George Grella: The Time-Bending Art of Minimalist Music
George Grella joins the podcast to discuss his book Minimalist Music and argue that the genre has nothing to do with sparse materials and everything to do with time.
Today, The Tonearm’s needle lands on music critic George Grella Jr.
George Grella Jr. is one of the sharpest music critics working today. He’s the music editor of The Brooklyn Rail and has written for The Wire, the New York Times, and The Tonearm.
He just published Minimalist Music, part of Bloomsbury’s 33⅓ Genre series. His central argument is that minimalism isn’t defined by sparse materials or specific harmonies—it’s defined by how it uses time. Understanding that distinction impacts how we approach and hear the music, and what happens to it when its originators are gone.
We talk about that thesis, the line between minimalism and post-minimalism, and what it takes to build a life in music writing. We also take a detour into John Zorn’s visual art.
(The musical excerpts heard in the interview are Terry Riley’s “In C” performed by Bang on a Can All-Stars, Philip Glass’s “Music in Twelve Parts: Part 1” performed by The Philip Glass Ensemble, and Steve Reich’s “Drumming: Pt. III” performed by Steve Reich and Musicians.)
Dig Deeper
• Visit George Grella Jr. at The Brooklyn Rail, where he serves as music editor, and on The Tonearm, where he is a contributor
• Subscribe to his Substack newsletter, Kill Yr Idols, and follow him on Bluesky
• Purchase Minimalist Music (Bloomsbury Academic, 2026) from Bloomsbury, Bookshop.org, Powell’s Books, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, or your retailer of choice
• Read Grella’s Substack post “Minimalism at the End”—the piece discussed in this episode
• Grella’s previous book: Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew (Bloomsbury, 2015)—part of the 33⅓ series
Key Composers:
• Steve Reich—official website
• Philip Glass—official website
• Meredith Monk—official website
• Morton Feldman—Wikipedia
• La Monte Young—Wikipedia
• Arvo Pärt—official website
• Louis Andriessen—Wikipedia
• John Zorn—Tzadik website
Key Works Discussed:
• Music for 18 Musicians—Steve Reich
• Electric Counterpoint—Steve Reich
• Drumming—Steve Reich
• Different Trains—Steve Reich
• Einstein on the Beach—Ictus, Suzanne Vega, Collegium Vocale Gent (VLEK, 2025), the recording discussed in this episode
• Glassworks—Philip Glass
• Panthalassa: The Music of Miles Davis 1969–1974—reconstructed and mixed by Bill Laswell (Sony, 1998)
• Kind of Blue—Miles Davis
Ensembles and Organizations:
• Bang on a Can—including the Bang on a Can All-Stars and the annual Long Play Festival
• Sō Percussion—Grammy-winning percussion quartet
• Ictus Ensemble—Brussels-based contemporary music ensemble
Referenced Books:
• On Minimalism: Documenting a Musical Movement—Kerry O’Brien and William Robin (University of California Press, 2023)
• Kerry O’Brien and William Robin on The Tonearm Podcast
• The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century—Alex Ross (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007)
Exhibition:
• John Zorn: Hermetic Cartography—The Drawing Center, New York (February 7–May 11, 2025); featuring drawings, graphic scores, and visual works spanning seven decades of Zorn’s practice
(This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.)
Lawrence Peryer: Congratulations on the book.
George Grella: Thank you very much.
Lawrence: Yeah, and the birthing process, I would imagine, is a thing.
George: You know, I like writing books. I like researching and writing books. I like getting the thing done. I like seeing it, but now it's like I'm just trying to arrange events, and it's just a…
Lawrence: It's not dissimilar from what we ask music artists to be these days, in terms of they have to not only be the artists who create the work, but they have to become social media marketing gurus, content creators, and event planners and all those things. I've made the comment here before that every moment we ask our artists to do something other than create art, it's a tragedy of what we're losing.
George: Yeah, it's really true. It takes so much time and it's so frustrating and it seems so fruitless. I'm so bad at it that I'm not even going to bother with the content stuff. It's like I can only do what I know how to do. The hurdle is finding a place that will let me get up in front of people and talk about it. But the talking about it is easy—I can do that. I wouldn't dare do that unless I have the knowledge and the experience and something to say. Just by doing that, it's like, okay, I am ready to do this. The places that seem to be more interested in this are listening bars, vinyl places. Not bookstores, but places that have to do with listening to music as part of what they're doing. And so that's my audience—people who, first of all, it's the music, and then they want to read about it, not vice versa.
Lawrence: I heard the funniest thing yesterday, which maybe you'll relate to. I was listening to a podcast with an author on an entirely different subject, but the host asked him where they could find his books locally. He mentioned a few bookstores, and then he said he's actually going around and putting his books in independent movie theaters and other independent outlets because there are too many books in bookstores.
