C. One performer beats a steady C pulse on the piano to keep the tempo throughout the duration of the performance. The others, in any number and on any instrument, perform these musical modules following a few loose guidelines, with the different patterns interlocking in various ways as time goes on. Each member must play the 53 patterns in sync with the pulse and consecutively, but decides how often and how long he rests when he moves from one pattern to the next one. The performance ends after all the players have arrived at pattern 53. The first performance of In C was given in 1964 by Steve Reich, Jon Gibson, Pauline Oliveros, and Morton Subotnick.

Riley met La Monte Young at the university in 1960, and they worked out some common ideas. Riley performed with La Monte Young in the Theater of Eternal Music in 1965.

The electronic album A Rainbow in Curved Air, recorded in 1967, inspired many later works in electronic and ambient music, progressive rock and even electronic jazz fusion. The work begins with a simple drone but quickly evolves to more complex structures with percussion and keyboard layering. Riley played all the instruments in this recording, using overdubbing.

In 1967 Riley started touring with his All-Night Concerts, where people could stay and relax, listen to music or sleep in hammocks and sleeping bags. These performances included strobe lights and other visual elements too, like the Dream House environments of La Monte Young.

In 1970, Terry became a disciple of the Indian Raga Vocalist Pandit Pran Nath, and made the first of his numerous trips to India to study with him, along with La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela. Terry Riley appeared frequently in concert with the master as tampura, tabla and vocal accompanist until Pran Nath's death in June 1996.

Like Young, Riley has composed music in just intonation. He played a modified electric organ tuned in just intonation on the solo concerts recorded in the album Persian Surgery Dervishes (1972). Next came the album Shri Camel, released in 1978 for solo electronic organ tuned in just intonation and modified by studio digital delay, and The Harp of New Albion was released in 1986 for piano tuned in just intonation.

Terry Riley held a long term collaboration with the Kronos Quartet and composed many string quartets for them. Cadenza on the Night Plain (1984) is the longest work on the album of the same title, which was the first studio album recording of a collaboration between de quartet and Riley. Another popular collaboration is Salome Dances for Peace (1989).

Currently Terry Riley is teaching and performing as an Indian raga vocalist and as a solo pianist. He regularly conducts raga singing seminars, and performs solo piano concerts of his works.

More information about Terry Riley can be found on his official website:
http://terryriley.net/

If you liked this article you may wish to read my series on minimalist music: American minimalist music, European music connected with minimalism and Precursors of minimalist music.

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La Monte Young, the first minimalist composer

2012-09-16T23:17:00.000+02:00

La Monte Thornton Young was born on October 1935 in the state of Idaho, and is generally recognized as the first minimalist composer. Along with Steve Reich, Terry Riley and Philip Glass, he was a major contributor to the emergence of American minimalist music, and is especially known for his development of drone music and his lengthy works conceived as "having no beginning and no end", existing before and after any particular performance.

In his childhood Young was fascinated by continuous environmental sounds, particularly those of motors, power plants and telephone poles. The dream chord (G, C, C sharp, D) on which some of his pieces are based is the chord he used to hear in the telephone poles.

During the 1950s La Monte Young was a jazz saxophone performer in Los Angeles, and played with Eric Dolphy, Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry, among others. He studied at Los Angeles City College and at the University of California. His music was initially influenced by Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern, Gregorian chant and Indian, Japanese and Indonesian music.

Trio for Strings was composed in 1958 and is based entirely on different spacings and transpositions of selected pitches (usually three at any one time) from the dream chord.

Vision (1959) is a work for eleven instrumentalists spread around a darkened auditorium, where eleven sounds are heard in 13 minutes. The duration and spacing of these sounds are calculated by the performance director with the aid of a random number book or a telephone directory.

In 1959 he attended the summer composition courses under Karlheinz Stockhausen at Darmstadt, where he discovered the indeterminate music of John Cage. In 1960 Young relocated to New York in order to study electronic music with Richard Maxfield. At Yoko Ono's studio he directed the first New York loft concert series, in 1960.

In 1960 his compositions included unusual instructions, and sometimes offered a challenge to the performer: to build a fire, to release a butterfly into the room, to push a piano through a wall. Composition 1960 #7 consists of a fifth (B and F#) and the instruction "To be held for a long time". Composition 1960 #10 consists of the instruction "Draw a straight line and follow it". Composition 1960 #15 consists of the sentence: "This piece is little whirlpools in the middle of the ocean".

With Poem for Chairs, Tables, Benches, etc. (1960) there was one performance that consisted of someone just moving a bench, and other performances with large groups of people moving chairs and tables over cement floors. Here the performance director uses random numbers again to determine the number and durations of movements and the length of the performance.

Arabic Numeral (Any Integer) to H.F. (1960), popularly known as X for Henry Flynt, requires the performer to repeat a loud, heavy sound every one to two seconds as uniformly and as regularly as possible for a long period of time. While scored for piano(s) or gong(s), in practice any sound has been used, typically a dissonant or unpitched one.

