Is there anything wrong with classical music being simple, if it really moves us?

Simplicity works for rock and pop, after all. Almost all of that stuff uses the same four-chord progression over the same 4/4 beat. Or throw in some computers, double the tempo, and automate the product - presto-chango, you've got house electronica.

But we expect more from classical music.

This might be because we see "humans at the wheel" in classical performances, whether it's a soloist or an orchestra of hundreds. Classical performers produce sound through an analog process, by the direct, practiced application of force to their instruments. And their focus is 100% on the production of each note.

Not that a rock band isn't up there strumming their guitars and pounding their drums. (I've played the video game - I know it's not easy!) But there's a different kind of focus there. And if the pop music of the last decade has showed us anything, it's that music can be automated, written by committee and produced by factory. We want our classical music to be hand-turned and personally delivered like artisinal furniture or homemade cheese.

And then there's the tradition of complexity and complication in classical music.

• A Bach Fugue, in essence, is an attempt to take a melody line and harmonize it over itself, in three or four voices, while inverting it, reversing it, compressing it, expanding it, and basically putting it through every melodic yoga-pose-pretzel that Bach could fit on two pages of manuscript paper.
• Beethoven pushed the boundaries of what could be accomplished with harmony, piling on the layers until the aggregated sound was something otherworldly, a sum much greater than its parts.
• Chopin experimented with melodic storytelling, singing to our souls and swaying our emotions line by line.
• Hindemith unsettled us with cross-tonalities - melodies in one key intruding on harmonies in another - and in so doing unlocked a whole new chest of musical tools.

The classical music listener gets off on complexity, is what I'm saying. And we usually recognize a composer as great for taking what his predecessors have done and adding new layers and innovations to it.

Philip Glass - Haunting Repetition and Uneasy Beauty

That's why, when I was younger, I had such a negative reaction to Philip Glass. Here's a guy who was supposed to be a classical composer (at least, his CDs were shelved in that part of the store), and who had a wildly successful career.

He published reams and reams of composition, and yet so much of it was just a repetition of the same few tricks. What gave him the right to all that success, all those accolades?

And yet there's something about performances like this that make them worth listening to.

Maybe it's that human performer at the helm, giving each repeated phrase a slight modulation, bringing out the different voices, modulating the dynamics in a way no computer ever could. Maybe it's the fact that, once we strip away the complexity of a complicated score, once we reduce the chord progressions to patterns that are comfortable and familiar to us, and once we repeat the same phrases over and over - we have a chance to impart a lot more emotional significance to each note.

Maybe it's because life is, in many ways, a series of gradually evolving but otherwise tedious repetitions, so this music provides us with something we can relate to.

For sheer cold minimalistic harmonies, it's hard to beat this rendition of Glass' Etude No. 5 by Vikingur Olafsson. It's not only repetitive - it's slow. But as a result, you can hear a world of significance in every note.

In comparison, the Etude No. 13 is positively peppy. Glass starts to have fun with some crossed rhythms in this piece, and even throws in some scales! But the repetition is still there.

It's often occurred to me that the hardest part of playing a Glass piece from memory would be keeping track of how many repetitions you've been through and when it's time to change. As easy as these pieces might be to play, they're a devil to memorize. Notice the iPad sheet music in the first video!

As simple as Glass' music is, it does provide a certain unsettling-haunting aspect. There's a sense of unease. A foreboding.

If you've seen the movie Koyaanisqatsi you've got a sense of Glass and his the world ain't quite right vibe. (Koyaanisqatsi is Hopi for "unbalanced life.")

The title sequence to the 1992 horror movie Candyman ramps the uneasiness up a little further. Some of my favorite Glass compositions come from the score to that cheesy B-movie.

Glass has haunting beauty and unsettling premonition down to a science. There's a reason he's scored more films that any modern composer.

Ludovico Einaudi - Pop Chords Gone Classical

Ludovico Eanaudi shares the elements of repetition, simplicity, and frequently slow, stretched out melodies with Philip Glass.

