Loading summary
Transcript52 lines
- [00:01]
George Grella Jr.
Heat up your Fourth of July at the Home Depot with our wide variety of grills under $300 and make every gathering one to remember. Give your outdoor space a glow up whatever your budget is, with savings on seasonal plants starting at $5. With the grill fired up and your backyard set to perfection, you'll be able to invite friends and family over to kick off the party. Start celebrating with low prices guaranteed at the Home Depot. Prices may vary by store.
- [00:27]
Bradley Morgan
Exclusions apply.
- [00:27]
George Grella Jr.
Seehomedepot.com Pricematch for details.
- [00:31]
Bradley Morgan
This summer, Prime Video takes you back
- [00:33]
George Grella Jr.
before Legally Blonde, before law school, and
- [00:35]
Bradley Morgan
into the world of Elle woods in high school.
- [00:38]
George Grella Jr.
Set in 1995, this Gemini vegetarian knows
- [00:41]
Bradley Morgan
exactly who she is until her family moves from Bel Air to Seattle. Packed with iconic fashion, 90s nostalgia and a throwback soundtrack, Elle proves one law school was hard, high school was harder.
- [00:54]
George Grella Jr.
From the world of Legally Blonde, watch Elle, a new original series only on Prime Video.
- [00:59]
Bradley Morgan
Watch now.
- [01:02]
George Grella Jr.
This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Listening to this podcast instead of doom scrolling Smart Move, Another smart move getting help from one of State Farm's 19,000 local agents when you choose to bundle home and auto bundling. Just another way to save with the personal price plan. Prices are based on rating plans that vary by state. Coverage options are selected by the customer. Availability, amount of discounts, and savings and eligibility vary by state. Welcome to the New Books Network
- [01:33]
Bradley Morgan
hello, welcome to the New Books Network. My name is Bradley Morgan and I am joined today by my Guest, George Grella Jr. George has written about music for over 30 years and is also the music editor at the Brooklyn Rail, publisher of the Kill youl Idols newsletter, and the author of the 33 and a third book on Miles Davis, Bitches Brew. His latest book is Minimalist Music, an installment of the 33 and a third genre series published by Bloomsbury. George, thanks so much for joining me today.
- [01:59]
George Grella Jr.
Thanks for having me on.
- [02:00]
Bradley Morgan
So, to get started, can you tell us what your book is about?
- [02:03]
George Grella Jr.
Well, you know, it's like the title says, it's pretty straightforward. It's about minimalist music. But it's a book about what defines minimalist music, what you know, how it's made, what it's about, and also, you know, it has a very important and deep historical context. And it's about that as well. The past, the present, and the future.
- [02:27]
Bradley Morgan
In order to explore minimalism as a genre and where it comes from, your book largely centers on two composers most associated with minimalist music, Philip Glass and Steve Reich. But however, before we get into them let's talk about what minimalist music is. And I know from reading your book is a really complex term for a number of reasons. But for those who may be less familiar, how is minimalism generally defined as a genre?
- [02:49]
George Grella Jr.
Well, that's where, you know, this is, this is my argument for writing the book, essentially, to back that up a little bit, which is that there's the idea of minimalist music and minimalism in music in not just the general public consciousness, but also everything that's been seriously written about the music. And I only wrote this book because I had read everything that was written about it and everything that has been written about it has been good and is really worthwhile and illuminating to read. But also everything kind of struck me as a little bit off. There was a, you know, there was kind of a, I guess an ungainly and illogical definition of the music that was less about saying this is what it is, this is what makes it. Then these are the people who were together in a certain period of time making this music. Some of it was, you know, some of these, these, these composers, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, but also Terry Riley and Lamont Young were all related, you know, either directly by working together or by connection. But that doesn't mean they were doing the same thing. And I think if you sit down and listen to music, especially from Lamont Young and then Steve Reich, you're going to hear two extraordinarily different things, you know, equally fine, but kind of opposing arguments and opposing ideas or, or non compatible ideas. And that's how it always struck me. And so my look at minimalist music is how these musicians worked with time, which is kind of a personal obsession of mine. Not just the nature of time itself, but also, you know, I studied music, I played music, I've composed music and have been writing about music. And music is. And this is the neglected dimension that so much study of music leaves out, which is time. The, if you, if you read about, study painting, study of the visual arts, read it, read art criticism, you're reading about literal physical dimensions, you're reading about colors and, and geometry and things like that, because those are the dimensions that the visual arts works with. And time is a dimension and music works with time. And it works with no other dimension. It exists in no other dimension. And so to me, minimalist music, specifically the music that Reich and Glass were making, was about whether they were thinking of this consciously or not. It's about showing how music and time work together and showing how time can shape music and makes Things possible in music and also music showing you how time works and defining time. And so it's this intensely interrelated activity and with the dimension. And that's to me what sets minimalist music and is how I define it from everything else.
- [05:50]
Bradley Morgan
Well, let's break down into each of those areas and I guess first in terms of regarding to how to define minimalist music, you write in the book that arguing for what minimalist music is means excluding things that it isn't. What are some of the more common misconceptions surrounding minimalist music?
- [06:05]
George Grella Jr.
