Minimalist Music Theatre: WNYC New Sounds Podcast (2008)
Minimalist Music Theatre (originally aired May 20, 2008)
“Hear some music theatre pieces on this New Sounds show. Listen to Philip Glass’s recent release “Waiting for the Barbarians,” adapted from the novel by the South African writer and Nobel Prize Winner John Coetzee. Also, there’s music by Paul Bailey – his post-minimalist music theatre piece “Retrace Our Steps.” He describes it as a four act vocal/instrumental spectacle based on texts by Gertrude Stein, Guy Debord and Jenny Bitner. The “alt-classical garage band” Paul Bailey Ensemble performs the work. And more.”
"Paul Bailey Ensemble at home in Fullerton" OC Register-Tim Mangan (2007)
thanks again to all of you who made our “home” show at csuf on tuesday night. it turned out to be a great evening; nice crowd, saw some old friends and made a few new ones. i’m kinda short on words today and humbled by tim mangan’s very thoughtful review of us in the oc register.
http://www.ocregister.com/entertainment/music-bailey-composer-1852433-three-one
“On the FAQ page of the Paul Bailey Ensemble’s Web site (paulbaileyensemble.org) the group is dubbed an “alternative-classical garage band.” One wonders what that is until one hears it and wonders no longer. It’s a good description. This is a flexibly sized chamber ensemble, locally based, made up of friends and colleagues who have mostly studied at Cal State Fullerton. Tuesday night’s incarnation of the group, when it performed at Meng Concert Hall on campus, included an electric guitar, electric bass, keyboards, clarinet and trombone (the last played by the composer himself, Paul Bailey). It makes a funky, gritty sound, but it also capable of a warm euphony.
I would say that Bailey’s music is minimalist, with the proviso that the composer himself, like so many minimalists, doesn’t like that label. His favorite composers, though, include the minimalists Michael Nyman, Glass, Reich and Riley, as well as Satie, Monteverdi, Bach and Palestrina. His own music combines a minimalist’s interest in repetition, motion and simple harmony with Baroque bass lines. In fact, the passacaglia, a set of variations on a repeated melodic bass line, popular with Baroque composers, is Bailey’s preferred metier.
This style was perhaps most explicit in the opening number, “Cheap Admiration,” written in 2005 and based on a work by the 17th century composer Johann Pezel. A fuzz guitar got a little rhythmic riff going, a Baroque progression with a syncopated groove, and the other instruments joined in, layering and interweaving lines, spinning, turning and floating.
Bailey’s music doesn’t put on airs. It’s easy to listen to and to understand the first time. The composer seems to take joy in the simple motion of music, in plain harmonies and melodic scraps as ordinary as do re mi. The fascination comes from hearing it all spin around and work itself out, like a load of mixed laundry in a dryer, or flames in a fireplace.
His music does express something, though. His “Fearless Leader” had a Glassian hypnotic melancholy, a growing in tension, then release. “Eye for Optical Theory,” based on a Nyman theme, scampered along quickly and jazzily and was decorated with soulful trombone scoops.
“Life’s Too Short,” the second of an eventual trilogy, added three vocalists, who talked and keened a dryly witty, existential text, made more so by both its matter-of-fact repetition, lyrical limning and uneven meter. The trilogy’s finale will be “Life’s Too Long.”
The New York-based trio Real Quiet (cello, piano, percussion) were guests on the program and joined the PBE for Bailey’s “Principal of Sufficient Irritation,” a piece that features a short ostinato riff tossed all around like a hot potato. The work morphs and builds (at one point finding itself in a quasi Bo Diddley groove) and is one of the composer’s most ambitious and engrossing.
On its own Real Quiet added three pieces, by Annie Gosfield, Phil Kline and Marc Mellits. Somehow, I found these pieces, accomplished and polished though they were, less satisfying, perhaps because they took themselves so seriously. Gosfield’s “Wild Pitch” encompassed aggressive allegros, lonely dreams and quarter-tone decoration. Kline’s “The Last Buffalo,” a three-movement homage to Hunter Thompson, juxtaposed long-arched cello solos with a motoric central movement in a heavy tread. The three of the four movements performed of Mellits’ “Tight Sweater” seemed mere etudes in hopping and grinding minimalism.
