It’s been a long, a long time coming
But I know a change gonna come, oh yes it will.
The world changed rapidly in the early 1960s, but not as rapidly as the accelerating rate of change after the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963. The heart of the 1960s was a tumultuous time that left the world forever changed.
In late December 1964, RCA Victor released a single of music by the smooth-voiced Sam Cooke, featuring an anthem for the Civil Rights Movement: “A Change Is Gonna Come.” Cooke, the “ultimate Soul man,” was not known for his political statements, but the times were changing, and he knew he needed to change with them. Cooke viewed his composition as a response to Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind.” More specifically, it was written in response to having been kicked out of a hotel and arrested for disturbing the peace when he and his band were refused entry on the basis of race, even though they had already reserved rooms.
Cooke’s anthem describes some aspects of racial prejudice, such as being unwelcome “downtown” or at the movies, among other indignities. In the end, however, he finishes with an uplifting message:
There have been times that I thought I couldn’t last for long
But now I think I’m able to carry on It’s been a long, a long time coming
But I know a change is gonna come, oh yes it will
The hopeful nature of the text is emphasized by the rich orchestration. Strings, French horn, and timpani emphasize the seriousness of the text, giving it a weight and depth that it would not have had with a simpler accompaniment.
But I know a change gonna come, oh yes it will.
The world changed rapidly in the early 1960s, but not as rapidly as the accelerating rate of change after the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963. The heart of the 1960s was a tumultuous time that left the world forever changed.
In late December 1964, RCA Victor released a single of music by the smooth-voiced Sam Cooke, featuring an anthem for the Civil Rights Movement: “A Change Is Gonna Come.” Cooke, the “ultimate Soul man,” was not known for his political statements, but the times were changing, and he knew he needed to change with them. Cooke viewed his composition as a response to Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind.” More specifically, it was written in response to having been kicked out of a hotel and arrested for disturbing the peace when he and his band were refused entry on the basis of race, even though they had already reserved rooms.
Cooke’s anthem describes some aspects of racial prejudice, such as being unwelcome “downtown” or at the movies, among other indignities. In the end, however, he finishes with an uplifting message:
There have been times that I thought I couldn’t last for long
But now I think I’m able to carry on It’s been a long, a long time coming
But I know a change is gonna come, oh yes it will
The hopeful nature of the text is emphasized by the rich orchestration. Strings, French horn, and timpani emphasize the seriousness of the text, giving it a weight and depth that it would not have had with a simpler accompaniment.
The British Invasion
By December 1964, it was clear that popular music was changing rapidly. The short period from November 1963 to February 1964 represents a watershed in popular music.
Beatlemania
During 1963, The Beatles’ popularity in England had reached a fever pitch. By the time they gave a command performance for the Queen on November 4, The Beatles held seven of the top twenty spots on the British charts simultaneously. They held the top position for thirty-seven weeks that year. After successful trips to Sweden and France and record-breaking television appearances in England, The Beatles were ready to cross the pond.
Although the Kennedy assassination had pre-empted Walter Cronkite’s planned broadcast of the CBS story about The Beatles, two and a half weeks later, in an effort to “cheer up” a depressed nation, Cronkite aired the spot, and the seed of Beatlemania was planted in the United States. America was ready for The Beatles. Capitol Records released “I Want to Hold Your Hand” on December 26, 1963, just over a month after the assassination of John F. Kennedy. America was looking for a distraction, and The Beatles provided it. It took five weeks for the single to climb to the top of the Billboard charts, but once it reached number one on February 1, 1964, it stayed for seven weeks—until it was replaced by another Beatles hit, “She Loves You.”
The Beatles arrived in New York City on February 7, 1964. Kennedy Airport had just been renamed to honor the recently slain president. Nearly five thousand screaming teenagers (mostly young girls) greeted the Fab Four at the airport. What everyone was waiting for was The Beatles’ appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show. The show was seen by the largest audience in television history. Music critic Ian Inglis suggests that, “it is no exaggeration to say that on February 9, 1964, Ed Sullivan also introduced a generation to its future.”
On March 28, 1964, The Beatles had fourteen singles in the Top 100, including the number one hit (“She Loves You”) and the previous number one (“I Want to Hold Your Hand”). The following week, The Beatles held the top five positions on the pop charts. Sixty percent of the singles sold in the first quarter of 1964 were Beatles recordings.
