Repeating Ourselves: American Minimal Music as Cultural Practice

5. “I Did This Exercise 100,000 Times”: Zen, Minimalism, and the Suzuki Method

F I V E “I DID THIS EXERCISE 100,000 TIMES” Zen, Minimalism, and the Suzuki Method Create inner strength by daily listening to the recordings. Have the child listen daily to the recordings of the pieces he/she is and will be studying—the more frequently the better. . . . Wake the child with the record. This is the first listening of the day. Play it again at breakfast. Fine to play it again while the child is at play. Once again at supper. Why not play it again when the child goes to sleep in place of a lullaby? Shinichi Suzuki, “Inner Strength” (1983) Our Soto way puts an emphasis on shikan tazu, or “just sitting.” Actually we do not have any particular name for our practice; when we practice zazen we just practice it, and whether we find joy in our practice or not, we just do it. Even though we are sleepy, and we are tired of practicing zazen, of repeating the same thing day after day; even so, we continue our practice. Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind (1970) 2 0 8 “ I D I D T H I S E X E R C I S E 1 0 0 , 0 0 0 T I M E S ” / 2 0 9 PRELUDE: “I SOLISTI DI HOOPLE” The one thing that H. C. Robbins Landon’s “A Pox on Manfredini” did not complain about in its savaging of the barococo revival was, surprisingly enough, the quality of performance enshrined on those multipledisc sets. This may be because his attack was primarily on the consumption habits of musical “snobs,” and thus the collections he reviewed are “models of luxurious presentation . . . with pages of illustrations, facsimiles , and engraved musical examples.” But as anyone who has sampled these 1950s and 1960s sets can attest, the playing and “interpretation ” (or lack of it) on the cheaper ones is, side for side, some of the most hypnotically mechanical on record. It may be hard to think of Vivaldi as a “minimalist” or “ambient” composer if your mind’s ear is filled with the quicksilver intensity of Il Giardino Armonico’s 1993 recording of The Four Seasons; but in the 1950s, actual recordings of Baroque instrumental music were as often as repetitive and impersonal as the most extreme experiments in contemporaneous trance music.1 This influential (if unintentional ) wave of “minimalist” playing was a direct result of the same technological forces that unleashed the barococo flood. Thanks to LPs and cheap, editable magnetic tape, Vivaldi was ground zero for the repetitive Taylorization of musical performance. A certain fly-by-night aura characterized many of the new, small labels (Vanguard, Westminster, Vox) that exploded into the classical recording market in the early LP era; their entire business model was predicated on carpetbagging and keeping overhead low: “For an investment of a few thousand dollars one could buy a first-class tape recorder, take it to Europe (where musicians were plentiful and low-salaried), and record great amounts of music.” The big labels had all the big stars, so these new competitors concentrated on nonstandard repertoire and obscure musicians. The eighteenth century, with its simpler textures and smaller, conductorless ensembles, was especially attractive—but as Roland Gelatt, quoted earlier, admitted as early as 1954, “Not all of this rediscovered music was imaginatively or even adequately performed. The very ease and cheapness of tape recording had brought about a certain lowering of standards.”2 Three factors conspired to make postwar barococo recordings some of the most “ambient” performances of early music ever captured. First was the aforementioned obscurity of the performers. When Peter Schickele invented the bumbling “Solisti di Hoople” to give the lesser- known works of P. D. Q. Bach a run-through, he knew what he was satirizing . The apocryphal band from the “University of Southern North Dakota” was standing in for the faceless, hungry conservatory students rounded up as musici and solisti to play ripieno in cities like Bologna, Venice, and Rome. More experienced players, like those in Vienna’s world-class ensembles, were brutally overworked and underpaid; how else could Robbins Landon’s own Haydn Society have wrung symphonies out of them for $50 a movement? (Perhaps it was his own bad conscience that kept him from caviling at lackluster barococo performers !) Work schedules in postwar Vienna hardly left time or energy for interpretive niceties; Herman Scherchen’s description...