ADAMS AND LANG: MINIMALISM’S DIVERGENT PATHS
Short Ride in a Fast Machine; Grand Pianola Music / LANG: Are You Experienced?; Under Orpheus / Netherlands Wind Ensemble; Mosko / CHANDOS CHAN 9363 [75:43]
You wouldn’t think wind transcriptions could make you forget the orchestra. But here we are.
Lawrence Odorn’s arrangement of Short Ride in a Fast Machine for wind band does something the original sometimes doesn’t—it lets you hear the machinery. The Netherlands Wind Ensemble under Stephen Mosko attacks this with a precision that borders on the frightening, each woodblock snap and brass blare etched in relief against that relentless motor rhythm. I’ve heard this piece perhaps fifty times in concert, usually as an opener designed to wake up drowsy subscribers. Here it sounds newly minted, dangerous even. The absence of strings paradoxically clarifies Adams’s layering; you catch the way he stacks his ostinatos like a man building a house of cards in a wind tunnel.
Grand Pianola Music is the real discovery on this disc. Conceived in 1982 when minimalism still carried the taint of the academic underworld, it remains Adams’s most audacious—some would say most vulgar—creation. The work sprawls across thirty-two minutes, the first movement alone accounting for nearly sixteen. That’s a lot of repetition to sustain, a lot of faith in your materials.
The two pianos, played here by Ellen Carver and Sepp Grotenhuis, create that characteristic out-of-phase shimmer Adams borrowed from player piano rolls and Terry Riley’s trance-inducing loops. But what arrests you—what made me stop taking notes and simply listen—is the entrance of those three sopranos around the five-minute mark. Lindsay Wagstaff, Kym Amps, and Ruth Holton produce what Adams calls “cooing sirens,” a description that doesn’t quite prepare you for the effect. They’re wordless, pure vowel sound, and they float above the pianistic chatter like some benign visitation from a Busby Berkeley musical scored by Steve Reich.
The balance throughout is miraculous. Wind ensembles can turn muddy in complex textures, but Mosko keeps everything transparent without sacrificing weight. “On the Dominant Divide,” the final movement, builds to a conclusion that manages to be both ironic and genuinely exhilarating—no small feat when you’re trafficking in the gestures of high Romanticism filtered through a minimalist sensibility.—David Lang is another matter entirely.
Are You Experienced? (1990) takes its title from Jimi Hendrix, though whether it quotes the music I couldn’t say with certainty. Lang himself narrates—his voice dry, detached, clinical—guiding us through states of consciousness following a blow to the head. The instrumentation is deliberately weird: single woodwinds, brass, strings minus violins (that omission creates an odd sonic hole), keyboard, synthesizer, and Hendrik Jan Renes on electric tuba.
Yes, electric tuba. Renes delivers an extraordinary cadenza at the end of the “Dance” section, the sound electronically manipulated into something between Hendrix’s wah-wah guitar and a foghorn from some industrial harbor. It’s arresting, certainly. Whether it’s necessary is another question.
Lang operates in a more dissonant harmonic space than Adams, more willing to court the avant-garde techniques that minimalism was supposed to have left behind. The rhythmic profile nods toward popular music—you catch glimpses of funk, rock, electronic dance—but filtered through an aesthetic that keeps pulling away from groove into something more astringent. I admire the ambition more than I enjoy the result.
Under Orpheus (1989–94) expands an earlier work for two pianos, adding instrumental ensembles that extend and color the pianos’ textures. Two movements, both exploring one- and two-note tremolos with the kind of obsessive focus that either hypnotizes or exhausts. The performances are committed, technically impeccable. But the piece feels static in ways that even Feldman’s most glacial work doesn’t—there’s repetition without the sense of ritual, stasis without genuine meditation.—Christopher Thomas, in the original liner notes, suggests Lang’s music may prove more vulnerable to stylistic fashion than Adams’s. A decade and more on, that judgment seems prescient. Adams has continued to evolve, to find new ways of working his minimalist materials. Lang’s pieces here, for all their intelligence and craft, feel increasingly like documents of a particular moment—the early nineties fascination with high-low crossover, with narrator-as-conceptual-frame, with making art music that acknowledges rock without quite becoming it.
Still, Chandos has given us performances that couldn’t be bettered. The album, made in Utrecht and London, captures the ensembles with ideal warmth and clarity. Anyone seriously interested in American music of the past forty years needs to hear Grand Pianola Music in this incarnation—it may convince skeptics that Adams’s most controversial work has genuine substance beneath the postmodern glitter. The Lang pieces make for valuable if somewhat austere companions, showing another path minimalism might have taken.
The Adams alone justifies the disc. Everything else is bonus, for better or worse.
