"It’s a roof-raiser."

Steve Reich (b. 1936) 
Music for Pieces of Wood (1973) 

A certain cohort of musicians had more reason than most to be grateful for the advent of minimalism in modern American music. That’s the baby boomers, born after the end of the Second World War and entering their professional training starting in the mid 1960s and extending onwards through the 1970s. 

That’s because we were being taught mostly by musical elders who had the forbidding cerebralism of mid-century serialism in their DNA. Dealing with the repertory assigned to us by those teachers was an unnerving if not altogether exhausting ordeal. The music was impenetrable, based as it was on mathematical manipulations of pitch, rhythm, and volume. No amount of attempted analysis would bring meaningful coherence to what typically sounded like random chaos, and for many of us the only chance for survival was to program the stuff into our muscle memory and pray that we wouldn’t slip up and derail the whole thing. Rehearsals were stressful, tempers were frayed. The implication was that we were just too stupid to understand this oh-so advanced music. After all that, we played to sparse audiences who sat on their hands. It was awful. 

But then came the minimalists – Steve Reich, Terry Riley, Philip Glass, John Adams – with their deliberate simplicities, their rhythmic patterning based on non-Western cultures, their delight in sheer sound. Rehearsals became a lot more fun. We didn’t feel stupid any more. And the audiences, now much larger, actually enjoyed our performances. They even applauded. 

Music for Pieces of Wood is a dandy example of that newfound liberation from those glowering beetle-browed types who caused us so much angst. It’s rather like being back in elementary school, standing in a circle and going clackety-clack with our pairs of claves. To be sure, it’s more challenging than that: the rhythms are trickier and, obviously, one is expected to perform like a proper professional and not just some kid whacking two wooden cylinders together. Nevertheless, it celebrates that wide-eyed childhood delight in sound, the basic joy of sitting on the floor and making lots of happy noise. So what if it irritates the parental units?

Danny Elfman (b. 1953) 
Percussion Concerto (2022)  

In America we’ve tended to separate our film composers from our concert composers, unlike the situation in other countries where such distinctions are much less likely. Consider British symphonists such as Ralph Vaughan Williams and Arnold Bax, both prolific writers for the movies, matched by Sergei Prokofiev in Russia. A few Hollywood composers such as Miklós Rózsa and Erich Wolfgang Korngold straddled both worlds, but they were the rare exceptions. 

That erstwhile distinction has been fading away, and nowadays American composers are much more comfortable writing for concert hall and cinema alike. Consider Los Angeles-born Danny Elfman, who brings an unusually wide range to a career that encompasses being the lead vocalist and primary songwriter for Oingo Boingo, writing scores for television, stage, and over 100 films, and also producing a series of remarkable concert works. It’s pretty safe to say that everybody has heard a few Elfman movie scores – Batman, Good Will Hunting, Men in Black, Fifty Shades of Grey count among them – or TV series such as Desperate Housewives or The Simpsons. Danny Elfman is something of an American musical institution.  

Elfman’s concert works begin with his Serenada Schizophrana in 2005; since then he has gifted us with concertos, tone poems, and chamber works. His 2022 Percussion Concerto, written for Scottish virtuoso Collin Currie, offers a prime display window into this remarkable composer’s fluid inventiveness. “Percussion has always been an important part of my life,” he tells us in his 2022 program note. “Beginning in my travels though West Africa when I was only 18 years old, when I began collecting and learning to play ‘balafons’ (kind of like the African version of a marimba), through my years of playing in metal-based Indonesian Gamalan ensembles in my twenties, as well as building my own strange metal and wood percussion ensembles in my early theatrical performance years, it has always been a lifelong obsession.” 

Listeners unfamiliar with the concerto (that’s most of us as yet) are in for a fascinating journey. The triple snare drums and glockenspiel that open the work set the stage for the toccata-like virtuoso opener Triangle, its minimalist vibe created by repetitive patterns, with a distinctly Southeast Asian flavor reminiscent of the gamelans of Indonesia and Cambodia. But it is also carefully structured, via clearly-defined sections that gradually speed up to a spine-tingling conclusion. 