George: Yeah, that's interesting. The one thing that I'm finding with this book is that I live in a neighborhood with two small, nice little bookstores, but they don't really carry books about music. Or they have like twelve titles and it's all the history of the Rolling Stones and things like that. That's fine, but—
Lawrence: The 33⅓ books are more specialized. This topic is more specialized, so it's just because it's a bookstore doesn't mean that they're interested in what you've written. Tell me a little bit about—if I can say it this way—sort of the thesis of the book, or at least the beginning portion of the book where you talk about, I guess, an attempt to frame or define minimalism, and you talk about this notion of marking the passage of time.
George: Yes. That is really why I wrote this book, to give that greater context. I've read all the books on minimalist music, and of course I've been listening to it for decades, and all these books are good—I recommend all of them. They're all informative and insightful. But the story always struck me as a little bit off, because it was including music that, well, literally, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Terry Riley, La Monte Young—this is the founding story of all the other books. What my ear was always telling me is that Glass and Reich are doing this thing, and Riley is sort of on the edge of it, and La Monte Young is not doing this thing at all. I mean, the experience of their music is so radically different. It's all great, it's all in sympathy, it's complementary, but it's not the same thing. I started to realize—it was the process of, why do I feel that way? What is my reaction? And trying to understand what that reaction is. It took a while, but it was really about how we experience time and how music works in time. And then it connected with this driving thing in my fundamental thinking about music for a long time now, which is that music only exists in the dimension of time and we just play and listen and talk and write about music in certain ways. And there's so little discussion of time. That always struck me as strange because it only exists in this fleeting instant. And then I understood that while I'm listening to La Monte Young, my experience of time is that it's being held. And when I listen to Steve Reich, my experience of time is like, oh, I'm watching it go by. And then it was, yeah, that's the thing. And then I understood that process more clearly, and that's really what it is, because the definition for me is that minimalist music specifically shows you how it's working with time. It may be doing other things—Philip Glass does many other things other than that, Meredith Monk certainly—but Reich is, I think, the key figure in all this because he literally shows you how music works in the dimension of time, and he shows you both how music can shape the experience that we have of time passing, and also how time controls what happens in music. That process of his is so gloriously sequential that it's unmistakable. He even uses the watch metaphor in some of his writing, but it is that you see the step by step by step going ahead and it could only go in one direction because time only goes in that one direction. And so that was really it. Other music can alter our perceptions of time—most music does. We don't usually think about how much time is this taking unless we're bored. But Reich is specific: it's right there on the surface, but that doesn't make it superficial because this is incredibly deep and profound. It connects to the nature of the universe itself, but it is like, no, you are living in this moment of time and here's the next one, here's the next one, here's the next one. And your memories are—I'm helping you make your memories, which are controlled by your recall of time.
Lawrence: Yeah. Reich is interesting for a lot of reasons, but he seems to engage a bit with interpreters of his music, even commentators or interpreters of him and his approach. Have you ever spoken with him? Have you had any interaction with him?
George: I have not. I always have mixed feelings about talking with critical subjects. As a critic, it was something that I wrestled with in writing this book. It was different with the Miles Davis book because most of those musicians were gone—although I spoke with Benny Maupin a little bit. But with Reich and Glass, it's sort of—I felt very certain about this being my idea, and I kind of didn't want them to dissuade me in any way, I guess, is the best way to put it. I am not necessarily right in that there is no one right answer to all this, but the answers that I had seen before did not feel right to me. When I wrote this out and thought about it, it made sense of my internal experience.
Lawrence: Before I move on from this strand, how long did you carry around that thesis? Or what's the relationship between your thinking about this music and the actual process of the book?
George: For me, that's a long gestation process. I would say about a decade of thinking in this way without being able to clearly articulate it to myself. The impetus also came when I read this edited collection called On Minimalism by Will Robin and Kerry O'Brien.
Lawrence: Yeah, I talked to them when the book came out.
George: Yeah. And that book is interesting because it's kind of in between—like a textbook, a classroom book, and a general interest book. One of the things I love about that book is how it shows you how, when this music was being formed, there was so much interest in it from outside the kind of official critical establishment. It's not that the classical world was saying, oh yes, we have to follow this. But there was, I think—there's like a review from Glamour magazine, you know, there was a general interest going on, which I think is culturally very interesting and profound. That book also, not only roping in La Monte Young, but John Coltrane and some other figures—and it was like, that just didn't feel right to me.
Lawrence: Yeah. Yoko Ono even.
