Writings On Music 1965 2000

In the mid-1960s, Steve Reich radically renewed the musical landscape with a back-to-basics sound that came to be called Minimalism. These early works, characterized by a relentless pulse and static harmony, focused single-mindedly on the process of gradual rhythmic change. Throughout his career, Reich has continued to reinvigorate the music world, drawing from a wide array of classical, popular, sacred, and non-western idioms. His works reflect the steady evolution of an original musical mind. Writings on Music documents the creative journey of this thoughtful, groundbreaking composer. These 64 short pieces include Reich's 1968 essay "Music as a Gradual Process," widely considered one of the most influential pieces of music theory in the second half of the 20th century. Subsequent essays, articles, and interviews treat Reich's early work with tape and phase shifting, showing its development into more recent work with speech melody and instrumental music. Other essays recount his exposure to non-western music -- African drumming, Balinese gamelan, Hebrew cantillation -- and the influence of these musics as structures and not as sounds. The writings include Reich's reactions to and appreciations of the works of his contemporaries (John Cage, Luciano Berio, Morton Feldman, Gyorgy Ligeti) and older influences (Kurt Weill, Schoenberg). Each major work of the composer's career is also explored through notes written for performances and recordings. Paul Hillier, himself a respected figure in the early music and new music worlds, has revisited these texts, working with the author to clarify their central narrative: the aesthetic and intellectual development of an influential composer. For long-time listeners and young musicians recently introduced to his work, this book provides an opportunity to get to know Reich's music in greater depth and perspective.

A surprising, enlightening series of conversations that shed new light on the music and career of “our greatest living composer” (New York Times) Steve Reich is a living legend in the world of contemporary classical music. As a leader of the minimalist movement in the 1960s, his works have become central to the musical landscape worldwide, influencing generations of younger musicians, choreographers and visual artists. He has explored non-Western music and American vernacular music from jazz to rock, as well as groundbreaking music and video pieces. He toured the world with his own ensemble and his compositions are performed internationally by major orchestras and ensembles. Now Reich speaks with collaborators, fellow composers and musicians as well as visual artists influenced by his work to reflect on his prolific career as a composer as well as the music that inspired him and that has been inspired by him, including: David Lang Brian Eno Richard Serra Michael Gordon Michael Tilson Thomas Russell Hartenberger Robert Hurwitz Stephen Sondheim Jonny Greenwood David Harrington Elizabeth Lim-Dutton David Robertson Micaela Haslam Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker Julia Wolfe Nico Muhly Beryl Korot Colin Currie Brad Lubman Through this series of insightful, wide-ranging conversations starting from his student days to the present pandemic, we gain a compelling glimpse into the mind of “the most original musical thinker of our time” (The New Yorker).

The worlds of new music and historically informed performance might seem quite distant from one another. Yet, upon closer consideration, clear points of convergence emerge. Not only do many contemporary performers move easily between these two worlds, but they often do so using a shared ethos of flexibility, improvisation, curiosity, and collaboration—collaboration with composers past and present, with other performers, and with audiences. Bringing together expert scholars and performers considering a wide range of issues and case studies, Historical Performance and New Music—the first book of its kind—addresses the synergies in aesthetics and practices in historical performance and new music. The essays treat matters including technologies and media such as laptops, printing presses, and graphic notation; new music written for period instruments from natural horns to the clavichord; personalities such as the pioneering singer Cathy Berberian; the musically “omnivorous” ensembles A Far Cry and Roomful of Teeth; and composers Luciano Berio, David Lang, Molly Herron, Caroline Shaw, and many others. Historical Performance and New Music presents pathbreaking ideas in an accessible style that speaks to performers, composers, scholars, and music lovers alike. Richly documented and diverse in its methods and subject matter, this book will open new conversations about contemporary musical life.

Since the early transformation of European music practice and theory in the cultural centers of Asia, Latin America, and Africa around 1900, it has become necessary for music history to be conceived globally - a challenge that musicology has hardly faced yet. This book discusses the effects of cultural globalization on processes of composition and distribution of art music in the 20th and 21st century. Christian Utz provides the foundations of a global music historiography, building on new models such as transnationalism, entangled histories, and reflexive globalization. The relationship between music and broader changes in society forms the central focus and is treated as a pivotal music-historical dynamic.

The explosion of minimalism into the worlds of visual arts, music and literature in the mid-to-late twentieth century presents one of the most radical and decisive revolutions in aesthetic history. Detested by some, embraced by others, minimalism's influence was immediate, pervasive and lasting, significantly changing the way we hear music, see art and read literature. In The Theory of Minimalism, Marc Botha offers the first general theory of minimalism, equally applicable to literature, the visual arts and music. He argues that minimalism establishes an aesthetic paradigm for rethinking realism in genuinely radical terms. In dialogue with thinkers from both the analytic and continental traditions – including Kant, Danto, Agamben, Badiou and Meillassoux – Botha develops a constellation of concepts which together encapsulate the transhistorcial and transdisciplinary reach of minimalism. Illustrated by a range of historical, canonical and contemporary minimalist works of different media, from the caves of early Christian ascetics to Samuel Beckett's late prose, Botha offers a bold and provocative argument which will equip readers with the tools to engage critically with past, present and future minimalism, and to recognize how, in a culture caught between the poles of excess and austerity, minimalism still matters.

In recent years the music of minimalist composers such as La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich and Philip Glass has, increasingly, become the subject of important musicological reflection, research and debate. Scholars have also been turning their attention to the work of lesser-known contemporaries such as Phill Niblock and Eliane Radigue, or to second and third generation minimalists such as John Adams, Louis Andriessen, Michael Nyman and William Duckworth, whose range of styles may undermine any sense of shared aesthetic approach but whose output is still to a large extent informed by the innovative work of their minimalist predecessors. Attempts have also been made by a number of academics to contextualise the work of composers who have moved in parallel with these developments while remaining resolutely outside its immediate environment, including such diverse figures as Karel Goeyvaerts, Robert Ashley, Arvo Pärt and Brian Eno. Theory has reflected practice in many respects, with the multimedia works of Reich and Glass encouraging interdisciplinary approaches, associations and interconnections. Minimalism’s role in culture and society has also become the subject of recent interest and debate, complementing existing scholarship, which addressed the subject from the perspective of historiography, analysis, aesthetics and philosophy. The Ashgate Research Companion to Minimalist and Postminimalist Music provides an authoritative overview of established research in this area, while also offering new and innovative approaches to the subject.

This book examines the American Sixties, and how that period’s socio-political essence was reflected and refracted in certain forms of the period’s music. Its five main chapters bear the names of familiar musical categories: ’Folk,’ ‘Rock,’ ‘Jazz,’ ‘Avant-Garde,’ ‘Classical.’ But the book’s real subject matter—treated at length in the Prologue and the Epilogue but spread throughout all that comes between—is the Sixties’ tangled mess of hopes and frustrations, of hungers as much for self-identity as for self-indulgence, of crises of conscience that bothered Americans of almost all ages and regardless of political persuasion.