         295

a sort of Postminimalist caroling party in Greenwich Village, the 45-minute-

long piece is now a holiday fi xture around the world. Another homage to In C
is Darren Solomon’s web-based work In B a 2.0 (2009), which allows the user to
combine short passages of music submitted via YouTube by musicians playing
acoustic and electronic instruments in response to the request: “Sing or play an
instrument, in B a major. Simple, floating textures work best, with no tempo or
groove. Leave lots of silence between phrases.”
Among the most prominent Postminimalists are several composers asso-
ciated with the New York–based new-music organization Bang on a Can:
Michael Gordon, David Lang, Julia Wolfe, and Evan Ziporyn. Known for
their wildly eclectic “marathon concerts,” these composers have infused
their works with elements of world music, in particular gamelan (see the
discussion of Ziporyn in Chapter 15), as well as virtuosic bebop jazz and the
aggressive energy of rock. Gordon’s multimedia projects include his score for
Decasia (2001), Bill Morrison’s haunting film based on decaying fragments of
found footage.
Postminimalism has extended and intensified the crossover of sounds,
ideas, and styles that was important to the emergence of Minimalism. La Monte
Young worked with fi lmmaker and musician Tony Conrad and with John Cale,
who went on to become a founding member of the art-rock band The Velvet
Underground. Cale later collaborated with Riley on the improvisatory rock
album Church of Anthrax (1971). Reich worked with jazz guitarist Pat Metheny
on Electric Counterpoint (1987), a prominent sample from which was featured in
The Orb’s widely heard dance track Little Fluffy Clouds (1990). The British elec-
tronic duo Orbital adapted Reich’s tape loop technique in their Time Becomes
(1993), creating a phase piece based on a vocal sample from Star Trek: The Next
Generation. We can also hear a Postminimalist homage to Reich in the ambient
electronic piece Music 4 No Musicians (1997) by Coldcut. A sample of Reich’s Come
Out is featured in the 2004 song “America’s Most Blunted” by the rapper MF
Doom and producer Mad Lib; their source was not the original but a remix from
1999 by Japanese DJ Ken Ishii. Glass’s Low Symphony (1992) adapts songs from
the 1977 album Low by David Bowie and Brian Eno. Eno, a producer for U2 and
many others, used tape loops, phasing, and echo effects in his Music for Airports
(1978). Together with software designer Peter Chilvers, Eno has created a series
of interactive multimedia applications such as Bloom (2008) that allow users to
create their own Postminimalist music in real time.

“ ”
We can hear very different formulations of Postminimalism in the music of three
composers who are sometimes grouped under the label of “Holy” or “Sacred
Minimalism”: from Poland, Henryk Górecki; from Britain, John Tavener; and
from Estonia, Arvo Pärt. Early in their careers all three composers explored
296 CHAPTER FOURTEEN              
the trends we have been considering, including Serialism, texture music,
and quotation and collage, before striking out in new directions in the late
1960s and early 1970s. Inspired in part by the sound and techniques of Mini-
malism, they adopted a radically simplified musical vocabulary, anchored
in tonality and modality and strongly tinged with religiosity and mysticism.
Like the Minimalists, they have reached broad audiences through record-
ings. The 1992 Nonesuch recording of Górecki’s hauntingly contemplative
Third Symphony (Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, 1976), featuring the soprano
Dawn Upshaw, went on to become one of the best-selling classical recordings
of all time.
Pärt (b. 1935) came of age as a composer in Soviet-controlled Estonia, where
his interest in twelve-tone music and other new techniques brought him into
confl ict with the authorities. Later his sacred work provoked similar trouble,
and he immigrated to Germany in 1980. We can hear Minimalism’s influences
in Pärt’s “tintinnabuli” style, which he introduced in the piano piece Für Alina
(1976). Taking cues from Minimalism, Pärt applies gradual musical processes
to simple diatonic pitch collections, but he was also inspired by the centuries-
old practice of “change ringing,” in which church bells are rung in elaborate
patterns over extended cycles. The opening of the Kyrie of Pärt’s Berliner Messe
(Berlin Mass, 1997) demonstrates the basic principles of the tintinnabuli tech-
nique, homorhythmically combining diatonic scales with arpeggiations of a
triad (Ex. 14.6). Thus in measure 3 the sopranos sing the notes of a G-minor
triad while the altos sing a descending scale from D to G. Throughout the move-
ment the vocal phrases are answered in the same fashion by the organ, which