The “D.S.C.H.” acronym at the head of the second movement refers to Dmitri Shostakovich, who represented his name in the German spelling (Schostakowitsch) using the the German note names D-S-C-H, i.e. D-E-flat-C-B. (Both Johann Sebastian Bach and Robert Schumann came up with similar mottos.) Elfman’s treatment of this familiar musical figure begins with a transposed but otherwise unadorned statement that gradually gains ornamentation and elaboration, including an intriguing transformation in which its third and fourth notes are lowered by a fifth – i.e., still familiar, but now subtly different. The thing’s delectably clever, and the more you can identify those transformations of Shostakovich’s motto, the more fun it becomes. 

All that glittering dazzle is replaced by mist and shadows in the atmospheric third movement Down, which remains in a state of calm stasis until about midway through, when rhythmic energy heats up, but soon enough equanimity is regained. To conclude, the final Syncopate offers rhythmic pizzazz galore, sonic thrills and chills, and an unexpectedly abrupt conclusion. All in all, this is no mere concerto. It’s a musical roller coaster ride, a virtuoso showpiece of the first order, and a headlong rush of musical imagination and inventiveness. 

John Adams (b. 1947) 
The Chairman Dances (Foxtrot for Orchestra) (1985)  

By the mid-20th century most pundits had given up opera for dead. Beyond a few glorious late blooms (Peter Grimes, Billy Budd, The Rake’s Progress) the entire genre seemed to have dropped itself into formaldehyde, perfectly satisfied to let its past stand for both its present and, it would seem, for its future. But as things turned out, rumors of opera’s demise were greatly exaggerated. The genre caught a second wind in the works of the minimalists (think Steve Reich, think Philip Glass) who, starting in the late 1960s, began wafting long-overdue fresh air through the mortuary mustiness. 

John Adams’s 1987 Nixon in China applied innovative operatic scoring to a bracingly unconventional libretto based on, of all things, Richard Nixon’s 1972 landmark visit to China. Audiences were presented with not only Richard and Pat Nixon as operatic singers, but also the elderly Chairman and Madame Mao as twinkle-toed hoofers à la Fred and Ginger, in a nostalgic third-act banquet scene in which both the Nixons and the Maos reminisce about their respective youths. 

That scene forms the background to The Chairman Dances (Foxtrot for Orchestra), a purely orchestral work that actually predates the complete opera, having been written in 1985 on a commission from the American Composers Orchestra and the National Endowment for the Arts. 

Ottorino Respighi (1879–1936) 
Pines of Rome (1924) 

There must have been times during Ottorino Respighi’s early career when he concluded that he should have opened a nice little haberdashery shop somewhere. As a young man he took gigs as he could get them, at first in Russia then later in Italy, mostly as a piano accompanist, a violist in so-so orchestras, a teacher, and a composer of oddball but charming arrangements of early music. In 1917, when he was well past his mid 30s, his ambitious tone poem Fountains of Rome laid an egg with its premiere audience. 

But as F. Scott Fitzgerald reminds us, never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat. The eminent conductor Arturo Toscanini took up Fountains a year later, it became a smash hit, and Respighi morphed into not only a world-famous composer but quite a wealthy one as well. 

He never looked back. Two more Roman tone poems followed, Pines of Rome in 1924 – which has become even better known than Fountains – and Roman Festivals in 1928, together with a cornucopia of operas, chamber music, lieder, and above all, orchestral music.  

Shortly before the 1924 New York premiere, Respighi himself gave us a fine look into his intentions regarding Pines of Rome: “While in his preceding work, Fountains of Rome, the composer sought to reproduce by means of tone an impression of Nature, in Pines of Rome he uses Nature as a point of departure, in order to recall memories and vision. The centuries-old trees which so characteristically dominate the Roman landscape become witnesses to the principal events in Roman life.” 

Pines calls for a gigantic orchestra augmented by extra brass and organ for the finale, and a recording of a nightingale for the third-place nocturne. It is said – but not confirmed – that Respighi himself made that particular recording, to this day included by the publisher with the score.