George: Yeah. And now I understand that connection in terms of the social environment—Yoko Ono and La Monte Young and the lofts and the events that were happening there. But yeah, it didn't feel right, and that kind of galvanized my own idea in my mind where I understood—it's all instinct in a way, and then it's like, let me explain it to myself. And then what I did—it's like I felt I had the idea and I knew that this new genre series was out and they had an open call for book proposals. So it was like, this is the one, the idea is ready for me to explain.
Lawrence: I love that you bring up On Minimalism because you articulated for me my experience with it as well, and I've revisited my thoughts about that book a lot over the last couple of years. I find it, on the one hand, incredibly invaluable—it's a great book, I've really enjoyed it.
George: Yeah.
Lawrence: But I struggled with the revisionism in it. I'm open to it because it was interesting, but it never fully somatically resonated for me.
George: Yeah, I share that feeling. It's that feeling in here—when a reader hears something that is just right, it's like you have a certain feeling, and when you read or hear something that's not quite there, you know, it's like an unfulfilled expectation. And also, another thing about that view is that it's an academic view looking from an academic standpoint into what I really do feel is a public field. And then again, that's another thing that I get at in the book, which is this complex relationship between classical music in Western history and in modern American history, and classical music in the public, and classical music in the institutions, and how that institutionalization of classical music after World War II was really a distortion of the direction of history. It set classical music into this kind of frozen set of ideas that had to be preserved in these institutions. My gestation as a musician and a composer was going through the normal process of the European classical tradition and following that history and getting to Schoenberg and thinking, oh, you know, he's this revolutionary. But then again, listening to the stuff and listening to the Adorno debate about Schoenberg and Stravinsky, and reading that, listening to stuff and thinking, you know, Adorno was wrong. You can hear Schoenberg. And also Schoenberg admitted this in his writing, that he is trying to preserve the past in the face of present developments that he feels will destroy it. So that's his method. His method is to adapt what he's hearing in the present in a way to preserve the forms and structures that he loved—and good for him. But his argument that Brahms was a revolutionary is just wrong. And then, meanwhile, it's Stravinsky who's like, okay, I'm finished with Romanticism—what do I do next? You know, he's like, oh, let me hold some of the past up here and make it something new. That's the revolution. That's the ongoing development of things. And then it also collided with this cultural notion that things that are advanced and difficult and sophisticated are somehow challenging to experience. The Schoenberg-Stravinsky thing again: Schoenberg—yes, it's not always easy to hear those rotating atonal patterns through time, you have to remember things, and that's tough for a lot of people. But Stravinsky is like, here's a theme, here's a little bit of the development, and also here are all these great rhythms that you can move your body to. And so that is, just because something sounds so appealing doesn't mean it's simplistic. It's actually harder to do something complex out of simple means than it is to do something complicated. That's the same thing with Reich and Glass. They went through the universities, they met at the postgraduate level at Juilliard, and they were both like, we don't want to be teaching this stuff, we don't want to make music that follows this approved consensus—we are making our own thing. And so they were out in public, they were working, they had a moving company together for a while. The groups that they performed with were essentially the same group. It's just that when Reich performed, it was Steve Reich and Musicians, and when Glass performed, it was the Philip Glass Ensemble. But they shared a whole cast of players and they were in art galleries, they were in museums, because that was where the venues were that were having them. They were in public, they were presenting their music to the public, and that is the actual history of classical music. This distortion of the twentieth century is ahistorical.
Lawrence: So you touch on a lot of avenues that are in my notes and that I want to explore with you. So I want to recenter for one moment. It would be really interesting to sit down and have a conversation with you and Alex Ross. What's the name of his book? It came out about twenty years or so ago where he—it's basically—
George: The Rest Is Noise.
Lawrence: The Rest Is Noise. I feel like this book of yours picks up where he kind of rushed through the ending, and there's a connection you make that I think is fascinating.
George: You know, that's interesting to hear you say that. That feels true to me also. And also his book is written at a time when there wasn't enough information about this stuff—it was still ongoing. Different Trains is like 1988. The Glass and Reich and especially Meredith Monk were still developing what they were doing. And since that time, not only is there a lot more presence on records, but it is so much easier to hear performances of this music. It's spreading into the repertoire in that non-specialist musicians are now playing this more and more, and that is really incredibly important. I was at the Bang on a Can Long Play Festival just this past week, and there was So Percussion playing some of the Reich—they've played Reich for quite a while now as a percussion ensemble—but they did their electric guitar quartet, pulled in nine other guitarists and bass, and they did a thirteen-instrument arrangement of Electric Counterpoint. It's an ensemble work that any group can play rather than just a specialist doing the backing track. And it was incredibly exciting to see these musicians work together doing this. That's the great nature of live ensemble playing. And then the Bang on a Can All-Stars played a new arrangement of Glassworks that Michael Riesman did. And also earlier this year, this ensemble in Belgium, the Ictus Ensemble, put out their own recording of Einstein on the Beach, which is, again, a momentous change. I wouldn't say it's the one recording you want to listen to if you want to listen to Einstein on the Beach, but all of a sudden another group other than the Philip Glass Ensemble is playing this. And so this is, you know, it's taken time to do this. And the time wasn't quite there when Ross wrote that book. But now it's 2026, you know.