The twenty-nine pieces of Young's Compositions 1961 actually recall Composition 1960 #10, consisting of directions for 29 identical actions ("Draw a straight line and follow it") repeated every 13 days, partitioning the year 1961 into 28 equal sections.

La Monte Young - Compositions 1961 - Pat Allison from Bob Lockwood on Vimeo.

Death Chant (1961), written on the death of a friend's child, is a notated piece for male voices with optional carillon or bells, and shows a similarity with the additive processes of Philip Glass.

In 1962 La Monte Young wrote The Four Dreams of China, which included the piece The Second Dream of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer, based on just four pitches (F, Bb, B, C) played continuously. For this work Young formulated the concept of a Dream House, a permanent space with sound and light environments where musicians would live and create music twenty-four hours a day, and a work would be played continuously. Young has presented Dream House environments in New York, Paris, Berlin and Lyon through several years. Today a Dream House exists at the Mela Foundation on 275 Church Street, New York, and is open to the public.

Young formed the Theatre of Eternal Music in 1962 to realize the Dream House concept and other pieces. The group initially included Marian Zazeela, his wife since 1963. Terry Riley performed in this ensemble in 1964.

Studies in The Bowed Disc (1963) was scored for a steel gong made especially by the sculptor Robert Morris. The gong was played with double-bass bows, and Young and Zazeela introduced many improvisations over several years.

With the Theatre of Eternal Music, Young began his ongoing ensemble work The Tortoise, His Dreams and Journeys (1964-present), a large work for voices and various instruments, with improvisation within strict predetermined guidelines. This work was gradually enhanced through the years with new sections and subsections, often with long and imaginative titles, e.g. "The Obsidian Ocelot, The Sawmill, and The Blue Sawtooth High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer Refracting The Legend of The Dream of The Tortoise Traversing The 189/98 Lost Ancestral Lake Region Illuminating Quotients from The Black Tiger Tapestries of The Drone of The Holy Numbers" (October 1965).

His other major ongoing work is The Well-Tuned Piano (1964-73-81-present), which Young considers his masterpiece, and is strongly influenced by mathematical composition and Asian classical music. The world premiere of this work took place in Rome in 1974 with a specially tuned piano. Some performances have exceeded six hours in length.

Young's work with drones had led him to investigate intonation. Intervals are more precisely tuned when sustained for a long time, and just intonation intervals yield stronger and richer overtones than equally tempered intervals. Young contributed extensively to the study of just intonation and to the development of rational number based tuning systems.

His interests in Indian classical music led him to study under the Indian vocal master Pandit Pran Nath in 1970, along with Terry Riley and Marian Zazeela. They became his disciples, and this relationship continued until Pran Nath's death in June 1996. Young and Zazeela performed with Pandit Pran Nath in hundreds of concerts in India, Iran, Europe and the United States, and continue to perform with their group The Just Alap Raga Ensemble.

For the most up to date information about La Monte Young visit the Mela Foundation website.

If you liked this article you may wish to read my series on minimalist music: American minimalist music, European music connected with minimalism and Precursors of minimalist music.

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Stockhausen, pioneer of electronic music

2012-08-27T21:08:00.002+02:00

German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen was born on August 1928 and has been acknowledged as one of the great visionaries of 20th-century music. He is known for his pioneering work in electronic music and his use of spatiality and aleatory (controlled chance) in serial composition. His extensive work includes electronic music, solo instruments pieces, chamber music, choral and orchestral music and opera. In this article I will only mention a few of his most notable works.

Stockhausen started writing his series of nineteen Klavierstücke (Piano Pieces) in 1952 as a set of four small pieces, and composed the successive sets along many years. The length of these works vary from less than half a minute for Klavierstück III to around half an hour for Klavierstücke VI, X, XIII, and XIX. The pieces from XV onward are for the synthesizer or similar electronic instruments, which Stockhausen took for the natural successor to the piano.

Kontra-Punkte was first written in 1953 for ten instruments, and revised later several times. This work resolves contrasts among different instrumental timbres, as well as extremes of note values and dynamic levels, into a homogeneous ending texture. Heterogeneous timbres reduce gradually to the solo piano, widely fluctuating durations reduce to similar values, and wide-ranging dynamics reduce to a generally soft level.

Gesang der Jünglinge (Song of the Youths) is an electronic music work made in 1955–56 and is considered the first masterpiece of electronic music. It integrates electronic sounds with the human voice and shows the use of spatiality. It was originally in five-channel sound, and later reduced to just four channels, mixed to monaural and later to stereo for commercial recording release. As a continuation of the earlier work of Anton Webern, this piece serializes the pitch, duration, dynamics, and timbre of every electronic and vocal event.

Gruppen (Groups, 1955–57) is among the best-known compositions of Stockhausen. In this work a "group" is a number of notes with one or more common characteristics (dynamics, instrumental color, register, etc.), where "the properties of one group may only be understood by comparing them in degree of relationship with the other groups" and the importance of individual notes is relatively low. This composition introduced a new conception of musical time, with different rhythmic layers of different speeds in each one. Gruppen was written for three orchestras, each with its own conductor, spatially deployed to the left, front and right of the audience. The premiere took place on 1958, conducted by Stockhausen, Bruno Maderna, and Pierre Boulez.

