Tag: minimalism
In C
by Josh K-sky on Aug.07, 2009, under Los Angeles, Politics, Uncategorized
Midnight in a Mexican restaurant. Two dozen musicians–3 vocalists, 3 clarinets, a violin, a cello, two on the keyboard, two electric guitars and two electric bass guitars, vibes, a piccolo, trombone, trumpet, bari sax, a few others — performed Terry Riley’s In C. And it rocked.
The promotional blog post suggested a typical modern-classical performance:
…not exactly stodgy, but irrefutably professional. (Not Ed Parker-professional. Just new-classical professional.)
This was rock-club, casual-dress, BYO-music stand. The trombonist and the trumpet shuffled and swayed together. The reed players displayed a kind of typical sweet and generous band-camp dorkiness. It looked like this:
From Wikipedia:
In C consists of 53 short, numbered musical phrases, lasting from half a beat to 32 beats; each phrase may be repeated an arbitrary number of times. Each musician has control over which phrase he or she plays: players are encouraged to play the phrases starting at different times, even if they are playing the same phrase. The performance directions state that the musical ensemble should try to stay within two to three phrases of each other. The phrases must be played in order, although some may be skipped. As detailed in some editions of the score, it is customary for one musician (“traditionally… a beautiful girl,” Riley notes in the score[2]) to play the note C (in octaves) in repeated eighth notes. This functions as a metronome and is referred to as “The Pulse”.
The freedom of each musician to advance as they wished, while respecting the injunction to keep mostly together, created an exquisite tension between predictability and randomness. The vague wash forward between movements felt like a game of Guess the Leader. But much harder to guess.
I’ve been helping promote the upcoming Beethoven Bragg concert. Describing it to a classical music writer, I felt completely out of my depth. “I don’t know if it will be of interest for exactly the same reason people go to classical concerts… Could you call it ‘folk classical’?” Maybe there’s nothing exceptional about this category, about an orchestral piece that synthesizes social context and sound to create an element of freedom. I have sat through very few orchestral pieces. But I really liked this one.
Thanks to Professor Pessah for the Juanita’s clip.