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The Rolling Stones
If The Beatles represented one prong of the British “assault” on America, the Rolling Stones represented the other. Both in music and image, the Rolling Stones were rougher, more aggressive, more rebellious (at least at first), but also more basic. Rhythm and blues inspired the musicians who eventually became The Rolling Stones. Formed in 1962, the band took its name from the title of a song (“Rollin’ Stone”) by the legendary Chicago blues singer and guitarist Muddy Waters. The new band caught the ear of George Harrison, who persuaded the Decca record company to sign them. In 1963, the first Rolling Stones single, a Chuck Berry song, “Come On,” only reached number 26. Try as they might, they could not swim against the tide that was The Beatles. If you can’t swim against the tide, why not swim with it? Their more successful second single was “I Want to Be Your Man,” a song dashed off for them by Lennon and McCartney. When Stones guitarist Brian Jones added slide guitar, they felt that had something that would succeed. The song made the top ten in Britain and received substantial airplay when the Stones performed it on the first-ever episode of the British pop music show “Top of the Pops.”
Touring the U.S. became the measure of success for a British rock group. With the Stones’ debut album in the top spot in the UK, plans were made for a U.S. tour, which began in June 1964. That is where the resemblance to The Beatles’ first tour ends. Instead of thousands of fans greeting them at the airport, hundreds awaited the Stones. Their first U.S. television appearance was on an obscure late night show, and their second appearance, on Dean Martin’s show, was mostly an opportunity for the host to joke about his guests. Concerts in the middle of the country drew only hundreds, and audiences were small until they played Carnegie Hall in New York. Later that year, they toured the U.S. again, and this time they appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show, with crowds of excited teens inside and outside the theatre. There were extensive complaints after the Ed Sullivan appearance, however, and the next day Sullivan declared to reporters, “I promise you they’ll never be back on my show if things can’t be handled. We won’t book any more rock’n’roll groups and we’ll ban teenagers from the theatre if we have to.” The Stones really were the “bad boys of rock”—in contrast to the polite Beatles. The crowds they attracted were rougher than Beatles audiences. In Paris, 150 Stones fans were arrested for violence. Arrests also accompanied performances in England, Scotland, and Holland.
Innovations in Classical Music
The mid-1960s was a time of great creativity for classical musicians. Each composition was expected to demonstrate new and unique techniques and sounds. Operating under the shadow of Stravinsky’s and Schoenberg’s advances from the first quarter of the century and Cage’s innovations of the 1940s and 1950s, composers of the 1960s found it challenging to surprise and fascinate audiences as well as fellow musicians and critics.
Philomel
One composer who succeeded in creating new sounds was Milton Babbitt (1916–2011). Babbitt had been one of the first U.S. innovators in electronic music. Babbitt’s interest in electronic music was largely based on his fascination with serialism. Earlier Babbitt works serialized all aspects of the music: pitch, tempo, rhythm, dynamics, and even articulation and timbre. Once he became involved with electronic (recorded) music, he had total control over the final result. His work with electronic music, however, led him to compose for live instruments again, with “a new vitality and color.”
In 1964, Babbitt combined these two aspects of his compositional development in Philomel, a work based on Greek mythology in which a soprano sings live, accompanied by taped sounds. This was not the first work to combine voice and tape, but it did have some fascinating and innovative techniques. The tape contained some purely electronic sounds, but also included manipulated recordings of the performer. This allowed the tape to represent the “disembodied entity” of Philomel, who has had her tongue ripped out, before the Gods permit her to metamorphosize into a nightingale.
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John Hollander, who wrote the text for Philomel, explained that they intended the live voice of the soprano to dominate, but that her performance would “be augmented, and perhaps echoed” by the taped sounds. The text played with sound elements within the words, with alliteration and consonance. Just as Babbitt’s serial method of composition would manipulate small units of sound (whether pitch or rhythm or timbre), Hollander manipulated small units of sound—phonemes—dissecting and reassembling the names Philomel and Tereus. The results include “feel a million trees,” “not true trees, not True Tereus,” “feel a million filaments,” “families of tears,” and “I feel a million Philomels.”
