response 82 of 156:

Nov 1 15:00 UTC 2001

"Sound space" music doesn't scare me, although I don't know how fond a 
composer would be of the term.  Also, I think it's out of fashion now.  
A critic recently complained about how tempting it is for certain 
conductors to "ambientize" Morton Feldman's music.  

Speaking of whom, several months ago I picked up a CD of Michael Tilson 
Thomas conducting three Feldman works, Piano and Orchetsra, Cello and 
Orchestra, and Coptic Light.  I enjoy all three, but Coptic Light 
towers above the other two, imho.  It's utterly, serenely, beautiful.  
Inexplicably beautiful, as if Feldman had discovered a new way to make 
beauty.  One thing about Feldman's music, and Coptic Light in 
particular, is that it spoils other music for me.  Around the same time 
I bought the Feldman CD I also bought a Toru Takemitsu CD, including 
the exquisite From Me Flows What You Call Time.  If I listen to it 
right after listening to Feldman it sounds vulgar and obvious, which in 
fact is about the last thing it really is.  

response 84 of 156:

Nov 1 20:30 UTC 2001

He did, many times, but kept it to himself.

response 86 of 156:

Nov 2 11:37 UTC 2001

I'm not very good with "schools" and "movements" in the arts.

response 88 of 156:

Nov 3 04:56 UTC 2001

"Minimalism" doesn't mean the same thing as "part of the Minimalist 
movement".  NOBODY was part of the minimalist movement: even Philip 
Glass and Steve Reich will deny it.  What they mean is, no composer 
worth listening to ever sat down and said, "Now I will compose 
Minimalist music."  They wrote what they wanted to write, 
and "minimalism" is a useful word to describe various works that have a 
lot in common.  If that includes Feldman's, and it does, 
then "minimalist" he is.

Of course his work never sounds like anything other than Feldman's.  
And Glass's sounds like Glass, and Reich's like Reich, and Gorecki's 
like Gorecki.  I could sort out a pile of unlabeled recordings of works 
by the four of them with no trouble whatever.  Nevertheless they do 
have certain striking things in common which set them apart from most 
other composers, and "minimalism" is the word used to describe that.

response 90 of 156:

Nov 4 07:20 UTC 2001

I'm not so sure about Reich, but Glass draws a sensible distinction 
which I am trying to draw in the above, between the minimalist movement 
and music which happens to be minimalist, the latter of which he agrees 
that his music is.  (Leaving aside another layer of complexity, which 
is that minimalism in the original sense is something he ceased 
composing around 1975.)

I refuse to play cute little word games, in which we search for a 
transparent euphemism for "minimalist" which means "minimalist" but 
not "member of the minimalist movement".  Minimalist is a standard term 
in the music dictionaries by now, it has a specific technical meaning 
which fits Feldman's music, and it's too late to complain about that, 
as Glass has recognized.  You might as well complain about "classical" 
and "romantic", both of which are equally inaccurate - and some people 
do.  But make up your mind, Michael, do you want to talk about music, 
or do you want to waste time fighting quixotically against established 
standard terminology?

response 92 of 156:

Nov 4 17:24 UTC 2001

Lovers of Feldman's music, talking among themselves, don't need to call 
him minimalist or non-minimalist: they already know what he sounds like.

Tonality is not really a requirement of minimalism, or at least of the 
things I hear called minimalism.  What's common to them all is simple 
harmony: this usually takes the form of tonality in Glass, but less so 
in other minimalists, particularly non-American ones, which is part of 
what I was thinking of when I said that Feldman is more like the 
Eastern European mystics than the New York minimalists.

I'm really sorry to see you using the word "pigeonholes".  That's 
usually just the derisive form of the words "labels" or "categories".  
Categorization, since you seem to be bewildered by it ("I can't imagine 
what pleasure anyone gets from doing that"), is a natural human 
function, akin to gestalt perception, which people use all the time.  
Faced with the infinite variety of music, people wishing to find their 
way around and make sense of it all will naturally observe that A is 
rather like B which is rather like C.  And when A and B and C all share 
striking similarities not shared by other works, and a word exists to 
describe it, they will use that word.  Learn to live with this, 
Michael, and stop refusing to see the forest for the trees.

It's especially useful when you're trying to describe composers to 
people who haven't heard them, and while you may be a Feldman expert, 
other people reading this topic may never have heard anything by him at 
all.  To describe it to them by saying "it's uniquely Feldman", while 
true, is of no help whatever; to use a technical description is, I've 
found, confusing to non-musicians; to say "it's basically like 
minimalism", which is what I'm really saying, can be very helpful.