Lawrence: So you give your framing, your definition, your thesis around minimalism and music and the marking of time. It's this idea of what is and what isn't minimalism. You root it in a modern classical thread. But then what does that mean in terms of whether it's what they did in the On Minimalism book? Or how should I think about its influence on jazz, or its interfacing with jazz, or ambient music? Like, is ambient music by definition minimalism? How should I think about that?
George: One thing I get at specifically in the book is dividing it up into two different words, which is "minimalist," which is Reich, Glass, Meredith Monk, Michael Nyman, Louis Andriessen, and "minimal music." Minimalist music is a process, while minimal music is about materials—minimal materials. So minimal music can be a lot of things, just like minimalist music can be a lot of things. I think La Monte Young's Trio for Strings is a minimal drone piece—it uses hardly any material stretched out to four and a half hours. Morton Feldman's indeterminate pieces. Ambient music is definitely minimal music because by definition it uses minimal materials. But minimalist music is music that is about the process of how music works in time. And it did come out of classical music, but it doesn't have to be defined by that, because anybody making music can decide: I want to explicitly show that I'm working with time. It's not a stylistic thing or a genre thing in that sense. It did come out of classical music specifically. There's that phrase that chance favors the prepared mind. And Reich and Glass became the composers that they are purely by accidental discoveries. Reich discovered what happens when two tapes are going out of sync with each other and said, let me try and write this out—this is a phasing process. And Glass got a call when he was in Paris studying with Nadia Boulanger to do some work in a studio for a movie soundtrack where his job was to use his classical ear training to write down what Ravi Shankar was playing. And then—
Lawrence: That's fascinating.
George: It is. And so Reich discovers his phasing by accident, and Glass discovers that he can structure harmonic rhythm in an entirely different way than he's been doing. He doesn't have to worry about bar lines of four-four. It's like, oh, sixteen beats, okay. So he starts working on these additive lines that cycle through a certain number of beats and then repeat again, and then moves them around slightly. So they were looking for something else, then they discovered these things that triggered their imagination, and then they got to work. It might have happened in some other way, but history is what it is. It was these two composers working with really hardcore classical training, but dissatisfied with the state of the contemporary professional field, and finding a new avenue forward. And also they are two composers who are deeply embedded in the history of classical music. Reich explicitly is like, medieval harmony, Bach, and then throughout all the rest, and then maybe some Stravinsky and be-bop—he learned his harmony from the medievalists and from Bach. Glass is varied. Glass loves Schubert and Bruckner, and you can hear ideas from the late Schubert piano sonatas and string quartets, and also Bruckner symphonies, in the way he works with thematic lines and harmonic movement. Glass is very much a classical composer in the old-fashioned sense, but classical music in terms of history was always music of now, until people just started looking more and more to bringing pieces from the past, and then the dead end of the twentieth century. But this has always been the natural course of things for a thousand years.
Lawrence: It's interesting where the story, or the road that classical music traveled throughout the twentieth century, where it can compare and contrast with jazz in that the impact of the Second World War on both those musics—you know, taking jazz out of the dance hall and putting it into the club where it becomes a studied, observed music.
George: It also becomes a unique combination of popular music and art music—bebop is like an abstract popular music. There's really no other music like that on Earth. And classical music is again very distorted by institutional backing, but it never was a music meant for specialist listeners. It was never a music meant for only the mind of the composer. It was meant for audiences, it was meant to be played. And I think that's very important in American culture because even as wild as Charles Ives is, Ives is always like, I want to play this for people—they'll get it. Copland is very much—Copland was a great modernist composer and then became a great populist composer in the sense that it's like, let me make something that works for a lot of people but that's still good. There's no pandering involved and there's no dumbing down. It's more like, let me give you a vernacular language—but put it into these forms and structures that you don't have to know anything about, but you will hear their effect. It makes me think of the show Deadwood. It's like this incredibly vulgar language in this incredibly traditional sentence structure.
Lawrence: Yeah, right. The Shakespearean sort of monologue. Yeah.
George: But it speaks to you.
Lawrence: What a show, by the way.
George: That is one of the great parts of American culture, which is that all we have is our own vernacular language, and we can and should put it into all sorts of different forms and not just settle for the easiest, simplest thing. You're not making anything elitist that way—this is just the way we talk, it's the way we think, it's the way we hear. And so Glass has that popular appeal, Reich has that popular appeal.
