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Entry: A Worthwhile Book Link: http://www.takimag.com/blogs/article/a_worthwhile_book#15104 Post contents: To follow Mr. Piatak’s wise suggestion: <i>But what does one do when the communal context that nurtured earlier composition, written for the ages, no longer exists?</i> Answer: Find a new communal context, go back to a distant earlier one, or like Aeneas, establish a new one. All four of the composers that I mentioned in my first post are working in a cultural context – and have found a new one. Let’s start with Reich and list the clichés: 1. Cliché #1 “Steve Reich's music sounds like it’s stuck in the groove.” (With that comparison I may have lost some of you youngsters there.) Bruckner is a formidable contrapuntalist. Wagner’s prelude to <i>Die Meistersänger</i> may be the best piece of counterpoint since the Baroque. Yet with these composers, Beethoven’s <i> Grosser Fuge</i>, Mozart’s <i> Jupiter</i> Symphony (last mvt), and Brahm’s 4th (last mvt), one has the feeling that it’s all somehow been done before, by Bach. Reich instead pole vaults over the entire history of Western music and comes down to the beginning of couterpoint, to Pérotin, a precursor whom Reich acknowledges. He goes back to Pérotin, and then he goes in a new direction. Do this experiment. Listen to the Gregorian chant <i>viderunt omnes</i>. Then hear Pérotin’s <i>viderunt omnes</i>, the first piece of four part music in Western history. Then take a work of Reich’s. I recommend his <i>Octet</i> (a bit more approachable than his <i>Music for Eighteen Musicians</i>). You will immediately hear the debt to Pérotin. You will also hear a piece of genius that expands the very idea of music – music without melody (except maybe the entry of the flute); music with rhythm so complex that you can’t tap your foot to it, yet you hear that it’s very much rhythm; – and music (for the first time since Pérotin) that’s fast and slow <i>at the same time!</i> 2. Cliché #2 “Reich uses for his ‘cultural context’ banal pop mass music.” Stick with the <i>Octet</i>. Reich <i>builds</i> upon pop music. Reich (and Adams) indeed starts out with the music of our time – superficial and with a thumping moronic beat – only to take it to places pop musicians and Mass Man never considered. And thus his music is redemptive. Another tired cliché: “You have to meet people where they are”. And where they are (pop) is, more often than not, the wrong place to be. Most 20 C composers just scorned pop. Reich meet us where we are, and he (and Adams) take us to a new world, both formally and thematically. First formally. Pop music obliges neither concentration nor the following of a long development. Reich’s (and Adams’) music demands the most intense concentration. Using the Beethovenian concept of development in free variations, Reich, by slow, gradual shifting and subtle changes of a pattern that never stays the same, with music in and out of phase, takes us to a place un-imagined. When you listen to Reich’s <i>Octet</i>, when finished, go back and listen to the first few measures of the beginning. You will see that, almost hypnotically, you were taken somewhere. 3. Cliché #3 “Reich’s music is more soothing than compelling.” Again, the <i>Octet </i>, now thematically. I imagine this music about a superficial modern man, starting out sitting in McDonald's with his Big Mac and fries, who has five epiphanies: 1. He suddenly discovers that he has a soul; 2. he discovers that soul is deep; 3. he discovers that that soul is empty, and 4. he yearns for something. Indeed, listening to the string parts of the <i>Octet </i>, I have never heard such a subtle yet profound feeling of yearning since <i>Tristan</i> or Schumann’s <i>Fantasy in C<i> – but unlike those works the <i>Octet’s</i> yearning isn’t romantic but spiritual Our modern lives are so full of clutter, so lacking of the sublime, that this yearning comes upon us softly, through a process of slow excavation. 5. At the end of the <i>Octet</i>, our subject has a final epiphany, he finds “something” that gives joy. Adams explores further what that "something" is. I’m told Reich redid the <i>Octet</i> and named it <i>Eight Lines</i>. I haven’t heard this version. It’s easy to dismiss a composer by only hearing the surface. Louis Couperin’s harpsichord suites sound overly ornamental. Only by careful and intensely does one discover his deep structure. Adams and Reich sound overly “casual”, unbuttoned, Reich more the urban “cool”, Adams the rustic or the boy at the beach. But listen carefully. Time permitting, I'll write about Adams, Messiaen, and Bruckner – prayerfully before this article becomes stale. Sent at: 2008 11 21