Carving the path for minimalism, or maybe just a niche?

So I sat down over vacation to do the assigned listening pieces for the blog; I was shocked by the vocal pieces by Joan LaBarbera, the spoken "I am sitting in a room", and by most of the music in general. Then I reached James Tenney's Chromatic Canon...

Now let it be known that I love, love, love minimalist music. I may or may not be listening to Reich right now as I right this. And as soon as I heard Tenney's piece, my ears and brian instantly snapped into the mindset I enter when I listen to minimalist works. There was such an astounding difference to me between this piece and the others, but I couldn't quite pin the reason why, what or how this was different.

Was in the instrumentation? 2 pianos, acoustic. Well, of course this is certainly different than spoken word or voice, or the early tape music of Oliveros, etc. Yet even if Chromatic Canon had been performed on electric organ, for example, like is often utilized in Glass and Reich, I would still feel compelled to associate it with minimalism.

How about the form? Well Tenney's use of "process" as Gann discusses is what also made me think of minimalism in the first place; a small amount of material undergoing a process or journey in a very organic fashion. Tenney does not ensure or desire a "rhetorical process" in form (ex. Wow the recapituation should happen in about 10 measures, oh there it is! Silly Haydn).

So I went on a little James Tenney binge, reading about his work at Bell laboratories and his work with sound perception and how his works reflected it. I listened to For Ann (rising) about four times before my ears started to hurt, but I could even see the pre-minimalist influences here. Wanting the audience to perceive an overall arch and growth of line, yet also playing on the notion that we will adjust to and recognize the small shifts in the music as well; is an idea that I could see being applied to many of my favorite minimalist works.




It is important to keep in mind Tenney was working at the same time as minimalism's heroes, Philip Glass and Steve Reich (not to exclude all my other favorites), but Tenney remains largely in the shadow and probably really isn't considered minimalist in most circles. I don't think, however, it is a coincidence that Tenney was one of the four performers in Steve Reich's Pendulum Music in 1969.

I definitely see myself investigating a little more into James Tenney's works and compositional style. At one point Gann says of a piece circa 1990 that "Tenney gradually brings about evolutions of melodic contour and tonality within a generally postminimalist tonal language" (Gann, 169).

Whoa wait, when did we get to post minimalism? I'm going to leave that for the later blogs on minimalism :)