Lawrence: Well, something that strikes me: had there been another twenty or thirty years of his life, it would have been very interesting to see how Frank Zappa would have been received and evolved, especially with the later work, especially with his sort of getting over and rejecting the rock band construct. He had such awful experiences in his last five or so years of touring life, keeping bands together and dealing with the interpersonal dynamics. And again, you have to account for his bizarre personality and his sense of having to be an outsider. But I think had he lived, his music would have turned the corner.
George: That's a very interesting idea. I do wonder where that late music would have gotten to. I mean, I like those pieces where he was using the Synclavier to generate material and then the Ensemble Intercontemporain and Pierre Boulez were orchestrating them and playing them. That's good stuff. And it's also stuff where he doesn't have all the answers, but he's asking the questions. And that is the fundamental thing.
Lawrence: And the American vernacular you talk about—to me, that's what triggered it for me. He's such an American product.
George: Yeah. I think these people all fit together. Although the music is very different, I think Captain Beefheart and Steve Reich are like, they belong to us and they both speak to us equally well. I touch on that a little bit in the book too, but Morton Feldman—his ideas about composing, the early indeterminate stuff, is kind of him working through his own experimentation, like Reich worked through phase music. And then Feldman becomes a composer in the traditional sense of notating scores in traditional language, exactly, because he knows exactly what he wants. And his method—the music is not about style because his sound and his style is so completely different—but it is minimalist music. He processes time that way. Here are five sixteenth notes and you're going to repeat them eight times, and now you're going to repeat them five more times, but there's an extra thirty-second-note rest in there. So this is what he's doing: he's showing you the transformation of music through time. And of course he's working with long time scales, but it is still minimalist music. And Reich himself is on record as saying that after Feldman died, he was looking at things like the String Quartet no. 2 and realizing, yes, he's doing what I've been doing, in his own way—but it's the same fundamental concept. That companionship is really, really close, even though the music may sound vastly different, and even though La Monte Young may sound closer to Morton Feldman. Feldman is not doing anything like La Monte Young did. He's doing exactly what Steve Reich was doing. And also, again, in a very deep, embedded view of the Western classical tradition—put Reich and Glass together with the music that they drew from the past, and you have a thousand years of history in their music, especially with Reich skipping over the nineteenth century completely.
Lawrence: I love that.
George: And then with Feldman you have that same tradition of Mozart and Beethoven—and I would also say Haydn. He loves Sibelius, and his thing was, you know, maybe these people you thought were conservative were actually radical, and maybe these people you thought were radical because of the way they presented themselves were actually conservative. And so his late music is very much radical and conservative at the same time—conservative in the sense that he's really honoring these past traditions, and radical in the sense that here's how we make them relevant to us right now.
Lawrence: I think that reading On Minimalism through the lens of your book is actually very helpful because the distinction between minimalism and minimal and post-minimalism reframes their thesis in a way that organizes it much better.
George: Yeah.
Lawrence: Now it makes sense why Kind of Blue is included, because it's minimal, not minimalist—it's minimal. That one's the biggest stretch.
George: Yeah. Although I have a bone to pick with that, because it's important to point out that maybe it's minimal, but it's also modal, and Miles moving to modality was incredibly important for all his music from '64 to '69. Which is totally different than Kind of Blue. The other thing is that when you're working with a form that demands improvisation—where there's space, it's set up for the musician to express themselves within that form—it's a totally different thing. There are some moments of improvisation in Philip Glass Ensemble pieces; he wrote out parts like, okay, John Gibson, you've got a couple of repeats to just fill something in. But Kind of Blue and jazz are sort of like, here's the vehicle, and now here's your existential moment. And those are just very different things. And also, I'm not trying to do any kind of comparative hierarchy of musical ideas or genres or styles, but I think it's important to—the best way to honor their qualities is to see what they are. I'm not saying that La Monte Young is not good. I'm saying that if you really want to honor La Monte Young, hear what he is doing. If you really want to honor Kind of Blue and Miles Davis, hear what he's doing, because Kind of Blue is sort of like The Rite of Spring—he's actually closing a door on an era, and then in the sixties he's making some of the most advanced, sophisticated, abstract music of any kind in the recorded era. Honestly, the finest—the epitome of what modern jazz can be—it has been equaled since, but has never been surpassed, and all because of not minimal music, but modality. And again, a different view of time, but his whole point was like, I'm tired of hearing the double bar at the end when we have the five-one and get back to the key. I want modes because it always feels like it needs to keep moving forward, just like time.
Lawrence: Just as an aside, are you familiar with it? Have you listened much to, and do you think much of, the Bill Laswell remixes of the Miles stuff?