Well, there's a very common misconception which is this kind of, you know, there's music that has that kind of evocative floating sound of sparse details and events, you know, a quiet. This is specifically a style of music that really comes out of Morton Feldman's early work, which is an, a kind of quiet surface spaciousness and musical events that are untethered from the feeling that time is passing. You know, this is, this connects to drone music in a way. And that drone music, especially Lamont Young in this context, is music that seeks to stop the sensation of time passing. You know, it, it holds time still while you experience the musical qualities and, and your reactions within it. It's the, it's the experience, if anyone ever has it, of going to see performances at Lamont Young's Dreamhouse, where the whole, not just the music itself, but the whole performing ritual, an audience ritual is based around the idea that we are coming into a space where time, time is outside the space. You know, we are holding time still while we are experiencing this. And then you, it's over and you step outside and you know, it's five hours later. That's not minimalist music. What I, what I point out in the book is that we can use language to make a difference between minimalist and minimal music that uses minimal material. And that is often like Lamont Young's music, uses minimal material extended to extreme lengths. Morton Feldman's early indeterminate music uses limited material, minimal material to create its form and structure. And this is also how minimalist music using, you know, and the sidebar is that Reich and Glass never liked that term, but it just came to stick. But using small musical ideas repeated and extended through time can create the same kind of maximal dimensions in duration. You know, Reich's music, he's not it like glass, but you know, drumming is a 90 minute piece. Philip Glasses, Einstein on the beach and music in 12 parts, you're talking about four and a half to five hours music if it's just laid end on end and played all the way through. But it's not so much duration. It's about experiencing the music as the process of time passing. And this is. This is. Gets into the element of Reich especially being process music. And he's very clear about this, which is that you. When you hear my music, you hear the process of the music working it itself. And that process is, you know, it's. It's all together. He puts everything on the surface. That process is the music, you know, hearing, okay, I'm adding a note, I'm adding a beat, I'm shifting one, one moment in time, you know, it's, it's. And that is how you viscerally hear and feel Reich showing you how time is passing. And part of the thrill to me with Glass as well, in a different style, is they're embracing time passing. They're not trying to escape it. And they're showing you this fantastic medium of time and this fantastic dimension that that music, more than anything else, can define and show you. Well, the drone music, minimal music, is again, it's about being outside of that dimension, which is again, its own pleasure and a very deep one and a very profound one, but it's a different, different thing.
- [09:52]
Bradley Morgan
So on this topic of time, you write in the book that time is the reason so many minimalist works just end in a way that really feels abrupt, especially when compared with songs or other types of music with more common structures like harmonies. How is minimalism's relationship with time different from what you can hear on pop radio?
- [10:08]
George Grella Jr.
Well, it's an idea of how you form and structure music in time. I mean, that's the fundamental thing. And it is a different idea with working with harmony. Although, again, we got to make this distinction between Reich and Glass because their idea of harmonies are very different. Reich is like. He's mostly. Well, I don't want to say mostly, but for a long time he was uninterested in harmony. His idea of harmony goes back to medieval music, which was drone music to a great extent. But in essentially, like we have one chord and that's all we need. Because he doesn't care about harmony in the same way, because he cares about this process. Harmony itself can be a process and often is. You hear it, yes, in songs on the radio. You hear it in symphonies. You know, harmony established in time, a series of chords that are designed to set up an established key, and then some sense and sensation of tension that gets resolved at the end. And there's the classical term is a cadence. There's something ends with that satisfaction of. We've gotten back to the first chord. And most songs are like that as well because they're trying to resolve a lyrical and thematic idea to this stopping point. If you're not trying to do that, if you're not making music that's about getting to this final chord, then you just. How do you. How do you end a piece where you just stop? I mean, Glass himself is a. Is a complex path in this music because he is very conscious of harmony, and he loves to work with harmony. He is sort of like. He is really a classical composer in the. In the traditional sense, and that his models are Mozart and Schubert and Bruckner. And so he's. You know, he loves modulations and he loves counterpoint and voice leading. All these basic fundamental virtues of classical music. He's about getting from one chord to the next. But at the same time, he's not about. I have to tell. An emotional journey. You know, we. This is not. This is not a dramatic narrative where we get to the. The last page and there's a period and it says the end.
- [12:21]
Bradley Morgan
His.
- [12:21]
George Grella Jr.
The end is the same as righteous, which is that. Okay, we've said enough.
- [12:25]
Bradley Morgan
So I want to explore one more example and something you brought up a couple times already, which is drone music. And you say that one type of music that can't be minimalist because of how it works with time is drone music. And some listeners might think of drone music as minimalist because it does lack a more conventional structure. I admit that prior to reading your book, I was rather uneducated what minimalist music was, So I would have described something like Lou Reed's metal machine music as minimalist music. So my question is, why is drones separate from minimalism?
- [12:55]
George Grella Jr.
