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Postmodern Music at BAM: Appealing, Monotonous, and Unpredictable
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13932 |
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THE ARTS
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2 / 1988 |
1,962 Words |
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Tom Pniewski
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The great musical centerpiece of the 1987 Next Wave Festival was John Adams' highly acclaimed opera Nixon in China, directed by wunderkind Peter Sellars. But a number of smaller production deserved equal attention, and lead to some speculation about what is positive and unique about Postmodern American music.
A quartet of names dominated the musical offerings, some old and some new, some unforgettable and some best forgotten. There were old friends such as Steve Reich and Meredith Monk, as well as the trendier Elliott Sharp and the hard-to-justify Peter Zummo.
Reich, at fifty-one years of age, is the grand old man of Postmodern American music. He began his musical odyssey after receiving a degree in philosophy at Cornell; study at New York's Juilliard School was followed by a move west, work with Darius Milhaud and Luciano Berio, and a lot of electric tinkering in the 1960s.
One evening in San Francisco, Reich set up two recorders playing identical tapes. Because of minute differences in their mechanics, the two machines varied slightly in their playback speeds; the music was occasionally synchronized, but more often the two tracks were slightly out of alignment with each other.
Reich began to explore and exploit this phenomenon. He relished the use of small differences between two or more acoustic sources, and began to write music that moved in and out of synchronization with itself.
An early and still classic example is Clapping Music. (Reich has a gift for blunt, unadorned titles). It is a short work for two performers, one of whom maintains an inflexibly repeated pattern of handclaps while the second is assigned rhythms that occasionally overlap and occasionally contradict the first. This is still a great piece to perform and to see performed; in its own way, it is like a Haydn string quartet, with much joy evident in the way individuals interact with one another.
Reich went on to found his own ensemble, "Steve Reich and Musicians," who put in long hours of rehearsal to perfect the small rhythmic differences and variations of his music. There were some classic records made, among them Music for 18 Musicians (1976) and Drumming. Larger and more lush ensembles were assembled, individual parts became more refined, and, in a paradox, what began as individuals having fun became a sort of mechanical reproduction of a complicated whole. The single player no longer counted for much, his or her contribution being lost in the totality. Reich had come full circle, from the rigidity of approach in classical Western music to explorations of freedom that we associate with the East to a new rigidity of his own.
Critics have jumped on his music ever since it began to be heard. It was derided as "stuck-record" music, "out-of-phase gimmickry," and worse. When Elliott Carter and Steve Reich traveled together to London's Proms Festival, representing American music, Carter refused to say any more than a few pleasantries to Reich. Andrew Porter, the influential critic of the New Yorker, accused Reich of confusing a mere acoustic phenomenon with real music, and said that he wrote like an innocent for other innocents--those ignorant of art or music but eager to be fashionable. On the other hand, musicians and composers as prominent as
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