Steve Reich | Conversations

Steve Reich—who celebrated his 85th birthday a week ago today—will release a new book in March of next year, titled Conversations. Published by Hanover Square Press (a subsidiary of Harper Collins), the volume will include interviews with "collaborators, fellow composers, musicians, and visual artists influenced by his work, to reflect on his prolific career as a composer as well as the music that inspired him and that has been inspired by him." These include Richard Serra, Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood, Kronos Quartet's David Harrington, Stephen Sondheim, Nico Muhly, Brian Eno, Elizabeth Lim-Dutton,  Micaela Haslam, Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, and many others. 

Dust jacket blurb accolades include "a surprising, enlightening series of conversations that shed new light on the music and career of 'our greatest living composer'" (The New York Times) and "Through this series of insightful, wide-ranging conversations starting from his student days to the present pandemic, we gain a compelling glimpse into the mind of 'the most original musical thinker of our time'" (The New Yorker). 

The title is due to be released on March 22, 2022 and is available for pre-order now. 

Jon Hassell, RIP

My favourite trumpet player - a distinction without competition - died yesterday, at the age of 84. 

Jon Hassell was a musician and composer best known for his "fourth world" music, which has managed to bypass the now-ubiquitous charges of 'cultural appropriation' through sheer rigour and respect. In an essay titled The Debt I Owe To Jon Hassell, Brian Eno wrote “If I had to name one over-riding principle in Jon’s work, it would be that of respect: he looks at the world in all its momentary and evanescent moods with respect, and this shows in his music.”

Hassell himself decried what he called “the banalisation of the exotic … the herd trampling through the campsites where I delicately and respectfully visited 15 or 20 years ago”.

He was born in Memphis and studied in Germany under Karlheinz Stockhausen, alongside classmates Irmin Schmidt and Holger Czukay, who went on to found the band CAN. He recently described to Billboard magazine an experience taking acid at Schmidt’s house: “I remember being on the floor listening to gagaku Japanese music and watching the fibres of the rug sway with the music.”

When he returned to the USA, he met Terry Riley and performed on his signature work, In C. He later worked with another influential minimalist composer, La Monte Young, joining the Theatre of Eternal Music and studying under Young's mentor Pandit Pran Nath. Nath was an Indian classical singer and master of the Kirana gharana singing style, a process dedicated to just intonation. Hassell applied these vocal techniques to the trumpet. 

Hassell’s debut album Vernal Equinox was released in 1978 and was followed by a collaboration with Eno two years later, Possible Musics/Fourth World, Vol. 1. The recording was was named one of the year's ten best recordings by The New York Times and the Village Voice. 

He subsequently collaborated with a wide range of performers, including Ibrahim Ferrer, Stina Nordenstam (an under-rated Swedish singer whose work I discovered when Hassell played on her excellent second album And She Closed her Eyes), David Toop, Bjork, Flea, Howie B, former classmate Holger Czukay, the Kronos Quartet, artist Walter De Maria, Michael Brook, Daniel Lanois, the Talking Heads, and countless others.

He was initially a third collaborator on Brian Eno and David Byrne's influential album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, but quit the project early on, disappointed with the results of the early demos. He remained estranged from Byrne, though later became close again with Eno, who started a GoFundMe page for Hassell in April 2020, to help raise money when the composer's health first began to deteriorate. Over a hundred thousand dollars were raised. 

“After a little more than a year of fighting through health complications, Jon died peacefully in the early morning hours of natural causes,” his family wrote in the statement. “He cherished life and leaving this world was a struggle as there was much more he wished to share in music, philosophy, and writing.” 

His fans included filmmakers (Wim Wenders, Chris Marker), visual artists (Jean-Michel Basquiat), composers (Philip Glass: "I recommend all the works of Jon Hassell"), pop stars (Charlie Watts, Pete Townsend, Bono, Ani Di Franco), electronic musicians (808 State, Scanner, Howie B) and other performers.  

Ry Cooder called him "One of the three or four players of wind instruments in the world who can command your attention with one note". Brian Eno described his frequent collaborator as someone who "planted seeds whose fruits are still being gathered”. 

David Bryne, Brian Eno and (an already pulling away?) Jon Hassell

Philip Glass | Quartet # 4 (Buczak)

Philip Glass
Quartet # 4 (Buczak)
New York City, Dunvagen Music Publishers Inc., 1989
23 min
Edition size unknown

Brian Buczak was born in 1954, in Detroit, where he received his BFA from the Center for Creative Studies. He moved to New York City in 1975 at age 21, and met Geoffrey Hendricks shortly afterwards. His work, which includes paintings, drawing, writings, artist's books, film and performance - has been exhibited internationally, including Canada, Italy, and Iceland.

