Same As It Ever Was...Same As It Ever Was...Same As It Ever Was...Same As It Ever Was...
Minimalism and the Talking Heads

"This primitivistic music goes on and on... At times you feel you have never done anything all your life long but listen to this music... it is altogether absorbing, exciting, and moving, too."⁽¹⁾

"...the rhythm section is like a ship or train-- very forceful and certain of where it's going. On top of that, you have this hesitant, doubting quality that dizzily asks, 'Where are we going?' That makes for a sense of genuine disorientation..."⁽²⁾

These could be excerpts from two reviews of the same concert. It would not even be unreasonable to assume that these were two excerpts from the same review. But these are, in fact, comments on two very different musical experiences. The first is from Alfred Frankenstein's November 1964 review in the San Francisco Chronicle of the first performance of Terry Riley's In C. The second is Brian Eno's description of the music of Talking Heads.

"Art" music and "popular" music in the twentieth century have enjoyed what could most charitably be described as an uneasy relationship. As the century progressed, a great divide seemed to develop between what art music composers were writing and what people wanted to hear. Advances in technology, both in recording and in marketing and distribution, served to magnify this division. By the second half of the century, there seemed to be little relationship at all between art and popular music. With a few notable exceptions⁽³⁾, what little interaction there was between the two worlds tended to be rather hostile. Classical composers resented the popular and commercial success of pop music, and pop musicians resented the classical music establishment's claims to artistic legitimacy, if they even thought of classical musicians at all.

By the 1950s, the classical music world was dominated by serialism, as epitomized in the work of such composers as Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen. This highly structured process of composition quickly found a home in universities and conservatories, where it was generally presented to young composers as the only legitimate method of music composition. Resistance to this philosophy emerged in the form of a number of avant-garde movements, most of which were based in the United States, especially New York and San Francisco, and took inspiration from the philosophies of John Cage. These musicians composed and performed outside academia and the classical musical establishment, generally performing their works in museums, galleries, art schools, and other such locations. Undoubtedly the most enduring and influential of these movements was minimalism.

The minimalists reacted to the overwhelming complexity of serialism by writing music which tended to feature clean, clear textures; clearly audible compositional processes; unabashedly tonal (and generally very simple) harmonic schemes with little harmonic motion; and, most prominently, a strong emphasis on repetition. Arising from the early experiments of LaMonte Young, such as his Octet for Brass (1957) and Trio for Strings (1958), minimalism soon provided an "outsider" alternative to serialism for young "serious" composers. Two forms of minimalism soon emerged. The first was based on long, sustained tones in the style of LaMonte Young's pieces. The second, known as pulse minimalism, can first be seen in Terry Riley's String Trio (1960)⁽⁴⁾ and was firmly established by In C. This soon became the dominant form of minimalism as used in the music of Philip Glass and Steve Reich.

Musicologists have been quick to point out the influence rock and jazz music had on the evolution of minimalism. Each of the "minimalist Fab Four," as Edward Strickland has dubbed Young, Riley, Reich, and Glass, had extensive experience in one or both of these styles. Miminalist music, especially that of Philip Glass, has also tended to feature the kind of amplification normally associated with rock concerts. Combine these features with harmonic simplicity, the steady pulse and rhythmic drive, and the anti-establishment stance of the music's origins, and the parallels with rock become clear. Reich and Glass tended to be understandably hesitant about acknowledging these connections, perhaps out of fear of being dismissed as "popular" music.⁽⁵⁾

In the 1970s, a revolution broke out in rock music in reaction to what was seen as the over-commercialization and over-complexity of rock. The result was the punk rock movement, arising from such groups as the Ramones and Iggy Pop and coming to maturity with such British bands as the Sex Pistols in the mid-1970s. Punk rock was based on the rejection of the commercialism of mainstream rock and elitist complexity of art rock; its central feature was simple, direct expression, which usually took the form of extremely loud, technically simple music. Punk brought with it an image of extreme rebellion, with a strong emphasis on drugs, sex, and violence. By the late 1970s, however, this violent image had grown tiresome for audiences, and a new style of punk evolved, "somewhat subtler and less prone to the gruesome, the overtly repulsive, and the sadomasochistic."⁽⁶⁾ These bands, which included Elvis Costello, Graham Parker, and Patti Smith, were referred to as the New Wave. From this scene emerged the Talking Heads.