Well, again, that's. That's. To me, the distinction between minimal and minimalist. A drone can feel like. Can sound and be a huge complex sound. You know, you're talking about something that's got all sorts of layers of harmonics and that, you know, you can hear them shifting and overlapping and there's all sorts of psychoacoustic effects. You know, a drone. Drone music as a minimal. Minimal music. To move back into the art world is sort of like looking at a color field painting. You know, you're looking at a painting that is from a distance, it's one solid color. It's white or it's black, or it's front's going blue or something like that. If you get close to the surface, of the canvas, you can see all sorts of, you know, they're not imperfections, they're idiosyncrasies. It's not. The pigment is not the same hue all the way through. You know, there's maybe there's some surface features, things like that. That's drone music. While minimalist music is, as I write in the book, is like Saul Lewitt, if you know his wall drawings and wall paintings, they are artworks that. The titles are the instructions. The titles are things like make a series of diagonal lines of this extent on this surface. And then you see it and it's you. You. Although it's a frozen image in time, you see that the title is about the process of how the piece was made. It does it. It does something with the idea of process in time. Closer to music, Reich and Glass. I mean, on the very basic level, the reason they're not drone music and that they're minimalist, not minimal, is that, you know, you. You get beats, you get rhythms, you get subdivisions of the seconds going by. You know, you get the sensation of things changing through time other than, you know, an object sitting in space, turning slowly, which a lot of drone music is. And again, those details on the object are fascinating and you want to be involved in. In seeing them. But metal machine music, Lamont Young's Trio for Strings, these are, you know, we are establishing a sound. And in metal machine music, it's limited to the side of the lp. You know, when you get to the. The end of it, when the needle starts spiraling towards the center, you know, that's over. But the idea is that you lose the sensation of passing time. And it's a different philosophical idea, it's a different spiritual idea, it's a different aesthetic idea. While Reich and Glass are absolutely. They're right on the surface. They're like, you're gonna hear. You're gonna feel this time passing. You know, even Reich, even Glass, I'm sorry, points out. And Morton Feldman in his late music, where he becomes a. Goes from being a minimal composer to a minimalist composer. They. They are sort of like. They're upfront about, you know, what. You don't have to sit through all four and a half hours of Einstein on the Beach. You know, if you need to go out and get a drink, come back in at a later point, that's fine. They, they. They are exploring the sense of boredom in music. And drone music is not trying to bore you. Reich and Glass and, you know, Feldman, Feldman, they're not trying to bore you. But they recognize that this processing through time, you're going to feel time passing. And that's kind of the. The essence of boredom. You feel time passing, but you have got, you know, there's. There's no. You're not filling it with anything. So that's a very. It's a very different idea. I mean, they're. They're almost literally opposed.
- [16:43]
Bradley Morgan
I wanted to ask you about time being what defines minimalism, because you also make clear the point that as a genre, minimalism is not defined by style. And I thought this was interesting to read because many people would generally regard style as what defines a musical genre, which is what. Why we have so many different sub genres within all sorts of different styles. So why isn't minimalism defined by style?
- [17:05]
George Grella Jr.
Yeah, I'm glad you asked that question, because that was another thing that really motivated me to write this book, which is that minimalism is a. Is a process. It's a tool. You know, I. Glass points this out when he hears Donna Summer. You know, he's like, yeah, these are. Wow. It's amazing that, you know, I Feel Love is using these same. You know, we made these tools and now anyone can use them. You know, you wouldn't think that I Feel Love is anything like Steve Reich or Philip Glass, but as it's about the tools and then how you apply them, and you can use these tools in any style of music. While drum music is. It's its own style. You know, it's minimal music. The kind of the floating sounds of, you know, a piano playing slowly in space and with a lot of space in between. That's a style. But minimalist music is a process. And so, you know, you can hear King Crimson playing minimalist music. You know, there's this really fantastic contemporary European band called Akuzmi, A K U S M I that is a minimalist rock band. And half of the stuff they play, you're like, wow, that's like Steve Reich's octet. You know, it's. It's. But it's not. But they're using the same process to do very different things. So it's about deciding to work with time, about specifically showing that time is our material. And here's what it sounds like to us. Here's how we shape it and work with it. And we're not, you know, other than. And where it brings us. When we get to our end of something, that's where time has brought us. Not we're going to get to the end of the song or we're going to get to this final chord. You know, it's really sort of giving yourself over to time, and it's like surfing time. So you can surf time with any kind of music that you want. You know, another good example is it's quite close, but it's not the same thing as Gamelan. Music is very, very much like minimalist music. Although, although it's also very different in certain ways because it has, it has a much broader social aspect that, that determines what it is and how it sounds. But it's very much working heavily with that, that dimension, with time in understanding
- [19:28]
Bradley Morgan
where minimalism comes from. Your book defines a lot of musical terms that surround it, but it also explores that these musical terms usually mean more than their definitions. And so what impact does culture at large have on what this music means and how we define it and talk about it?
- [19:46]
George Grella Jr.