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Terry Riley
![Picture](/uploads/6/1/8/8/61886323/stoners090427-250.jpg?250)
Terry Riley (b. 1935) grew up in California and met other similarly minded musicians while studying at Berkeley. These musicians introduced Riley to trance-like music of sustained tones that avoided tonality. He experimented with tape loop composition, and his first completed piece was titled Mescalin Mix. As he continued to experiment with tape manipulation, he learned a technique that allowed him to record a sound on one machine and then play it back seconds later on another, which resulted in a type of improvisation not unlike sampling today. He experimented with these tape improvisations with the great jazz trumpeter Chet Baker, using Miles Davis’ “So What” as the melodic, rhythmic, and modal framework. With its minimal harmonic motion, the modal nature of “So What” seemed to align well with the slowly evolving nature of Riley’s music. Riley’s tape manipulation method would add layer after layer of the same material without synchronization.
Riley decided to see if a similar concept could be imposed on an ensemble of live musicians and began to work on a piece that incorporated improvisation, his layering technique where everything builds from the first fragment, and ideas he had gathered from his experience with tape manipulation. New York Times music critic Alex Ross suggested that Miles Davis’ modal “So What” was “proto- minimalist,” meaning that Davis’ musical concept of extreme harmonic simplification helped lay the groundwork for the minimalist compositions that followed. One Riley composition based on these ideas stands out as a major influence on the trajectory of the music that came to be called minimalism: In C.
LISTENING EXAMPLE 5: IN C (1964)—TERRY RILEY
In 1964, the San Francisco Tape Music Center defied expectations and sponsored the premiere of a piece that did not use any pre-recorded sound, but was performed entirely by live musicians: Terry Riley’s In C. In C consisted of fifty-three short fragments of music, each made up of a few of the notes of the C Major scale, with the addition of the notes F♯ and, near the end, B♭. The instrumentation was not specified and thus, like music of John Cage, not within control of the composer. The whole set of notes was not introduced at once, but rather revealed as each new fragment entered. Performers were at liberty to repeat the fragments any number of times, but were instructed to stay within two or three patterns from the rest of the ensemble. The result was a strange sort of canonic imitation, like the overlapping repetitions of a round (e.g. “Row, Row, Row Your Boat”).
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Each performer played the same fragments, in the same order, but not at the same time—and one, two, or even three earlier fragments might still be going while new fragments were introduced. This caused the music to have many characteristics of earlier aleatoric music, meaning sections could be played in different orders by different musicians, but in this case, the order of sections was predetermined. Just the number of repetitions and the alignment of the fragments were left to chance. This meant that rhythms would overlap and combine in new, unusual, and interesting ways. Polyrhythms abounded. Pitches sometimes clashed and sometimes blended. At times a performance might be full of consonant triadic, chordal sounds, while another performance (or even another section of the same performance) was full of tone clusters and dissonance.
Although Riley had written specific recognizable rhythms for many of the fragments, he originally intended them to be played without a specific tempo designation. The result would have been an amorphously mutating blob of notes. Imitation would have been difficult to discern because of the different unrelated tempos. The work would probably not have been as intriguing for the listener. Then Riley’s friend, fellow composer Steve Reich, suggested designating a specific tempo and adding reiterated high C eighth notes (the highest two Cs on the piano, an octave apart) to establish and maintain a tempo.
Although Riley had written specific recognizable rhythms for many of the fragments, he originally intended them to be played without a specific tempo designation. The result would have been an amorphously mutating blob of notes. Imitation would have been difficult to discern because of the different unrelated tempos. The work would probably not have been as intriguing for the listener. Then Riley’s friend, fellow composer Steve Reich, suggested designating a specific tempo and adding reiterated high C eighth notes (the highest two Cs on the piano, an octave apart) to establish and maintain a tempo.
With this adjustment, suddenly the rhythmic relationships and the imitation became distinct. The steady and unified tempo had the additional effect of directing the audience’s attention to rhythms and pitches, now that the tempo was the same in every voice. One other surprise effect came from this adjustment. The repeated Cs, the aligned rhythms of the fragments, and the gradual rhythmic and pitch changes as the players moved from fragment to fragment resulted in an almost hypnotic, trance-like effect. It also gave the impression of a long improvisation (which, in a way, it was—just with specific pitches and rhythms) over a static harmonic structure, much like modal jazz, some Latin jazz, and many rock and roll guitar solos. Audience reaction was more positive than most experimental music could expect, and a new branch of classical music composition was born: minimalism.
This is not to say that there were not minimalist compositions before In C, but this was the piece that caught everyone’s attention, in particular because the steady beat reminded audiences of rock and roll. Composers realized that they had a unique opportunity now. Improvisation combined with simplified harmonies, a discernible beat, and slowly morphing and mutating melodic and harmonic structures resulted in a hypnotic and trance-like calmness. Composers could create music that satisfied and challenged classical music performers and critics, while still being palatable, perhaps even attractive, to less discerning audiences whose primary listening experience was with rock and roll.
