In this article we will focus on three American composers of modern classical music who released major works in 1970. We begin with a composition influenced by the war in Vietnam.
George Crumb – Dark Angels
In 1970 composer George Crumb received a commission from the University of Michigan for its resident ensemble, the Stanley Quartet. He has not written music for this format since his student days in the mid-1950s. Early in the composing process the charged political events around him started influencing the work. He later commented: “Very soon after I got into the sketching process, I became aware that the musical ideas were picking up vibrations from the surrounding world, which was the world of the Vietnam time. And there were dark currents operating and those things were somehow finding their way into the conception of the string quartet.”
After He finished writing the score, Crumb titled it ‘Black Angels’ and dated it ‘Friday the Thirteenth, March 1970 (in tempore belli)’. Tempore belli means ‘in time of war’ in Latin. He explained: “By the time I finished writing the whole piece, in token of this recognition of its character and identifying with that very dark time, I inscribed the work ‘In Time of War’ using the model of Joseph Haydn’s ‘Mass in Time of War’.”
The work is a threnody, with insect sounds symbolizing the sound of choppers, at the time a constant fixture on TV broadcasts from Vietnam. Crumb wrote about the composition: “Black Angels was conceived as a kind of parable on our troubled contemporary world. The work portrays the voyage of the soul. The three stages of this voyage are Departure (fall from grace), Absence (spiritual annihilation) and Return (redemption).” Part of the composition references Schubert’s Death and The Maiden.
Crumb wrote the music for a standard instrumentation of a string quartet: 2 violins, viola and cello. He labeled the piece an ‘electric string quartet’, going into detail in the performance program notes: “The amplification of the instruments is of critical importance in ‘Black Angels.’ Ideally, one should use genuine electric instruments (with a built-in pick-up). Otherwise, fine quality contact microphones can be attached (by rubber bands) to the belly of the instrument. The player should find the best position for the microphone in order to avoid distortion of the tone. If the amplifier is equipped with a reverberation control, this should be set on ‘high’ to create a more surrealistic effect.”
Performers of this piece of music find themselves quite busy on stage, focusing hard not only on playing the notes, but also engaging in other activities. The performance notes continue to include the duties of shouting and whispering in different languages, playing tam-tams, maracas, and water-tuned crystal goblets. Finally, musicians are instructed to make their instruments play sounds far from their original intent: “Gradually increase bow pressure until pitch becomes pure noise.”
Black Angels premiered by the Stanley Quartet in October of 1970, and was first recorded by the New York String Quartet in 1971. Almost twenty years later Kronos Quartet gave it a fresh interpretation. David Harrington, founder of the quartet, talked about the history and recording of that unique piece of modern classical music: “The Vietnam War was raging, and so how does one find a voice that feels real? In August of 1973, on the radio one night, I heard Black Angels by George Crumb. And for a moment the world made sense. And I didn’t have really any choice but I had to start a group in order to play that piece.”
Years after writing the quartet, George Crumb summarized its impact on listeners: “I think that Black Angels should inspire a sense of terror although, toward the end, I introduce a note of optimism. As black as things are, there is a progression from the dark to the light over the course of the work, even though the final page again has a flashback to the hysterical music of the opening page. It’s not uniformly black, but the prevailing sense is probably very much that.”
In the year 2004, in the midst of the Iraq War, Crumb talked about the cyclical nature of difficult political conflicts: “I think that when I hear this piece played in very recent times, I’m struck with the haunting sense that here we go again. We’re heading right into a very dark period for America. It’s surprisingly reminiscent of so many things that worried us about the Vietnam time. I heard the piece played several times just in the last year and a half, and I kind of shudder that things move in cycles. We get ourselves into these awful, abysmal messes. We can’t seem to avoid that every so often in our history.”
