Bang on a Can

Bang on a Can has played a number of works by Louis Andriessen over the years - it has always seemed to us that he is one of the European composers who listened hard to American music, coming up with his own solutions to our national musical problems. In America of the 1960s there were many composers who were experimenting with open forms - pieces that left something unspecified, like the choice of instruments, or the order of musical ideas, or the coordination of the individual parts. Cage's experiments with indeterminacy, Earle Brown's Available Forms, Frederic Rzewski's Coming Together, Terry Riley's In C, early Philip Glass and John Adams - a lot of composers were trying to find out how to take the controls away from making music. Workers Union (1975) is the young(ish) Louis Andriessen's contribution to this approach. Everything is specified in this piece except the notes - the rhythms, the phrases, the attitude are all there, but not the notes. It is clearly a piece that owes something to the American experimental tradition but what that thing is is hard to hear. To me, that's interesting.

-- David Lang