Lapels Will Be Grabbed

I haven’t heard all of Nico’s second record, but I loved the colors of the first one (Pillaging Music!) and he was good enough to send us an advance pressing of The Only Tune, a 15-minute electro-acoustic arch of different ways (now doomy, now sweet) of looking at a folktune sung by Sam Amidon.   I’m puzzled, though, by this:

“…whereas Romantic music appeals to the Jungian journeys we “all” supposedly can relate to (the home, the woods, the lover, the villain), minimal music, for me, is unspecific in origin but specific and very personal in destination. You take six pitches, and oscillate between them in some sort of pattern, and one person in the audience remembers playing a broken pump organ, and another remembers a childhood spent playing underneath high-tension electric wires.”

I don’t imagine that, with “Romantic,” Nico’s yoking all of nineteenth-century music to programmatic pieces like “Erlkönig” or Till Eulenspiegel. (And do we reach back to Rameau, or forward to Ravel?) Still, I’m squinting at the notion that minimal music is, a priori, more specific emotionally than any other kind.  Can’t a Chopin nocturne, a Fauré impromptu, spark one person to remember this old woman reading alone in a café; another, that shred of newspaper blowing down the alley?  I’m interested in this, because when minimal music doesn’t engage me it’s precisely when it feels very little “specific,” very little “personal in destination.” More often I hear it, contrarily, as safe, casual, approximate: cool, i. e., both chic and detached. It’s certainly an ear-friendly way of writing: it makes for (literally) easier listening.  On the other hand, I find it also, too often, recessive: it makes a space for an audience’s response more effectively than it stimulates one.

I don’t think one has to choose between minimum means and maximum heat. Adams turns up the emotional temperature quite effectively both in the last movement of Harmonium (Dickinson’s “Wild Nights”) as well as in Nixon in China’s “I am the wife of Mao Tse-tung;” and a few years ago I wrote  a choral piece called No. 10: Supreme Virtue which I think is at once rather lapel-grabbing and the most minimal thing I’ve done.  (You can judge it for yourself midpage.)   You could argue that text changes everything, of course.  But I wonder if we’re really talking about the difference between minimal music and other kinds, or even between group feeling (we “all” cry when Mimi dies) and individual experience (that broken pump organ.)  Maybe the real distinction is between music that wants to evoke (which is not to say overdetermine) an experience, with music that simply opens the possibility of one.  Theatricality vs. hospitality, perhaps?