Well, that, that's, that is a huge, I mean, within the limited scope of the book. I, I, I know I discuss it a little bit, but it's a huge topic because you're talking about the historical meaning of music in society and the radical changes that we've had essentially since, since we could record music and reproduce it and, you know, since people could buy music and play it in their homes, you know, this is a, this is an enormously radical change in the human history of making music. Music was always an immediate thing. And that also meant that the music that we now consider classical music was always new music. And it, there was really no separation in the public mind over, you know, Handel's operas and popular songs people heard in the street, because often those two intertwined, you know, Handel would have a big hit. I mean, to use him as an example, here's one of the great classical composers, one of the, Made me the greatest baroque opera composer who was very much like, wow, that was a big hit. Let's keep it going. And also they would do things. He had an oratorio Hercules, which was a failure, and so he scrapped it. And then he had to move on to the next thing because he was like, I gotta make some money. That was, that was how our idea of this music worked with society. And these musicians, you know, who Mozart and Beethoven were musicians in the modern sense, they were freelancers. They were making music, they were doing commissions. They were making, you know, the Magic Flute was meant to be put on a stage to make money to sell tickets. You know, Mozart wrote his piano sonatas because his publisher said, hey, if you write some stuff for the piano, I bet we can sell it to People who play the piano at home, because that's, that's how people heard music at home. They play the piano, they play the violin. So once we get to the recording era, now all of a sudden we have music as a commodity, you know, and we have, you know, music, but also objects. You know, cylinders and 78s and LPs and cassettes and compact discs, you know, they're. They're not just. They're objects that also contain music. And, you know, one of the big problems with commercialization of music via the record companies, that the record companies treat so much music as just. They think they're selling music when what they're actually put together is objects while on the. Which can be frustrating on the listener end. And minimalist music, in a very, to me, very interesting ways, connects that older tradition, which is really. I mean, I, I. Older is not quite the white right term. It connects how human beings have always made music for tens of thousands of years back into the public sphere via recordings. You know, one of the great triumphs to me of minimalist music, of Russian glass, is that they were coming up in the middle of this extreme academicization of serious classical art music. And they just, you know, they had their conservatory training. They learned counterpoint, you know, they learned. They learned all the techniques of composition, and they just did not want to be involved with the extreme, extremely academic music of the era, which we're still kind of getting. Working our way out of. And so instead they were out. You know, they left Juilliard. They had a moving company together. They shared an ensemble. You know, glass drove a cab. In my book is the famous anecdote where the art critic Robert Hughes has got a plumbing problem in his soho loft. And he calls up the plumbing company and they send over filled Glass because he was a plumber's assistant. And Hughes was astonished because he knew who Glass was. He's like, what are you doing? You're a famous composer. And it's like, well, I'm, you know, I got to make a living, so here I am fixing your pipes. You know, so they were out in public, and they were out in the world. They were also part of the generation of composers who grew up in this recording environment. You know, they could hear music on the radio. They could listen to records, and Glass's father had a record shop. So they're like, they're products of our modern media environment. And to them, that mix of their classical training and jazz and soul and bebop and everything else rock that they were hearing this Is like, again, they were back in the natural state of musicians in society. And so here they are when they're playing music. They're playing it in art galleries or places like that because the classical establishment just was rejecting what they were doing. But they were out in public, you know, so they're the, the. To me, the, the.
- [24:34]
Bradley Morgan
The.
- [24:35]
George Grella Jr.
The appeal of their music, a great part of it is that it is like they always wanted to make music for people to hear, not for their professional colleagues to hear. You know, not as a research project. But they were like, we, we love this sound. We want this sound. We love this feeling. You know, you. So you feel that the tremendous, the beat, the pulse, the tremendous satisfaction of glasses, lines moving through time. You know, Reich's tremendous rhythms. You know, they're. They're all about like, hey, we have something that we think you'll enjoy hearing. Which was. All this has always been the case until. Until our bizarre contemporary times.
- [25:13]
Bradley Morgan
I really appreciate you sharing all that with me because I found it interesting how misunderstood minimalism is. Or maybe that just was my perception of it. But, you know, with what you brought up in terms of Philip Glass and Steve Reich and how, you know, their earlier careers were and what they were doing, I think this is a nice segue to talk about them more in detail and as well as some of the other composers behind the. Behind minimalism. And so you already mentioned a few details about how they came up. But how did they influence each other at the beginning of their careers with their early compositions?
- [25:47]
George Grella Jr.