This only becomes pigeonholing when, having established the category, 
the user starts criticizing the composer for not fitting it perfectly, 
or more precisely for not fitting the default form.  This happens all 
the time, but I am not doing it.

The key similarity I see is one I often have to point out in defense of 
this kind of music (or "these kinds of music" if you prefer), and one I 
believe I tried to describe uptopic.  Critics of minimalism complain 
about its thinness of intellectual content and that it has no thrust or 
forward motion, as most Western music does.  It requires a different 
kind of listening.  And this fundamentally different kind of listening 
is a requirement that all the composers we've been talking about share.

It's also shared by some earlier problematic composers, notably 
Bruckner, whom I've seen described as a proto-minimalist.  Not a 
minimalist per se, because of the chronologic distinction and because 
he's so different in other respects, but he does have this in common.  
It gives me pleasure, Michael, to contemplate the similarities between 
Bruckner and the minimalists, because it enriches my experience of 
listening to both, and if you call that pigeonholing, I can only regret 
your inabiliity to see the great web of similarities and influences in 
the vast field of music.

response 94 of 156:

Nov 6 00:39 UTC 2001

Michael, I already observed that most composers - indeed, most creative 
artists of any sort - dislike labels.  Partly because they fear what 
you fear, which is pigeonholing (not, I repeat, the same thing as 
labeling), andf partly because, having found their metier through 
private personal imperatives, it's kind of disconcerting to find other 
people whose own private personal imperatives have led them to the same 
place.  It's a little like finding other people at the same obscure 
state park campground you've always secretly considered your own.

But that doesn't make the labels any less useful and valuable.

I am not "tying a can to his tail", and if you think I am, that shows 
you either do not in fact understand what I've said or are deliberately 
choosing to ignore it.  To "tie a can" means to me to claim that this 
is the only, or the essential, thing to say about Feldman, or to demand 
that his music fit the predetermined category - that is, pigeonholing, 
which I repeat I'm not doing.  Nowhere have I criticized Feldman for 
not being more like a canonical minimalist.

If it sounds like I'm harping on this one point, it's only because I'm 
trying to make it clear.  It's a minor point, really, and if I'd made 
it clear the first time, I'd have dropped it.

To "be told that someone things Feldman is a minimalist" doesn't do 
anything to enhance my appreciation of him any more than yours, and if 
you think I said it did, that shows you either do not in fact 
understand what I've said or are deliberately choosing to ignore it.  
What I said enriches my listening experience is "to contemplate the 
similarities between Bruckner and the minimalists," or Feldman and the 
minimalists (or the other minimalists, or whatever), which is not the 
same thing.  It is to listen to the music itself and notice the 
enriching similarities between one composer and another.  If, as you 
imply here, you regard each composer as a completely separate unit from 
all other composers, with no close similarities or resemblances, you 
are indeed missing a tremendous amount of appreciation - of any 
composer.

I am hardly the only person to have noticed the close similarity 
between Feldman and the canonical minimalists.  Norman Lebrecht in 
his "Companion to 20th Century Music" writes that Feldman's music is 
remarkably similar to "early minimalism" (by which he means pre-1975 
strict minimalism).  And Grove 7 (the new New Grove) writes that 
Feldman's late style "embraced minimalist repetition", and also notes 
that he was influenced by New York abstract expressionist painters - 
the direct stylistic ancestors of the minimalist painters.

Are you going to say that these respected reference sources are "tying 
a can to his tail"?

If, contrary to the thrust of everything you've written so far, you 
would now like to draw a distinction between saying Feldman's music is 
minimalist and that it bears certain resemblances to minimalism, I 
could go along with that - but those statements are far too closely 
allied for the one to be dismissed as total nonsense while the other is 
agreed to.  If that's what you mean, you would have done well to say so 
a lot earlier.  But if you insist on total separation, I'm going to 
conclude that Lebrecht and the Grove writers know more about music than 
you do.

response 96 of 156:

Nov 7 00:46 UTC 2001

The fat-person analogy in the Feldman quote seems to me to not only 
give one permission to call his music minimalist, it's as much to admit 
that he realizes it falls in that category, even though he doesn't 
think of it that way himself.  (And why should he?  Good creative 
artists rarely think of themselves as fitting in categories, no matter 
how well they do fit.  That's what criticism and analysis are for.)