Steve Reich – Four Organs
1970 was the year Steve Reich completed a musical composition with a new concept, inspired by 12th century music. French composers Pérotin and his predecessor Léonin introduced three and four-part harmonies. They developed a music style called Organum, replacing the monophonic Gregorian chant with polyphony. Reich noticed the extremely long notes in the tenor parts written for Organum pieces. He conceived of a new technique that he named augmentation, and based his new work ‘Four Organs’ solely on this method. He explained the process of augmentation in detail: “Four Organs is composed exclusively of the gradual augmentation (lengthening) of individual tones within a single (dominant 11th) chord. The tones within the chord gradually extend out like a sort of horizontal bar graph in time. As the chord stretches out, slowly resolving to the tonic A and then gradually changing back to the dominant E, a sort of slow-motion music is created.”
Reich also added a steady pulse in the form of maracas playing fast eight-notes throughout the piece, thus grounding both musicians and listeners to a constant rhythmic feel. Even though the musicians only play very minimal amount of notes, they have to focus very hard on that pulse and the length of the notes they play. In some cases they mentally count up to as much as 256 beats on a given cycle of sustained tones. Talking about the uniqueness of this composition method, Reich said: “Four Organs is the longest V-I cadence in the history of Western music. You’ll find the chord in Debussy and Thelonious Monk – the tonic on the top and the dominant on the bottom. It is the only piece I am aware of that is composed exclusively of the gradual augmentation of individual tones within a single chord. From the beginning to the end there are no changes of pitch or timbre. All changes are rhythmic and simply consist of gradually increasing durations.”
Some people who listen intently to Four Organs may have a hypnotic experience, focusing for fifteen minutes on four identical instruments playing the same notes in varying lengths. Reich explained: “There is a sense of slow motion: something you heard that takes a few seconds gradually takes longer and longer. And you hear more and more melodic movement revealed as the chord pulls apart. Meanwhile, you have the maracas sprinkling salt over the whole piece, constantly shaking out a growing number of eighth notes from the beginning to end.”
Reich completed the work in January 1970 and first performed it at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City with members of his ensemble later that year. In 1971 Michael Tilson Thomas invited him to perform it with members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and then at Carnegie Hall in 1973. That second performance provoked a riot. The famous conductor remembers the experience vividly, as he recalled in 1997: “Carnegie Hall was packed with a mixture of the Boston Symphony’s conservative subscription audience and a sprinkling of wide-eyed New York downtowners. In all my years as a performer, I have never seen such a reaction from an audience. After a few minutes into Steve’s piece a restlessness began to sweep through the crowd: rustlings of programs, overly loud coughs, compulsive seat shifting, gradually mixed with groans and hostile exclamations crescendoing into a true cacophony. There were at least three attempts to stop the performance by shouting it down. One woman walked down the aisle and repeatedly banged her head on the front of the stage wailing, ‘Stop, stop, I confess.’”
Immediately after he completed working on Four Organs, Steve Reich wrote another piece of music for four electric organs, titled Phase Patterns. This time he combined his love of drumming with melodic instruments and instructed the performers to drum on the organs. He explained the basis of the composition: “Each hand plays certain notes throughout the piece, only alternating left, right, left, left, right, left, right, right, which, in Western rudimental drumming, is called a paradiddle. The idea of drumming on the keyboard came out of my studies of rudimental drumming as a teenager. The result is a new approach to the keyboard. One can look at keyboard instruments as extraordinary sets of tuned drums.” The work is unique for its use of melodic and harmonic instruments purely for rhythmic purposes. Reich later said that this piece made him concentrate on the study of African drumming, used heavily in his later compositions.
Philip Glass – Music with Changing Parts
If you looked closely at the picture above from a rehearsal of Steve Reich’s Four Organs, you probably noticed Philip Glass playing one of the four keyboards. Glass knew Reich from the time they both attended Juilliard School of Music. He was highly impressed by the phasing technique that Reich started using in his composition Piano Phase in 1967. At the time Glass was experimenting with various compositional techniques of his own, and he came up with his own flavor of repetition: “I had to find a music that would hold your attention. I began to use process instead of story, and the process was based on repetition and change. This made the language easier to understand, because the listener would have time to contemplate it at the same time as it was moving so quickly. It was a way of paying attention to the music, rather than to the story the music might be telling.”
