Gabriel Ménendez offers a commented listening of “Nixon in China”, by John Adams, to conclude his course on minimal music at the International Institute.

Tomorrow, Tuesday 11 April, from 19:00 to 21:00, the third and final part of the course on American musical minimalism that has been held since before Easter at the International Institute of Madrid (Calle Miguel Ángel, 8) will take place at the American cultural centre. The course is entitled Reiteration of Diversity: Minimal Music and American Opera of the 20th Century and has been given by Gabriel Menéndez Torrellas, PhD in Aesthetics and Philosophy and Musicologist and Art Historian at the Albert-Ludwig-University of Freiburg im Breisgau (Germany), where he was a professor in the Faculty of Musicology. Menéndez currently directs the Seminar on Opera and Musicology at the CEU San Pablo University in Madrid, where he teaches the History of Opera.

The third lecture focuses on Nixon in China, the opera by John Adams whose premiere in Madrid will take place on Monday 17 April at the Teatro Real and which has served as an excuse for the celebration of this informative cycle, which will be completed on 27 May with a concert of minimalist music entitled Liquid Soundscapes, by Boost Percussion, which this year celebrates the tenth anniversary of its formation.

Professor Menéndez Torrellas explains in this interview what the third and last lecture of the course on minimalism or, as he prefers to call it, minimal music, will consist of.

Tomorrow, Tuesday, you will give the third of the lectures on musical minimalism at the International Institute of Madrid, which will deal with the opera Nixon in China. Without going into the subject of the lecture, what can you tell us about this opera?

It is not so much a lecture as the third session of a monographic course that began before Easter with two other sessions. The first one I think would have been very interesting for many people, because it was an introduction to the musical aesthetics of minimalism, which I prefer to call by its American form of expression: minimal music. It dealt with the roots of the style.

You refer to the socio-cultural environment in which it emerged…

Yes, because it is perhaps one of the aspects where minimalism or minimal music is really the most original. In the fifties and sixties it was still in the immediate post-war integral serialism, which had emerged, in a way, as a solution of necessity. Firstly, because it is a link with the lost generation: by National Socialism, the war and the Holocaust a generation gap was created between the pre-war generation and the post-war generation, and the best link to return to the Vienna School and to dodecaphonism was that serialisation of all parameters which, moreover, allows us to make a relatively abstract and “dehumanised” music if you like, in inverted commas, at a time when Adorno has said that “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” All that is still present in the sixties, because the great dominant composers, whether Pierre Boulez, or Bruno Maderna, or Stockhausen, etcetera, are in that current. But, as Steve Reich says, there is a feeling of saturation on the part, above all, of a whole new generation that has grown up in the United States, for whom integral serialism is a relatively alien thing. They are immersed in a world where classical tendencies very closely linked to John Cage – which is something quite different – coexist with, on the other hand, non-European movements: African music, which is of great interest to Reich, or Indian music, which is of great interest to Philip Glass and, in part, to Terry Riley. This new socio-cultural environment suddenly makes it possible not to give importance to things that for the serialists were like two sacred dogmas, such as maintaining atonality at all costs and not generating at any time a sensation of tonal centre. This generation suddenly comes along and they don’t care about that idea at all. It’s not that there is an absolute return to tonality, but it’s not something they care about.

The funny thing is that John Adams is considered a minimalist composer, when he actually started composing when the founding fathers of minimalism were already saying that minimalism had ceased to exist, in the mid-seventies.

Yes, it had passed its heyday. That’s true. As you know, I don’t like to use the term minimalist, but minimal music, a term that was not coined by any of the pioneer generation, but invented by Michael Nyman, I think in 1968. He starts talking about minimal music by analogy with something that already existed, which was minimal art. But none of its members are particularly happy with that expression. And, on the other hand, there are big differences between a Riley, a Glass or a Reich. Or a La Monte Young, who doesn’t work so much with repetitive structures, but goes more into pure sound. Minimalism or minimal music is a kind of catch-all that suits us, just as we say Romanticism and within it we put Berlioz, Brahms and Richard Wagner. They are simply more or less pragmatic concepts that can help us.

