For instance, tabla music by Ravi Shankar and Allah Rakha that Glass knew quite well, having made a study-trip to India, then to Northern Africa and Central Asia.
Glass’s music thus produces sound differences in time, using the same elements in constantly differentiated sequences.Ĭreating these differences within a context of repetitions is not only the heart of Minimalism, but it is also one of the basic principles of Far-Eastern musics. He thus proposes a variable within a simple arithmetic gradation: rhythmically in unison and in parallel, contrary or similar motion. If Young offers a continuous sound of a constant pitch, Riley a repetitive principle subject to the improviser’s fancy, and Reich a process of gradual progression, Glass, however, insists on the use of an additive process of development founded on the progression of a repeated figure. Glass studied composition with William Bergsma and Vincent Persichetti, and then studied with Darius Milhaud and Nadia Boulanger. Moreover, all these musicians are of the same generation - the first one, Young, was born in 1929 and the last one, Glass, in 1937.
However, this idea can be linked to another basic phenomenon, one of extra-musical origin, namely the oriental philosophies, in which Sol LeWitt, the sculptor, envisages a more mystical than rational perspective in which “illogical judgements lead to new experience” it is a salutary experience with variety in the repeated pattern, thus granting a specific treatment of space, duration and sound, as duration and rhythm for Glass, as well as for La Monte Young, Terry Riley or Steve Reich, are the main parameters of sound, at the very heart of compositional thought. From a European point of view, this conception is equivocal. It is no longer a closed system, but rather an opening enriched with freedom for the individual. Thoreau used to say: “Music, as I see it, is ecological… it IS ecology”. This avant-garde differs from the American one in that its origin stems from a philosophical foundation. Since the sixties, Minimalism continues to be a liberating experience allowing artists to break away from a Europe totally immersed in the Darmstadtian avant-garde.
0 kommentar(er)