Zyklus was composed in 1959 for one percussionist playing a circle of instruments around him, including marimba, vibraphone, cymbals, african drums and several others. The score is circular and the performer is free to start at any point and in any direction, left to right or right to left.

The composition Kontakte (Contacts, 1958–60) exists in two forms: for electronic sounds alone, and for electronic sounds, piano, and percussion. It was composed in four channels, with loudspeakers placed at the corners of a square surrounding the audience. With this work Stockhausen started to use the concept of moment form, a compositional approach also used in many later works, in which a narrative overall line is deliberately avoided, and the component moments are related by a nonlinear principle of proportions.

The cantata Momente (Moments) was written between 1962 and 1969, as a moment form with a rich mode of expression with voices and sounds: spoken and whispered language, crying, laughter, isolated syllables or phonemes, tongue clicks and screams. The choir members clap their hands, snap their fingers, stamp and shuffle their feet, and slap their thighs.

Momente consists of 30 sections called "moments" and designated by letters. There are eight M, seven K, eleven D, and four I moments. The M type stands for Melodie (melody), and scores mainly for the brass and solo soprano, with mixed pitches and noises and "random" rhythms. The K type stands for Klang (chord), and scores for percussion and men's voices, with a predominance of noises and periodic rhythms. The D type stands for Dauer (duration), and scores mainly for the electric organs and women's voices, with a predominance of pitches and syncopated rhythms. Finally the I type stands for indeterminate and is used to separate the other types of sections and to stand at the beginning and the end. Each of the 30 moments may show one "pure" type or include a slight influence from another type, or even a balance between several types.

Mikrophonie are two live-electronic works written in 1964 and 1965, where the microphone is used actively as a musical instrument.

Mikrophonie I for tam-tam, 2 microphones, 2 filters, and controllers, is an example of moment form, with 33 sections or moments, which can be ordered in a number of different ways, according to a connection scheme specifying the relationships between successive moments. Two percussionists play a large tam-tam while another pair of players uses hand-held microphones to amplify subtle details and noises, inflecting the sound through quick (and precisely scored) motions. The last two performers, seated in the audience, apply resonant bandpass filters to the microphone outputs and distribute the resulting sounds to a quadraphonic speaker system.

Mikrophonie II for choir, Hammond organ, and four ring modulators, also consists of 33 moments, though, unlike the earlier work, their order is fixed in the score, and the durations of these moments are made according to the Fibonacci series. The choir consists of two sections of sopranos and basses, who sit in an arc with their backs to the audience, facing the Hammond organ player. Each section is picked up by a microphone and the signal is fed into one side of a ring modulator, while the organ's output is fed into the other side.

Hymnen (1966-67) is an electronic and concrete work, with optional live performers, made of recordings of national anthems. It has four movements called "regions" by the composer. Region I is dedicated to Pierre Boulez. Region III is dedicated to John Cage and includes the American anthem and the Spanish anthem.

Stockhausen explored the harmonic series in Stimmung (1968), a serial and tonal composition for six vocalists and six microphones. This is another moment form, with 51 sections or moments, each one introducing and repeating a new overtone melody several times. A voice leads a new section and other voices gradually transform until they reach "identity" with the lead singer, and then the lead singer asks another singer to lead the next section. Stimmung was possibly influenced by Stockhausen's student La Monte Young and his drone music with The Theater of Eternal Music. Another precedent for Stimmung is the unfinished work Monophonie by Stockhausen himself, begun in 1960, with just one single note.

Aus den sieben Tagen (From the Seven Days, 1968) is a collection of 15 text compositions characterized as intuitive music, produced primarily from the intuition of the performer(s). The theater piece number 8, Oben und Unten (Above and Below), gives the most detailed instructions for three actors and four instrumentalists, while most of the other pieces are musical descriptions for an ensemble.

Mantra (1970) is scored for two ring-modulated pianos, percussion (cymbals and a wood block) and a short-wave radio producing Morse code or a magnetic tape recording of Morse code. The structure of the piece is a melody or "mantra" which is never varied, only expanded and contracted, both in duration and in pitch to different degrees. Near the end of the composition there is an extremely fast section that is a compression of the entire work into the smallest temporal space, with all of the expansions and transpositions of the mantra summarized as fast as possible and in four layers. The sounds of both pianos are ring modulated by a device specially built for this work to Stockhausen's specification.

Inori: Adorations for One or Two Soloists with Orchestra was written in 1973–74, and is performed by mimes, using a set of prayer gestures. In connection with Inori, Stockhausen also composed a Vortrag über HU (Lecture on HU), an hour-long musical analysis of the work, for performance by a singer as an introduction to Inori.