The minimal is the first impulse of very pioneering works of the sixties and of larger scale works of the seventies, which is perhaps the moment of awareness that it is a movement already established, and it is when Steve Reich composed Drumming between 1970 and 1971 and with Glass and the opera Einstein on the Beach the great step forward was taken. That is to say, they no longer made “little works” of five or six or ten minutes, as had been done until then, but works that lasted one, two or three hours, and that was the moment of apogee.

What I think is that John Adams belongs to a second generation, in the eighties. And his greatest contribution is probably that he reintroduces the melodic contribution and the singability. The big difference between Nixon in China and Einstein on the Beach is that in Glass’s opera there is no semantic singing: there are texts that don’t even relate to anything to do with Einstein, and the rest are syllables that are either musical notes or numbers in the bar. But there is no “libretto”. In Nixon in China, on the other hand, there is a libretto, there are characters and there are arias. John Adams is the recovery… The way of inserting a large part of the operatic typology within the minimalist aesthetic. He belongs to a new generation that is perhaps less dogmatised, that no longer has to show things that have already been shown and that goes in another direction.

John Adams is, in fact, the most symphonic of them all and the only one who has been invited by the Berlin Philharmonic to give a Carte blanche-Konzerten concert.

Why is it that the great conductors, including Dudamel, work regularly with John Adams and not with Philip Glass, for example? Why is there this rejection?

Well, the Berlin Philharmonic has given concerts by Philip Glass, but it is true that Philip Glass is less frequent in the symphonic world. He took a giant leap with Einstein on the Beach and then tried to adapt the minimal aesthetic to conventional opera with the two following operas, those dedicated to specific historical figures, Gandhi and Akhnaten, working on the characters, creating a more linear story, as far as possible, and from there on his language becomes saturated. From the nineties onwards, Philip Glass began to reiterate the same models, and the saturation now comes from another side, with the continuous saturation of perfect triads, usually minor, which end up making his music a bit of a minimalist potpourri.

Meanwhile, John Adams continues to evolve. For example, in the richness of timbre, something that Philip Glass has never worked on. John Adams makes symphonic pieces that orchestras record because they can take advantage of a great timbral differentiation of the instrumental families. When that happens, orchestras love you more and invite you and premiere you. In Einstein on the Beach there isn’t even an orchestra: it’s two electronic keyboards, the choir and some five other instruments. And if you listen to Philip Glass’s Concerto for violin and orchestra… that’s not an orchestra: that’s a keyboard turned orchestra accompanying the solo violin, with the typical harmonic triads. It may have a consummate lyricism, I don’t deny that, but a major orchestra is going to find it much less interesting to play that concerto than all of John Adams’ later repertoire, which is still being recorded.

However, conservatory-trained musicians who define themselves as avant-garde consider Adams to be much more conventional, for example, than Steve Reich.

It depends on the parameters. Steve Reich’s music is fascinating but very marginal. A Drumming is still a great piece, but to play it you have to take your marimbas, your xylophones and so on. It’s very difficult to integrate a Steve Reich piece into a normal concert programme. It’s probably less conventional because to do Drumming you have to hire a very particular group of instruments and tell two vocal soloists that they’re going to make guttural sounds with the voice, right into that whole percussion ensemble. You’re not going to have the Vienna Philharmonic play that piece. It doesn’t make any sense, because almost the whole orchestra is going to be sitting on their hands for the whole concert.

What John Adams has perhaps done is to adapt his way of understanding minimal music more to the repertoire music of large orchestras. If that’s why he is more conventional…! I don’t know the criteria for conventionality. What I do see is that after the eighties Steve Reich has not composed anything that is usually mentioned. We are all left with those early works. Even Terry Riley’s famous In C started out as an almost solo piano piece and he has re-recorded it in the 21st century with twenty instruments on stage. In the end, you also end up wanting to experience that kind of timbral unfolding.

