The First Ancestor of Minimalism?

Encountering previously unknown music through the Nicolas Horvath Discoveries series of albums is turning out to be a major cognitive undertaking. For the past few days I have been listening to the six CDs in his album devoted to Dennis Johnson’s “November.” The release includes an essay by Bertrand Ferrier (translated into English by Horvath) that probably has more than sufficient content to occupy a serious academic seminar. Johnson wrote the score in 1959; and it would subsequently inspire his friend, LaMonte Young, to pursue a path of his own in composing “The Well-Tuned Piano.” This chronology suggests that Johnson may be recognized as the “founding father” of what has come to be called “minimalism.” Ironically, Johnson gave up music around 1962 and shifted his attention to pure mathematics, with the California Institute of Technology serving as one of his bases of operations.

Like “The Well-Tuned Piano,” “November” has a somewhat fuzzy boundary between composition and improvisation. When Kyle Gann was preparing to perform “November,” Johnson provided him with what he called a “working manuscript.” This consisted of “six pages of melodic cells and diagrams explaining how to put them together.” One of those pages is reproduced in the booklet accompanying Horvath’s “November” album:

Gann also had a cassette tape with 112 minutes of performance, presumably by Johnson himself. However, it was not until 2009 that Gann, together with Sarah Cahill, gave a four-and-one-half-hour performance based on Johnson’s cassette tape and score pages. This was followed by a recording of roughly the same duration of a performance by R. Andrew Lee given at the University of Missouri in Kansas City, which was subsequently released as an Irritable Hedgehog album of four CDs in March of 2013. Taking both Gann and Lee as points of departure, Horvath made his own recording in 2020. This was a “single take” of an interpretation, whose duration turned out to be a little over seven-and-one-quarter hours.

Ferrier’s booklet notes state that Horvath chose to “present the work in six movements.” Presumably, this was due, at least in part, to the recording being released as six CDs. However, the ambitious listener can download those six “movements” from Bandcamp and transfer them to a player such as Apple Music, which would easily accommodate the entire duration without any interruptions.

To be honest, however, I did not try to listen to “November” this way. By the same count, I have never tried to listen to the roughly five hours of “The Well-Tuned Piano” without interruption. I have found that attentive listening often involves finding just the right balance between focus and fatigue. Where both Johnson and Young are concerned, I am still trying to find a suitable balance!

Mind you, extended duration is probably the only feature that these two works have in common. Young’s composition is an exploration of expressiveness (and, probably, improvisation) based on using just intonation as an alternative to equal temperament. On the other hand, the above score page suggests that Johnson was primarily interested in music based on those “melodic cells,” exploring them through devices of sequencing and superposition (possibly also involving different degrees of spontaneity).

It has been a while since I have listened to “The Well-Tuned Piano;” but there was a time when I drew upon it as a significant source for training my listening skills to adjust to intervals based on integer ratios, rather than the “irrational” twelfth root of two. Where “November” is concerned, I am still trying to decide how it will enhance my “skill set” for listening. Given the nature of the page of “melodic cells” reproduced above, I suspect that the primary skill to be cultivated will be one of part-whole relations.