Occasionally teaching is indeed its own reward, even discounting the involvement of the students. This semester I'm teaching my Advanced Analysis Seminar, which I'm devoting to minimalist and postminimalist music (partly in advance of my postminimalism book, partly in anticipation of next September's minimalism conference). The idea of the seminar is that we work on pieces I haven't yet analyzed myself, so that instead of me telling them ex cathedra what I already know, we all go through the discovery process together, and they watch me do what I do when I analyze music, both fumbling around and flashes of insight. And they help me, their brains being newer and quicker than mine. Classically minimalist music is, of course, fairly easy to parse, though we have to come up with our own methods to represent its procedures and figure out how perception and process interrelate. And today we were working on Einstein on the Beach, of which I bought the score earlier in the year.
And man, what a blast. Whenever I go through a piece of music I know well with the score for the first or second time, my opinion of the piece either rises or falls somewhat, depending on what I start to perceive in the piece once I fully realize what's going on. Einstein was a vastly important piece from my youth, and while I always loved sections of it, my opinion of the whole has risen noticeably this week. (I had an opposite experience with Glass's later opera The Voyage, a more tedious work than I'd remembered.) Today we went through the "Train" scene in about an hour and a half, and broke it down into an A A' B A" B form - it's the most complex scene from the opera, bringing together two of the recurring chord progressions (there are only about five in the whole four-hour work), as well as running ostinatos of different lengths together, Totalist style - which I may have to start calling Minimalist style. There's a returning transitional passage ("x") between the other sections, so it's really A x A' x B x A" x B, and the three A sections all fall into the same material after awhile, but start out with a different additive-process buildup. (The B sections recur in the final "Spaceship" scene.) In short, the form is both musically logical and satisfyingly intuitive. We had a similar experience with Reich's Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices, and Organ, and I'm not even going to tell you where I got that rare score - one of the prettiest pieces ever made. Much as I love so much minimalist repertoire, I somehow don't expect it to excel in the intuition department, and I'm being pleasantly surprised.
And now I'm pissed off as hell that I had to wait until age 52 to get a score to Einstein, a piece I'd been obsessed with since I was 22. I was wearing out my vinyl discs of this piece nonstop in 1978, and a score should have been available for sale at Patelson's by 1980, so I could have learned all of Glass's (and Reich's) formal tricks before I embarked on my professional career. Instead, I find out that I correctly stole some of their ideas by ear, but there were some other neat formulas that I didn't realize were there. It's criminal that great music can't pass in score form to younger composers within a few years. And it's why I put nearly all my scores up as PDFs on my web site: I refuse to catapult any ideas out into the world without facilitating their immediate theft by young (or older) composers. I may not have any ideas anyone wants to rip off, but I'll be damned if I'm going to squirrel them away out of reach.
Copyright 2008 by Kyle Gann
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