Well, that's an interesting question, because I don't think strictly they influenced each other in their early careers. I think that in the larger context of, you know, we need to be doing something different than what we've been hearing in, you know, in the conservatories. They were very much in sympathy with each other, and of course, they were friends and they played in each other's ensembles. When Glass had a concert, it was the Philip Glass ensemble and Ren Reich had a concert with almost the same group of musicians. It was Steve Reich and musicians, but they were always going in parallel directions outside of what. They ended up having a personal conflict. But outside of that, they were. It's remarkable how complimentary they were because Reich was always very specifically, you know, I am not interested in most 18th century and all 19th century music. His ideas he put together through a combination of this medieval composer, Perilton Bach, and then he goes to Stravinsky and, you know, Charlie Parker, he just, to him, that whole, that whole. The whole idea of the emotional journey of 19th century romantic music was just. He just didn't like it. He wasn't interested in it. He's like Stravinsky's neoclassical period, when Stravinsky's like, you know, music has no power to express anything except itself of how the notes work together. Which is like, yeah, you know, he's not saying music doesn't mean anything to you. It's more like, we want this sound and it's up to you to decide how you want to feel about it. You know, while Glass is totally different in the sense of. He's like, yeah, Mozart, Schubert, Bruckner, you know, he loves that storytelling, you know, that. That kind of emotional connection. He is something he's about the feelings that he's feeling that he wants to kind of share with you without necessarily naming them and again, telling you how to think and feel. But he's very much. He's met very much in the Beethoven model of, this is my personality, you know, this is my inner personality coming through to you. While Reich is more like, this is what I consider beautiful. He's more like Mozart in that sense, coming through to you. So they're not. They're not influential to each other in that. In. In. In the way of, oh, I hear what you're doing, I want to do it. And oh, I hear what you're doing, and I want to do it. Because also their kind of origin stories are two very different stories, although compatible, again, because both, Both these guys, it's really kind of remarkable. They. They became who they were entirely in a way by accident. And it is like. Like Spider man, you know, Peter Parker getting bitten by the radioactive spider. But they were both looking for something else, and they were both mentally prepared for figuring out something new. And for Reich, it was discovering in the San Francisco Tape Music center when he recorded this tape of a street preacher in Union Square park. And he duplicated that tape. You know, this is 1964. So he's got reel to reels, and he's playing the tape on both just to see if the duplicate worked out. And that's when he discovers that the tape machines are slightly out of sync with each other. And he discovers this result of, wow, if I put these two sonic patterns together and then move them out of the phase, I get all sorts of fascinating things happening. So he's hearing how time works with music, and he's hearing the sound that he. That becomes his phase pieces. And then he later kind of, you know, he later kind of shoves it into a much more specific rhythmic structure. While for Glass, he's in Paris and he's studying with Dariel Blanche and. And he gets a call, you know, like, friend of a friend, connects him with this film director who needs a soundtrack for a movie. And what he needs Glass to do is to take his sp. His specific classical training, which is almost. Which is 90% ear training, listening to music and writing it down on paper and hearing. Learning to hear intervals and chords and things like that. He has Reich commit to the studio and listen to Ravi Shankar improvise on the sitar and write down what Shankar is playing and then orchestrated for chamber ensemble. And so Glass is doing this and he's writing down the music, and he eventually asks, you know, where do I put the bar lines? And Shankar is like, bar lines. You know, it's like 16 beats. And then when the 16 beats are over, you start 16 beats again. And just like with Reich discovered phasing, Glass discovered, ah, I can form music in these long patterns and I can layer these patterns against each other. I could push these patterns and I can add a little emphasis here and take a little bit away there. And for him, that worked perfectly with harmony, which, again, he's never left harmony behind. You know, he was always just. You know, he just loves that classical structure of harmony. So they end up doing two very different things, but that are also absolutely interrelated because they're about thinking and working with time. Tomorrow morning is knocking. Stock your fridge now. How about a creamy mocha frappuccino drink? Or a sweet vanilla smooth caramel, maybe?
- [31:18]
Bradley Morgan
Or a white chocolate mocha? Whichever you choose, Delicious coffee awaits. Find Starbucks frappuccino drinks wherever you buy your groceries. Well, I'm glad you mentioned about these accidents that happen, because there's a theme in this book that you convey this idea that musical innovation largely comes from accidents, but also that minimalist music exists because of those accidents. And Steve Reich's Tape and Delay system is a really profound example in your book of that. And I wanted to ask you about a little bit more about those phase compositions, because this was. That system was the beginning of a creative period for him. And he did several of these phase compositions, and this runs through 1971 to a piece called Drumming, which you refer to as one of his great masterpieces. Could you tell us more about drumming?
- [32:03]
George Grella Jr.
Yeah, Drumming is. Drumming is a fantastic, fantastic, thrilling piece of music. And I mean, I don't care what anybody likes to listen to. I don't care if it's house music or heavy Metal. Listen to drumming and you will just be like 90 minutes later like, what just happened to me. Drumming is literally a. Well, it's more than a percussion piece, but it starts off with a musician hitting a drum, and then another musician comes in and starts hitting a drum in offbeats. And. And then what gradually happens is two rhythms start to conflict and overlap with one each other, and then another one comes out of that, and then that second rhythm is established and then another player comes in and starts playing a rhythm on top and across it. And then they conflict and then another rhythm comes out of it and it just keeps flowing along like that. And, and just. That very basic technique just, Just keeps. You feel like everything is just. Even though the beat, the tempo is steady, you feel like everything is pushing forward. Like you almost kind of want to run along with it. And then he brings in and moves through four sections where he starts with bongos, and then he moves into tuned percussion, and then he adds piccolo and voices. And it's just. And bells. And it's gorgeous, you know, it's gorgeous, but also not like. What I like about Reich is that his sound is gorgeous, but it also has this nice percussive edge to it. You know, he's, he's, he's, he's always got the beat. He's not trying to, you know, give you that kind of. I don't know, it's not Kind of give you that kind of new wave, like, sleepy, you know, just relaxed quality. It's like, wow, listen to how brilliant that sounds. And, and drumming moves that way for, again, for about 80, 90 minutes, because the musicians decide how many times to repeat each other pattern. Although he does suggest, like, don't, you know, don't do it too many times. Don't play this too long. But it's just a thrilling piece. It's so engrossing. And it's not just engrossing because it sounds fantastic, but it's engrossing because even if you can't name it, you feel like, oh, my God, this is how time works. You know, you, you, you just, you. You see each new moment in the future coming into view, and then the next one, then the next one, the next one. That is just. To me, again, this is just personal inclination. That is deeply thrilling, deeply profound also. But, yeah, drumming is just. It's, you know, it's fantastic. Both, Both Reich and Glass have these pieces that kind of like, sum up all of their ideas, and then afterwards they work with different permutations of them and different extensions of them. But drumming is that for Reich, his most famous piece is music for 18 musicians, which comes after. But this, there's like a neat dividing line between those two pieces. It's like with drumming, he's like, okay, this is. I've totally. I totally understand what phasing is to me. And now I'm going to work with the next step of those ideas. And with. Right. With Glass, it's music in 12 parts. And Einstein on the beach, where you can hear, like, every idea he has with harmony and counterpoint. You can hear him working with those. And then later on, I mean, it, he literally, and not in a bad way, he reuses that material. He has been for decades afterwards because he's like, this is my toolkit.