Example 14.6: Arvo Pärt, Kyrie, from Berlin Mass, mm. 1–4
       297

sustains a G pedal. Within the piece’s serene and contemplative atmosphere,

Pärt creates contrast and a sense of progression with varied rhythms, dynam-
ics, and textures.
Here and in other works, Pärt draws connections with the long history of
sacred choral music not only by setting the Ordinary of the Catholic Mass, but
also by employing medieval techniques such as isorhythm and fauxbourdon,
while his melodic style is inspired by Gregorian chant.
The success of Holy Minimalism owes much to the renewed popularity of
chant and New Age spirituality in the late twentieth century. In 1995 the Choir
of King’s College, Cambridge released a recording of works by Tavener, Górecki,
and Pärt interleaved with performances of plainchant; the previous year an
album of chant recordings made in a Spanish monastery by the Benedictine
monks of Santo Domingo sold millions of copies worldwide. Another measure
of the broad interest in chant was its surprising appearance in electronic dance
music, such as the samples of chant recordings used in Enigma’s MCMXC a.D
(released in “anno Domini” 1990).

Here and in other works, Pärt’s music and its contexts symbolize the astonish-
ing and often bewildering heterogeneity that characterizes Western musical cul-
ture at the turn of the twenty-first century. But the idea that such an incongruous
combination of elements—Postminimalist techniques used by a devout Russian
Orthodox composer from Estonia, marketed to audiences involved with medie-
valism, New Age spirituality, and rave culture—could coexist in one piece no lon-
ger seems particularly unusual. While Bartók, Stravinsky, and Ligeti responded
to a similar sense of overwhelming diversity in terms of “tangled chaos,” a terror
of “the infinitude of possibilities,” and the breakdown of “taboos,” in the new cen-
tury such border crossings between styles, audiences, and traditions are likely to
be perceived as just the way things are, as we will see in Chapter 15.

FOR FURTHER READING

Bernard, Jonathan W., “Minimalism, Postminimalism, and the Resurgence

of Tonality in Recent American Music,” American Music 21, no. 1 (2003):
112–133
Cohn, Richard, “Transpositional Combination of Beat-Class Sets in Steve
Reich’s Phase-Shifting Music,” Perspectives of New Music 30, no. 2 (1992):
146–177
Duckworth, William, Sound and Light: La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela (New
York: Associated University Press, 2009)
298 CHAPTER FOURTEEN              
Fink, Robert, “(Post-)minimalism 1970–2000: The Search for a New Main-
stream,” in The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Music, edited by Nicholas
Cook and Anthony Pople, 539–556 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2004)
Gann, Kyle, American Music in the Twentieth Century (New York: Schirmer,
1997)
Glass, Philip, and Robert T. Jones, Music by Philip Glass (New York: Harper and
Row, 1987)
Gopinath, Sumanth, “The Problem of the Political in Steve Reich’s Come Out,”
in Robert Adlington, Sound Commitments: Avant-garde Music and the Sixties,
121–144 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009)
Hillier, Paul, Arvo Pärt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997)
Joseph, Branden W., Beyond the Dream Syndicate: Tony Conrad and the Arts after
Cage (New York: Zone Books, 2011)
Locke, David, “The Metric Matrix: Simultaneous Multidimensionality in
African Music,” Analytical Approaches to World Music Journal 1, no. 1 (2011)
Potter, Keith, Four Musical Minimalists: La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich,
Philip Glass (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)
Trochimczyk, Maja, The Music of Louis Andriessen (New York: Routledge, 2002)