The Growing Debate Over Minimalism : Four composers’ views on minimal music--where it’s been, where it’s going and what’s the brouhaha?

Ever since minimalism appeared on the music scene 25 years ago, academic composers have decried the trashing of their complex music language and the acceptance, in its place, of a highly simplified--some say simplistic--one. Their charge: a sellout to commercialism.

The minimalists say the scholars adhere to an “old-boy network” whose in-bred, practically impenetrable scores alienate everyone except each other.

With growing alarm and resentment, the old guard watched while these upstarts basked in the spotlight and took the prizes: audiences, publicity, career opportunities. They festered. They stewed. For every article on standard-bearer George Perle, for instance, there are 500 profiles of the ever-popular Philip Glass. For every $10,000 commission given Charles Wuorinen, a $1-million one turns up for Steve Reich.

A whole generation has grown up listening to mimimalism’s repetitive, bare-bones thumping--in the movies (“The Thin Blue Line”), in dance and opera (“In the Upper Room” and “Nixon in China”), even in the sanctified museum of the concert hall (“Harmonium”).

Critics and commentators have debated the issues but composers tend to be closed-mouthed about their peers. Not so Perle and Wuorinen, Pulitzer Prize winners, recipients of MacArthur Fellowships and articulate debunkers of minimalism.

In fairness, minimalist John Adams and neo-romantic David del Tredici were given opportunities to defend their striking successes. That said, here they are in full cry.

Charles Wuorinen: Thanks to Short-Sighted Critics, the ‘Quick Fix’ Winds Up as Most Popular

Charles Wuorinen treads the same path of rigorously difficult composition as an Elliott Carter or Pierre Boulez and talks about his “passion” for music as High Art. At 51, he is a fierce polemicist, waging verbal wars against what he sees as the rising tide of Philistinism.

Unhappy with the status quo, he does not equivocate in laying blame; his finger points first to music journalists.

“It’s the fault of the critical press,” he says, “that people lose sight of the difference between the real nature of a thing and how it is promoted.” Citing an example, Wuorinen quotes Harold Schonberg, former music critic of the New York Times, who remarked 10 years ago: “I am going to protect the public from new music.”

“That statement outraged me,” Wuorinen says, explaining how such a prejudice fuels public intolerance “to anything but the familiar. Critics are not supposed to be indistinguishable from audiences. They’re supposed to know more, to stretch the limits of listeners’ experience. Instead they try to gauge only the immediate appeal of a piece,” he charges.

What the New York composer is complaining about is the same thing political pundits decried in the last presidential campaign: that after televised debates between the candidates, TV anchors waited to see the polls before declaring winners or losers, thereby relinquishing their own critical evaluation. Yet it would seem that arts critics bow less to popular opinion than television’s news entertainers.

“Pandering to the least worthy effort just because of its easy appeal serves neither the public nor the cause of music,” Wuorinen continues.

“Familiarity breeds love, but if audiences never get a chance to become familiar with something new, it cannot have an impact. Look at Brahms and Tchaikovsky, for instance. It’s only because some critics defended their music that it is now a concert hall staple.”

So have orchestra managements been less than valiant, according to the academic proselytizer. He mentions a San Francisco Symphony study, designed to explain subscriber dropouts. One woman who let her subscription expire protested being duped, he recalls:

“She saw a brochure flagging Isaac Stern and Tchaikovsky and she came expecting him to play that composer. As it turned out he performed a new concerto, its name buried in fine print, and the orchestra played a Tchaikovsky symphony. Why set up that kind of disappointment? Why treat patrons as though they were merely customers you’re trying to sell toothpaste to? Why not be forthright and honorable?”

With this in mind, Wuorinen doffs his hat to Ernest Fleischmann and the Los Angeles Philharmonic for championing Boulez, the stellar composer/conductor, himself a stern tribune of all that’s cerebral in music:

“Is he charismatic? No. Is his music anything but complex? No. There is nothing half-hearted or apologetic in the way the Philharmonic presents him. And the public responds to the endorsement, the year-in, year-out commitment to what Boulez offers.”

