Minimal

"Systems Music" is a term which has been used to describe the work of composers who concern themselves with sound continuums which evolve gradually, often over very long periods of time. The most well-known of these composers are Steve Reich, Philip Glass, and La Monte Young. The most striking feature of their work is repetitiveness or stasis. Their works contain little or no variation of pitch, tempo, dynamics or timbre. Certainly, their work exhibits virtually none of the characteristic concerns of traditional Western music, such as harmonic movement, key modulation or thematic development.

The listener is invited, not to follow a complex musical "argument", but to concentrate upon a slowly changing sound and focus with microscopic awareness on different aspects of it. For such listeners such intense concentration has produced pyschological states comparable to drug-induced euphoria or meditative trance. However, Young is probably the only composer for whom such effects are of primary importance. Significantly, he is also the only composer whose music is entirely devoid of rhythmic pulse, consisting mostly of combinations of drones. Reich, by contrast, has explored the different ways in which a rhythmic figure can move out of phase with itself, while Glass has used rhythmic figures which increase or decrease in length as the piece progresses. Common to all three is the fact that their music avoids any sense of climax, development or directionality. Their pieces are either cyclical in form or static. A typical Reich piece will commence with two or more musicians playing a rhythmic pattern in unison. Gradually, they move out of phase with each other - initially by, say, a quarter note - and secondary rhythms are generated by the way in which the off-parallel rhythms intermesh. The process is continued until the players are again in unison - a cyclical rather than a developmental form. Alternatively, a piece may involve a process of expansion which is theoretically limitless, as is the case with Reich's Four Organs where a single chord is gradually stretched out to a duration of several minutes.

Systems composers appear to have worked largely outside the mainstreams of both European and American music, drawing inspiration instead from various ethnic musical forms - Ghanian and Balinese music in Reich's case, Japanese Gagaku in the case of Young. Many other influences can be discerned. Such non-Western musical forms, as Young has observed, involve stasis in contrast to climax or directionality. But systems music also relates to some aspects of contemporary Western music. Young has cited the "unchanging chord" in Schoenberg's Five Pieces for Orchestra, as well as Webern's technique of repeating the same pitches in different octave placements; equally he acknowledges the influence of Machaut and plainchant. Glass, on the other hand, studied with Nadia Boulanger and Ravi Shankar, and acknowledges the influences of Bach and Indian music.

Of the three it is perhaps Reich whose music most decisively repudiates the Western classical tradition. Works such as Drumming relate more to African tradition than to either Varese or Cage. Nevertheless, Reich's music developed very much as a reaction to European serialism as well as American indeterminacy. In his critique of these systems Reich makes similar observations to those made by composers like Xenakis and Pousseur. Xenakis had observed that in serial music there is a discrepancy between method and auditory result; for while the compositional method is highly mathematical, the outward impression is one of randomness. Pousseur likewise observed that:

"where the most abstract constructions have been employed ... one has the impression of finding oneself in the presence of the consequences of an aleatory free play".

Reich extends this criticism to indeterminate music as well. He argues that in both cases one cannot hear the process by which the music was constructed. In the case of serialism one cannot follow the permutations of the twelve note series - the retrogrades and inversions destroy any recognisable melodic content. Similarly, in Cage's music one cannot hear the chance operations which determine the choice and disposition of notes. He writes:

"The process of using the I Ching or observing the imperfections in manuscript paper cannot be heard when listening to music composed that way. The compositional process and the sounding music have no audible connection."

