Just back from travels, major and minor, and I've been trying to
catch up on current threads. This one caught my eye, and I'm hoping
the switch of subject-line makes it okay for me to butt in without
having read all the previous discussion, which would probably take me
till Christmas.

Since I had some of this conversation with Mark not too long ago, in
the flesh, as it were (hi, Mark!), he'll already know my slight
contribution, but I'll make it anyway . . .

For me, one of the major breakthroughs in using words came through
hearing Reich's "Different Trains". I find it an emotionally powerful
piece of work anyway, but it also stuck me as opening up new
possibilities for taking 'cells' of words (in his case from recorded
interviews) and arranging them procedurally to produce large and
complex work. It's a complexity of its own kind, quite different from
Bartok or Mahler, say, but genuine nonetheless I feel.

Having said that, here comes the disclaimer: I subsequently went and
bought quite a few other CDs of Reich, and found them universally
disappointing. Even where he seemed to be using the same bag of
tricks, as in 'City Life', I found the work simply tedious. Maybe it
was the emotional drag of the words he 'set' in 'Different Trains'
that did it, but that remains for me his one success, and without
knowing it I'd never have got to using matrices and spread-sheets in
structuring my own stuff. No Reich, no 'Syzygy'.

Best,

T

>  Well, Mark, those guys do bother you. And you sound a more experienced and
>demanding listner than I am--music's importance to me has come and gone.
>Certainly Glass and Reich haven't bored me, but then I've not followed them
>closely (last thing I bought was Glass's music for Khundun and I liked
>that--and the movie) As you'll be aware I follow art more closely, and your
>response to Glass and Reich reminds me of my own to Sol LeWitt's
>retrospective at the Whitney a few years back; the idea that set Le Witt's
>project going just didn't allow for enough development for the work to
>become major and big picture turned out to be  a show of large wallpapers
>samples. Maybe it is a feature of the tradition of the new, that the quality
>of early work that seems crucial to a shift in an art's direction is
>accidental, a feature of the zeigeist and not necessarily the foundation of
>a major oeuvre.
>
>I ran into their music in the mid to late 70s, when what had been my great
>musical love--the jazz of the 1940s-60s--seemed tragically to have stopped
>in its tracks, 'the music died' and so-called serious music as I was then
>aware of it was still so given over to modernist disjuncture that I couldn't
>engage with it. Perhaps ignorantly I thought it had become academicized.
>Glass and Reich, particularly in performance, seemed very fresh and exciting
>to my ears. This climaxed with seeing Einstein on the Beach at the Met;
>Glass's music was central to the emotional tone of Wilson's piece. I know
>what you are saying about the salsa band, Stravinsky, and Coltrane's late
>groups,but isn't there an idea of rhythm in early Glass and Reich that is
>different from what you have in those examples?
>
>There are varieties of boredom. Your boredom is that of a  listener whose
>interest has been (too readily)
>Exhausted, another kind (which I was associating with a kind of initial
>'difficulty') is that which can find no
>interest to begin with. Boredom of this kind contains the promise of a new
>mode of attention. If the work
>Can't go on sustaining that mode, then I grant your boredom kicks in. I
>don't know whether any of this makes
>Sense to you, but I'd be intrigued to hear.
>
>                 Wystan