John Adams - The Chairman Dances

Whose the most maximal minimalist in the tiny universe of Pulitzer Prize winning composers who didn't like serialism? John Adams. He asks the question, what do you do after minimalism? I wanted to use the pun post-malonimalism, but it's too awkward to do it properly (and that's how you insert an unusable pun).

To answer that question, you obviously have to define minimalism and take it to its logical end. If the minimum requirement for a piece of music is a single process that logically unfolds and returns to its original state, then when you remove the process itself you are left with simply pulse. That pulse can be rapid or infinitely long, but the pulse is all that remains this side of nothingness (what are the chances we step across that line tomorrow?).

Adams assembles his music from little kernels of musical thought. Highly repetitive gestures that wriggle and mutate and accumulate to form larger structures. Critics often call him the most interestingly boring composer of all time, and i of course disagree. His music is boringly interesting and there's a world of difference when you turn those two words around. Reich, Reilly, and Glass are to my mind the musical equivalent of conceptual art. Adams though, really takes Cage to heart: anything can be the foundation of a musical work, it simply requires making it. That's a much better perspective than the Inception of an idea which is pointlessly banal to actually implement. What conceptual art (in the broadest sense) lacks is the structural recognition of its own apparent stupidity. We call that delusion.

His own word for his music is "architectonic." Ooh, i like that word. Structural conglomerations that move and rub and crash against each other; a larger process without discernable teleology. That, to me, is the essence of life. His pieces are alive. You must slow down and let the fast machine perform its own internal ritual.

I watched Nixon in China in the library at OU a long time ago. Something about a ping-pong tounament. Adams frequently includes saxophones and synthesizers in his orchestras. I think his works should be performed more, but i imagine the cost of doing so is astronomically ridiculous.

I guess what i'm trying to say is that the sky is blue, and all the leaves are green. My heart's as full as a baked potato. I think i know precisely what i mean when i say it's a shpedoinkle day. Enjoy.

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