George: That's an interesting album. I've been listening to it since it came out. Sometimes I love it and sometimes I hate it. He very much is turning the material into ambient music, and so part of it is, you know, are you in the mood to hear that? My critical mood on that varies between sometimes thinking it's great—just this minimal, clear, very light touch that he has on it—but on the other hand, it's sort of like, if you're going to do this, then maybe you should give me a clearer idea of what you think of the music other than it's this groovy sound. So I have wildly mixed feelings about that album.
Lawrence: When you say that, do you mean—and this is a thing that I think about a lot with Laswell's recorded output—there is no context ever. There's never a liner note, there's never an essay, there's never anything except the music and some credits.
George: Sometimes you want that context because sometimes I feel like I want something more—I want an explanation for why you did this, because it's not fully satisfying.
Lawrence: Yeah. And he's not a great interview. There's not a ton of people banging down the doors or outlets to publish interviews with him. But yeah, I find that he does not illuminate much—he's kind of like McCoy Tyner in later years in that he says the same things in all the interviews.
George: He is an invaluable presence in modern music, it really is, and he links so many things together. But there's that weird line—and again, this is a personal, emotional taste thing—which is that I want to know: is this exactly what you wanted, or are you just pulling in things that sounded good and letting them happen? What's the thinking? The thinking is not always clear. And that, again, is just an instinctual thing. I feel like I'm very sensitive to when I listen to music, and especially see somebody perform—I'm very sensitive to clarity, sincerity, and honesty. Not all those albums hit all three of those things.
Lawrence: There's something I love about him. It's this sort of maximal commitment to an idea—he did the Miles record, he did the Bob Marley one, which I return to both of those a lot. But then he did it a few other times. He did an opera one, he did a Cuban music one, and they don't work really that well. But it's fascinating that he was like, I'm going to drive this idea, this approach, this technique until I've rung every possibility out of it.
George: You're actually helping me articulate that to myself just now. It makes me think of something Stravinsky said about Bruckner, which is that some pieces of music, before they finish—but he's sort of like, you know what I love about Reich is that he's not worried about filling the duration. He's more like, let's just keep marking time, because he's letting time take care of so many things. He's gotten more and more about getting a piece to an end and then wrapping up, but the early things, especially Drumming—it's sort of like it could just keep going because it's about how we get to the next moment. Why stop? You stop for practical purposes, but conceptually, why stop? You never leave time unfulfilled.
Lawrence: I very much enjoyed the annotated discography at the back of the book. It really presented itself to me as like a gift or a prize—almost like the prize in a Cracker Jack box, really. It was a delight. And something that struck me was, I have a few of the 33⅓ Genre books, and they're all basically the same size, which implies to me you're commissioned for a word count or page count. You're constrained. And to include the annotated discography is a choice about real estate.
George: Yeah. That was the hardest thing to work through in the book, that decision, because there is a strict word count. Honestly, there was a ton more to say. In one sense, I wanted to write more about post-minimalism. Every time I started, it was like, oh, this is just too enormous a topic—there's no way to do it. And then it seemed to make sense to me that since this music is a product not just of the classical tradition, but of the recording era—for a long time, unless you lived in a place like New York City, you would never have a chance to hear this music being played, but you could get the records. And also other musicians weren't playing the music, so you had to get the Philip Glass Ensemble records and you had to get the Steve Reich and Musicians records. So this is the practical nature of the world of new music, which is that if you can get recordings and build a body of work, then it lives in recordings even more than it does in the concert hall.
And then you get into the idea of, well, people listening to those recordings—the Ensemble Modern doing like, you know what, we want to play Music for 18 Musicians. There's no score. Let's listen, let's learn it from the records. This is how specialized music becomes repertoire music, and with the music that was being made outside of the academies, that's literally how it happened—through records. Now the academies are catching up. There was a concert at Carnegie Hall a couple of weeks ago, which was Juilliard at Carnegie Hall, and Nico Muhly did arrangements of Philip Glass Ensemble pieces for Juilliard students. And it was fantastic to see because the music was great, very beautiful, the arrangements were excellent. But also, as they pointed out, it's like, we're getting these students to play totally outside of what they're comfortable with playing. But at the same time, Glass—this is classical music—so they are kind of expanding, the world is expanding for them and they are expanding into the world. And so now we have a new generation. It's the same thing that's happened with Robert Ashley, but you have to have that new generation to bring the music forward, or else we only have records. Now we're on the cusp of that happening.
Lawrence: Well, and that's the next thing I want to ask you about, which is your piece on your Substack, "Minimalism at the End." It strikes me as being in dialogue a little bit with the section of your book where you talk about this very notion of—when Reich and Glass's performance interpreters, their official bands, if you will, stop performing, what does that mean for the future of performance of this music? And then you, in your Substack piece, you talk about Pärt not composing. And you sort of pose this larger idea of like, are we at the end of minimalism? And I'm really curious about how literal that concerns you.
