In a year of incalculable losses and turmoil, where grief has graduated from emotion into something more like the weather we’re all weathering, one recent loss hit me particularly hard: The composer Jon Gibson died Monday at the age of 80 after complications from a brain tumor.
A skillful flutist and saxophonist, Gibson was perhaps best known as one of the founding members of the Philip Glass Ensemble, going back to its first appearance in 1968 and on through premieres of major works like “Music in Twelve Parts” (1974) and “Einstein on the Beach” (1976).
Gibson was also an inventive and idiosyncratic composer and performer, recording and releasing works through the ’70s on Glass’s own Chatham Square label, going on to compose extensively for dance pieces and composing an opera. As a visual artist, he created alluringly spare art for his recordings, as well as “graphic realizations” of his compositions into rolling, proto-pixelated landscapes.
He also achieved a Zelig-esque ubiquity and utility in the new music scene of the ’60s and ’70s, performing in the premieres of landmark works like Terry Riley’s “In C” (1964) and Steve Reich’s “Drumming” (1971), and collaborating with composers including Julius Eastman, LaMonte Young, Harold Budd and Arthur Russell. With those performances he played a unique part in complicating a realm of music often maligned for its alleged simplicity: minimalism.
If the word unsettles you slightly, you’re not alone. Baked right into the term is a sense that you’re not quite getting your money’s worth — that something that could be given to you simply isn’t. It’s a term that invites visions of dissatisfaction: an expansive dinner plate bearing a quail nugget in a puddle of reduction; a clutterless white room where one’s breath registers as a racket. It smacks of joylessness.
Meanwhile in musical milieus, “minimalism” is often deployed as a polite byword for either minimal effort or maximum pretense.
In 1989 — a full quarter-century after minimalism first started causing patrons to crumple their programs — the Los Angeles Times ran a piece by critic Donna Perlmutter covering the still-simmering controversy. In it, the composer Charles Wuorinen derided minimalism as “utterly unchallenging, unprovocative kind of music,” an unfortunate byproduct of decreasing cultural sophistication and increasing hunger for instant gratification. “Pandering to the least worthy effort just because of its easy appeal serves neither the public nor the cause of music,” he said, in what today would have been a savage tweet.
Composer George Perle was equally chilly on Glass, Reich & Co., if a bit more succinct: “It’s music for people who hate music.”
Even John Adams — brought in by Perlmutter to defend his fellow accused minimalists — admitted the term was “eminently mockable.” Though he also took the opportunity to call Wuorinen “a square” and reject the “grim attitude behind art for art’s sake.”
“What’s getting these guys so apoplectically mad is how loved our music is,” Adams said. “Whether it, or any other music, has value though, no one can be sure of.”
Now, some 40 years past the prime that Gibson first helped define (or further blur), minimalism’s new-car smell has long worn off, and its sporadic showings on concert programs still elicit hostile receptions. (I have friends who can’t sit through a minute of Glass — unless it’s “The Hours.”)
Wuorinen’s complaints against the commercial sheen of minimalism were certainly cranky, but they also proved eerily prescient: Every other ad on TV now features some form of aggressively arpeggiated piano or productive-sounding marimba. Far from relegation to the fringes of contemporary music, minimalism is now the musical dialect of consumer culture. (Every time an iPhone rings, so, too, must Steve Reich’s ears.)
But, as Gibson demonstrated in his own work, minimalism done right can be a powerful force.
It can stall time (see: Morton Feldman), or it can play with its infinite divisibility (see: Steve Reich — who composed his “Reed Phase” for Gibson). It can discover mantric possibilities within rhythmic repetition or subtle variation (see: Terry Riley). The “deep minimalism” sometimes attributed to composers like Pauline Oliveros, Eliane Radigue and Meredith Monk can push things even further — blurring the line between hearing and listening.
To my ears, Gibson stands out from his fellows by managing to accomplish all of these possibilities, sometimes within a single work. But what I enjoy most about his contribution to minimalism is that very thing we’ve just lost: his presence.
If the formulas, processes and sequences that guide and undergird minimalist compositions often translate as icy or empty, Gibson’s presence as a player in his music bestows it with a sensual, often scruffy humanity. (Ditto his recordings, which like Russell’s solo tapes, derive an extra glow from their notebookish informality.)
Over time, a piece like “Song I” (available on a Superior Viaduct reissue of “Songs & Melodies, 1973-1977”) becomes less about its fragmenting patterns than the unlikely timbral affinity between Gibson’s saxophone and the strings. In the same way, “Untitled (1974)” becomes more about the sound and texture of Gibson’s solo alto flute than the figure it spends 18 minutes tracing, retracing and erasing.
Even “Cycles,” a radiant 23-minute improvisatory drone on the organ at Washington Square Church in New York City recorded in 1975 (also recently reissued by Superior Viaduct) feels as though it draws Gibson’s breath.
Gibson’s structures and sounds sometimes echo the approaches of his contemporaries and collaborators, but I still resist thinking of his music as “minimal,” let alone minimalist. He inhabits the music so fully — there’s scarcely any void left to fill.
The more of Gibson’s work I revisit today, the less I think about who else’s fingerprints might be on it. I just like how covered it is with fingerprints — little imperfections, breaks in the pattern, cracks in the code. It’s music rich with something that’s lately in short supply: evidence of humanity.