"Sparse [and] minimal" (if not necessarily minimal_ist_) are certainly 
words that have come forcibly to my mind whenever I've heard anything 
by Feldman.  If you don't find that so, it could be because you've 
heard too much Feldman: the more familiar in detail with an artist's 
work one is, the more aware one may be of subtleties and variations in 
the generalizations - but that doesn't make the generalizations any 
less valid as generalizations.  Whatever your justification for 
disagreeing with them, I'm not going to take it on your word that 
Lebrecht and the Grove encyclopedia don't know what they're talking 
about, especially as what they say fits what my ears hear.

You say that the relation between Feldman's music (or that aspect of 
it - at last we have an acknowledgment that there is such an aspect) 
and "the minimalists themselves" is "analogous at best, and certainly 
not homologous."  The problem with that is that "the minimalists 
themselves" are no homogenous group either.  Maybe that's the 
perceptual problem: if one considers "the minimalists" to be 
homogenous, of course one will resent the inclusion of a person outside 
of the original group.  But the music of Glass and of Terry Riley 
(especially if you don't boil them down to their best-known mannerisms, 
and in particular don't assume that Riley is all like "In C") is as 
different as either is from Feldman.  And once one includes the Eastern 
European mystics as minimalists, which I've been doing from the 
beginning of this discussion, the variety within "the minimalists" is 
even more dramatic - especially as, even allowing for their shared 
nationality, Glass, Riley and Feldman have a much more similar 
intellectual background than any of them does with the eastern 
Europeans like Gorecki or Pärt.  For what it's worth, the single other 
composer Feldman most reminds me of is LaMonte Young.

All music is repetitious in one way or another.  Minimalism is more 
than repetition (though some people who dislike it will deny that), but 
it is marked by a particular way of handling repetition, a particular 
style of repetition, or, if you will, "a distinct species".  I don't 
know what Holst works you have in mind as pseudo-minimalist: the oboe 
theme in Beni Mora, perhaps?  But that's not at all minimalist 
repetition; and if Feldman's earlier string quartet pieces are equally 
non-minimalist repetition, that only reinforces Grove's point that it's 
Feldman's later works which are more minimalist.

response 98 of 156:

Nov 12 06:26 UTC 2001

Well, I hear the simplicity and repetition in Feldman and most 
minimalists as working the same way.  The simplicity and repetition in 
Holst and, say, a Baroque passacaglia work differently.

Being adept at taxonomy as a science doesn't mean one knows one's 
ferns.  I've studied taxonomy too.  Evidently you know Feldman better 
than I do, but I suspect I know the canonical minimalists better than 
you do.

I would be readier to accept your conclusion that I'm a lumper and 
you're a splitter, were it not for your earlier posts ridiculing the 
very notion of lumping.

response 100 of 156:

Nov 12 14:02 UTC 2001

Whereas we grammar-nitpickers insist that it should be "we splitters".

response 102 of 156:

Nov 29 22:49 UTC 2001

Waiting for my daughter to emerge from swim practice the other night, I 
was listening to Morton Feldman's Coptic Light on the car CD player.  
When she got into the car, I offered to switch back to FM, but she said 
to let it play.  "You'll change your mind."  "What is it?"  "Morton 
Feldman."  "Different."  Two minutes later, she said, "How long does it 
go on for?"  "Half an hour."  "Half an hour!  It's not even music.  If 
I was the percussionist, I'd have a drum stick in my right hand and 
Vogue in my left hand."

response 104 of 156:

Feb 27 17:39 UTC 2002

At Harmony House Classical on Woodward, I picked up a couple of new CDs:

Way back in response #31 I mentioned an Albany Records re-release of 
three old monaural recordings issued by Columbia in the early 1950s: 
Walter Piston's Symphony No. 4, Roy Harris's Symphony No. 7, and 
William Schuman's Symphony No. 6, all by Eugene Ormandy and the 
Philadelphia Orchestra.  The Piston 4th has been recarded a couple of 
times since then, but I'm not aware of any new recordings of the Harris 
7th or the Schuman 6th until now.  Koch has released a CD with both of 
those works on it, performed by the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra 
under the direction of Hugh Keelan.  The Harris symphony is very 
listenable but rather slight.  The Schuman 6th is still a masterpiece, 
and I don't use that word often.  Thus Koch and the New Zealanders once 
again trump the big American labels and orchestras in rescuing great 
American music from oblivion.  (They started the Samuel Barber revival 
in the 1980s.)

Speaking of Barber, the other CD has three Barber works -- the Second 
Symphony, the Cello Concerto, and the orchestral suite from the ballet 
Medea -- all with Samuel Barber himself conducting the New Symphony 
Orchestra.  The recordings were made in 1950, and are absolutely 
horrible.  I guess thanks should go to the Pearl label for digitally 
remastering these recordings, although they are valuable only as 
historic documents.