The popular composition Tierkreis (Zodiac, 1974–75) consists of twelve serial melodies originally written for music boxes, each melody representing one sign of the zodiac. A complete performance begins with the melody corresponding to the zodiac sign within which the day of the performance falls, and proceeds through the twelve melodies of the cycle, ending with a return to the starting melody.

Licht (Light), subtitled The Seven Days of the Week, is a cycle of seven operas composed between 1977 and 2003, with 29 hours of music. Each opera is named for a day of the week, but the cycle has neither a "beginning" nor an "ending", like the days of the week. The composer described the work as "there is neither end nor beginning to the week. It is an eternal spiral". The music is based on three counterpointed main melodies or "formulas", each associated with a central character.

Stockhausen died on December 2007 in Germany.

If you are interested in contemporary classical music, you may wish to read my series of articles on minimalist music: american minimalist music, european music connected with minimalism and precursors of minimalist music.

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Precursors of minimalist music

2012-08-02T21:04:00.001+02:00

The first musical works identified as minimalist were some early compositions written by the american composer La Monte Young on the late 1950s, and minimalist music is usually associated with the work of Young and the first works of Terry Riley, Steve Reich and Philip Glass. This is covered on the first article in this series, American minimalist music.

Several music composers from the late 19th and the 20th century made works that have been described as prototypes or precedents to minimalism, including some well-known composers such as Erik Satie, Arnold Schoenberg, Carl Orff and Anton Webern.

French composer and pianist Erik Satie is seen as a precursor to later artistic movements including minimalism. The Gymnopédies (1888) are three short and melancholic pieces for piano, regarded as an important precursor to modern ambient music. Following the same lines, Gnossiennes (1889–97) are six piano pieces, the first three with free time (without time signatures or bar lines) and slow tempos.

Satie's Vexations (1893) consists of a short theme in the bass whose four presentations are alternatively heard unaccompanied and played with chords above, and shows the following instructions: "In order to play the theme 840 times in succession, it would be advisable to prepare oneself beforehand, and in the deepest silence, by serious immobilities". From the 1960s onward, this text has mostly been interpreted as an instruction that the page of music should be played 840 times, and the first performance in this way took place in New York on 1963, with twelve pianists, among them John Cage. It lasted over 18 hours.

Arnold Schoenberg's inclusion of atonal elements allowed the development of slight changes in musical material, as was later seen in the additive processes in the music of Philip Glass. La Monte Young met Schoenberg during his studies and was strongly influenced by the twelve tone theory. Schoenberg's Five Pieces for Orchestra (1909) was originally scored for a very large orchestra and developed the concept of total chromaticism that Schoenberg had introduced earlier, focusing attention on timbral and textural elements rather than on harmonic and melodic motion.

Anton Webern was an Austrian composer and follower of Arnold Schoenberg and the twelve tone technique. His economy of materials and sparse textures led to a reduction of means common in minimalism.

Jakob van Domselaer was a Dutch composer who met the painter Piet Mondrian in Paris and applied some theories from Neo-Plasticism to music. Domselaer's piano suite Proeven van Stijlkunst (Experiments in Artistic Style, 1913–17) was an early precedent to minimalism.

American composer George Antheil wrote Ballet Mecanique (1924), a performance of mechanical instruments instead of human dancers, with player pianos, airplane propellers and electric bells. Soviet composer Alexander Mosolov wrote the orchestral work Iron Foundry (1927), also with mechanical and repetitive patterns that create a factory-like sound. However, while Antheil uses mechanical elements, Mosolov uses a live orchestra to create a similar soundscape.

Canadian composer and musicologist Colin McPhee was the first western composer to make an ethnomusicological study of Bali. His highly percussive composition Tabuh-Tabuhan for two pianos and orchestra (1936) combines balinese and traditional western musical elements, with repetitive pentatonic patterns.

Moondog was a blind american composer who lived as a street musician and poet many years in New York. His music of the 1940s and 50s is said to have been a strong influence on minimalism. Philip Glass has written that he and Steve Reich took Moondog's work "very seriously and understood and appreciated it".

Carl Orff was a German composer, best known for his cantata Carmina Burana (1937), but in his later theater works Antigone (1940–49) and Oedipus der Tyrann (1957–58), used repetitive patterns with multiple pianos, xylophones and a strong percussion section.

Yves Klein's Monotone Symphony (1949) is an orchestral 40-minute piece whose first movement is an unvarying 20-minute drone and the second and last movement a 20-minute silence, predating by several years both the drone music works of La Monte Young and the "silent" piece 4'33" (1952) of John Cage.

In 4'33", with a length of 273 seconds, Cage reduces the musical information to a minimum during the performance and declares the noises produced by the audience as music that cannot be previously defined, with no way of controlling which ambient sounds will appear. This is Cage's most famous and controversial composition, and the best-known of the musical works that consist mainly of silence.

German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen is known for his pioneering work in electronic music and his use of spatiality and aleatory (controlled chance) in serial composition. He wrote the series of nineteen Klavierstücke (Piano Pieces) along many years since 1952. Gesang der Jünglinge (Song of the Youths, 1955–56) serializes the pitch, duration, dynamics, and timbre of every electronic and vocal event, as a continuation from the earlier work of Webern.

