0.10 Appendix 1: musician biographies  (Page 27/37)

Reich first became known as a leading exponent of musical minimalism, a movement of the 1970s that grew out of a predilection for extreme simplification in painting and sculpture in the 1960s. Minimalism was to some extent a reaction against serialism and other complex and highly intellectual theories of composition. In developing compositional techniques and formulating an aesthetic for their new musical language, minimalist composers looked to popular music and non-Western cultures, in Reich’s case, to Africa and the islands of Indonesia. In his own words, “I studied Balinese and African music because I love them and also because I believe that non-Western music is presently the single most important source of new ideas for Western composers and musicians.” While in Ghana, he was introduced to a structural concept of the “timeline,” a basic rhythm over which other musicians play repeated rhythmic patterns, with the most complex performed by the group leader or master drummer. The essential organization is thus polyrhythmic, the simultaneous performance of independent repeated patterns resulting in a complex interplay of rhythmic layers.

The materials of minimalist composers are short melodic, rhythmic, and harmonic patterns. Reich’s musical materials may be originally composed, or samples from recorded speech and urban sounds. A taped phrase of a street vendor, for example, supplies the main musical idea of Check it out, one of the five movements of City Life.

Whether original or borrowed, patterns are repeated and gradually transformed over musical spans ranging from a few minutes to a half hour or more. Through a technique called phasing, a pattern gradually moves out of sync with itself, becoming its own counterpoint. The rate of change in minimalist music is slow, creating a hypnotic effect that reflects the influence of Eastern mysticism and practices of meditation embraced by Reich and other minimalist composers.

Schoenberg, arnold (1874–1951)

Arnold Schoenberg was born in Vienna. He did not come from a musical family and was largely self-taught in music, learning the violin and cello without benefit of study with a good teacher. His formal education ended when financial circumstances following the death of his father forced him to take a job as a bank clerk, but he continued to pursue his interests in literature, philosophy, and music on his own. Schoenberg was drawn to the ferment that characterized artistic and intellectual movements around the turn of the century and allied himself with the Viennese avant-garde. His first compositions are clearly indebted to late romantic influences, but a more personal style, characterized by extreme chromaticism and polyphonic complexity, emerged in an outpouring of works written in his thirties. Between 1915 and 1923, Schoenberg stopped composing, devoting himself to the formulation of his twelve-tone theory of composition on which all of his works after 1923 are based. In 1925 he was appointed a professor of composition at the Berlin Academy of Arts, which provided a supportive environment for experimental art. This situation changed radically when Hitler came to power in 1933. Schoenberg, vulnerable to persecution as an artist and because of his Jewish background, emigrated with his family from Germany, landing first in Great Brittan and eventually immigrating to the United States. He taught at the University of California at Los Angeles until his retirement in 1944, and continued to compose until his death.