to be themselves, not fashioned into shapes determined by human will.
Steve Reich, for long an associate and friend of Young, is also an observer of the behavior of sounds, but sounds not stationary but gradually changing from within, following their own natural evolution. His compositions are, as he himself says, literally processes, which happen extremely gradually, much as a plant unfolds. One often fails to perceive the process happening, but only becomes aware that a change has taken place. Reich compares such processes to “pulling back a swing, releasing it, and observing it gradually come to rest; turning over an hour glass and watching the sand slowly run through to the bottom; placing your feet in the sand by the ocean’s edge and watching, feeling and listening to the waves gradually bury them.”36 Such processes, though fascinating to the mind that is prepared to sit and let them happen, are essentially undramatic; so is Reich’s music, which might be dismissed as monotonous by minds attuned to the violent and dramatic contrasts of classical music. A piece tends to consist of an extremely small amount of material, both rhythmic and melodic, played by several performers (or, in the earlier pieces, on several tape recorders) who are slightly out of phase with one another, so that material is constantly being revealed in new, gradually changing relationships with itself; fascinating and beautiful new melodic and rhythmic patterns are constantly being created. The music is not difficult to play in terms of the actual notes, which tend to be simple repetitions of melodic patterns, but the task of playing the same pattern as one’s neighbor at a slightly different but perfectly controlled speed requires intense discipline and months of rehearsal for each piece. Reich has collected around him a group of musicians who have developed the kind of social rather than individual virtuosity, which is perhaps the most important fruit of his period of study under a master drummer in Ghana. The nature of the processes at work is always perfectly clear to the listener; unlike tonal-harmonic or serial music it keeps no secrets. As Reich says, in the same article, “We all listen to the process together since it’s quite audible, and one of the reasons why it’s quite audible is because it’s happening extremely gradually. The use of hidden structural devices has never appealed to me. Even when all the cards are on the table and everyone hears what is happening in a musical process there are still enough mysteries to satisfy all. These mysteries are the impersonal, unintended, psycho-acoustic byproducts of the intended process. These might include sub-melodies heard within repeated melodic patterns, stereophonic effects due to listener location, slight irregularities in performance, harmonics, difference tones, etc.”37
Reich’s largest and most ambitious work to date is Drumming, a work for tuned tomtoms, glockenspiels and marimbas, with singers, whistlers and piccolo to outline the melodic patterns that are implied as the highly disciplined performers move in and out of phase with one another; it was for me a musical experience of great beauty and joy when it was first performed in London in 1972. Reich’s gift is the ability to set up situations in which, as the sounds unfold according to the rules of their own evolution, they make continuously beautiful and interesting patterns without the apparent intervention of the composer’s will. There is an openness and a complex simplicity about this exploration of sounds that parallels the workings of nature herself.
The music of Terry Riley, a Californian and friend of both Young and Reich, takes place in a similar area of musical sound; it first struck a wide public at least, in this country with In C, where some fifty short melodic fragments, all diatonic on the scale of C, are played by as many instrumentalists as desired; each player plays each fragment as many times as he wishes before moving on to the next, the performance being held together rhythmically by a rapidly repeated high C on the piano. The result is an extremely pleasing music, not unlike Reich’s in sound, but governed more by the whims of the performers than by the internal logic of the sounds; it is a less rigorous, more engaging, perhaps finally less satisfying music than Reich’s. Later works have included tape loops and feedback systems, sometimes with delays built in; the sound is relaxed and slow-changing, and takes the listener again far into the awareness of the sounds themselves.
In these and other ways the ideas of Cage have been taken forward, ways which in the purely musical results are perhaps more sympathetic to the uncommitted ear than those of Cage himself. There has always been a strong didactic, even dogmatic, streak in Cage; one sometimes has the impression that certain pieces were composed more to prove a point than from any genuine aesthetic impulse in any traditionally comprehensible sense of the word, and having heard the piece, one frequently has no real desire to hear it again; the point has been made, the idea got across, and there seems no need to repeat the experience.
There is perhaps a parallel here with the modern movement in American painting, discussed wittily in a recent magazine article by Tom Wolfe, who sees it not as the consequence of an aesthetic impulse but as a response to a theory of art, usually propounded by a critic. He says, “Frankly, these days, without a theory to go with it I can’t see a painting,”38 and suggests, tongue only half in cheek, that when the final great retrospective exhibition of American art 1945–75 is presented at the Museum of Modern Art in the year 2000 the exhibits will consist of blow-ups of the writings of critics with, by way of illustration, tiny reproductions of the paintings themselves. Cage does not always avoid the trap of the piece written to illustrate a point about perception, sound, silence or society. If music is to be alive, however, Art, to parody Billings, must go first and strike out the work, then Theory comes after and polishes it over.
For this reason, it could be that despite the power of Cage’s ideas to shock and disturb our preconceptions, a much more seminal figure will in time prove to be Harry Partch, who, born in 1901, was vouchsafed a mere four lines in a recently published history of music in the United States; his death at the end of 1974 passed almost unnoticed in the musical, not to say the general, press. If we compare Cage with the African and Balinese musicians discussed in chapter 2 [Music, Society, Education], it will be clear that he remains, for all his invaluable study of non-European ways, very much tied to western urban culture, and that his discourse is still carried on within the conditions of the western concert tradition. It is Partch, more than any other twentieth-century western musician, who represents a real challenge to that tradition, a challenge which stems not from the “Tomorrow’s World” optimism of Cage, who is still, it seems, hung up on the engaging technological lunacy of Buckminster Fuller and the behaviorist nightmares of B. F. Skinner, but from the old, universal and forever new ways of ritual theatre. “The work that I have been doing these many years,” says Partch, “parallels much in the attitudes and actions of primitive man. He found soundmagic in the common materials around him. He then proceeded to make the vehicle, the instrument, as visually beautiful as he could. Finally, he evolved the sound-magic and the visual beauty in his everyday words and experiences, his ritual and drama, in order to lend greater meaning to his life. This is my trinity: sound-magic, visual beauty, experience-ritual.”39
Partch, in fact, may be the first musician of the west to have transcended the limitations of its concert tradition—or at least to have pointed a way in which this can be done. He is unique, not only in the thoroughness and explicitness of his rejection of European classical music, a rejection more complete than that of Cage or indeed of anyone since Billings and the New England tunesmiths, but also in the fact that he has succeeded in erecting a living alternative to it, growing not out of theory (though well supported by theory, coming after the creative fact) but out of “an acoustical ardor and a conceptual fervor”40—out of the fundamental creative impulse. In a single robustly-written chapter in his book Genesis of a Music, he surveys the whole of western music from Terpander in 700 BC to the present and finds it wanting in what he calls corporeality, that quality of being “vital to a time and a place, a here and now,”41 of being “emotionally tactile.” To him, the overwhelming majority of western musical compositions, including almost all of the post-Renaissance tradition (he has an interesting list of honorable exceptions, which includes the Florentine Camerata and Monteverdi, Berlioz, Mussorgski, the Mahler of Das Lied von der Erde, Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande, the Pierrot Lunaire of Schoenberg—but nothing else by him—and Satie) is