- [35:27]
Bradley Morgan
Well, I'm glad you mentioned Philip Glass and music in 12 parts, because the composition that made Philip Glass famous was Einstein on the beach, premiering in 1976, a couple years after Steve does drumming. And while it didn't earn the same public recognition as Einstein the Beach, you called music in 12 parts the. The single most important composition he's made. Why?
- [35:51]
George Grella Jr.
Yeah, because you can, you know, you can and should listen to an Einstein on the beach and see a performance if you can, but that's a theater work. And so. And which is, again, to get back to the differences between Glass and Reich. Glass is always like, I'm a theater composer, you know, he's always trying to give you some kind of thematic, dramatic idea, even if it's totally abstract. And Einstein on the beach, the musical material is expansive, but it's also, in a sense, limited, and not in a bad way, but it's limited by what the dramatic idea is. It's like the spaceship scene, the train scene. These are like, okay, we're showing this idea, so the music has to show this idea. Music in 12 parts is much more expansive. And. And if you, if you only listen Einstein on the beach, you'll probably get like, you know, let's say 85, 90% of what Philip Glass does. But if you listen to music in 12 parts, you get 100% of what he does because it is every single structural idea that he ever uses to the nth degree. And it's. It's also, again, like. Like Reish's piece. It's beautiful. I mean, it's thrilling. It's. There's parts that are just complaint contemplative and gorgeous. There are parts that are as propulsive as any rock band. You know, it's. And. And super complex in. In the way of if you fit simple materials together in various ways, you produce tremendous complexity. You know, it's. Yeah, it's. It's like a. It's like the well tempered Clavier of. Of Reich. He's sort of showing you, you know, I. Bach is like, okay, I write preludes and fugues and this is how they work. And glass is like, okay, I work with voice leading and counterpoint, and this is how it works.
- [37:47]
Bradley Morgan
Your book puts a lot of focus on glass and rice because they are the two most associated with minimalism as a genre. However, you write that Meredith Monk is a composer who never got their due as being foundational to minimalism as a genre as well, and that she came to minimalist music in a much different way. Could you tell us more about Meredith and how she came into minimalist music? Yeah, she.
- [38:09]
George Grella Jr.
She's a. She's five years younger than. Than R and glass. And so. And she had a different background, so she was just, you know, just a few years behind what they were doing. And her specific background. One of the fundamental things for her is that when she was a child, she practiced Del Croise Eurythmics, which is a process of music, of learning music and making music, where you do it in a classroom with other people and everything, it's easier to see it in practice than to describe. But Eurythmics takes every part of making music and puts it in the body and combines it with physical sensations and movement. I think one thing that I saw from her, this goes back to when I was in San Francisco in the 1990s, where during one of Michael Tilson Thomas's American Mavericks Festival, he had Monk and her ensemble perform. And one of the things that they did was they did kind of a demonstration performance with some of the symphony musicians, which was just really fascinating and also quite beautiful and very moving to see where her idea from Eurythmics is as simple as if you're singing something and you start from a low note and go whoop. Then you start from down here at the waist and then you rise up and if you're singing something and you just go, oh. Then you start from there and you bend down. And so I remember seeing the Symphonies principal bassist doing this along with her, and he was just like moving up and down and singing along with her. And it was that simple. But it was also that fundamental to the human practice of making music. One of the things that makes us human beings. And it was just remarkable to see this. And that's what her music is, a musical embodiment. Of what the body is and what the body does. And so everything is wrapped up that way. So even if you just hear her music without seeing her perform or her ensemble perform, and all her performances are about this movement, I mean, it's. It's. Nothing is. Everything is integrated. But you hear a song, you know, it's like there's no words. It's a la la la la la la la. You know, different vocal sounds, but you know exactly what she's telling you. Because she has so integrated the bodily process of making sound that. That you hear her body speaking to you through those vibrations of sound. And it's really. It's. It's very powerful expressively. And she just found that again, that technique of working with repetitive rhythms, repeating ideas through time, showing you how that kind of rhythmic nature of time and syncopation is. Is exact, is closer to what Reich was doing, but it fits in exactly with minimalist process.
- [41:10]
Bradley Morgan
Meredith Monk composed an opera called Atlas that you write is a great avant garde minimalist work in a way that Philip Glass's Einstein on the beach is not, albeit that one is more notable. What sets Atlas apart?
- [41:24]
George Grella Jr.