What would be the main argument to explain the importance of Nixon in China?

I think it is, above all, to make minimal music a music capable of generating opera like that which is being made in the eighties: it is a politically committed opera, based on real events in history and which manages to give musical entity to real characters. It manages to combine well the objective-historical dimension with the affective-subjective dimension of each character. And he managed to make a repertory opera that has been maintained to this day; it is probably the most performed American opera. I just saw it in Paris, conducted by Dudamel, precisely. And it’s in I don’t know how many theatres these months, it’s become a classic. There you have a classic of minimal music opera from the late eighties. That’s how classics are made. Sometimes you have to wait forty years. Just like Einstein on the Beach, which is from 1976, was not available on DVD until five years ago.

What is the course you are going to give tomorrow on Nixon in China going to consist of, strictly speaking?

Just like in the first two classes of the course – the introduction to the musical aesthetics of minimal music, and Einstein on the Beach – there is going to be a commented listening of fragments of the opera. I’m very holistic and I don’t like to put things into compartments that don’t communicate with each other. At the time, for the first session, I had many of the things mentioned by Steve Reich in the prologue to the book I was using for the course, The Ashgate Research Companion To Minimalist and Postminimalist Music, because he himself mentions many references that are not precisely those that one immediately imagines with that North American current. Obviously we know that Reich is going to talk about John Cage -it is inevitable- and about African music, but in that prologue Reich also mentions Perotinus -the composer of the school of Notre Dame de Paris in the 13th century- and people don’t know that: Perotinus already used structures absolutely similar to those of minimal music. In the four-voice Organum Quadruplum, there is a bass voice drone and three voices above it repeating a rhythmic structure over and over again. So, for Reich himself to say that Perotinus is one of his models seems to me fundamental in order to see to what extent they are looking where there is a need to look. Just as he mentions Bach in The Art of the Fugue. So I exposed them in the course, in the same way that Ligeti or even Stockhausen himself are no longer doing that integral serialism in the sixties, because they too are tired of it. That’s why I gave Stockhausen’s Stimmung as an example: all the important early works of minimal music don’t use the human voice, because for them the human voice is a limitation. You can do the minimal music experiments perfectly well with instruments, but they didn’t know how to make a singer sing semantic texts with that aesthetic. And suddenly, right there, in the middle of the sixties, Stockhausen published Stimmung, which is the first vocal work that solves that idea: we are going to declaim names of gods of antiquity, syllables, onomatopoeias. There are parts of Stimmung that if you put them in and say that they were composed by a minimal music composer, nobody could object.

Stockhausen gave them the solution. And from there, immediately after Stimmung, Reich puts voices in Drumming and then comes Philip Glass with Einstein on the Beach: they’ve already told me what I have to do instead of declaiming love phrases; to emit syllables, numbers, onomatopoeias. And that’s how the voices are inserted. It doesn’t matter if it’s one, two or a whole choir in minimal music. But you have to listen to this work by Stockhausen. All these minimal music composers are people who had been in Europe. And Philip Glass didn’t premiere any of his early works in the United States. Not one. Einstein on the Beach in Avignon. Satyagraha in Rotterdam, and Akhnaten in Stuttgart no less. I think that minimal music becomes much more interesting if we insert it into this interest in certain medieval music, or in the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, or in what is happening with Ligeti and Stockhausen. Or with John Cage. Why did Cage go to Paris as a young man? To study the music of Erik Satie. The composer who has arranged most of Erik Satie’s works is John Cage. Since the famous Socrate that John Cage is the first to do Satie’s dream of unfolding a very short work and making it last an hour. The most interesting thing about the composers of minimal music is probably that they went to look where European composers were not looking: Perotinus, Bach or Satie. And suddenly they discover a kind of “parallel avant-garde”, so to speak. That was the first session and the second session focused on Einstein on the Beach and in this third session I’m going to do what I call a “commented listening”. I’m not going to give data, because that’s already on any site, but on how to listen. I start by listening directly to the music. And, from there, to draw conclusions.