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Process as Means and Ends in Minimalist and Postminimalist Music Galen h. Brown 1. Means and Ends In the summer of 1968, Steve Reich had four of his most important early works behind him (It's Gonna Rain (1965), Come Out (1966), Piano Phase (1967), and Violin Phase (1967)), and he found himself "trying to clarify for [himjself what [he] was doing."1 This reflection resulted in the essay/manifesto "Music as a Gradual Process," which has become perhaps the most iconic description of process in music. "I am interested in perceptible processes," writes Reich. "I want to be able to hear the process happening throughout the sounding music."2 Reich lists several features of process music, but I want to draw our attention to the idea that the "compositional process and [the] sound ing music ... are one and the same thing," and that this identity Process as Means and End I 8 I between process and music creates a different kind of listening experi ence than does traditional music: Listening to an extremely gradual musical process opens my ears to it, but it always extends farther than I can hear, and that makes it interesting to listen to that musical process again. That area of every gradual (completely controlled) musical process, where one hears the details of the sound moving out away from intentions, occuring [sic] for their own acoustic reasons, is it.3 Compare Reich's attitude toward process with David Lang's attitude toward process in his own music. I interviewed Lang for Sequenza21 in November of 2008, and he was quite explicit: "I don't want people to hear the process." He then explained the kind of relationship he prefers to have between composer and audience: "What I want in other people's music is I want permission to listen deeply if I want to and I want permission to feel deeply if I want to. But I want to make the decision myself about how deeply to feel and how deeply to think." Lang feels that his job as a composer is to give his audience those kinds of permissions and opportunities, and that process enables him to do it: I don't want people to know about the mechanics of it, but I also feel like for me there's a way in which these materials, the way of using these processes or mathematical things or my stories or my little silly games that I play—they're ways of me putting up a little screen between what could be a more direct emotional response . . . Imagine there's a room, and this room is "intense emotional response," and what is your job as a composer? Is your job to . . . open the door and push people through that door? . . . Well, many composers think that's their job . . . What if a composer's job is to build the waiting room, one of whose doors is "intense emotional experience." So my job is not to open that door and push you through, with your blessing or against your will, but my job is just to build the waiting room and to let you know "here is the place where you may sit, and you make the decision whether you go in that room or not." . . . And in order to build that room I feel like I have to have some distance from that intense emotional room myself. I think some of these I 82 Perspectives of New Music ways of working with materials, some of these rules and structures and formulas, are distancing things for me that allow me to con centrate on the size of the room, the comfort of the benches, whether or not there's good reading material in the room while you're waiting, whether or not there are other doorways out of that room that you could also take, that you're also being invited to take.4 Lang goes on to list other reasons that he uses process: . . . They're like strategies for me how to take up a certain amount of time. I think also sometimes if you know where you're gonna go in a piece, like if the...

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