It was clear from the first few lines of instructions that In C was not an ordinary piece of chamber music. After specifying that the fifty-three fragments are to be played in order, Riley refused to specify the instrumentation: “Any number of any kind of instruments can play. A group of about thirty-five is desired if possible but smaller or larger groups will work. If vocalist(s) join in they can use any vowel and consonant sounds they like.” The recording on the USAD CD is a 1968 studio recording (remastered in 2009) that incorporates overdubs to increase the number of layers. Performers on this recording include Riley himself on saxophone, plus flute, clarinet, oboe, bassoon, trumpet, trombone, viola, marimba, and “the pulse” played on the top two Cs of the piano. This performance is approximately forty-two minutes in length. We will hear the first 5:04.
It was clear from the first few lines of instructions that In C was not an ordinary piece of chamber music. After specifying that the fifty-three fragments are to be played in order, Riley refused to specify the instrumentation: “Any number of any kind of instruments can play. A group of about thirty-five is desired if possible but smaller or larger groups will work. If vocalist(s) join in they can use any vowel and consonant sounds they like.” The recording on the USAD CD is a 1968 studio recording (remastered in 2009) that incorporates overdubs to increase the number of layers. Performers on this recording include Riley himself on saxophone, plus flute, clarinet, oboe, bassoon, trumpet, trombone, viola, marimba, and “the pulse” played on the top two Cs of the piano. This performance is approximately forty-two minutes in length. We will hear the first 5:04.
Steve Reich
Terry Riley’s friend Steve Reich (b. 1936) was fascinated with the textures created by jazz improvisation. He appreciated the balance between the predictability of expected tempos, beats, rhythms, and the roles of the various instruments and the unexpected or surprising combinations of pitches and rhythms that occurred when one or more of the instruments improvised. He was particularly captivated by the music of John Coltrane and heard Coltrane live at least fifty times.
He considered jazz music of the moment, music that did not need, or even permit, analysis. Before Reich began to compose minimalist music for live instruments, he burst onto the scene with two pieces of musique concrète using only a short sample of human speech as the sound source. In these first works, Reich established his minimalist concept of “music as a gradual process” through a very simple method of tape manipulation.
He considered jazz music of the moment, music that did not need, or even permit, analysis. Before Reich began to compose minimalist music for live instruments, he burst onto the scene with two pieces of musique concrète using only a short sample of human speech as the sound source. In these first works, Reich established his minimalist concept of “music as a gradual process” through a very simple method of tape manipulation.
LISTENING EXAMPLE 6: “IT’S GONNA RAIN” (1965)—STEVE REICH
Steve Reich (b.1936) grew up commuting by train between his father’s residence in New York and his mother’s residence in California. Reich later suggested that his fascination with motoric, unrelenting rhythm formed while listening to the “clickety-clack” of the train. Reich had a sensitive ear, attuned to what was going on around him. His interest in rhythm was also stimulated by his study of percussion. After earning a degree in philosophy at Cornell University, he studied music at Juilliard in New York City and at Mills College in California, where he earned a master’s degree under the tutelage of both Darius Milhaud and Luciano Berio.
In 1964, while pursuing sound samples for tape loop experiments, he came across a Pentecostal preacher in San Francisco’s Union Square who was riffing on the story of Noah and the flood. With the Cuban missile crisis, the assassination of Kennedy, and Bob Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall” all fresh in Reich’s ears, Brother Walter’s invocation of a rain that would destroy the world struck a chord. Reich captured a sample of Walter’s sermon and saved the tape to use later.
In 1964, while pursuing sound samples for tape loop experiments, he came across a Pentecostal preacher in San Francisco’s Union Square who was riffing on the story of Noah and the flood. With the Cuban missile crisis, the assassination of Kennedy, and Bob Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall” all fresh in Reich’s ears, Brother Walter’s invocation of a rain that would destroy the world struck a chord. Reich captured a sample of Walter’s sermon and saved the tape to use later.