He later said this about Reich: “In Steve Reich’s early pieces, he did this with phasing, and I did it with additive structure. In this case, when process replaced narrative, the technique of repetition became the basis of the language.”
In 1970 Glass wrote a composition he later described as a transitional piece, ensconced between the 1969 works ‘Music in Similar Motion’, ‘Music in Fifths’, and ‘Music in Contrary Motion’, and his breakthrough composition ‘Music in Twelve Parts’. During a rehearsal of ‘Music in Similar Motion’ in Minneapolis in May 1970, Glass suddenly heard a sound that was not part of the score. It sounded like a human voice, an oddity in a piece written solely for musical instruments. Glass looked at the musicians, all focusing hard on their challenging musical parts, none of them singing. He realized that he was hearing the result of a psychoacoustic effect.
Glass decided to incorporate what he heard as a written part of his next composition, ‘Music with Changing Parts’, adding wind instruments and a human voice to play long tones. These notes are held for the length of a breath, over a pulsating and ever changing pattern played on keyboards. Glass described the piece: “Clouds of notes would emerge that formed harmonic clusters, as if surfing through the ongoing ocean of rhythm. A constant beat would always be there—a steady stream of notes. Within that, the texture could change and the melodies could float throughout. There could be a wash of sound, places with just a little bit of rhythm, and places with barely more than long tones.” Glass kept the score open, leaving many parts up to the musicians to improvise and decide which lines to play. The instrumentation is also ambiguous, with performances of the piece varying from four keyboards to much larger ensembles featuring voice, violin and wind instruments.
John Rockwell, who was in the audience when the composition was performed in Soho in 1973, wrote: “Glass’s ensemble that night played with the spirit and precision that only years together can bring. The music danced and pulsed with a special life, its motoric rhythms, burbling, highly amplified figurations and mournful sustained notes booming out through the huge black windows and filling up the bleak industrial neighborhood.”
In 1971 Philip Glass selected the composition as his first to be recorded for an album release. He was short on funds back then and could not afford paying for a recording at a major studio. Through a lucky turn of events, he met Carla Bley and Michael Mantler. The two were well-known in the New York experimental jazz and avant-garde scene, and at the time were recording Bley’s milestone album Escalator Over the Hill. They were using a mobile studio, rented from ‘Butterfly Recording Studio’, and offered Glass the use of the studio on a weekend they were not working. He later recalled the recording session in his book ‘Words Without Music’: “We played ‘Music with Changing Parts’ straight through for the recording, but problems remained. Martinson Hall wasn’t set up as a studio at all, so we didn’t have the possibility of isolating the players. There were nine of us in one large room playing together. In addition, we had never done a recording before and had to spend time learning how to set up the microphones and how to balance the instruments correctly. Above all, we had to be able to hear ourselves, and at the same time avoid feedback from the monitor speakers. In spite of these complications, and others that we hadn’t anticipated, it was an exhilarating two days—something I think you can hear in the recording.”
The recording was released on a cheaply made package of two LPs, which required a disruptive fade-ins and fade-outs at the beginnings and ends of sides. It was not until 1994 that Nonesuch Records released a remastered continuous version of that recording on a single CD. Glass rarely performed the composition after the 1970s, but he said later that, “It was very important to my development. I proved to myself that the music I was making could sustain attention over a prolonged period of time — an hour or more. And that led directly to ‘Music In Twelve Parts’ and then on to the operas.”
To enjoy that composition and many others by Philip Glass, you have to immerse yourself in the music to a point where the repetitiveness of the patterns puts you in a deep listening mode that allows you to notice the never ending changes. Glass summarized it well: “There is a psychology of listening involved in this. One of the most common misunderstandings of the music was that the music just repeated all the time. Actually, it never repeated all the time, for if it had, it would have been unlistenable. What made it listenable were precisely the changes.”
Sources:
Writings on Music, 1965-2000, by Steve Reich
Words Without Music: A Memoir, by Philip Glass
Writings on Glass: Essays, Interviews, Criticism, by Richard Kostelanetz, Robert Flemming