But then came the grand finale, Frederic Rzewski’s 1969 “Les Moutons de Panurge,” which requires a touch of explanation. Both ensembles joined in for this ebullient gambit, written for “any number of musicians.” “Panurge” consists of a single melodic line of 65 notes which the players are instructed to perform in additive fashion, first 1, then 1-2, then 1-2-3, and so on until the end. They begin together but invariably get off, the composer instructing, “if you get lost, stay lost.” Also, the tempo continuously accelerates. The result is a kind of mad “Row, row, row your boat,” of canons gone wild and off track, of “Bolero” on steroids.
It’s not mayhem, though, the instructions providing for the relentless rewinding of the melody with a single note added to it each time; the listener is in a space where the music dances around him like so many bouncing atoms. To my knowledge, there’s not another piece quite like “Panurge” and these musicians had rollicking good fun with it. So did we.”
"Let's Burn that Puppy Down" Rex Reason/OC Weekly (2005)
OC Weekly January 13, 2005 By Rex Reason
“Paul Bailey saw a lot of space between pop art and high art and decided to fill it, rather than just rant about it over fish tacos and soda—although he does a pretty good job at that, too. The jovial, articulate composer/trombonist/bandleader is just as likely to talk about Wes Anderson or Love & Rockets comics as elements of the baroque chamber music his nine-piece ensemble—two violins, cello, vibraphone, synthesizer, electric guitar, bass guitar, clarinet and trombone, augmented by vocalists as necessary—draws on. It’s classical instrumentation and architecture, but the amplified guitars are front and center, enough to scare off the furs-and-tiara set. And that’s fine for Bailey, who’s proud of a distinctly un-academic—though definitely not uninformed—take on classical composition, something between Weezer and Wagner. With many of his musicians coming from Cal State Fullerton, his ensemble is familiar with gigs at local art galleries, churches and other impromptu performance spaces; this month, however, Bailey will debut Retrace Our Steps , a work based on writings by Gertrude Stein, Guy Debord and Jenny Bitner that was commissioned by the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts in what Bailey describes as a happy accident.
OC Weekly : So you left Kansas to become a professional musician in California, and you ended up . . . at Disney. How was that?
Paul Bailey: It’s Disney. Anything anyone else has said? It’s true. I was trained to be a musician, I practiced very hard, and I got there, and I basically had to make farting noises on my trombone and play show tunes. At Disney, you don’t have a choice. We played the same 12 songs for four years.
Is that what drove you to become a teacher?
Being a teacher is the only way I can be a composer and a musician and not have my soul taken out of me. Being paid to play trombone or being paid to write music, I have to worry about who’s going to pay me next. Now, in a sense, I have no filter. I can write whatever I want. It can be shitty, but at least it’s what I want.
So explain why you want to do what you do.
I’m 36. Are people my age supposed to listen to pop music their whole lives? The whole music industry is set up to please a 17-year-old kid. I don’t mind listening to that stuff, but am I supposed to live my life through the eyes of a 17-year-old?
But you told me earlier how much you like Weezer.
I love Weezer. They’re one of my favorite bands, but it would be false of me to write pop songs or rock songs. Is rock and pop music the only way you can express yourself in today’s culture? If I had drums, we’d be a rock band. Right now, it’s very deliberate—I’m not a rock band, although I use rock instruments
So is this something closer to an orchestra?
Fuck the orchestra. Let’s burn that puppy down and start over. The orchestra’s proper place is the museum. The idea you’re getting some cultural experience that’s going to make your life better and it’s going to expand your mind is total bullshit.
Then how do you reconcile the two forms?
There’s the technical aspect where I can say, academically, we’re not modernist music. We believe in stuff that has the same chords as Weezer, the Beatles or Radiohead. I’m choosing to deal with music I grew up with and that interests me. But I don’t want to make people go through all these things to decide whether they like it or not. In my latest work (Retrace Our Steps), there might be a message, but the actual music takes very little to understand. You don’t need to listen to Michael Nyman or Steve Reich or Phillip Glass to listen to my music—although it’s based on them. You don’t need to understand hundreds of years of music history in your mind to listen to stuff I write.”
