Minimal Fanfare, Please

Classical music can never get enough of birthdays and anniversaries. Concert halls and record companies everywhere are busily milking Schubert’s 200th birthday and the 100th anniversary of Brahms’ death, both of which occur this season. New York, San Francisco, London and Vienna know it is a big California year, what with their aggressive celebrations of Henry Cowell’s 100th and Lou Harrison’s 80th birthdays. This is also a milestone year for opera, which began as an experiment in Florence 400 years ago.

But there is an additional set of birthdays this season which have not yet been getting quite the attention they deserve. Partly that may be because Steve Reich (who was 60 in October), Philip Glass (whose 60th birthday occurred on Jan. 31) and John Adams (who reached 50 on Feb. 15)--the three dominant voices of Minimalism--are America’s three most famous living composers, and we easily take them for granted.

But mainly it’s because the party is just getting started.

Although there have been some local Reich concerts this season, and Glass passed through town with a piano recital, the big events are still to come. This Friday, Adams will be on hand as guest conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic to lead the first local performance of his most celebrated recent work, the Violin Concerto, with Gidon Kremer as soloist. And the following week, Reich arrives in Orange County to present the West Coast premiere of his largest-scale work, “The Cave,” a modern-day biblical epic for musicians and video, at the Irvine Barclay Theatre, beginning on May 15. In October, UCLA will present Glass’ latest music theater work, “Les Enfants Terribles,” a collaboration with the choreographer Susan Marshall based on the Jean Cocteau film. In addition, Nonesuch will release 10-CD retrospective box sets for each birthday boy, beginning with Reich later this month.

It’s hard not to see this confluence of birthdays as a coming-of-age for Minimalism. However much the more conventional side of the musical establishment may still hate it, Minimalism now takes its place with the other major stylistic movements of the century--the Serialism, or 12-tone music, of Schoenberg and his disciples; the neo-Classicism of Stravinsky; the Impressionism of Debussy, or the Boulez-led postwar avant-garde.

*

Minimalism is typically considered a ‘60s reaction against the forbidding 12-tone music promulgated in Europe and pursued by specialist composers at American universities. Twelve-tone music’s tightly layered complexities had little to offer a generation that grew up on popular culture and social activism. Simple harmonies and strung-out repetitions were far more relevant.

Early on, Minimal music was equated with the Minimalist movement in the visual arts, in which painting and sculpture were reduced to elemental color and basic shapes. But, in fact, it’s always been different, serving more as a receptacle that could be filled with music of just about any kind, from high culture to popular, from world music to Mozart. Reich, for instance, poured into his Minimalist patterns techniques he learned studying drumming in Ghana and the gamelan orchestra in Indonesia. And he is still questing and pouring to this day. “The Cave” generates pitch and rhythmic patterns from documentary recordings of Jews and Moslems in America and the Middle East responding to questions about the Bible.

Similar musical accommodation has also allowed Glass--and Terry Riley (Minimalism’s senior figure, having turned 60 two years ago)--to employ rhythmic and melodic procedures inspired by Indian raga. Adams has been able to remain closer to home demonstrating that even the style of Schoenberg and Sibelius can be compatible with Minimalist thinking. The British composer Michael Nyman, who is credited with applying the art term of Minimalism to music and making it stick (others had come up with much worse, such as the pejorative No Nothing Nihilism), made pieces out of Purcell and Mozart. The Dutch composer Louis Andriessen let his interest in Stravinsky and black American popular music guide his particularly hard-edged variety of Minimalism.

The reason for this accommodation lies in the fact that Minimalism didn’t originate purely as an act of rebellion (that came later). It has always also encompassed synthesis.

Its first popular piece was Terry Riley’s “In C,” which had its premiere at the San Francisco Tape Center in 1964, and seemed a radical departure from all music that had come before it. But “In C,” with its hypnotic pulse and its stringing out of small melodic cells around one tonality, was really the culmination of an exploration that Riley had begun with his friend La Monte Young some years earlier--not a clean break with tradition.

In fact, the idea for Minimalism was planted here in our backyard. It was in Los Angeles in the mid-’50s when Young learned of Webern’s reductive Serialism from Leonard Stein, the pianist and Schoenberg authority, at Los Angeles City College. It was around the same time he discovered Gagaku--the slow, static traditional court music of Japan--across town at the UCLA ethnomusicology department.

Young combined these two notions in a Trio for Strings that he wrote as a graduate student at UC Berkeley in 1958, slowing Webern down to Gagaku lengths. An impressed fellow student, Riley, described the Trio as “like being on a space-station waiting for lunch.”

Riley took the idea two steps further with “In C,” by bringing in tonality and a pulse, while still keeping the music static.

As it happened, Reich was a percussionist in that first performance of “In C,” and he then carried the technique further by introducing complicated “phase” ideas. Glass made his initial experiments with repeated music around the same time but somewhat independently. He had witnessed Young’s more conceptual music (one such work asks a pianist to feed hay to a piano until the instrument is sated), but got his inspiration for simplifying harmony and emphasizing rhythmic pattern through exposure to Ravi Shankar.

The history of Minimalism quickly become intricate and combative. Glass, Reich and Young all have made competing claims about who did what when (Riley has steered clear of the fray). But the more interesting history has been of individuals rather than of the group. The situation is not unlike that of the 18th century, when composers rebelled against the elaborate complexity of the high Baroque and came up with what ultimately became the Classical style. They wanted more clearly articulated structure, and the initial works by composers we’ve mostly forgotten have a formulaic sameness. Yet it was out of this new simplicity that Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven developed.

Reich and Glass have become Minimalism’s Haydn and Mozart. This comparison is not meant to equate personalities or intentions or the music, but rather to demonstrate the parallel of how individuality can arise from a new, formulaic style. For Reich, Minimalism allowed him to mature as a percussionist with a highly developed sense of music as intricate pattern. Even in a theatrical excursion, such as “The Cave,” Reich does not write music to convey the meaning of words but instead creates music directly out of the spoken word, from the rhythm and accents of the speaker.

Glass--like Mozart, a man of the theater--has used Minimalism in a very different way, especially in his large body of music for the stage. In his operas and film scores, he shares the space with words and the stage or screen. His music makes its strong statements almost but not quite independently of the word or image, realizing that the mind is capable of making distinctions, and creating a new sense of freedom and openness in music theater.

It would be pushing the analogy too hard to next present Adams as the Beethoven of the birthday trio, but at least symbolically he is. He represents, as Beethoven did to Mozart and Haydn, the next generation. Less the rebel compared to Glass or Reich, Adams has never considered himself a card-carrying Minimalist, and most listeners will be hard pressed to hear much in the way of repetition in his Violin Concerto until the last movement.

Still, Minimalism offered Adams the example of how to be himself. In the academic music he studied at Harvard in the late ‘60s, there is simply no way he could incorporate the various kinds of music he loves--American popular music, fin de siecle Expressionism, world music--into a coherent style without the techniques of Minimalism.

That is the example, furthermore, that keeps Minimalism fresh still. The next generation, now in its 30s and sometimes called Post-Minimalist or Totalist, has had no need to rebel against its teachers. These composers have been able to incorporate Minimalism’s beat with rock, world music and anything and everything else at hand to create a new music that abounds in a raw energy that even the rebellious early Minimalists couldn’t have imagined.

Moreover, Minimalism has become second nature to even younger musicians. Last Sunday, at a birthday retrospective for Adams in Berkeley, a string orchestra composed of young children from the local Crowden School performed the first part of the composer’s early, tightly Minimalist “Shaker Loops,” a work that Adams told the audience once stumped the Boston Symphony. These youngsters, under a delightfully competent 15-year-old conductor, Morgan Staples, were accurate and lively.

And there lies the real legacy of the aging Minimalists. As long as these kids keep bopping along to their parents’ music, its future is assured.

*

* John Adams conducts the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave. Friday and Saturday, 8 p.m.; Sunday, 2:30 p.m. $8-$60. (213) 365-3500.

*

* “The Cave,” Irvine Barclay Theatre, 4242 Campus Drive, Irvine. May 15-17, 8 p.m.; May 18, 2:30 and 7:30 p.m. $30-$35. (714) 854-4646.