Apart from such a rarely seen attitude, Wuorinen says, “people have stopped trying to be civilized. At one time there was a striving for prestige. Compositions had stature because they invoked higher values.

“Now, hardly anyone takes such a stand. What we have is the quick fix, the need for instant self-gratification. And that accounts for this utterly unchallenging, unprovocative kind of music. In fact, it accounts for the general ills of our society--all the way up to our government leaders.

“These days it’s a question of how many clap the longest and loudest. Nothing is being asked of the creator or the recipient.”

Lest his comments be seen as sour grapes, the composer points out that he “has as much work, and more, as I can handle.”

Certainly Wuorinen practices the fire and brimstone that he preaches. In order to uphold his lofty standards, he founded a chamber orchestra, the Group for Contemporary Music. Without absolutely compelling performances, he argues, there can be no persuasion of a difficult work’s excellence. Too often, he believes, unconvincing accounts of new music give it a bad name. And too often symphony orchestra musicians show the same skepticism as audiences.

If anything, players do not embrace the typically simplistic examples of minimalism. For example, when the Los Angeles Philharmonic played an excerpt of Philip Glass’ “the CIVIL warS” several years ago, the musicians deliberately turned pages noisily to express their contempt of its incessant arpeggio repetitions and limited harmonic interest.

Wuorinen, apparently unmollified by this response, fears that “the distinction between art and entertainment no longer exists. . . . We’ve succeeded in cheapening art and ruining entertainment. By making popularity the touchstone, we rationalize that we’re being democratic and realistic.”

His favorite anecdote on the subject of music’s lowered standards involves a composing student who naively told a professor that he wanted to be famous and loved and popular.

“How popular?” asked the professor. “As popular as Schoenberg? But Stravinsky is more popular than Schoenberg. As popular as Stravinsky?But Beethoven is more popular than Stravinsky. As popular as Beethoven?But Tchaikovsky is more popular than Beethoven. As popular as Tchaikovsky?But Lawrence Welk is more popular than Tchaikovsky.”

So much for goals and definitions of popularity.

“Our refusal to be serious,” Wuorinen says, “can be seen in this surge of anti-intellectualism and yahooism. It’s been going on for 25 years. If things don’t change--and I don’t think they will--serious music will disappear.”

John Adams: Dividing Art Between ‘Serious’ and Unworthy Is Far Too Simplistic

John Adams, a Grammy laureate of different flora altogether, stays happily out of academic gardens. Right now, he’s fielding phone calls from maverick director Peter Sellars, among others, in his hotel room, having just finished rehearsing the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra for a concert of 20th-Century music.

He says this is a convenient time to talk, “if you don’t mind interruptions. I have about 15 minutes before rushing out to a dinner engagement.”

Adams has barely said this before another call comes in--this one from Lisa Klinghoffer, daughter of Leon Klinghoffer, the wheelchair-bound American murdered aboard the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro by an Arab terrorist in 1985.

What the 42-year-old composer of “Nixon in China” and “Harmonium” is doing is another opera based on current affairs--this one recounting the above incident. It too will enlist Sellars as collaborator. Commissioned by six opera companies, the work will have its world premiere in Brussels in 1991.

Adams has already pondered the debate over minimalism. Creators in a given field always seem to know who their detractors are and what they’re saying.

“In fact, I couldn’t be happier to answer Charles and his criticisms,” says Adams. “It’s something I’ve never had the chance to do before. Frankly, (pause) I think he’s a square.

“To make arbitrary divisions between what is serious and what is outside the worthwhile realm is just too simplistic. Has he ever considered that Shakespeare and Goethe drew on the vernacular? That they were hardly averse to referring to their own contemporary culture? This is what Sellars does so brilliantly. It’s essential to utilize the environment we are part of, rather than cut ourselves off from it.”

