On Wednesday this week I attended the English National Opera’s production of the Philip Glass opera Akhnaten. I am something of a devote of American minimalism.
(When I introduced it to my U3A Group they weren’t impressed. They made no sense of it. what is the point of it was a very good question posed. Their habituated mode of listening didn’t work in this case so it seemed.[1])
I have seen both Philip Glass and Steve Reich in concert and a wonderful Kronos Quartet performance of Reich’s Different Trains.
I recall in 1984 running a workshop making minimalist music on an Arts in the Curriculum in service training day for staff in my secondary school. I was learning how to master whole class workshopping at the time.
Both Reich and Glass reject goal directed music, use repetition to deny the building up of expectation, tension and release and all that the Western European Art Tradition relies upon to create narrative structures through time.
In Anahid Kassabian’s fascinating ‘Ubiquitous Listening’ [2] reference is made to Adorno’s typology of listeners. [3] The expert listener has the ability to follow the musical narrative – the capacity to follow a theme throughout its journey, relating past, present and future together. ‘Such a listener is fully conscious, fully attentive, and able to hear longitudinal, structural relationships in large-scale musical works.’ [4]
Listening to a 1985 Glass work this week the musical method was predictably minimal. What might have been a music phrase curled to nothing, cyclical drumming did its work, pungent chords stood alone. Being one of Adorno’s expert listeners I had to think differently rather like I have to when involved in a Frankophone drumming ensemble and when listening to music beyond the white frame of Western European Art Music.
I am left wondering about music education’s commitment to producing Adornoian expert listeners. And just who is the expert listener?
On Wednesday the audience’s appreciation was fulsome.
Notes:
[1] See my blog ‘The Impatient Music Teacher’.
[2] Kassabian, Anahid, 2013 Ubiquitous Listening: Affect, Attention and Distributed Subjectivity. University of California Press.
[3] Adorno, Theodor, 1988. Introduction to the Sociology of Music. Continuum.
[4] Kassabian, Anahid, 2013 Ubiquitous Listening: Affect, Attention and Distributed Subjectivity. University of California Press. Page xxii.
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