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Reich cued up two tape recorders, each with a copy of the key words of Walter’s sermon: “It’s gonna rain.” He had a third machine connected to record the combined output. He was planning to rapidly pan (switch from one channel to the other) on the third machine, so that “It’s gonna” would be in one ear and “rain” would be in the other. When he started the tapes, he realized that they were not quite going the same speed. Fascinated, he pursued it further. Reich created a simple technique to cause the tapes to slowly get further and further apart. He simply put his thumb on one of the reels, slowing it down. The resulting composition put a new twist on several older techniques. First, it resembled micropolyphony, in that the same material was moving at slightly different speeds. Second, it resembled canonic imitation, in that one voice was imitating what the other said, but at a different time. Third, the combining and separation of the two channels caused the rhythmic and pitch aspects of the speech to be emphasized, an idea that continued to be significant in Reich’s composing throughout his career and was especially important in his 1988 composition Different Trains. As the alignment of the two channels changed gradually, different rhythms were created by the intersection of the voices. This slow, gradual change was the process that fascinated Reich and that seemed to mesmerize listeners who became enamored with minimalism.
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The only sound material used in the construction of “It’s Gonna Rain” was the recording of Brother Walter’s voice and background noises captured at the same time. In other words, one must accept that human speech not originally intended as music can be made into music by a composer manipulating a recording. This, therefore, goes back to John Cage and his experiments that suggested that any sound could be music. Several common tape manipulation techniques can be heard in Reich’s “It’s Gonna Rain”: panning; overdubbing (adding layers by playing multiple tapes at the same time and recording them onto a third machine); splicing (changing the length of samples by cutting and duplicating them); and particularly phase shifting (taking two recordings of the same material and moving them out of synchronization or “phase”). One technique that Reich specifically chose not to use was speed change. It was common for tape musicians to take a sound and speed it up or slow it down to make interesting and unusual sounds, but Reich wanted his piece to be an exploration of the speech rhythms and pitches of Brother Walter, so he chose not to alter the speed.
“It’s Gonna Rain” is divided into two parts. The first part emphasizes phasing, which causes an echo effect. We perceive changing timbres, even though we know they are only caused by the combination of the sounds of this short sample. As the left and right channels separate further, the canonic nature of the recording becomes more readily apparent. Gradually, the two channels come back together, and it sounds like the beginning. Reich lets three more words sneak in (“after a while”), and then section one ends. The second part (not included on the CD) introduces new text from Brother Walter and lasts another nine minutes, during which the discernible text seems to disintegrate into pitch, rhythm, and timbre, without any textual meaning.
Shortly after the premier of “It’s Gonna Rain,” Reich was asked to create some music for a benefit at Town Hall to assist with the legal defense of six young African-American men accused of murder, who were also victims of police brutality. Reich chose the words of Daniel Hamm, who was explaining how the police had beat them, but only those who were bleeding were going to be taken to the hospital. Aware that he needed medical treatment, he decided to open his bruise: “I had to, like, open the bruise up, and let some of the bruise blood come out to show them.” Reich took the quote, excerpted the words “come out to show them,” and applied similar sampling techniques to those he had used in “It’s Gonna Rain.” The resulting piece, “Come Out,” received even more attention than “It’s Gonna Rain,” and Steve Reich was on his way to the forefront of the minimalist movement.
Shortly after the premier of “It’s Gonna Rain,” Reich was asked to create some music for a benefit at Town Hall to assist with the legal defense of six young African-American men accused of murder, who were also victims of police brutality. Reich chose the words of Daniel Hamm, who was explaining how the police had beat them, but only those who were bleeding were going to be taken to the hospital. Aware that he needed medical treatment, he decided to open his bruise: “I had to, like, open the bruise up, and let some of the bruise blood come out to show them.” Reich took the quote, excerpted the words “come out to show them,” and applied similar sampling techniques to those he had used in “It’s Gonna Rain.” The resulting piece, “Come Out,” received even more attention than “It’s Gonna Rain,” and Steve Reich was on his way to the forefront of the minimalist movement.
The significance of Reich’s experiments with the manipulation of recorded speech continued to reverberate for decades after the initial impact. Today’s electronic technology for sampling is much simpler than what Reich had to deal with using magnetic tape in 1965, but the concept is the same, and decades of hip-hop, rap, and other sampling- dependent genres owe much of their success to Reich and his musique concrète predecessors. In 1999, Heidi Sherman, writing for Rolling Stone Magazine, called Reich “The Father of Sampling” and discussed his influence on the popular music styles that incorporate samples.
