by Rob Haskins
The American "minimalist" composer Philip Glass has viewed his music as an alternative--indeed, an antidote--to the modernist school. Similarly, the modernists have vilified minimal music for its iconoclastic simplicity and wholesale embrace of traditional materials. The polemic rancor of this debate has long discouraged thoughtful scholarship about minimal music and prevented a reasoned historiography of twentieth-century music in general. Minimal music is more profitably viewed as an imaginative mediation between traditional and modernist aesthetics and techniques. Glass's Einstein on the Beach (1975), widely regarded both as the most important work of early minimal music and a milestone of late twentieth-century culture, is particularly noteworthy in this regard. In "Dance No. 1," for example, a number of tonal areas of varying pitch-class density are articulated, the structure given coherence through the recurrence of rhythmic figures, a central tonal area, and a ubiquitous trichord. The method of articulation, however, remains resolutely modernistic. In like fashion, perceptible motives--harmonic, rhythmic, and melodic--provide formal cohesion both to conventional designs and original structures in which phrases of ever-increasing length and complexity deny traditional closure. Moreover, Glass's interest in altering radically the passage of musical time has positioned him alongside avant-garde composers as diverse as Milton Babbitt and John Cage. This reconciliation of traditional and modernist tendencies gives Glass's early music its characteristic richness and offers us a new lens through which we may view the legacy of twentieth-century Western music.
[Presented at the National Meeting of the American Musicological Society, Minneapolis, Minnesota, October 30, 1994.]