From Adams to Wolfe, Minimalist music gets its long-awaited popular makeover

Published 7:45 pm Tuesday, October 3, 2023

Those who think of Steve Reich and John Cage when they think of Minimalism in music (especially if they listen to neither) will get a pleasant surprise at the Reser Center this Friday, Oct. 6.

A concert promises to “juxtapose Minimalist figureheads with a quintet of dynamic new voices, this evening gives a glimpse of a thrilling, varied and emotionally resonant future.”

“Stay On It: Minimalism Past, Present & Future” is named for the piece “Stay On It” by Julius Eastman, which will be played at the climax of the show. 

The show is 7:30 p.m. Friday, Oct. 6, at the Patricia Reser Center for the Arts, 12625 S.W. Crescent St. in Beaverton.

Eastman, a Black, gay, avant garde composer working in the 1970s, is having a moment.

“Sometimes Minimalism can be a little bit of a punchline, and yet we’ve come a long way from the founders of the 1960s and ’70s,” composer Gabriel Kahane told the Pamplin Media Group.

As creative chair at the Oregon Symphony, Kahane puts together the symphony’s Open Music series about how a symphony orchestra can tackle living composers.

Think Process

Kahane says the influence of Minimalism can be heard in the woodwinds and strings of modern folk music, pop songs and ad jingles. Many of the original Minimalists rejected the term in favor of “process music.”

“You take a little cell of music, and over the course of a piece, it transforms,” Kahane explained.

Of Eastman, Kahane said, “His music was as Maximalist as it was Minimalist. This concert is really built around his music, and it’s the first time that the Oregon Symphony is performing any of his music.”

As a singer-songwriter himself and also as a composer of concert music, Kahane feels a kinship with Eastman. For one thing, they both sing from the piano with a microphone, which is definitely not symphony-type behavior.

“He’s stylistically all over the place, and that’s something that I can certainly relate to,” Kahane quipped.

He calls the lineup for the show “populist” in the sense that it is new-ish stuff. The oldest piece is from 1973, and the youngest is so new it’s not on Spotify yet. Kahane says he wrote “For Meredith” just a few weeks ago. It opens the program.

Open house

The Symphony’s Open Music series has been expanded to five concerts per year, and in search of a bigger venue than the Alberta Rose Theater, this one will be in Beaverton at the still-new Patricia Reser Center for the Performing Arts.

“For people who haven’t yet been to the Reser Center, the architecture and the experience of being there is worth the price of admission,” Kahane said. “Cool, living composers, will be celebrated at Oregon Symphony’s Open Music concert this Friday … it’s fantastic.”

As a recent transplant from New York, he added, “We’re trying to signal that these concerts are for anyone who loves music, and people who go to museums, who go to Literary Arts events, who go to the Hollywood Theater, and who maybe haven’t found their way into the Oregon Symphony. Potentially who are interested in indie rock, who go to the Doug Fir and Holocene.”

Using the Reser means the symphony can be flexible on stage, with different-sized ensembles and dramatic lighting. Although a couple of pieces will have a conductor, Kahane will be more of the bantering master of ceremonies than a dry lecturer between pieces.

“It’s definitely not that static thing you expect from an orchestral concert where it’s just a bunch of musicians sitting there in one position for the whole the whole evening,” said Kahane.

While Eastman said you can play “Stay On It” with any instruments, some pieces will have the auteur imprint, such as the selections from Steve Reich’s “Electric Counterpoint,” which will use solo electric guitar and electronics.

Kahane is friends with some of the other leading musical lights of the day, such as Sufjan Stevens and Nico Muhly, whose opera “Dark Sisters” was recently performed in Portland by OrpheusPDX. They are the fun side of modern composing, funny and sensitive, dipping in and out of pop and high classical with ease, a sort of “Queer Eye” for the Conservatory Set.

Blame atonal Arnold

In the mid-20th century, concert music suddenly lost touch with folk and pop music, with singing and dancing.

In Gustav Mahler’s “Symphony No. 1,” Kahane said, “there are these klezmer tunes, Jewish folk music.” That piece dates back to the late 19th century.

“The aberration to me is from (Arnold) Schoenberg, God love him, through the mid-century. The academy has a stranglehold on concert music, and it becomes extremely inaccessible, even to people who are trained musicians,” Kahane continued.

It’s just fashion.

“In all aesthetic movements, the pendulum swings toward a kind of conservatism and elitism, and other times it swings toward a kind of populism,” said Kahane.

Having Julia Wolfe in the mix (“A Wild Furze”) excites him because she was a cofounder of Bang on a Can.

“They went around as young composers in New York in the late ’70s and early ’80s hearing music in all different styles and scenes, and the scenes were very, very tribal,” said Kahane. “Their thinking was to be celebratory of all new work that had craft. And that’s what I’m after in my work at the Oregon Symphony.”

He added, “Andy Akiho is descended from Minimalist practices, but he really transcended that. I’m certainly not a Minimalist. I don’t think Shelley Washington thinks of herself as a Minimalist. The interesting question to ask is, who were the original proponents of that movement, like Julius Eastman, who are not as well known? And how did these ideas get passed down? As for the old schism between concert music and popular music, I just don’t think that is a thing anymore.”

Money and markets play a part.

“Some of it may also be a function of capitalism, like an accidental benefit of a violent and awful economic system,” Kahane suggested. “People have realized that they want to program work that is more accessible to people. In general, I’m not a fan of the idea that art should be responsive to markets. The happy accident is that there’s a useful return to populism.”

No more sandwiching the new stuff between the old at a concert so people can’t avoid it, like in the 1980s.

“We’re long past that,” Kahane declared. “Portland is a city with a ton of new music: Third Angle, Fear No Music, 45th Parallel Universe … And under Carlos Kalmar, Jr. and now under David Danzmayr (in his second season as music director of the Oregon Symphony), there’s a huge amount of new music happening.”

Tickets: thereser.org/event/stay-on-it-minimalism-past-present-future/

Program

Gabriel Kahane: For Meredith (World premiere)

Steve Reich: Selections from Electric Counterpoint

Shelley Washington: Middleground (arr. L. Lanzilotti)

Reena Esmail: Darshan for Solo Violin

Sam Adams: Movements (for Us and Them)

Andy Akiho: Three Shades, Foreshadows for Solo Cello & Electronics

Julia Wolfe: A Wild Furze

Meredith Monk: Ellis Island

Julius Eastman: Stay On It

Artists

Deanna Tham, Conductor

Gabriel Kahane, Host, Piano & Curator

Trevor Fitzpatrick, Cello

Erin Furbee, Violin

Mike Gamble, Guitars

Oregon Symphony