George: That's a good question because it concerns me, but I know that I shouldn't be too concerned. And what I mean is—
Lawrence: So you're a New York neurotic? (laughter)
George: Yeah. No, it's more like I'm trying to take the long view, which is that anybody who loves minimalist music, you are alive in a very unique time because this is the era in which it has been created and mastered and is spreading. It can be hard for us to see that we are in the middle of not just something revolutionary, but also something that is as important and as high quality as anything that happened a hundred years ago, sixty years ago. Despite what you see in, for example, a lot of Substack newsletters, music has not been getting dumber. Music has not been getting worse. That just doesn't happen. If you're only talking about manufactured music for popular consumption, maybe, but we have this fantastically profound, intellectual, beautiful-to-the-heart and beautiful-to-the-mind revolution that's ongoing. But the people who made this revolution are not going to be with us much longer. This is what happens—Schubert died, Beethoven died, we don't get more. Mahler died, we don't get more from them. But we have a post-minimalist generation now, which is a fantastic generation. Even just the Bang on a Can composers—David Lang, Michael Gordon, Julia Wolfe—their stuff is fantastic. It's really important and it belongs in the long history of great works. Even in the past few weeks since I wrote that piece, I'm seeing these new people playing this music, so it's going to be the end of an era because no one is making music like Reich makes music, like Glass makes music, like Meredith Monk makes music. I think for me there's some kind of complex feeling of, that—we won't get anything more from them when it happens, and no one else is doing what they do. But then again, people need to do their own thing, and their ideas have moved on to this new generation and have been mixing back in with contemporary music again, which is the whole tradition of Western music moving forward. There's been no division between classical and popular, whatever—it's always been mixing together. It just stopped for a while and now it's mixing again. So this is what happens. At the very least, we have these fantastic records that we can always hold onto. And now we might be able to have a lot of, you know, Pärt is somebody who has always been in the classical notational tradition, so people can play his stuff. The Philip Glass Ensemble stuff is more problematic. But again, the Ictus Ensemble has done it now, and there's this new arrangement of Glassworks. So it's an ongoing process. There is a living future to it, not just the preservation, the documentation.
Lawrence: Right.
George: Which is, yes, it's great to have that documentation, but you don't want to only end up with it.
Lawrence: It's interesting because I talk about this a lot both here in my conversations and just with my music-nerd friends who like to have these types of conversations. But I think a lot about the pop and rock era, especially the classic rock era. There's this whole notion of tribute bands or bands that continue on with new members—you can definitely take an approach and hold your nose about those things, but I always come back to why shouldn't a kid who's sixteen years old be able to go see Led Zeppelin music played live? Because that popular music exists to be performed in a sweaty, communal environment. It will only die if it's left to be only recorded music, especially in this era. I want young people to go hear David Bowie and Velvet Underground. Whatever it is, I want that music to be performed live.
George: Yeah. Music is music. Music making is a social activity—you make it with other people around you. A CD, an LP, is a document of something that happened. Yes, it's music when you listen to it, but it's also really just a representation of a moment in time, and it's never going to change, and there's no social activity involved in it when you put it on. This was very important to me this past weekend, again, seeing other musicians playing Reich and Glass, because this music is meant for musicians to play together. And even though Reich wrote Electric Counterpoint for a solo guitarist, why can't a bunch of guitarists play it together? Here is an ensemble playing it together. So instead of one person up there playing—and when a person plays music in front of you, they're showing you what they think about something—instead of one person doing that, it was thirteen people showing what they think about something. So it was thirteen different views at the same time. That is a social communication in a very profound sense. And that's the same thing, like when a kid goes to see a band play Led Zeppelin, because Led Zeppelin is effectively not around anymore. The albums are great, listen to them, but they're documents. They can never replace somebody in front of you showing you in that moment what they're thinking. And the way music works with time—the way time works in your mind—is that the impression it leaves you is a special thing that can't be recreated by listening to the albums, because those are totally different impressions. The albums give you—you can memorize every note in the end, you can get to the same satisfactions. But the thing live is that you're going to think and feel things that had not occurred to you before.
Lawrence: It's funny. I've taken that to an extreme in some of my conversations with friends in the music business. I've said, you know, why don't some of these artists or estates or even record labels come up with some initiative—there should be the 1975 version of the Led Zeppelin show where there are official transcriptions of the arrangements they played on that tour. Maybe there are costumes because they wore the same general clothes, a set design, and then go license that stuff out. Why not?
George: You make me think of the School of Rock videos on YouTube where it's like a bunch of teenagers playing "Close to the Edge." It's fantastic. It's moving.
