‘Glass Cage’ that drove musical minimalism
Michael Johnson is a music critic with particular interest in piano.
Johnson worked as a reporter and editor in New York, Moscow, Paris and London over his journalism career. He covered European technology for Business Week for five years, and served nine years as chief editor of International Management magazine and was chief editor of the French technology weekly 01 Informatique. He also spent four years as Moscow correspondent of The Associated Press. He is the author of five books.
Michael Johnson is based in Bordeaux. Besides English and French he is also fluent in Russian.
You can order Michael Johnson's most recent book, a bilingual book, French and English, with drawings by Johnson:
“Portraitures and caricatures: Conductors, Pianist, Composers”
here.
It was British composer Michael Nyman who in the late 1960s coined the term musical minimalism, the application of limited materials borrowed from ideas of modern architecture, literature and improvisational performance. Today, thanks to John Cage, Philip Glass, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, La Monte Young and others, musical minimalism has found a secure place among composers and performers.
Defining it is a slippery exercise, however, as it means different styles to different musicians. I nominate Cage as the ultimate simplifier. He wrote in a 1989 memoir that he believed anything simple that vibrates can be called music. He says he began life as a composer by “hitting, rubbing everything and then writing it for percussion instruments and playing it for friends”.
Philip Glass took the basics – repetition, phase music, steady drones, consonant harmony – and made a brilliant career of it. He is the most widely performed living composer today, with a prolific range of solo piano, symphonies, concertos, operas and 30 film scores to his credit.
Glass leads the new CD "Minimalist" with his Etude No. 4, a 4-minute string of phrases that chage shaoe as the theme develops. In this clip, Lithuanian pianist Augustina Vasiliauskaite plays his Etude:
Glass advises listeners to pay attention to changes in all his work. The value, he says, is in not knowing what’s coming next.
The new CD was conceived and programmed by the young Polish pianist/composer Szymon Nehring, who included one of his own compositions, the hypnotic and melodic “Bridge”. Also on the disc are works by Arvo Part, Giya Kincheli, Henryk Mikomaj Gorecki, Simeon Ter Holt, and Wojciech Kilar. Orchestral pieces are performed by the Polish Radio Orchestra in Warasaw, conducted by Michal Klauza.
Nehring, considered to be one of the most gifted Polish pianists of his generation, is a regular in concert venues throughout Europe. His contact in the United States dates from his two-year Artist Diploma program atYale University in the class of Boris Berman.
The compilation of “minimalist” compositions on the CD cover a wide spectrum of the concept stretching the very spare definition of the haunting one-finger ideas of Arvo Part to the full-blooded richly orchestrated Kilar concerto for piano and orchestra. Nehring’s playing reflects his world-class training from the leading Polish institutions to the Berman touch at Yale.
A valuable bonus in this album is the detailed history of minimalism written by the Spanish author and musicologist Pierre Elie Marmou. He quotes a line from Leonardo da Vinci, praising simplicity as “the ultimate sophistication”.
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