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Louis Andriessen: Excerpt from De Staat (1976)
From the album De Staat
While the musical style broadly known as American minimalism comes in many flavors, from the cinematic ear-candy of Philip Glass to the playful psychedelia of Terry Riley and the symphonic bombast of John Adams, these various manifestations have in common a modal-diatonic approach to pitch organization and a tendency to eschew abrupt transitions in favor of gradually unfolding tone-patterns. American minimalism was intended (and in large part received) as a corrective to the overly “difficult” music of the mid-century avant-garde.
When minimalism made its inevitable appearance on the European continent, it took on a very different tone, one conditioned by the generally darker tendencies of European music in the postwar period. The premiere of Dutch composer Louis Andriessen’s De Staat in 1976 signaled a radically new take on the possibilities of musical minimalism. Jagged, angular, and suffused with lush dissonances that betray the composer’s debt to Igor Stravinsky, De Staat consists of the brusque juxtaposition of highly differentiated textural blocks (Stravinsky again) played at a consistently breakneck pace.
De Staat is written for an unorthodox ensemble heavily weighted toward winds and brass, plus the distinctive addition of electric and bass guitars. (Beginning in the early 1970s, Andriessen refused to compose for the conventional orchestra, which he saw as a symbol of the conservative musical establishment.) Four female singers intone snippets from Plato’s Republic concerning (ironically) music’s potential to disrupt the social order.
Played 105 time(s).
January 15, 2012, 10:24pm