The argument that art and entertainment run along clear-cut and separate paths is one that Adams doesn’t buy. While he concedes that Lawrence Welk and Liberace are “strictly entertainers,” too many others defy such easy categorization.

He hastens to add that his own music was intended to have entertainment value--”so did Mozart and Ravel acknowledge it, as well as all the great composers did, until these self-appointed guardians of theory came into existence.” But he finds “the dour, grim attitude behind art for art’s sake to be phony.”

As for minimalism, per se, he does not object categorically to the term.

“I don’t know if there’s any more antipathy to it than to catch-all labels in the past. Picasso probably didn’t like being called a Cubist, simply because it unfairly limited his identity.

“But the word minimalism is eminently mockable. How many times do we hear the standard snipe: ‘Minimal music for minimal minds?’ ”

What Adams is eager to talk about is the genesis of the much-debased form. He explains it as a pendulum swing away from the forbidding 12-tone music of the Second Viennese School--a revolt against Schoenberg and his disciples, who dominated compositional thought from the 1920s.

He sees music composition as having gone through cycles of complexity--”inbreeding to extinction”--followed by radical reappraisals of language.

“Look at Mozart,” says the defender of populism. “His music was immensely simple compared to the Baroque style, which immediately preceded it, almost a contradiction to the kind of involved counterpoint Bach put forth.

“But I still say that our critics, Wuorinen and his elite brotherhood, are torchbearers of High Art out of defensiveness. What’s getting these guys so apoplectically mad is how loved our music is. Whether it, or any other music, has value though, no one can be sure of.

“There will always be an academic music, a theory music. We (minimalists) exist outside of it. Our important feedback comes from the people--the ones who write letters expressing how profoundly affected they are by a piece. As for the future, we must hope that the swing does not go too far, that the love affair with popular culture does not become an end in itself.”

George Perle: Minimalism’s Numbers ‘Mean Nothing to Me . . . I’m Not Counting’

George Perle, now at UC Berkeley to deliver the prestigious Ernest Bloch lectures, takes a morning phone call. The nocturnal composer did not spend most of the night working as he often does. So he has the patience to explain that his music is accessible without being simplistic, that he is not guilty as charged of being an eat-your-peas academic.

An invitation to jump into the fray is less than compelling, however.

“I have little concern with telling people what to listen to and why. Do they like it?” asks the 74-year-old detester of minimalism. “Then let them go ahead. I won’t sit in judgment.” Perle takes the opposite stand of Wuorinen. Society will find its way, he believes. He need not be a standard-bearer for anyone but himself. Indeed, it is only with much cajoling that he addresses the minimalists and others who, he says, “have nothing new to say.”

Philip Glass, for instance.

“What he writes is childish babble. It uses the most superficial aspect of an old musical language. People do not come out of the hall humming it because it’s applied to visual events and doesn’t stand alone. It’s music for people who hate music and can only be looked at historically, as a reaction to the misunderstood 12-tone system, which created problems both for audiences and composers.

“But surely those old harmonic relationships (Brahms and Beethoven) can find better means of preservation than the bare-bones formulas devised by the minimalists.”

Perle--who, in his early research into the first 12-tone music, found his compositional niche--has brought that 20th-Century language to a comfortably integrated place, one placing him in what he calls the mainstream. Whether that mainstream has 1,000 or 1,000,000 listeners swimming in it, though, is immaterial.

“My approach is not concerned with popularity,” he says, conceding minimalism’s fascination for the masses. Numbers mean nothing to me. I’m not counting.”

He goes on to describe his pleasure over the world premiere of his “Windows of Order,” presented by the Juilliard String Quartet in April in Washington’s Library of Congress.

“It was a Beethoven crowd that filled the hall, people with a sincere and developed love for music. But if someone told me I could exchange this for a stadium mob of 10,000, I wouldn’t make the trade off.

“I’m not an elitist, though,” says the esteemed author of contemporary music theory. “I come from a working-class background. My favorite novelist is Henry James.”

But, “I’m also inclined to go to a movie or turn on TV. I don’t have to be serious about everything.”

