Dutch composer Louis Andriessen is often talked of in the same breath as American minimalists such as Steve Reich and Terry Riley. Bang on a Can All-Stars' programme revealed the similarities and differences between Andriessen's music and two of the classics of minimalism: Reich's Four Organs and Riley's In C.
Four Organs is one of the ultimate minimalist statements: the piece consists of a single, repeated chord that is gradually lengthened throughout the work's 17-minute duration. It sounds like a recipe for a cerebral musical experiment, but Bang on a Can brought a physical and dramatic vigour to their performance. In the work's opening section, the chord transformed from a staccato moment into a sustained harmony. Instead of sounding like a predictable process, Four Organs unfolded as a series of paradoxical musical effects, as mobile melodies emerged from the seemingly static chord. The music finally filled the Queen Elizabeth Hall with a massive wall of electronic sound.
Andriessen's Dubbelspoor, scored for a glittering ensemble of celeste, piano, glockenspiel and harpsichord, shares superficial similarities with Reich's reductive musical process: a sequence of chimed chords gradually picks up musical momentum and becomes an energetic dance. However, Andriessen uses a much wider range of musical material, from simple melodies to complex rhythms, and where Reich's piece was repetitive and hypnotic, Andriessen's was never trance-like or comforting. Dubbelspoor confronted the audience with a hard-edged soundworld, and listening to it was like looking into the workings of an elaborate clockwork mechanism, as rhythms and patterns collided with one another.
In fact, there was more in common between Andriessen's work and music by the American, Conlon Nancarrow. Clarinettist Evan Ziporyn arranged four of Nancarrow's player-piano studies for a six-piece ensemble; and with prominent parts for electric guitar, double bass and clarinet, these arrangements released the jazz-like energy latent in the original versions.
Riley's In C was another essay in how to create a dazzling musical complexity from the simplest of building blocks. Bang on a Can sculpted a compelling, hour-long performance from the amorphous melodic cells of Riley's open-ended score, and they found an enormous range of harmonic and melodic contrast, making the piece sound rich and abundant rather than austere.