Lawrence: It's moving.
George: It's beautiful.
Lawrence: Before I let you go, I wanted to ask you—and I promise I'm going to try to draw a thread here to make this relevant—I was really excited to read your piece about the Zorn exhibition at the Drawing Center.
George: Okay. Yeah.
Lawrence: I didn't know that was happening, because I'm no longer a New Yorker, so I don't find out about the cool stuff—especially Zorn, because he doesn't, we don't get much. Although with Wayne Horvitz living out here, we do get some decent interpretations of Masada and other stuff on occasion. But I think Zorn represents a lot of the threads you and I talked about—the integration of classical tradition, the American filtering or narrative, and also taking very serious music and infusing it quite honestly with humor and levity and bringing it to the people, putting it in clubs.
George: Performing it.
Lawrence: Yeah. Performing it.
George: Playing in front of people. Yeah. That Zorn experience live is—
Lawrence: Visceral.
George: The records—there are so many of them that they all kind of sound the same after a while. But then you realize it's like, maybe that's the jazz origin, which is that, well, I have a bunch of material, and then we play live, and it's like, let's see what happens. That's why human beings make music.
Lawrence: Yeah. Well, I think what I wanted to ask you is you articulated a lot about Zorn in that very short piece—this idea of his impenetrable core and the way he interfaces with the mystery schools as part of his aesthetic, but it's also clearly part of his philosophical core. Tell me about your experience walking through the room and being exposed to the drawings. You communicated that it was clarifying, or at least illuminating. Tell me a little more about that experience.
George: Well, I think part of it is that I spent a long time trying to have some idea that I could feel that Zorn hermeticism inside myself. A lot of this music is about—he produces it because he's got these hermetic feelings inside him, and can I get that feeling? And in the end, I really couldn't. It's a very personal communication, and some people are going to totally get it and some people aren't—it's a frame of mind, it's experiences, all sorts of stuff. But seeing these same ideas turned into graphic images, essentially like signs, signals—and having that experience of it, you can just look at it. You don't have to worry about time, you don't have to worry about that image moving through time and getting to the next thing, following the line, following the beat, whatever. Just see this one thing. It's not that I understood his hermeticism, but I understood that it was clear to him. I think the music can actually kind of obfuscate that. It's the same kind of thing—when a musician has some political idea and gives a piece of music a political title, and then it's like a thirty-two-bar AABA melody and you're like, well, I don't hear that political title.
Lawrence: Yes.
George: To them it was clear, but what they were saying didn't come through. Maybe music is not the vehicle for that. But I think for that very particular part of his mind and heart, when he sat down to make these drawings—and they're very intricate and very carefully made, this took time—it's like, this is something I can make very clear, and then it just sits there. What it means is open to interpretation, but that it clearly means something is a definite thing. And music is like that too. Don't you love music where you're like, I really am not sure what it's saying to me specifically, emotionally, but it sure is saying something to me?
Lawrence: I think of the opposite of that as something like Coltrane—his music is quite effective in conveying the spirit and the intent of what he's out to do.
George: Yeah.
Lawrence: One other quick thing about the Zorn exhibition: was there any information as to what period of time—like, are those current drawings or is that a body of work over time?
George: It's a body of work over time. I could go dig out the catalog, but it was an art show and so everything had dates on it. It even included—I can't remember if I mentioned this—it included hand-drawn flyers for his shows in the seventies, and graphic scores—
Lawrence: Oh, wow.
George: —from even when he was like a teenager.
Lawrence: Wow.
George: But everything was dated, and especially the drawings that can stand alone as drawings, just abstract images—all had dates. So that's been an ongoing through the eighties and nineties and the twenty-first century too.
Lawrence: For a Zorn enthusiast, it actually seems like it's an important show then.
George: I think it is. I think it is. It had much stronger impact and was more clarifying than I had expected. I thought it would be some kind of nice adjunct to his music and sort of add context, but it's really an in-depth thing and very well put together.
Lawrence: I'm going to check that out right after we go here.
George: Yeah.
Lawrence: George, thank you for doing this. I would like to ask you to come back and do this again, or perhaps when I'm in New York next I would love to sit down and talk music with you more. I've so enjoyed connecting with you.
George: I would absolutely love to, and thanks for having me too. I would love to do more.
Author
George Grella is a musician and writer. He's played at CBGB and Carnegie Hall, and composed acoustic, electronic, and computer music. His writing and music criticism has appeared in the Financial Times, The Wire, Bandcamp, New York Classical Review, The Tonearm, Music & Literature, Signal to Noise, The Strad, Red Hook/Village Star-Revue, New York Times, and numerous other publications. He's the author of the 333 series book "Miles Davis' Bitches Brew," and is the music editor of The Brooklyn Rail.