Talking Heads began in New York's Bowery in 1974 as a trio of Rhode Island School of Design alumni-- leader David Byrne (guitar and vocals), Chris Frantz (drums), and Tina Weymouth (bass). Avoiding the extreme costumes and "onstage antics"⁽⁷⁾ then common to rock acts, the Heads featured "wholesome collegiate looks"⁽⁸⁾ and, Chris Frantz explained, "we thought it was modern to have a female in the group who wasn't featuring her voice or breasts."⁽⁹⁾ By August 1975, they were the cover story of the Village Voice, whose headline labeled them "the conservative impulse of the new rock underground."⁽¹⁰⁾ Jerry Harrison, an architecture student from Harvard, joined the group as keyboardist in time to play on their debut album, Talking Heads '77, completing the band. Brian Eno first worked with the group as their producer on their next album, More Songs About Buildings and Food, and by the time he produced their fourth album, Remain in Light, he was generally considered to be the fifth Head.

Talking Heads came from an atmosphere very similar to that in which Steve Reich and Philip Glass were working. These were highly educated art students who moved to Greenwich Village and started a band. David Byrne had specialized in Bauhaus theory and conceptual art while at RISD⁽¹¹⁾ and had a strong interest in non-western cultures. Later, he would go on to work with Philip Glass, writing lyrics for Songs From Liquid Days (1985), and Robert Wilson (the avant-garde theater director who directed most of Glass' operas), providing music for Wilson's epic play The CIVIL WarS (Glass was the other composer on this project).⁽¹²⁾

By the time he began working with Talking Heads, Brian Eno was already an established figure in both the classical and popular experimental music scenes. In 1973, he produced the first commercial recording of John Adams' music-- a record of American Standard for Obscure Records. He played in both the Scratch Orchestra and Portsmouth Sinfonia. In the early 1970s, he collaborated with guitarist Robert Fripp on two albums-- No Pussyfooting (1972) and Evening Star (1975)-- which drew heavily on the tape loop techniques pioneered by Terry Riley and Steve Reich, as well as the pulsing repetition of Glass, whose Music with Changing Parts he had heard at the Royal College of Art in 1971.⁽¹³⁾ In a 1981 interview, he claimed, "the most crucial [pieces] for me were by Steve Reich. He did some records in the mid-'60s, first Come Out and then It's Gonna Rain... That was extremely important for me."⁽¹⁴⁾ In 1978, he started a new record label he called Ambient, "which aimed to use the perceptions and understandings acquired from the experience of experimental music... to make a new popular music."⁽¹⁵⁾ Like Reich, he developed a strong interest in Ghanian music, spending a month there in 1981 studying and performing with local groups.

By the time Talking Heads released their third album, Fear of Music, it was quite clear that they had established a unique voice and musical style. More importantly, their next album, Remain in Light, showed that they were not content with resting on their laurels. These albums introduced a reliance on minimalist and non-western (particularly West African) musical devices to an extent previously unseen in popular music.

A major feature of many of the songs on these albums is a lack of traditional dramatic structure. Most of the songs lack any real sense of development, climax, or resolution, and tend to exists in large, static blocks of sound. This can be seen in "The Overload," the final track on Remain in Light. A constant drone is layered over a two-bar (4/4) drum loop and surrounded by various swirls of sound from the guitars and synthesizers. Over this is layered a very simple, chantlike vocal track intoning the lyrics. Five minutes into the song, a faint pulse is heard from the synthesizer which continues through the end of the song a minute later. There are no chord changes at all in the course of the song. There is no memorable melodic contour. The song is six minutes of a single pulsing drone surrounded by subtly shifting swirls of sound. Like the music of Reich, the piece succeeds by entrancing the listener with the slowly evolving contours of what superficially appears to be static music.

The use of multiple layers of sound is another important feature in this music. Since the Heads often choose to abandon harmony as a primary building block of their songs, the manipulation of various coexisting layers of sound often become a key element in defining the form of a song. In "Crosseyed and Painless," from Remain in Light, the drums and bass perform the same two-bar (again in 4/4) loop throughout the whole of the piece. Once again, the entire piece is based on a single chord. However, this piece features a much more immediately obvious verse-chorus song structure than "The Overload." This is established through the orchestration. The introduction establishes the basic groove of the song (ex. 1) which is present throughout the piece. Through the verse, David Byrne sings the lyrics over this loop in a stacatto, almost toneless voice. In the chorus, however, the orchestration thickens. The lyrics are taken over by several voices singing in unison in a much more lyrical style, and a second guitar adds a string of pulsing sixteenth note a's. On the bridge ("Facts are simple and facts are straight..."), the agogo bell suddenly pops to the foreground of the texture. These orchestrational changes are minor, but they are effective in delineating the form of the song for the listener.