What sets it apart and also to contrast it with Einstein on the beach is that Einstein on the beach is a. It has specific narrative scenes that are kind of inside a nonlinear. I would say a nonlinear structure, and everything is abstracted and that the scenes are kind of all, you know, metaphorical or allegorical, although that's. That's. That's just kind of working around what they are, which is much more complex. But Einstein on the beach is not about. We start the story at this point in time and then this happens, and this happens, this happens, and then the sands. It's about. Yes, it's about this impression of, again, the. The. It's about the impression of the experience of time. And in a deeper way, it's about how Einstein defined light as both particle and a wave traveling through time. You know, discrete instances which are the scenes traveling through time, not necessarily telling you something that strikes you from your experience as a coherent narrative. Meredith Monk's Atlas is an opera in. And that's an opera in the traditional sense. Meredith Monk's Atlas is also an opera in the traditional sense. But the thing about it is that she doesn't. Except for one scene, there are no words. So what she's doing with Atlas through her method is to show you the narrative possibilities of music drama in a way that happens to be both advanced because she has worked through music history to get to this Point and also, again, go back. They go back to this ancient, ancient thing, which I think is very profound in her work, which is that Meredith Monk's music is understandable to anyone on Earth, no matter what their inherent language is, because she embraces the idea that music is the fun, the most fundamental form of human communication before we get to spoken a written language. And it's something that I argue about in the book, about when you have two groups of people in ancient history who happen to encounter each other and they don't speak the same language, how do they get along? They make music together. They beat out rhythms and dance and sing together, and then civilization begins because of that. Civilization exists because people can and have made music together when they couldn't communicate in any other way. And that's what Meredith Monk does. And sure, it sounds like, wow, this is. Sounds absolutely contemporary in her methods, because this method, the sound of minimalist music, is very contemporary. But what she does is, you know, if. If she or her ensemble was sent back on a time machine to someplace, wherever, the Balkans, Africa, any place on Earth, 150,000 years ago, and they played Atlas, people would understand what she was doing.
- [44:20]
Bradley Morgan
I think it is important to note that all the composers we've been discussing so far are American. And your book also profiles international musicians who have had major influences on minimalism. And we don't have time to talk about all of them, but I do want to talk about one that you identify as the most important and famous minimalist composer outside of America, Arvo Pert from Estonia. And you write that he does something with repetition that never disrupts the spiritual feeling of his music. Could you tell us more about that?
- [44:48]
George Grella Jr.
Well, this boils down to just his own genius and talent, but he discovered minimalist means entirely independently because he was creating music behind the Iron Curtain in Soviet Estonia. And what he ended up doing was entirely radical politically. But he, like Reich, he went back to medieval music. But while Reich was thinking in structural terms, for Parrot, it was religious terms. You know, he grew up Lutheran, but eventually converted to orthodox Christianity. And the spiritual impulse in his music comes from his own personality, you know, and his own need. And he discovered that these medieval ideas would give him the spiritual, the access to spirituality that he desired and sound. And as working with them, it's almost as if the logical conclusion then, like Reich found through his own way, was, well, I've got these very basic medieval ideas. How do I extend that through time? Well, just through basic repetition. And so Part Perth works with time in the same Process repeating rhythmic patterns, repeating melodic patterns, repeating some harmonic movement and pausing and repeating again and. Or layering one repetition on top of another, or just using the most basic idea of that. We're repeating this idea, but we're just getting louder. You know, those, these things should not be discounted because a crescendo is an incredibly expressive and gripping thing. And, you know, so he created this incredibly delicate and beautiful music that has become. He is the most performed contemporary composer in the 21st century. I mean, you know, there's John. There's John Williams and Arvo Pert, and there's really everybody else. And Apert is often performed more often than John Williams because his music is. It has this profound beauty that again, speaks, speak to, speaks to audience audiences with also this paradoxical quality of that. He's, you know, he's thinking in terms of medieval communication. And that was the era before mechanical clocks and the idea of time meant something very different than what we have now. So he manages to give you the idea of the process of passing time while holding you still in that moment at the same time, which is really. This is unique in music where he is actually channeling the minimal drone experience through minimalist process. So that's. He's a very special, special figure in music history.
- [47:31]
Bradley Morgan
I appreciate you talking with me about all those great composers. And there's so much more in your book that we didn't get a chance to discuss, such as all the different ways that Philip Glass and Steve Reich appear in pop culture. That was a really fun part to read. And so I encourage people to check out your book to know more. But before we end, I did want to take some time to talk about one last composition because your book features a list of recommendations for the 10 essential minimalist tracks. And we've already discussed several of them, but my personal favorite is Music for 18 Musicians by Steve Reich. And I just want to know why does that earn a spot on your list of the essential minimalist tracks?
- [48:06]
George Grella Jr.
