A tape is interesting when it’s an interesting tape
—Steve Reich
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A couple months ago, I returned to Steve Reich’s 1968 essay “Music as a Gradual Process.” It’s an essay that for me describes a fantasy of creation: that by choosing all one’s parameters—by “setting the dials”—creative labor can be finished without struggling through the long unfolding of the work. One’s initial choices about which processes to follow “determine all the note-to-note (sound-to-sound) details and the over all form simultaneously.” Just flick the first domino. On the seventh day, you rest.
I’ve always been attracted to constraints and generative principles of the sort that animated Oulipo masterpieces like Life: A User’s Manual or Cigarettes, and envied writers who worked in that mode. I think anyone short of Kenneth Goldsmith must occasionally fantasize about automating all the decisions of the writing process which occupy most of our working time. Too bad literature, unlike music, requires meaning and sense, and so except in the most rote and randomizing n+7 experiments cannot productively resemble, as a piece of music can, “pulling back a swing, releasing it, and observing it gradually come to rest.”
Except, now, of course, automating the writing process in this way is as simple as using a piece of AI composition software like GPT-3, described in my September newsletter “Who Writes It? Who Is It For?” Giving GPT-3 a prompt and seeing what comes out the other end of the concentrate of a billion typewriters seems like the closest thing in writing to Reich’s description of his own compositional process:
Musical processes can give one a direct contact with the impersonal and also a kind of complete control, and one doesn't always think of the impersonal and complete control as going together. By "a kind" of complete control I mean that by running this material through the process I completely control all that results, but also that I accept all that results without changes.
I’ve been listening to Reich for more than a decade—I remember ripping his 10-CD box set onto my laptop computer in the Iowa City Public Library c. 2010, mind about to be blown—but have recently come back to him, and also to a cohort of related composers and musicians, not all of whom I’d heard before. Alvin Curran, Terry Riley, and Charlemagne Palestine were all new to me. They sent me back to other musicians working in similar traditions whom I fell in love with years ago, and I scoured the internet for complete discographies of Midori Takada (who, by coincidence, I finally got to see perform last month in Berlin together with Jakob Bro) and Pauline Oliveros. I play them while I work, in the morning, in the evening—they are the soundtracks to my day.
(Who else? So much to discover, and what an age when so many are just a few clicks away! Curran describes the New York scene he discovered not in downtown Manhattan but in Rome: “It was just this essentials-only, radically-compelling, back-to-the-roots America which moved the adventuring gallerist Fabio Sargentini of the “L’Attico” to produce a yearly series of concert events importing the crème of that exalted scene: Glass, Reich, Palestine, Lamonte Young, Riley, Simone Forti, Trisha Brown, Joan Jonas, and Joan LaBarbara were among the featured stars, whose determination, youthful energy, and brilliant invention I felt a part of and completely in tune with.”)
Reich was the first for me, punishingly textured and technical and new-sounding. He hadn’t become part of ambient filmscapes as Glass had. Nor was he as “difficult” as Cage. Back when I was discovering Reich, I used GarageBand to collaborate with a poet/musician in my writing program on derivative versions of phase music out of spoken words—following Reich’s “Come Out” and “It’s Gonna Rain.” It was music even a (mostly) non-musician could try for himself.
Now Curran has crept up on me, especially the three sonic worlds recorded and released in the 1970s and recently collected in Solo Works. They seem to exist inside a musical galaxy whose planets have not yet been classified (as in not yet raised to the status of classical; stamped as jazz; siloed as ambient, electronic, or experimental; or tossed into the discount box labeled ‘new age’).
Reich’s “Music as a Gradual Process” describes something that feels again of the moment, a preference for the overtly programmed, or at least for the “impersonal’ (his preferred term) in the creative act. I said above that Reich’s process resembles AI-aided composition, but there’s nevertheless a difference between pseudo-neural processes that imitate (or, depending on your point of view, constitute) the creative process and those that are simple and transparent in the work itself, even as their effects become complex over the course of a gradual unspooling. Reach describes the latter as deliberately obvious:
The use of hidden structural devices in music never appealed to me. Even when all the cards are on the table and everyone hears what is gradually happening in a musical process, there are still enough mysteries to satisfy all. These mysteries are the impersonal, unattended, psycho-acoustic by-products of the intended process. These might include sub-melodies heard within repeated melodic patterns, stereophonic effects due to listener location, slight irregularities in performance, harmonics, difference tones, etc.
What’s fun about writing by musicians is that it is interesting in exact proportion to how much you respond to the music itself. I could imagine a composer I don’t care about writing the above paragraph and finding it dull, vaporous, incorrect. But because Reich is writing it, and because the text illuminates the process of work I already find mysterious and lovely, I find the text as sharp as it is mystic. In my reading, too, I find myself increasingly interested in efforts to transcend or trouble the personal through transparent and gradual processes of composition (e.g. Annie Ernaux’s The Years, almost certainly the best book I’ll read this year, or the book that will mean the most to me).
Why I have I stuck by Reich while largely abandoning my other major ~2010 ICPL discovery, Keith Jarrett? A suspicion of certain kinds of conspicuous virtuosity? Too much personality? (By which do I mean—the weird moaning?) Not long ago I came across a Gramophone review of Curran’s Early Works that praised the collection by way of a Jarrett hatchet job. The reviewer attacked his
anaemic vamps and arpeggios with which [Jarrett has] managed to persuade gullible audiences he was touching the divine when, in fact, he was manipulatively deploying melodic hooks and tried-and-tested harmonic sequences all designed to push the right emotional buttons.
Back in 2011, I would have dismissed this as the sad atheist rantings of the unsaved. (Especially the review’s Rock Em Sock Em kayfabe—“Alvin Curran does everything Jarrett was trying to do but about a million times better” is a literal quote.) Now…I sort of see what he means. Likewise, ten years ago, I would have rejected out of hand the recent critical review of a book by another long-time favorite, fellow Jarretthead Geoff Dyer, as mean-spirited. But then maybe personality, polished too often or to the exclusion of other pursuits, really is just a bag of tricks. “In time,” Vivian Gornick writes, “the reader comes to realize there is no organizing principle.” Contrast with Reich:
While performing and listening to gradual musical processes one can participate in a particular liberating and impersonal kind of ritual. Focusing in on the musical process makes possible that shift of attention away from he and she and you and me outwards towards it.
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I am inaugurating a new section of this newsletter. Its purpose is to collect small thoughts and share consumption habits (movies, books, articles) that don’t rise to the level of a longer thing. You can unsubscribe from either newsletter section if you just want to get one or the other. These short pieces will live on the site in their own section under the heading Little Atomies, a phrase taken from a well-known digressive monologue of smallness, still a personal favorite, which I once memorized for Shakespeare club in high school.
xo,
Ben