The overall sound created by their orchestrations and mixes makes the Talking Heads unique among rock bands. Unlike many bands, in which parts are clearly distinct and easily separated, it is often difficult when listening to a Talking Heads song to determine who is playing what. The Heads create their parts in such a way that they interlock with each other, creating the impression of a single overall texture, rather than a collection of individual timbres, an orchestrational feature they share with several of the minimalists, notably Steve Reich (listen to Music for 18 Musicians for some particularly effective examples). There are no real instrumental solos on either Fear of Music or Remain in Light. Rather, the emphasis is on a communal sound. Byrne has noted, "I don't play too many melodies on guitar... Even the lead parts I do tend to be textures and effects rather than a melody that's worked out. They tend to be a series of weird effects that build up the way a melody does, but they don't use melodic structure."⁽¹⁶⁾ This contrasts rather starkly with the virtuosic demonstrations of guitar wizardry so common to rock music.

Like most minimalist music, Talking Heads' songs tend to feature a constant tempo and a clear demarcation of the pulse, even more so than most rock songs. They also often use repeated melodic fragments or motives to emphasize certain parts of the beat to create the groove. This is a concept common to both minimalism and many African-American musical styles such as funk. However, the repetition of these fragments tends to be much more blatant than in other groove-oriented rock. The third track on Fear of Music, "Paper," features a simple one-bar riff in the introduction that could be from any number of pop ballads; it feels like a pick-up bar into a new strain of music (ex. 2). However, rather than proceed into a phrase of music as expected, the Heads repeat this single bar of music eight times without variation, giving the same "broken record" impression created by many minimalist pieces. Throughout the course of the song, each section consists of a single looped motive treated in a similar fashion. The song features more harmonic motion than is found on those songs previously mentioned, but it is still relatively static from a harmonic standpoint.

These features combine to give the music of Talking Heads an objective, almost emotionless tone. In his review of Fear of Music, Roy Trakin referred to it as "dance music for neurotics."⁽¹⁷⁾ and observed that "David Byrne reduces the complexity of Funky Western Civilization to its basics-- consciousness..., the (heart) beat, forward movement."⁽¹⁸⁾ This overwhelming simplicity of style didn't come about by accident. From the beginning, the Talking Heads consciously set out to be innovative. "It's a question of semantics," David Byrne noted in an interview, "I think people confuse coldness and unfeelingness with the fact that we're aware of what we're doing."⁽¹⁹⁾ Elsewhere, he said, "My intention has always been for the musical structures of the stage performance or even the lyrics to acknowledge their structure, to kind of let you see how they're put together."⁽²⁰⁾ In another interview, Chris Frantz confessed, "The only thing we have going for us, besides our eccentricities, is our sound. Sometimes I imagine our whole purpose is to conceive of a song structure or rhythm that would be a breakthrough in music. Maybe get a little paragraph in some theory book. Sounds real corny, but that's kind of what I hope this group does."⁽²¹⁾ This kind of conscious innovation and emphasis on audible musical procedures and structure seems much more consistent with the attitudes of avant-garde composers in the classical tradition than most rock musicians.

Of the many minimalist-influenced tracks on Fear of Music and Remain in Light, two stick out as particularly deserving of attention. "I Zimbra," the opening track on Fear of Music, and "Once in a Lifetime," the fourth track on Remain in Light, are both permeated with minimalist techniques to a degree not seen in most of the other songs on these albums.

"I Zimbra" is, for all intents and purposes, an instrumental piece. Like many of the Heads' songs, the music was written first, after which the lyrics were added. However, according to David Byrne,

I couldn't think of words, in this instance, that beared repeating... The melody came from Brian Eno, and he noticed that this dada poem fitted the melody. It's a dada sound poem-- poems that were meant to be read aloud. The dadaists were doing the same thing we were doing: trying to get behind the language to the meat of the expression. It was all in the sound of what was being said.⁽²²⁾

Like Reich, who claims that his best pieces are vocal pieces, whether or not words are involved,⁽²³⁾ the Heads use human voices in this song for their sound quality, rather than their communicative quality. Like many Heads songs, it features a continuous groove at a constant tempo. However, "I Zimbra" bears the distinction of being the first Talking Heads song to be so insistent in its use of repetition; because of its placement as the first song on Fear of Music, many critics heard it as a kind of artistic manifesto.

"I Zimbra" is built from two basic modules, one based on the tonic, and the second based on the dominant. Each of these modules are made up of several musical layers which are added or removed in the mix to build the song. The song begins by constructing the tonic module (ex. 3). The first thing we hear are the drums establishing the groove. After six bars, the synthesizer (a clavinet) and bass enter. After four more bars, the rhythm guitar enters. After two more bars, the vocals begin to chant the dadaist poem over this groove. This pattern of decreasing temporal intervals between entrances (six bars, four bars, two bars) increases tension by creating a kind of subtle "countdown" effect.

