I was looking for a representative masterpiece of minimalism for my list of favourite songs. I have settled for Mad Rush , a composition of my idol Philip Glass.
I do usually listen to it in loop. I have a stack of the score in my playlist just before the whole of Aguas of Amazonia—my favoured composition of the time these last six months—that I listen for hours, completely possessed and relieved. When I hear the drops of the Tiquie River, I realize I am back from a long journey.
I love minimalism. Maybe poor musical education or complete lack of innate musical abilities or mediocre intellect leave me staring in awe at some of the most grandiose masterpieces ever conceived, such as the Musical offering, merely able to get a sense of how deep is the work and how shallow is my penetration of it. But I am an explorer and like to delve in the darkness, to find the gem. When you succeed, then, maybe everything sounds like the Toccata E Fuga, the divine composition.
Minimalism, being so much simpler, is an easy journey for the mind, it grips the soul by the heart. It all speaks to me. It dances and murmurs, marches and runs and sits and floats and swims all at the same time, and speaks and speaks and speaks with the hands that it does not have or have too many, with its notes, with, or without, a melody, a mathematical theme, a mechanical beauty, a universal harmony, a fundamental truth, a naked absolute.
In my list of favourite songs, many would be classified as minimalistic, although composers of the genre often reject the classification. Satie was seeing himself as a "phonometrician" ("someone who measures sounds") [1] and Glass as a composer of "music with repetitive structures" [2].
I happen to love pretty much all of Glass, earlier or later periods, from what might be regarded along the previous lines as his less minimalistic oeuvres (such as les Enfants Terribles) to songs that would cause riots from people sharing an office with me (Einstein on the Beach could produce such an effect).
It is quite understandable there is a sense of triviality in the genre that makes it look like the retard of classical music [3]. And it might just as well be, I do not know and could not figure out from competing arguments of experts and amateurs alike. I believe in hierarchy and if this is true, it only tells me how formidable and immense is the musical universe I am blind and deaf to. But would a Forty-niner during the gold rush, to whom would befall the cold fact knowledge that there are other planets to conquer, drop the wonders at hand to aim for a much more thrilling quest? If this is wrong, it just shows how human sophistication does not compete with the simple and the basic, that it lacks elegance.
For my selection of favourite classical music compositions, I wanted a piece of contemporary minimalism to be featured, the genre being so dear to me. But there are so many, all representative in a different way, I could not really decide for one to stand neatly, or symbolically, or formally, or in any way at all, for all the others. I was thinking of Tiersen with a piece such as La Maison or La Démarche. I finally settled for The Deutsch Mark Is Coming (from Good Bye, Lenin!) for its captivating rhythm which I find is the most faithful musical rendition of our recently past century. Can't you feel the forceful, ruthless, terrible march of progress and nations of our age in this song?
I also wanted a piece that could be repeated endlessly. Minimalism should be able to expand itself in the infinite of space and of time, like Glass waiting for the Dalai Lama. That's the image I have of it. The Deutsch Mark Is Coming is of this type too, although the sudden cut befits it well. The march of society is only never-ending until it drops dead.
The Tiersen song is fabulous, however it does not capture this fleeting trait, this vibrant mark that make me stand still every time I hear such a characteristic minimalist song for the first time, recognizing at once an old time favourite, as if from another, forgotten existence.
Mad Rush, the play of the wrathful and peaceful deities, this is my paradigm of the genre. It is sad and triumphant at the same time, it is death and birth, the sound of wind falling like water, of truth finding its way in the infinite of incompleteness, the light treading and/or deafening march of a theorem in a mathematical space, it is humble and all encompassing. Such beauty in so simple a composition, it has to be deeply, divinely beautiful.