French composer Pierre Boulez wrote Le marteau sans maître (The Hammer without a Master, 1953-1957), which combined influence from jazz, balinese gamelan, japanese music and african music with innovative techniques like pitch multiplication, an application of mathematical multiplication to music. Boulez experimented with the use of controlled chance, where the players are given detailed performance possibilities to choose from.

Olivier Messiaen’s music is often considered as minimalist because of its use of additive rhythms and its sense of repetition and timelessness, sometimes with extremely slow tempos. He used techniques of symmetries of time and pitch, with ancient greek and hindu rhythms, balinese and javanese gamelan, birdsong and japanese music.

This article is the third of a series starting with:

In future articles I will revisit some of the composers mentioned here and cover them one at a time in greater depth.

If you are interested in minimalist music, you may wish to follow this series by adding your email to my feed, and every time I post a new article, you will receive an email about the article. With one click you will be at the new article. You can unsubscribe at any time.

You may also bookmark this page and come back to check it whenever you can as I will add new links here each time I post a new article in the series.

European music connected with minimalism

2012-06-14T19:49:00.000+02:00

In the 1960s and 1970s, while american minimalist music originated in New York, some composers also approached the style in Europe, like Arvo Pärt and Gavin Bryars, and in the 1980s composers Michael Nyman and Wim Mertens were in many ways influenced by the minimalist and post-minimalist movement. However most of these european composers don't fall under a specific category.

Gavin Bryars wrote The Sinking of the Titanic in 1969 as an attempt to construct an aural picture of the disaster, with repetition and overlapping of hymns supposedly played by the ship's orchestra. After several performances during the next years, this piece was recorded and released in 1975 on Brian Eno's Obscure label.

In 1971 Bryars wrote the well known Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet. This work begins with a recorded loop of a London tramp singing a hymn of that name, and then gradually introduces harmonies with different instruments increasing in density: first strings, then guitar and bass, and then the entire chamber orchestra.

Bryars has composed prolifically for theatre, dance and for the concert hall, as well as some operas and chamber music for the Gavin Bryars Ensemble, which was founded in 1981 and performs internationally.

Estonian composer Arvo Pärt is considered a pioneer of holy minimalism. He invented his own compositional technique, which he called tintinnabuli, influenced by his mystical experiences with chant music. This style is rhythmically simple and has two types of voices: the tintinnabular voice which arpeggiates the tonic triad, and a second voice which moves diatonically in stepwise motion. Some early works to show this style were Für Alina (1976) and Spiegel Im Spiegel (1978).

Another example of tintinnabular style is the popular short canon titled Cantus in memory of Benjamin Britten (1977), for string orchestra and bell, an impressive elegy to the death of the english composer.

Fratres consists of a set of eight or nine chord sequences, separated by a recurring percussion motif. The first version for string quintet was written by Pärt in 1977, and further versions for different instruments were written in the next years. Another popular work is Tabula Rasa (1977), scored for two violins, string orchestra, and prepared piano.

In England, after having worked as a music critic since 1968, Michael Nyman explored the influence of John Cage on his book Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond (1974). In 1976 he founded his first ensemble, the Campiello Band, for a production of the italian dramatist Carlo Goldoni's Il Campiello. This group was later known as the Michael Nyman Band.

Nyman held a long term collaboration with filmmaker Peter Greenaway, writing a lot of popular film scores including The Draughtsman's Contract (1982), A Zed and Two Noughts (1986), Drowning by Numbers (1988), The Cook The Thief His Wife and Her Lover (1989) and Prospero's Books (1991). However he is best known by the public for his best seller score to Jane Campion's award-winning The Piano (1993).

Michael Nyman has written several operas, as the acclaimed The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat (1986), as well as concerts, chamber music and even ballet music.

Recently Nyman has composed music for the spanish flamenco singer Estrella Morente, in a collaboration for her next album, not released yet.

In the late 1970s Wim Mertens worked as a radio and television producer in Belgium, where he produced concerts by Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Terry Riley, Meredith Monk and others. He recorded with Gust De Meyer the album For Amusement Only (1980), an electronic experiment around the music of pinball machines.

Mertens' early works were released under the group name Soft Verdict, usually exploring musical ideas with overdubbing of single instruments or sounds. Some classics from this period are the songs Close Cover and Struggle for Pleasure.

Wim Mertens composed the music for Jan Fabre's play The Power of Theatrical Madness, which premiered in Venice, Italy, on 1984. This music was released as the double-disc album Maximizing the Audience (1985), which in some degree revisited earlier works for some sections of the album. Lir is a piece for two pianos that incorporates the 1982 composition Gentleman of Leisure, and the track Maximizing the Audience quotes from the 1983 piece Inergys.

Mertens' music was used in Peter Greenaway's film The Belly of an Architect (1987), which also featured music by New York based composer Glenn Branca. The film included the tracks Struggle For Pleasure, 4 Mains and Close Cover among others.

