Why I Call Myself a Minimalist By Kyle Gann
Polytempo - the articulation of different tempos at the same time - has been a preoccupation of my music since the late 1970s. I sometimes have as many as seven tempos running at once. Much of my music is microtonal, often using from 25 to 37 pitches per octave, and in one case 58. So some of my scores look dauntingly complex, and even some of my instrumental music requires rhythmic feats way out of the ordinary. Plus, even in normally tuned music I tend toward constant chromaticism.
And yet, I have always called myself a minimalist, even though minimalism is popularly associated with simple rhythms and diatonic harmony - and even though minimalism is still a word that raises hackles in the academic composing world, after all these decades.
The reason is that, early in my career, I learned new formal paradigms from the minimalists. There were two in particular. Steve Reich's early music, such as Piano Phase, was concerned with pulses going out of phase with each other and eventually coming into phase. Philip Glass's early pieces, such as Music in Fifths, were mostly based on additive process: play phrase A, repeat it and add phrase B, repeat those and add phrase C, so eventually you build up a form A, AB, ABC, ABCD, ABCDE, and so forth.
I never, even in my early enthusiasm, dreamed that Piano Phase and Music in Fifths were great pieces that I would continue listening to into old age and always marveling at them. Instead, they seemed like simple templates capable of infinite extension. I don't think I exaggerate when I say that, listening to them, I could hear through them into the complex music I would write many years later. Most importantly, they provided a substitute for sonata form, which was the basic formal idea we had all inherited from Europe, and which seemed to always retain its connections to Enlightenment rationalism. As Virgil Thomson wrote, "[S]onata form is only good for dramatizing visceral states, which are never static, which, quite to the contrary, are constantly varying in intensity, constantly moving about over the pleasure-pain and tranquility-anxiety scales... There is no sonata without drama, struggle, the interplay of tensions." ("Why Composers Write How.") And that seemed old-fashioned and unattractive to me, not the new cool and calm that minimalism offered. Minimalist processes seemed flat and open, ready to be filled with anything, perceptually fascinating and free from ideological metaphysics.
In addition, phase shifting and additive process complemented each other. Additive process starts somewhere and is inherently open-ended: start adding phrases to your initial idea, and there's no telling where you'll end up. Phase shifting, on the other hand, is circular, because any two or three pulses, or four or five, will eventually return to the point at which they started and start the process over again. One is a journey out to the stars, the other a symbol for eternity, and perhaps Nietzsche's "eternal recurrence."
And so, as a sonata form composer instinctively starts with a theme in one key moving to a theme in another, I began to start with an additive process. I quickly found that A, AB, ABC, ABCD, ABCDE, applied to a large-scale form, could become tiresome, so I began omitting the unnecessary: A, AB, ABC, BCD, BCDE, DEF, DEFG, EFGH, and so on. (Examples of this type of form in my music include "Jupiter" from The Planets and "Rings of Saturn" from Hyperchromatica). Likewise, a repeating ten-against-eleven rhythm is quickly processed by the ear, I used 13-against-29 (Texarkana), or 11-against-17-against-19, which still give a feeling of mathematical balance but don't quickly become predicable. Interestingly enough, the new rhythmic complexities that this music made possible were a link back to earlier innovative American sources, such as Charles Ives's marching-bands-at-different-tempos music and the amazing chapter on rhythm in Henry Cowell's book New Musical Resources. It also allowed me to use complexities as fearsome as those in the musics of Elliott Carter and Karlheinz Stockhausen I had studied, but in contexts in which their meaning was easier to hear.
What a lot of composers of my generation realized quickly (and you can see other such composers documented here) is that minimalism provided a simple context in which complexities could be heard and performed. No way were we going to sit and doodle triadic triplets forever. And by calling myself a minimalist, I locate myself on the other side of a divide, not in the European tradition from Haydn to Stockhausen, but in a new tradition from Riley and Reich and Glass to wherever. I identify the composing instinct which is my default mode (not that I don't also depart from it frequently, just as not every Beethoven first movement is in sonata form). It's a way of reminding myself where my music came from, and no matter how far away I get from Reich and Glass, that American DNA is still in there.
Copyright 2021 by Kyle Gann
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