CHAPTER 18 | CLASSICAL MUSIC IN THE 1960s 449Exploring the softest part of the dynamic range, Crumb’s music creates a
ghostly ambiance in which Lorca’s words and an old devotional song hover
mysteriously.MINIMALISM
By 1965, La Monte Young and Terry Riley, both from the western United States,
were writing lengthy works based on small amounts of musical material that
would point the way for Philip Glass, Steve Reich, and other young composers
who fi t none of the three niches of New York composers—although the infl uence
of Cage’s experimentalist ethos bears strongly on the music of Young, at least.
When asked whether any one piece of new music had inspired them to become
composers, many musicians born after 1940 point to Terry Riley’s In C and Steve
Reich’s Come Out. Written in 1964, In C became in some ways the anthem of a
movement that in the 1970s would borrow its name, minimalism, from the
visual arts. As applied to music, minimalism denotes music based on a radically
reduced amount of musical material and relying on static harmony, patterned
rhythms, and repetition.
Questioned about his work’s origins, Riley has described improvisation as
one of its main infl uences. The fi fty-three short motives that make up In C—
each repeated many times over a fast pulse high in the piano—must be played in
order by any number of musicians, but each performer decides independently
when to move from one motive to the next and therefore how they overlap and
fi t together. Having grown up playing jazz, Riley was comfortable with the idea
of on-the-spot creation. Technology was another infl uence. In C is written for
live performers playing an unfi xed number of unspecifi ed instruments, but its
repetitions sound much like tape loops: lengths of magnetic tape spliced end to
end in a circle, so that the recorded sounds repeat indefi nitely, an effect Riley
and other electronic music composers had been using since the 1950s. A third
infl uence was Riley’s outlook on life. “I was a beatnik, and then I turned into a
hippie,” he told an interviewer. “For my generation,” the mid-1960s provided “a
fi rst look towards the East, that is, peyote, mescaline, and the psychedelic drugs
which were opening up people’s attention towards higher consciousness. So I
think what I was experiencing in music at that time was another world. BesidesBist du bei mir, geh ich mit Freuden
zum Sterben und zu meiner Ruh.If thou art near, I go with joy
To death and to my rest.Listening Guide 18.2“Todas las tardes en Granada,”
from Ancient Voices of Children GEORGE CRUMBListen & Refl ect
- The quotation of “Bist du bei mir” could easily be played on a conventional piano. What
effect does Crumb obtain by specifying the use of a toy piano? - Many commentators have noted the ritualistic character of Crumb’s music. Is that evident
here? If so, how?
Terry Riley, In CCD 3.19172028_18_440-467_r3_sd.indd 449 23/01/13 11:02 AM