After the success of “It’s Gonna Rain” and “Come Out,” Reich experimented with applying a similar phasing technique to live musicians, resulting in the composition, “Piano Phase.” While Reich’s earlier tape pieces relied on recorded speech to determine what pitches were perceived by the audience, this new composition, which would be played on two pianos, required Reich to select the pitches in advance. Given the tendency in the mid-twentieth century to avoid all tonality, this was certainly a path that Reich could have taken. During his studies with Berio at Mills College, Reich had worked hard to master the twelve-tone system, but he seemed unable to avoid tonality. Finally, Berio said to him, “If you want to write tonal music, why don’t you write tonal music?” This permission led Reich to select a simple group of pitches for “Piano Phase.” Reich began with the first five notes of the B minor scale, in an ambiguous pattern that minimized the emphasis on the B. About halfway in, he introduced the note A, shifting the emphasis from B minor to the first six notes of A major. The music was simply tonal. Piano Phase” was a success and took minimalism to a new level.
After the success of “It’s Gonna Rain” and “Come Out,” Reich experimented with applying a similar phasing technique to live musicians, resulting in the composition, “Piano Phase.” While Reich’s earlier tape pieces relied on recorded speech to determine what pitches were perceived by the audience, this new composition, which would be played on two pianos, required Reich to select the pitches in advance. Given the tendency in the mid-twentieth century to avoid all tonality, this was certainly a path that Reich could have taken. During his studies with Berio at Mills College, Reich had worked hard to master the twelve-tone system, but he seemed unable to avoid tonality. Finally, Berio said to him, “If you want to write tonal music, why don’t you write tonal music?” This permission led Reich to select a simple group of pitches for “Piano Phase.” Reich began with the first five notes of the B minor scale, in an ambiguous pattern that minimized the emphasis on the B. About halfway in, he introduced the note A, shifting the emphasis from B minor to the first six notes of A major. The music was simply tonal. Piano Phase” was a success and took minimalism to a new level.
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Minimalism Meets Rock and Roll
Steve Reich’s live performance experience with “Piano Phase” led him to pursue additional opportunities to perform pattern music with a steady beat, a tonal center, and slowly changing alignment of parts. He began to perform with a group that was essentially a rock band without vocalists and ended up touring, including to Europe, much like a rock band. His former Juilliard classmate Philip Glass (b. 1937) was inspired by Reich’s live music groups and began to perform with a live electronic group that resembled instrumental rock and roll. Minimalism was absorbing some of the characteristics of the instrumental aspects of rock music, and soon rock musicians would be influenced by minimalism.
Return to Tonality
As minimalists like Reich, Riley, and Glass brought audience members back to the classical music realm with their tonal music with a predictable beat, few other classical musicians were brave enough to separate from the prevailing avant- garde techniques such as micropolyphony, serialism, tone clusters, indeterminism, and other techniques intended to avoid tonality and predictability. One musician who was confident enough to return to tonality without fear was Leonard Bernstein. With his reputation as a composer and conductor secure, Bernstein, in 1965, took a sabbatical from his time as director of the New York Philharmonic. Bernstein was planning to work on a musical to follow the success of his 1957 West Side Story, as well as on twelve- tone and experimental music, but these ideas fell to the wayside. Instead, the major accomplishment of Bernstein’s sabbatical was a work commissioned for the Chichester Cathedral in England. Bernstein, in a poem sent to the New York Times, explained how his new piece broke from the mainstream of mid-twentieth-century classical composition:
For hours on end I brooded and mused
On materiae musicae, used and abused;
On aspects of unconventionality,
Over the death in our time of tonality...
Pieces for nattering, clucking sopranos
With squadrons of vibraphones, fleets of pianos
Played with the forearms, the fists and the palms—
And then I came up with the Chichester Psalms.
. . . My youngest child, old-fashioned and sweet.
And he stands on his own two tonal feet.
For hours on end I brooded and mused
On materiae musicae, used and abused;
On aspects of unconventionality,
Over the death in our time of tonality...
Pieces for nattering, clucking sopranos
With squadrons of vibraphones, fleets of pianos
Played with the forearms, the fists and the palms—
And then I came up with the Chichester Psalms.
. . . My youngest child, old-fashioned and sweet.
And he stands on his own two tonal feet.
Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms may have been tonal and avoided the avant-garde techniques in vogue at the time, but it was not bland. Bernstein incorporated jazz rhythms and harmonies, mixed meters, and in an unusual twist chose the Hebrew versions of the Psalm texts. Chichester Psalms premiered to a full house at Philharmonic Hall, and it has since become a staple of the choral/orchestral repertoire. The success of the tonal Chichester Psalms, along with the rise of minimalism, helped open the door for more composers to return to tonality.
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