I confess I have avoided Minimalism. It struck me, at its worst, as a form of sonic narcolepsy or, at its best, as aural anesthesia. But now, through immersion in a spate of recent CD releases, I have come to a limited appreciation of it as a genuine symptom of musical recovery. Recovery from what? From the nearly successful self-destruction of Western music over the past fourscore years. Of course, there were a number of composers who refused to participate in this self-destruction, but they generally found themselves outside the pale of what became the enervating academic orthodoxy of the music establishment.
What is especially interesting about Minimalism is that its principal practitioners were all immersed in this academic orthodoxy and at some point in their lives had to break decisively with its tenets. Therefore, to understand Minimalism as a "movement" in music, one first has to grasp the extent of the destruction preceding it, to which it is a reaction. Then one can come to appreciate Minimalism's rehabilitative role in a recovery that has already moved beyond Minimalism to a new music of astonishing spiritual virility.
The beginning of the twentieth century was a time of ferment and crisis characterized by a revulsion against the grotesqueries of bathetic Romanticism. Composers recoiled in a variety of ways. Igor Stravinsky took refuge in Neoclassical discipline and clarity. Erik Satie and Francis Poulenc tweaked noses and punctured pomposities with humor. Serge Prokofiev celebrated the new "Age of Steel" with motoric and violent hymns to the new god--the machine. Bela Bartok and Zoltan Kodaly turned to folk music for inspiration.
However, it was Arnold Schoenberg who decisively steered music down a path from which it seemed it might never return. After taking morbid Romanticism about as far as it could physically go, in a magnificent two-hours composition for Mahlerian mega-orchestra and chorus called Gurrelieder, he turned against his first love with an almost pathological vengeance. He gutted music of tonality and key structure and attempted to replace them with his system of twelve equal tones. He "emancipated" dissonance. Atonality, of course, had been used in music before--but for the purpose of dramatizing disorder. Haydn, for example, used dissonance to great dramatic effect to portray chaos in The Creation. Dissonance was used expressively by many composers to portray disorder, combat, storms, and so on, but it was never a norm until Schoenberg.
Schoenberg's twelve-tone revolution was seen, or presented as, historically necessary due to the supposed exhaustion of the tonal resources of Western music. It was as if one could run out of tonal music as one might run out of fossil fuel. But as Ernest Bacon once pointed out, Mozart never used two harmonies in a row that other composers had not used long before him, yet his works do not suffer from "exhaustion," but are preternaturally fresh. The real problem is quite different.
As Stravinsky said in Poetics of Music, the composer's dilemma is not due to a paucity of materials, but rather to their profusion, to the bewildering question of where to begin with the already almost infinite possibilities available. The real problem is one of setting limits, and on that basis one does so. If music has an identity, like anything else, it is because it has limits and is defined by boundaries. The question is, Are the limits natural or artificial? This is
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