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490

The Recent Past, and the Present

symphony concerts because pop insults their intelligence) unaware that the situati,cn is now precisely reversed. ) My approach is that of what once was termed the long-hair composer, somewhat disillusioned, nourished at the conservatory yet exposed all his life (as is any American, of necessity) to jazz. M)'colleagues and I have been happily torn from a long antiseptic nap by the energy of rock, principally as embodied in The Beatles. Naturally I'v. g.o*rt curious about this energy. What are its origins) \44rat need does it fillf \Mhy should The Beades-who seem to be the best of a good thing, who in fact are far superior to all the other groups who pretend to copy them, most ofwhich are nevertheless American and perpetuating what once was an essentially American thing-why should The Beatles have erupted from Literpoolf Could it be true, as the jazz critic Nat Hentoffsuggests, that they "turned millions ofAmerican adolescents on to what had been here hurting all the time, but the young here never did want it ralv so they absorbed it through-the British filter"f Do The Beatles hurt indeedf And are they really so newf Does their attraction, be it pain or pleasure, stem from their words-or even from what's called their sound.-or quite plainly from their tunesl The once thriving Art of Song, dormant since the War, is restirring in all corners of the world-which is not the same world that put it to bed. As a result, when Song really becomes wide awake again (the sleep has been nourishing), its composition and interpretation will be of a quite different order and for a quite differeni public. The artful tradition of great song has been transferred from elite domains to The Beatles and their offshoots who represent-as any n6n-5pecialized intellectual will tell you-the finest communicable music of our time. unlike their ,,grandparents," all theie groups write most of their own material, thus combining the traditions of t2th-century troubadours, 16th-century madrigalists and l8th-century musical artisans who were always composer-performers-in short, combining all sung expression (except opera) as it was before the 20th century. Curiously, it is not through the suave innovations of our sophisticated composers that music is regaining health, but from the old-fashioned lung exercises ofgangs ofkids. That the best of these gangs should have come from England is unimportant; they could have come from Arkansas. It seems to me that their attraction has little to do with "what had been here hurting," but on the contrary with enjoyment. No sooner does a culture critic like Susan Sontag fin "one Culture and the New Sensibility,,, an essay of

long out of use. By music I include not only the general areas of jazz, bui those expressions subsumed in the categories of chamber, opera, symphonic: in short, all music. And by sensitive I understand not the cultivated listening ability of elite Music Lovers so much as instinctive judgment. (There aye st:,ll people who exclaim: "what's a nice musician like you putting us on abour The Beatles foif ,, They are the same ones who at this late date take theater more seriously than movies and go to

these thingsl well, perhaps what I'm doing here is a duty, keeping an ear on my profession so as to justify the joys of resentment) to steal an idei or rwo, or just to show charity toward some friend on the program. But I learn less and less. Meanwhile the absent artists are home playing records; they are reacting again, finally, to something they no longer find at concerts. Reacting to whatf ro The Beades, of course-The Beatles, whose arrival has proved one of the healthiest events in music since 1950, a fact which no one sensitive can fail to perceive to some degree. By healthy I mean alive and inspired-two adjectives

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492

The Recent Past, and the Present

Beatles exemplify this feature, then we have reached (strange though it may with our planet's final years) a new and golden renaissance of song.
Boohs,

I believe, The

seem as coincidence

gradu p

18 January 1968. Reprinted in Elizabeth Thomson and David Gutman (eds.), The Lennon Cotnpanion (New York: Schirmer Books,

Ned Rorem, "The Music of The Beatles," Nen, Tork Repien, of l9BB),99-I09.

163

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Minimalism
So taken for granted was the extremism of the postwar avant-garde that advanced

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composers began to worry about impending dead ends. "How can you make

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revolution,,, Charles Wuorinen asked an interviewer (thinking perhaps of Cage), "when the revolution before last has already said that anything goes?" That was in 1962. By the end of the decade, the answer was clear: "No, it doesn't!" Many of the most self-consciously innovative composers who came into prominence during that decade had begun experimenting with a new kind of radicalism: radically reduced means. Because of that reduction, and because of its reliance on a great deal of (near) repetition of small units, the trend became known (after a comparable tendency in the visual arts) as minimalism. But that term, originally intended (like impressionism or even baroque) as pejorative, has never sat well with the makers of the music, and there are aspects of their products-extravagant length being one-that definitely contradict the convenient label. The way they have talked about it suggests that "pattern and process// might better describe their music. At least the second term in the proposed phrase was explicitly embraced by steve Reich (1936J, one of the movement's pioneers, in the title of one of his most characteristic statements of principle. The main principle was that the process informing the music's unfolding (unlike the principles informing serial or aleatoric music) should be wholly available to perception. It would be a mistake, however, to regard minimalism, or pattern-and-process music, as a break with the postwar avant-garde rather than a part of it. lts crucial point of likeness with earlier avant-garde attitudes (and even with earlier rsrns like neoprimitivism and neoclassicism, both associated with Stravinsky) was its unequivocally embraced impersonalism, its lack of interest-ringingly declared in Reich's final sentence-in human psychology or subjectivity. Still and all, the trend was distinctive, and highly significant in that it was the first American classical style to exert a strong technical and structural influence on the music of European composers.

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Music as a Cradual Process I do not mean the process of composition but

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process.

rather pieces of music that are, literally,

The distinctive thing about musical processes is that they determine all the note-tonote (sound-to-sound) details and the overall form simultaneously. (Think of a round or infinite canon.)

sonal, u include to listen and so c

List, extends

am interested in perceptible processes. happening throughout the sounding music.

want to be able to hear the process