In 1986 Mertens released the album A Man of No Fortune, And with a Name to Come, dedicated to his father. With just piano and his countertenor voice, this might be one of his best works. After Virtue (1988) is another outstanding piano solo album with occasional voice.

Wim Mertens has composed music from piano solo to chamber music ensembles and symphonic orchestra, and his music has occasionally been used in some quite well-known commercials.

This article is the second of a series starting with:

Once I finish these I will revisit some of the composers and cover them one at a time in greater depth.

If you are interested in minimalist music, you may wish to follow this series by adding your email to my feed, and every time I post a new article, you will receive an email about the article. With one click you will be at the new article. You can unsubscribe at any time.

You may also bookmark this page and come back to check it whenever you can as I will add new links here each time I post a new article in the series.

American minimalist music

2012-05-31T20:24:00.000+02:00

Minimalist music originated in New York in the 1960s, with the works of american composers La Monte Young, Steve Reich, Terry Riley, Philip Glass, and later John Adams in the 1970s.

This music may include the use of simple, repetitive melodies with few sounds or pitches and features such as limited and gradual transformation, extremely low tempo, music moving in circles, layering of repeated melodic phrases, consonant harmony, additive processes, phase shifting or resulting patterns.

In 1962 La Monte Young wrote The Four Dreams of China, which included the piece The Second Dream of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer, based on just four pitches, played continuously. Young's works are often extreme in length, conceived as "having no beginning and no end".

La Monte Young formulated the concept of a Dream House, a permanent space with sound and light environments in which a work would be played continuously. Today a Dream House exists at the Mela Foundation on 275 Church Street, New York, and is open to the public.

Terry Riley collaborated with Young and even performed in his ensemble as a member. In 1964 Riley composed In C, a work scored for any group of instruments, consisting of 53 separate modules, each with a simple musical pattern in the key of C. One performer beats a steady C pulse on the piano to keep the tempo throughout the duration of the performance. The others, in any number and on any instrument, perform these musical modules following a few loose guidelines, with the different patterns interlocking in various ways as time goes on. Each member must play the 53 patterns in sync with the pulse and consecutively, but decides how often and how long he rests when he moves from one pattern to the next one. The performance ends after all the players have arrived at pattern 53.

Steve Reich worked with Riley and was involved with the premiere of In C. Reich experimented with tape loops to create phasing patterns, and later translated this technique from recorded tape to performance. He introduced the idea of phase shifting in 1967 with Piano Phase, a work for two pianos with only six pitches, repeating two melodic phrases, initially in unison, then at a slightly different speed to slowly shift out of phase with each other, until the two parts line up again, but one sixteenth note apart. The second player then resumes the previous tempo. This cycle of speeding up and then locking in continues throughout the piece several times.

Violin Phase, also written in 1967, was built on a similar way, but here Reich introduced what he called resulting patterns. The interlocking of several shifted parts, all playing the same pattern, creates new patterns, and the listener decides what he wants to hear each moment in this texture of sound, like a new experience with each listening.

In the 1970s Reich moved on from the phase shifting technique and began writing more elaborate pieces.

Philip Glass formed his first ensemble in New York in 1967, with Steve Reich and Jon Gibson as members, after having worked closely with Ravi Shankar, who was an important influence on his music and on his perception of rhythm as being entirely additive, unlike the divisive western perception. With additive structure principles, small parts are brought together to create larger parts with a different structure, and melodic figures are augmented by the addition of small differences.

Glass never liked the term minimalism to describe his music and preferred to speak of "music with repetitive structures", but he does accept the term minimalist for his early works up to the first 1970s. He made an extensive use of additive processes in his works Two Pages, Music in Fifths and Music in Contrary Motion. Later in the 1970s, Music in Twelve Parts (1971-1974) summed up most of Glass's techniques until then, in a four hour long music work, and then he started with a new conception of functional harmony in the series called Another Look at Harmony (1975–1977). Glass wrote that this series "was a way of combining harmonic progression with the rhythmic structure I had been developing, to produce a new overall structure". Consonant harmony means the use of intervals which in a tonal context would be considered to be stable. This was used in some sections of Glass's opera Einstein on the Beach.

John Adams made Shaker Loops in 1978, a work for a string septet, with a different pattern speed for each instrument, resulting in a shifting texture of melody and rhythm. In the first 1980s he wrote Harmonium (1980-1981), where an additive process converts a single, pulsing note into a tone cluster, then a chord, until a huge and energic sound stream. Then became Grand Pianola Music (1982), one of his most popular works from that period.

In the 1970s and 1980s minimalism became very popular worldwide and influenced other genres including progressive rock and experimental rock, with artists like Brian Eno, King Crimson, Mike Oldfield, Robert Fripp, Tangerine Dream, Kraftwerk, David Bowie and many others. Early minimalist music also evolved into less simple styles enriched with other influences. In Europe some composers like Michael Nyman, Wim Mertens, Gavin Bryars and Arvo Pärt approached the minimalist style but added their own distinctive character, gaining huge popularity.