In Music as a Gradual Process (1968) Reich advocates the use of compositional processes which are clearly audible to the listener. He argues that in order to facilitate closely detailed listening a musical process must happen extremely gradually, like the movement of the minute hand on a watch or the slow trickling of sand through an hour glass. The first type of gradual process which Reich explored was that of moving a rhythmic pattern out of phase with itself. This idea developed out of Reich's experiments with tape music. In 1965 he recorded the voice of a black preacher in San Francisco. Afterwards in the studio, he selected a short phrase and ran two tape loops of it on supposedly identical tape machines. Because of minute differences between the two machines the phrase was heard marginally out of synchronisation with itself. He then began to control this discrepancy by delaying one spool with his thumb, but to such an infinitesimal degree that pitch was not affected. Out of these experiments came two tape pieces: It's Gonna Rain (using the preacher's voice) and Come Out (1966) in which the single phrase "Come out to show them" is recorded on two channels, first in unison, and then with channel two beginning to move ahead. As the phrase begins to shift a gradually increasing reverberation is heard which slowly passes into a sort of canon or round. Eventually the two voices divide into four and then eight. Gradually, the intelligibility of the voices is destroyed - one hears only a constantly changing polyphony of rhythmic elements.

Reich seems to be concerned with transcending his own personal taste to achieve a kind of objectivity. If changes or embellishments are made during rehearsal they are collaborative, involving all the musicians in Reich's ensemble. During the rehearsal of Drumming the three vocalists, including Reich himself, selected certain unintended patterns which resulted from the phase shifting of the basic rhythm and decided collectively on an order in which to vocalise them. For Reich there is no element of self-expression here - the players are merely drawing out the rhythms which are latent in the music.

Reich feels that it is important to distinguish his music from some currently popular modal forms of music, such as Indian classical and drug-oriented rock and roll. These musical forms may make us aware of minute sound details because in being modal (constant key centre, hypnotically droning and repetitious) they naturally focus on these details rather than on key modulation, counterpoint or other peculiarly Western devices. He stresses, however, that these idioms are more or less strict frameworks for improvisation - they are not processes. The distinctive feature of a musical process is that it simultaneously determines the note to note procedure and the overall form. "One can't improvise in a musical process", Reich argues. "The two concepts are mutually exclusive".

Reich's later works, however, are less strictly predetermined and show a greater flexibility of compositional approach. In Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices and Organ (1973) and Music for Eighteen Musicians (1974-6) he abandons simple phasing processes in favour of the more elaborate techniques of Drumming and the processes of rhythmic augmentation first used in Four Organs. His most recent works are less minimalist in approach, showing a greater variety of rhythmical change than the earlier pieces and a stronger sense of harmonic movement. In Tehillim (1981), which is based on Hebrew psalms, and The Desert Music (1983), based on poems by William Carlos Williams, Reich makes a limited use of key modulation and gives far greater independence and expressiveness to the vocal parts.

While Reich's earlier music involves a decisive rejection of the Western classical tradition, his later work shows an increasing tendency to accomodate aspects of that tradition, often in combination with Eastern and Afro-Asian stylistic elements. In Music for Eighteen Musicians chords lasting initially twenty seconds are expanded for entire five minute section "rather as a single note for the cantus firmus of 12th century organum might be stretched out as a harmonic centre by Perotin". As well as Perotin, Reich feels an increasing affinity with Debussy, whose non-functional harmony seems very close to his own, especially in terms of harmonic ambiguity. He has also likened his use of a chordal suspension technique in Variations for Wind, Strings and Keyboards (1979) to Bartok's Second Piano Concerto. Other later works, such as Tehillim show a strong feeling for tonality. It's last movement "affirms the key of D major as the basic tonal centre of the work after considerable harmonic ambiguity earlier". On the other hand, Sextet (1985) exploits ambiguities of rhythm and metre which are more reminiscent of African music.

One feels, in listening to Reich's more recent work, the sense of a dialectic between Eastern and Western styles and between ancient and modern traditions. In this respect Reich seems to have given an entirely new interpretation to Stockhausen's idealistic vision of "a unified world music", one which combines elements of the music "of all lands and races".

Comment: Forget the theory. Run yourself a bath and soak to Reich's compositions; observe your mind move to successively deeper grooves within. Especially recommended for this fun are "Six Marimbas" and "Music For 18 Musicians".