Well, it has, you know, it earns a spot both aesthetically and I would say, you know, in the music business. That's the piece that is the step after drumming where Reich has kind of divided up phasing into a very specific process of, you know, a two night phrase. You know, he kind of keeps adding things and cycling. And so the. The process of time is. Of how time passes is just incredibly etched. And he uses shifting. He changes harmonies. You know, like he once said, I didn't change harmonies for 8 years. And music for 18 musicians works that way through cycling, through harmonies. And also. It's also got this tremendous. You can hear it in recordings, but it's also. If you can see it in a video or see a live performance, it's got this tremendous thrill of seeing the musicians working together. There are parts of it where there's certain percussion parts where that are played constantly for 70 minutes or more. And at some point in time, somebody has got to spell the original musicians. So they kind of overlap and then one takes over. And it's just. It's this process of ensemble play that he learned by studying drumming in Ghana. And it's fantastic to see. It's not just fantastic to hear music, but again, music is a social activity. It's about seeing musicians working together and them working together for your pleasure. And it's just. There's very little music that is out there in the world that has this same kind of thrill of just, wow, look what they're doing. Take that back.
- [49:43]
Bradley Morgan
So.
- [49:44]
George Grella Jr.
And again, it sounds fantastic. You just, you. It's the kind of thing you start playing and you really. You cannot turn it off until it ends. It's also very interesting because there's this complex history with ECM Records, which is now one of the most famous record companies and one of the most important. And Deutsche Gramophone, the great classical music imprint, put out Reich's drumming. And they recorded music for 18 musicians. But the sales of drumming were not good. And so ECM bought the tape for Music for 18 musicians from Deutsche Gammophon, and the rest is history. And that's also wrapped up in the great success of Keith Jarrett's Konn concert, which sold 4 million copies and allowed Manfred Eichert to be like, okay, I can put out some more music. But Music for 18 Musicians started the new series on ECM, the Non Jazz music, the modern composition music. And then it extended into earlier music. And ECM is also the recording company that put out All Road Parrot's first recording in the west, which is Tabula Raza, which is also another fan. This. These are some two of the great albums that you should have in your music collection. And. But it's sort of that. That's that accidental success, that accident of Deutsche Gramophone deciding, oh, we can't make money off this, and then ECM making money off this and saying, hey, how about this guy Arvo Parrot? Let's put him out too. You know, it's really important to our modern discographical society.
- [51:12]
Bradley Morgan
Well, I'm glad you mentioned that ECM new series, because I wanted to bring up music for 18 musicians because your book does include a guide of album recommendations and even warnings for which ones to avoid. Not just for the recording itself, but also the format as well. And I have a very strong opinion on which edition of music for 18 musicians is the best. And it is for me, the ECM New Series editions, the one with the grey cover, but specifically the CD version instead of the vinyl, because otherwise you don't have that continuous listening experience. I know we described music for 18 musicians as a track. It technically is a 59 minute track. So you do have to have that uninterrupted experience. So I just wanted to close things out, just hearing your thoughts on that.
- [51:58]
George Grella Jr.
Well, that's a very good point. And for me, I first heard music of 18 musicians on the original LP. You know, I had a friend, we were studying jazz and playing jazz together and you know, it's like, ah, ecm. Wow. We heard Keith Jarrett, we heard Art Ensemble of Chicago, and one day he went and bought. He was like, what is this album? Music for 18 musicians. We knew nothing about. I was in high school, we knew nothing about Steve Reich. And he put it on. It's like we didn't know what to think about it at first because it was so different than what we had been hearing. But it was a thing where you'd have to play the whole half and then flip it over and hear the rest. So the advent of the CD has been great for minimalist music because again, so many of these pieces have a long duration. You know, music for 12 parts, it's divided up into parts and it's performed usually like three parts at a time. So it works on CD that way. But yeah, music for 18 musicians, you got to hear it all the way through. So the CDs work. Although I also want to add the point here, which is that what Deutsche Grammophone has done with drumming, all of their CD transfers is just. That is an album where it's three LPs to hear these parts. And it is a continuous piece of music. It's in four sections, but it's continuous. And so what Deutsche Grammaphon had to do, and I think from the side, from side B to side C is they had to fade down side B. And then you take the LP off and you put down the second LP and start up side C and then it fades in. And when you hear the CV transfers, they do the same thing. Every digital transfer fades down and fades up. I mean, we live in the digital era, yet no executive at Deutsche Gramophone has ever thought, ha. You know, maybe we should just like go back to the original tapes and not bait it down. Ah, that's how little they really well, they sold the tape for music for 18 musicians, so other than making money off their back catalog by reprinting it ultra times, that's how much they care about it, which is not very much.
- [54:00]
Bradley Morgan
Well, George, thanks so much for speaking with me today about your book. It is a brilliantly compelling overview of a misunderstood and unappreciated form of music, and I think you should be really proud.
- [54:10]
George Grella Jr.
Bradley, thank you so much. Believe me, I appreciate just that you read it than anybody reads it. So thank you. It's great to hear.
- [54:17]
Bradley Morgan
My name is Bradley Morgan and you've been listening to New Books Network with my guest, George Grella Jr. His latest book is Minimalist Music, an installment of the 33 and a third genre series published by Bloomsbury. Thank you for listening to this episode of the New Books Network. We are an academic podcast network with the mission of public education. If you liked this episode, please share it with a friend and rate us on your preferred podcast platform. You can browse all of our episodes on our website newbooksnetwork.com Connect with us on Instagram and BlueSky with the handle ew booksnetwork, and subscribe to our weekly Substack newsletter at newbooksnetwork.substack.com to get episode recommendations straight to your inbox.