But instead of eerie, haunting unease, he's gone straight for the feel-good progressions of four-chord pop. His 2002 album, I Giorni ("The Days"), consists entirely of C, G, D, and F chords, arpeggiated in slightly different patterns over 14 tracks with a couple poppy melodies laid on top.

I know, because I bought the sheet music when I wanted something easy to play on my aging piano. Spoiler alert - it's wicked easy to play! It's also satisfying. You get an amazing emotional punch for minimal effort. And those major chords make for feel-good, positive stuff. It's good therapy music if you're feeling down and want to play something without getting frustrated. I found some pleasure in experimenting with tempo and phrasing, and in seeing just how much I could bring out of these simple notes. (Still, I'm going to share Einaudi's own performance of a part of it with you.)

Here's Einaudi performing one of his compositions on an artificial iceberg in the arctic for Greenpeace!

It seems like a bit of stunt, playing this simple music out on a floating $100,000 piano while Greenpeace sets off charges to make a glacier collapse in the background. It seems almost manipulative somehow.

But isn't that what music is supposed to be? We put on a track because we want to feel something as a result. We're paying the musician to feel manipulated. If they've found a way to use the simplest of tools to do that to us, can we really hold that against them?

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Lord knows I've got no talent for improvisation or composition.

I'll leave that up to @cmp2020, who by all indications has a great future ahead of him in the world of music. (Seriously, check out his feed. That kid knows composition and music history.)

I was always more of a study-memorize-perform kind of pianist.

A lot of this was attitude. And maybe sour grapes. Back when I was getting the rudiments of music theory, I'd experiment a little with those first basic chords, playing a bit with arpeggios and chord progressions. Then I'd set them aside as childishly simple. "That sounds so pretty," my grandma would say. "What is it?"

"It's just a C-chord, grandma."

"Well, you should play more of that."

If someone had told me you could write something like I Giorni and then wind up performing it at Royal Albert Hall, the younger me would have either laughed in their face, or lectured them on the fall of Western Culture. This was just popular music, stripped of the guitars and raunchy language.

But here's the thing. Sure, anybody could write down these chords again and again and call it a score, but Glass and Einaudi actually went and did it. People liked it and audiences bought it. If these sounds move and haunt us at such an elemental level, is there any reason to disdain them?

And here's the other thing: these composers kept on doing it. They started with something childishly simple and then wrote song after song building on these same simple patterns. They produced bodies of work that are instantly recognizable because of their simplicity. Within those boundaries, they've found ways to captivate the listener that no one else has. Like Pollack with his paint-splatters or Warhol with his soup-cans, they kept at their childishly simple work until it became something nobody else could do.

It turns out that even Bach started off his 48 Preludes and Fugues with a simple C chord.

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For a final bit of fun -

Here's someone deconstructing just how simple Philip Glass' work is. If you know how to arpeggiate a few chords, you can convince someone you're playing a piece of Glass without ever seeing a score. But I don't think you'll put Glass out of business any time soon.

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Are you a classical music listener?

What are your tastes? Do you stick with the ancient greats or do you welcome a bit of modern simplicity into your life on occasion?

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My Previous "Music" Posts on Steemit

Loving The Imperfect In Music And Art: Glenn Gould, Nico Muhly, and Sam Amidon
Spine-Tingling Reaction To Modern Operatic Performance by Barbara Hannigan
Glenn Gould Reaches The End Of Bach
Searching For Operatic Transcendence In Heavy Metal Music
The Steemit Hive Mind Starts Me On My Metal Opera Journey
The Music of Richard Dawson: Historical Mischief In The Raw
The Hurdy Gurdy - An Ancient Instrument With A Modern Sound
Chamber Orchestra Performing Omgyjya Switch by Aphix Twin
Povarovo and Ben Frost - Two Ambient-Experimental Musicians Blending Tradition with Technology

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