New Sounds, New Grooves

By Michael Walsh

WHO: MINIMALIST COMPOSERS

WHAT: THREE NEW ALBUMS

LABEL: POINT MUSIC

; THE BOTTOM LINE: Roll over, Schoenberg: here is compelling evidence that a once scorned movement is here to stay.

WHAT BECOMES A REVOLUTION most? In music as in politics, the answer is popular acceptance, a solid legacy of accomplishment and a new generation to carry on the work of the founders. Over the past 15 years, minimalism -- once derided as needle-stuck-in-the-groove music -- has emerged as the most potent force in contemporary composition, its catchy, insistent strains audible today in everything from grand opera to television commercials. But is the music of Philip Glass, Steve Reich and their disciples really a serious rival to the century's other great musical uprising, the 12-tone system? Three releases from Philips' new avant-garde Point Music label suggest that it is.

The first is Glass's "Low" Symphony, composed last year on themes from Low, the seminal David Bowie-Brian Eno album, which mystified listeners when it was first released in 1977. The work, with a largely instrumental texture, hinted at, rather than declaimed, its subtle, otherworldly melodies. For his symphony, Glass has taken three of Bowie's songs -- Subterraneans, Some Are and Warszawa -- and woven them into a melancholic 40-minute web that preserves the source while remaining unmistakably Glassian in timbre and texture. Big, expansive and artfully fashioned, the symphony is Glass's most moving work in years.

Lest we forget minimalism's uncompromising roots, though, along comes John Moran (not to be confused with Robert Moran, with whom Glass collaborated on the 1985 fairy-tale opera, The Juniper Tree) and his savage The Manson Family. First performed in Lincoln Center's "Serious Fun!" series in 1990, the theater piece is less an old-fashioned opera than a free-form collage of music, sound effects and dialogue based on the brutal 1969 murders of Sharon Tate and others at Roman Polanski's home in Los Angeles, and the subsequent trial of Manson and his "family."

Perhaps it is no compliment to say that Moran, 27, does justice to his subject, but The Manson Family may be the most terrifying depiction of mental instability in opera since Wozzeck, thanks largely to the fact that Moran used some of Manson's own obscene, apocalyptic ramblings as the text of his libretto; this must be the first opera recording in history to bear a parental-advisory sticker. But it is left to a simple little piano melody, played by one of the "Manson girls" as the opera opens, to sum up Manson musically: plaintive, repetitive, monomaniacal and utterly insane.

By contrast, In Good Company is an affectionate homage to minimalism's pioneers, performed by ace saxophonist and composer Jon Gibson, who was present at the creation. To works by Glass, Reich, Terry Riley, Terry Jennings and himself, Gibson brings his smooth reed tones and his innate understanding of the style. And while some of the pieces, such as Reich's early Reed Phase, are classic stuck needles, others illustrate how far minimalism has come. Listening to Gibson exhale the glorious Pat Nixon aria from John Adams' Nixon in China -- tremulous, quivering and ecstatic -- dispels any doubts that minimalism's best works are the equal of anything our revolutionary century has to offer.