The Bolero of Composers

I learned early on in middle school that repeating a joke did not make it funnier. When I thought I was making a callback, a reference to when I made my lunch table laugh, all I was doing was reminding them that I was not currently entertaining them with something clever and new. I got my chuckle, then what ruined it myself by enjoying it too much. Instead of chasing that high, I should have sat quiet, breathed, looked around and enjoyed what little creative humor I brought to lunch. However, as many people do in this situation, I was compelled to ensure that everyone knew how much they find me funny.

Just like this introduction, when the horse is beaten to death, the audience is left not with a sense of fulfilment, but rather with one singular thought. “I get it.” This is all I can think of whenever I suffer through Maurice Ravel’s Bolero. There are two melodies, a snare part, and a crescendo. That is the entire description of the 15-minute work. Slaving over that much music, and only describing it with nine words might not sound like an accomplishment, but it retroactively became one when minimalism became mainstream, and in that lies the greatest flaw of the minimalist movement.

Minimalism fails when the goal is to tell the shortest story possible. I feel like this is the truest when Steve Reich is brought into discussion. His contributions to the music world are insightful and revolutionary, however, I find it difficult to describe a large breath of his output as musical works. They feel more like auditory experiments than a musical narrative. He sets up parameters and tests where they take him, but then stops there with the art. Instead of using the parameters to tell a story, he claims that those very rules are the story. This idea had its point in the time when it originated, but as the counterculture nature of minimalism faded, so did the impact of this idea. Reich’s experiments were legendary, however, since they were so pure in nature, their idea survived but not the works themselves.

People do not much perform Reich anymore. Instead people discuss his ideas, put on a video of Piano Phase, listen to one minute of it then skip ahead three times to show that the later music is truly different than what was heard at the beginning. This is not because of some cynical, youth-hating reason. This is because Reich’s music does not tell a story worth discussing. Much like Bolero, there is nothing to say about it. Imagination is perhaps one of humanity’s greatest inventions, so why would it be worth listening to an entire 15-minute piece when the imagination can replicate it with only 1-minute worth of information. That is why people say, “I get it.” They do not need it explained again. They know the full story in their heads, and Ravel and Reich only go on to prove that assumption correct.

I am not trying to paint a bad picture of Reich though. Loved or hated, his music is an important part of twentieth-century music. Even more, I actually really like Reich myself. Yet I noticed this aching feeling in my gut when discussion Reich arose. I mention how much I appreciate him; however, I only listen to half of his works all the way through. Pieces like Music for Eighteen Musicianscan listened to and re-listened to endlessly and yetPiano Phase, perhaps his most famous work, can only be listened to if there is a gimmick to accompany it. I believe the difference is that in Eighteen MusiciansReich is not setting up parameters to experiment, but rather, he uses the results of his earlier tests to tell a detailed story. The description of the whole piece is not short, but the description of the material that makes of the piece is brief, and it is in that that lies the greatest achievement of minimalism.