The scholarly composer points to the enormous growth of music today--including the recording industry, expanded numbers of live concerts, etc.--that comes as a result of greater leisure time. Yet he sees an erosion of standards. And worse, “certain colleagues manipulating the public.”

“There are those in the business of feeding that public, who don’t care about it or music--only their own success. They appeal to trend-seekers and set themselves up as arbiters of trendiness. Who is truly on the side of the public? I think I am. Not because I’m a nice guy or want to be popular but because my music has integrated the 12-tone language into something accessible.

“There’s a difference between the complex and the complicated. Mozart was complex and so is our spoken language, with its elaborate grammar. But some serial music is only complicated. By that I mean artificial, not relevant. People think I’m more humane than Boulez, for example, which is hardly the point. My music is simply more coherent than his.

“Minimalism is not the only thing I dislike, although some of its practitioners--like Adams--are more palatable than others. Quoting hundreds of bars of Mozart--George Rochberg does this--hardly counts as new music. And borrowing a dead language, the way (David) Del Tredici does, is no better. I don’t want to get personal, but these composers gain no more of my sympathy than the Glasses of the world.

“As for minimalism, I think it will grind itself out of existence. But something just as bad will take its place.”

David del Tredici: Good Minimalist Music Will Bring Audiences Back

David del Tredici, at 52, remembers having John Adams as a student in his music theory class at Harvard. He’s also good friends with minimalist Steve Reich. But even this mild-mannered middleman among composers has a satiric epithet for Philip Glass: “He’s Rossini without melody. I think his music is awful.”

Nevertheless, Del Tredici has considerable empathy for the minimal movement--for he too belongs to a generation that defected from the hard-core atonality that was fashionable until the mid-’60s.

“I remember being thrilled by very dissonant music,” he says. “Everything I wrote at first was in the voguish Schoenbergian mold. So my first attempt at tonal music was terrifying. But when I heard the wild roar of approval from the audience--a far different thing from the respectful neutrality that typically greeted new works--I knew it was a turning point.”

He’s referring to his “Final Alice,” an enormously popular piece jointly commissioned by the Big Six orchestras--Los Angeles, New York, Cleveland, Chicago, Boston and Philadelphia--for the 1976 Bicentennial celebrations. It earned him a Pulitzer.

It also earned him an adjective that he is not fond of: accessible.

“It’s a synonym for cheap,” he says. “The word has a bad connotation. We all grew up with the attitude that immortality comes to those who write ‘ahead of their time.’ To be accessible is to lack the wherewithal for immortality. We consoled ourselves that no one in Beethoven’s day could understand his late works. Therefore our music should be in accessible. Hogwash!Everyone knew back then that even his difficult pieces were extraordinary. We’ve overdone the idea of ‘ahead of his time.’

“And now the reaction to it--minimalism--is also excessive.”

But if Del Tredici trembles at the thought of being called accessible, why does a somewhat forbidding George Perle crave such a label?

“One man’s accessible is another man’s forbidding,” says the easygoing neo-Romantic, who is accustomed to his current outside-the-academy rank as composer in residence at the N.Y. Philharmonic.

“If you want to be a bad boy today, that is, an anti-scholar, you take up minimalism or what I embrace, neotonality. Neither of these has any place in the academic hierarchy. That, in itself, attests to their vitality!

“Twelve-tone music has lost its thrill. It’s a waning reality, an historical fact that doesn’t mean anything now. Neither a Boulez nor a Stockhausen has any relevance today. But it still takes courage to walk away. Less courage for minimalists who are regarded as ‘new.’ The fact that they’re boring is only a secondary consideration.

“Adams is trying to extend the horizons of minimalism. Steve Reich, acting like a spider under a rock, wants to hold onto its static subtleties. However, no honest person could deny the powerful influence of minimalism. It begets audiences and, in that, gives contemporary music a good name. Where 12-tone dissonance sent people fleeing, the best forms of minimalism are bringing them back.”