The second (dominant) module features a very distinctive melodic figure (ex. 4) that is extremely similar to many of Reich's melodic fragments, such as those found in Vermont Counterpoint or Piano Phase. The groove under this melody remains essentially the same as for the tonic module. From these two building blocks, the song is constructed. In the course of the song's three minutes and five seconds, these motives are fragmented, augmented, combined, shifted against the groove, and manipulated in many other ways. The similarities between this rock song and many minimalist pieces is quite striking, and, in fact, while listening to it, "I Zimbra" may easily evoke memories of Section VI of Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians (1976).

Equally striking in its use of minimalist compositional techniques is "Once in a Lifetime" on the following year's Remain in Light. As with "I Zimbra" and so many other Talking Heads songs, "Once in a Lifetime" features a groove laid out by the bass and drums which stays fundamentally unchanged through the course of the piece, though subtle shifts of emphasis do occur from time to time, giving it an organic, breathing character. Over this foundational groove, however, is laid a new element. The synthesizer (programmed with a quasi-celeste patch) plays a constantly moving sixteenth note ostinato throughout the piece which, though composed of only three notes, arpeggiates unpredictably between them, creating a kind of swirling, giddy excitement that is perhaps meant to evoke the image of the water referenced in the chorus. The constant sixteenth note pulse keeps the music from losing forward momentum, but the unpredictability of the pitch content of the ostinato adds an air of breathless excitement reminiscent of parts of Philip Glass' opera Einstein on the Beach (1975), particularly the "Spaceship" and "Building/Train" scenes in Act IV.⁽²⁴⁾

Because of its harmonic stasis (like "Crosseyed and Painless," it is based entirely on a single chord), "Once in a Lifetime" relies heavily on timbre and texture to define its form. The beginning of the piece features the aforementioned synth ostinato over the drum and bass groove which continues throughout the piece. Over this comes the sound of David Byrne's voice, speaking (preaching?), rather than singing, the lyrics of the verse. Upon reaching the chorus, the texture changes. Byrne's spoken lyrics give way to the group singing in unison, and the synth ostinato recedes in the mix (though it doesn't disappear) to make room for the rhythm guitar figure which enters.

After the second chorus comes the bridge, which, like the opening to "Paper," features a single bar repeated eight times. This module consists of the bass and drum groove over which is layered an interlocking rhythmic figure played by guitar and a synth (this time with a kind of fuzzy sine wave sound). Over this is David Byrne's rhythmic vocal figure setting the words "Same as it ever was."

Once this "Same as it ever was" figure is repeated eight times, the song plunges into the third verse, where we encounter yet another feature inspired by Steve Reich. On the second half of this verse, Brian Eno sets up a tape loop on David Byrne's vocal, which takes off in a rhythmic groove so that the lyrics at the end of the verse are almost inaudible under the rhythmic repetitions of "remove the... remove the... remove the..." At the end of the song, the song goes into the bridge again, and "Same as it ever was" continues to repeat for nearly a full minute before the song fades out, which, in effect, indicates that it never ends.

Several attempts have been made by various scholars to find minimalist influences in the works of a number of rock musicians, including Pink Floyd, Van der Graaf Generator, ELP, and others.⁽²⁵⁾ Some of these connections seem plausible, but most are a bit of a stretch. With the Talking Heads, it is difficult to ascertain exactly how much of a direct influence minimalism played in the creation of their music. This becomes more difficult because the Heads-- Brian Eno and David Byrne in particular-- were extremely interested in non-western music, especially Ghanian drumming and other West African music, which was the same music Steve Reich cites as being instrumental in his development of phase music. It is nearly impossible to say how much of the similarity between the Talking Heads and the minimalists stems from direct influence and how much stems from deriving similar conclusions from a common inspiration. But the similarities between their music is too strong to dismiss entirely, and, given the historical connections between the Heads and Reich and Glass, it seems safe to assume that a substantial number of these similarities are representative of the mark left by avant-garde composers on popular music in the 1970s.

Endnotes

1. Alfred Frankenstein, quoted in K. Robert Schwarz, Minimalists (London: Phaidon, 1996), 43.

2. Brian Eno, quoted in Mikal Gilmore, "Talking Heads: psychodramas you can dance to," Rolling Stone 305, 29 November 1979, 23.

3. Leonard Bernstein's musical theater works, notably West Side Story (1957) and Mass (1971), both of which unapologetically incorporate popular music elements, come to mind.

4. Edward Strickland, