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minimalist jukebox part IV, minimalism is dead!

minimalism is dead! long live minimalism!

i couldn’t help thinking this during the final minimalist jukebox festival concert featuring the music of john adams and philip glass.

the evening started off on a high note with a very convincing concert reduction of glass’s opera akhnaten. the piece represented high minimalism at its best scored for a reduced pit orchestra without violins.

like steve reich’s three movements and variations for winds strings and keyboards, john adams harmonielehre was one of the first postmodern/minimalist works that i enjoyed. unfortunately the implied direction that was exciting to me in 1986 has not been realized in his recent works. i had a curious reaction when i first heard that john adams had been chosen to lead the first ever minimalist festival/retrospective.

tonight i figured out why

its become clear to me that although adams is today’s most interesting orchestrator, his musical aesthetics have very little center(for me). his compositional processes reminds me of my friends who spend more time collecting their baseball cards and analyzing statistics than watching the game. his orchestrations are unique and interesting, but the content and elements of his compositions seem to be interchangeable.

for example; harmonielehre uses harmonic and melodic elements from glass, hanson, barber, mahler, debussy and reich. he is not a plagarist at all, but created orchestrations that in many ways surpass the original source material. for me this is what listening/studying an adams piece has become; his secret mutant power is the ability to create the magic through orchestration within the limitations of the orchestra. he colors inside the lines, and is less interesting as he walks further down this path.

it was a big conceit for adams to program this festival and the final concert the way he did. minimalism is dead, he helped kill it 20 years ago by his successfully assimilating just enough elements of glass, reich, and riley’s music to keep the barbarians at the gates. he is a marketers dream by giving the audience just enough of the ars nova (new) with lots of the ars antiga (old) to keep the bluehairs in the seats.

the main result of this festival (unwittingly touched upon in deborah borda’s opening remarks in saturday’s symposium) took us from the early days of minimalism to its consumption and absorption into the status quo of the concert hall.

to me minimalism was never about the orchestra or concert hall

to me the real revolution was just as much about their ensembles (glass, reich, riley, nyman) as the music they wrote.

minimalism was about creating new delivery systems for the musicians and audience (ensembles and venues)

ending the festival with harmonielehre was like the killer coming back to the crime scene to check on the corpse.

no problems john, still dead…

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Related posts:

1. minimalist jukebox, part I
2. minimalist jukebox part III, terry riley
3. minimalist jukebox part II, Glenn Branca
4. minimalist/postmodern listening list
5. new york, part 2

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 2nd, 2006 at 3:34 am. It is filed under Uncategorized and tagged with john adams, performance, philip glass, review. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.