This article is the first of a series starting with:

Moondog: the sound of the streets

2012-05-23T22:35:00.000+02:00

Moondog was an american composer born on 1916 in Marysville, Kansas. At the age of 16 he lost his sight in an accident with a dynamite cap.

In 1943 he moved to New York, where he decided to live as a street musician and poet, and this environment inspired most of his music, including some jazz influences from the streets, where he met Benny Goodman and Charlie Parker. He used to stay on a corner in Manhattan, later to be known as Moondog corner, wearing home made clothes and a viking helmet, and playing keyboards and some home made drums. His song Bird's Lament is a tribute to Charlie Parker.

In 1974 he went to Germany where he met Ilona Sommer, a young student who hosted him, became his manager and helped him transfer his works from Braille to sheet music.

In 1989 he was invited by Philip Glass to conduct the Brooklyn Philharmonic Chamber Orchestra. Philip Glass has written that he and Steve Reich took Moondog's work "very seriously and understood and appreciated it".

Moondog died in Germany in 1999.

More info on Moondog:

http://www.moondogscorner.de
http://www.stefanlakatos.de

Angels We Have Heard on High

2011-12-17T04:14:00.000+01:00

Here is my particular cover of a traditional Christmas carol, Angels We Have Heard on High. This song will be available as a free download on ReverbNation, but only for a few days.

Free sheet music can be found here.

What do you think of this song?. Leave your comments and questions in the box below.

Unearthed - A Guide To New Music Vol. 1

2011-05-10T18:15:00.050+02:00

Unearthed - A Guide To New Music Vol. 1 is a promotional CD featuring my song Warming Oceans and other great independent music.

The Unearthed Program is scheduled for Thursday, May 12th from 7:30pm - 10:30pm Eastern, with Nick Katona from Melodic Revolution Records. Hosted by onlinewithandrea on Blog Talk Radio.

Listen live or listen to the archive via the same link: http://www.blogtalkradio.com/onlinewithandrea/2011/05/12/unearthed-a-guide-to-new-music-vol-1

Listen to internet radio with onlinewithandrea on Blog Talk Radio

My Bandcamp site and a free download

2011-05-09T22:08:00.000+02:00

Bandcamp is one of the best places I know to host music and offer quick and reliable streaming and downloading. The music is available in any audio format you may desire, including lossless FLAC.

I have put the short version of Rainy as a free download. Pick your audio format and get the track for free:

<p>&amp;lt;a href="http://jaloes.bandcamp.com/track/rainy-short-version"&amp;gt;Rainy (short version) by Jaloes&amp;lt;/a&amp;gt;</p>

And the digital album is available with a lot of bonus material at the price you wish. You name the price to get the nine tracks from the album, plus five bonus tracks of alternate mixes and artwork files:

jaloes.bandcamp.com

<p>&amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;a href="http://jaloes.bandcamp.com/album/weather"&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;Weather by Jaloes&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/a&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;gt;</p>

Beyond the Dawn show, May 2nd

2011-04-30T00:53:00.000+02:00

Did you miss last April 4^thBeyond the Dawn radio show?. You may find it at www.tdawn.com under podcasts, or just here:

http://www.tdawn.com/tdawn-podcasts/?p=episode&name=2011-04-21_04-04-2011-beyond_the_dawn_show.mp3

My music will be again for the May 2^nd show at 7PM EST on the Beyond the Dawn radio show. Click on the image at that time to tune in and catch the live feed, or click later for the replay:

Beyond the Dawn

2011-04-01T20:24:00.000+02:00

My music will be on the next Beyond the Dawn radio show, hosted by T Dawn. The show is April 4^th at 7 PM EST, next monday. Don't miss it.

The show will go into instant replay as soon as it starts, in case you miss the live feed. You may also find all previous shows at www.tdawn.com under podcasts.

Pongid and other radio airplay

2011-01-08T23:55:00.008+01:00

Pongid is an indie music site and online radio station that streams via Live365 and in Second Life:

Some other sites where I know my music is being played are ruKus radio, Altsounds and the sites mentioned in this post about radio airplay.

Arenacast: Featured Artist interview: Jaloes (E47)

2010-12-07T15:30:00.003+01:00

Read the interview on the ArenaCast blog:

Arenacast: Featured Artist interview: Jaloes (E47): "About: Jaloes 'Jaloes is a spanish composer of instrumental minimalist music. His songs, made with piano and computers, are described as ..."

Listen to the ArenaCast Episode 47 Playlist, with the track Stormy:

Arenacast: ArenaCast Episode 47 Playlist Cheers from Sunny S...: "Hi guys! We have an exciting announcement for you regarding our podcast! We decided to try something new and special this week, so this epis..."