Buczak and Hendricks c-founded the Money For Food Press and produced many collaborations together. Buczak died from AIDS at the age of 33, on July 4th, 1987.

Hendricks commissioned Philip Glass to compose a piece to commemorate Buczak's life (offering a large canvas work in trade). It premiered on the second anniversary of Buczak's death, at either Hauser Gallery or Emily Harvey (online reports differ).

The work can be heard on the CD Kronos Quartet Performs Philip Glass (Nonesuch, 1995), and online here.

"The music of Philip Glass, especially works composed after the formative period of the late '60s and early '70s, demonstrates a stylistic consistency that critics deride as utter predictability. And certainly, some of his most characteristic gestures have become movie music clichés: the murmuring minor third alternations and subtle shifts of metric accentuation that so drew in viewers of director Errol Morris' startling documentary The Thin Blue Line, for example, have been borrowed by numerous other composers looking to cast an anxious, pensive mood on a tense, cinematic moment. Still, even his harshest critics must admit that in a handful of works, Glass ventures rather far afield of his minimalist roots, exploring sounds and textures that merge with his more characteristic techniques in surprising and often moving ways.

Such is the case with Glass' String Quartet No. 4, subtitled "Buczak." The subtitle derives from the work's memorial nature, composed as it was in memory of artist Brian Buczak, who succumbed to AIDS in 1988 [sic]. The inevitable combination of mourning and remembrance play out in the work's musical character, which is likewise conflicted in its textures and techniques. At the core of the work's first movement is a device typical of Glass' oeuvre: a chord progression carried by slippery semitone voiceleading through a string of unexpected tonalities before finally and unexpectedly arriving at its starting point. Likewise, the metrical terrain constantly shifts, with units of three and four beats unpredictably juxtaposed (a trait not as prominent in Glass' later works, but central to expanding and contracting melodic cells of his early pieces).

What sets this movement off, however, is its occasional use of strident polytonal complexes. A theme with variations, the movement occasionally bifurcates the strings into divergent harmonic camps, carving out arpeggios and melodies on entirely different planes (an idea carried even further in Glass' Symphony No. 2). This stratification is enhanced by contrasts between arco and pizzicato articulations. The second movement is more mellow, but also more melancholy, its chromaticism drawn out into long, lyrical melodies and delicately strident harmonies reminiscent of Fauré or Debussy in a dark mood; reaching into the extended upper range, the violins evoke a yearning for transcendence. The third and final movement alternates between long-breathed chords and somber, minor-mode polyphonies, ultimately settling into the major mode and ending on a note of serene repose.

Glass wanted his fourth quartet to represent "a musical impression of [Buczak] as a person as well as a tribute to his life's work".

- Jeremy Grimshaw, Allmusic

Laurie Anderson and the Kronos Quartet

Laurie Anderson has teamed up with the Kronos Quartet for a new album, which is due out a week from today, on February 16th. Released by Nonesuch on both Vinyl and CD, Landfall is inspired by Anderson’s experience during Hurricane Sandy, in 2012. The 30-track LP features song titles like "CNN Predicts a Monster Storm", "The Electricity Goes Out and We Move to a Hotel" and "The Wind Lifted the Boats and Left Them on the Highway." 

“These are stories with tempos. I’ve always been fascinated by the complex relationship of words and music whether in song lyrics, supertitles or voice over. In Landfall, instruments initiate language through our new text software, erst. The blend of electronic and acoustic strings is the dominant sound of Landfall. Much of the music in this work is generated from the harmonies and delays of unique software designed for the solo viola and reinterpreted for the quartet. In addition, there were elements of the optigan, a keyboard that uses information stored on optical discs.”

- Laurie Anderson

“I have hoped that Laurie Anderson would write for Kronos since first encountering her work 30 years ago. She is the master magician musician who has always inhabited those secret places where technology has personality, where “real time” is questioned and where all the elements of performance meet and combine into music. Her process is to gather and continue to gather potentially useful aspects as she sculpts a shape. Her sense of play and fun and her continuous experimenting make her the ideal chemist [or is it alchemist?] in the laboratory of music. As Laurie discovers new essential elements, the world of thought is more encompassing and shapes of the future are becoming more apparent. What a thrill it is for Kronos to join her in Landfall as we explore what emerges together.”

—David Harrington, violin

The Kronos Quartet have previously collaborated with John Adams, Arvo Pärt, Allen Ginsberg, The National, Tom Waits, David Bowie, George Crumb, Björk, Henry Górecki, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Terry Riley, Homayun Sakhi, Astor Piazzolla, Amon Tobin, Faith No More, and countless others. Anderson's musical collaborations include Brian Eno, Peter Gabriel, William S. Burroughs, Philip Glass, John Zorn, John Giorno, and her late husband Lou Reed.