Listen to the podcast on iTunes:

http://itunes.apple.com/podcast/arenacast-this-weeks-hottest/id359891834

View the album Weather on iTunes:

http://itunes.apple.com/album/weather/id312451249

New video: Warming Oceans

2010-10-12T19:54:00.005+02:00

This is the video for my song Warming Oceans. All pictures come from morgueFile, under the morgueFile Free License, and from the Earth From Space NASA database of images, under public domain. The music is written by myself, played with an M-Audio keyboard and mixed with Ableton Live.

Hope you enjoy it.

New song: Warming Oceans

2010-09-18T01:48:00.007+02:00

Warming Oceans is my latest piano song. This is a protest against ocean temperatures that may influence the weather and climate of the whole planet. This song is part of my next music project, a solo piano album. Hope you enjoy it. Share your comments below!.

New versions of Rainy and Foggy

2010-07-28T18:14:00.005+02:00

I am glad to announce new versions of the songs Rainy and Foggy, with the instrumentation, mixing, production and mastering by str.productions (broadjam URL here).

Rainy (2010) is a new version for three pianos, with a Yamaha grand for the main track and a Steinberg grand for the two other tracks. The new mastering gives the impression that there are three pianos playing in the same room, with the main piano in front of the listener and the other two pianos either side at the back.

Foggy has two new mixes available. One of them is a new version with the same instruments but with a new piano sound, and the other is a new version with a lower tempo and a new strings section.

David Jones is a producer/engineer working from his own studio in the UK. He is helping many indie artists getting affordable professional production and mastering.

Here is a brief description of how str.productions set up one of these songs, as described by David:

I have been given the midi tracks from Jaloes and from these I have put the tracks on to logic pro 8 digital audio workstation. I use pro-logic as to me the sound is clearer than pro-tools for this type of genre but I will vary the two systems depending on how much production each mix requires. I have then used from the sound library in logic both the Steinway and Yamaha grand pianos to give the midi the best sound which the songs deserve. I will then add various effects including an aux channel with one of the presets in the logic space designer that will complement the overall sound and reverb I am looking for. I will only send a small percentage of the main channels to the aux channel as I do not want the room reverb to dominate the mix. By sending all the channels to the same room reverb this gives the impression that all the instruments are in the same room but in different places, just like in a real sound room.

I then eq the tracks differently to allow each instrument their own sound space in the mix so they can be heard. I do not use a great deal of compression as on pianos I like to leave their natural ambiance come though. I have then pushed one piano to the left of the mix and one piano to the right. I have left the third piano in the centre but I have made the midi track in to two tracks with the same piano on but widened one piano and narrowed the other and again have eq`d the same piano differently to give different frequency responses to separate the two tracks.

The mix has then been mastered on logic using waves diamond and other custom mastering software I have developed.

David Jones, Str.productions

Some changes to the blog

2010-06-12T23:27:00.004+02:00

As you may have noticed, I have made some changes to the blog design, using one of the new Blogger templates. After some time without activity here, I have decided to change the look of the site and restart writing with some new contents.

I will begin a new series of articles about several kinds of music that I like, including a series on minimalist music. I will also be writing about some new independent musicians that I think are worth to discover and listen.

Caroline Moore is one of these independent musicians, that you may find on my Featured Website section on the sidebar these days. She is a freelance film and media composer and has music featured in films, documentaries and commercials. Check out her music:

Jaloes official website and a free download

2010-03-06T10:15:00.006+01:00

My new website is up and running since last week:

http://www.jaloes.com
http://jaloes.com

I have already received some feedback about the design and the site content. Thank you for your help!. I have considered many of the comments received, and I have just made some new changes to the site. To give back thanks for it, I will send a free download of my song Foggy to all the people who have sent me any kind of feedback about the site or the music. Those who have already sent comments will get the free download in a few days.

I have tried to make a clean and simple design for the site, with a minimalist touch according to the music style.

I will still be waiting for your comments about the website and the music. Please follow the Contact link on the website and fill in the form with your comments, or just click here to submit your feedback. I will give away my song Foggy for free to all who send me comments until March 31. Please be honest and tell me what you really think. I appreciate your help.

Featured website section

2010-02-19T00:58:00.004+01:00

While I'm still working to finish my new website which will be available soon, I thought I'd put a new Featured website section in the sidebar, to share music related sites that I find interesting to visit. It will only contain one link to a website for a few days or until I find another interesting link to share.

My first suggestion is Wim Mertens official website. Wim Mertens is the belgian composer of many minimalist works and you should check him out if you don't know him yet.

CD Baby will donate toward Haitian earthquake relief

2010-01-23T08:36:00.004+01:00

Starting on Monday, January 25th and continuing for two weeks, CD Baby will donate $1 from every CD sale through their website, and $1 from every download sale over $8.99 on their site, to the American Red Cross and to Mercy Corps, a Portland-based relief organization with a large presence in Haiti.

By buying any music on CD Baby from January 25th, you can help raise funds towards those affected by the disaster.

My music on 7digital

2010-01-03T18:06:00.004+01:00

Radio airplay

2009-12-17T23:27:00.004+01:00

Here are some online radio sites where my music is being played:

Jango

The Songwriter's Network

Breakaway

IMRADIO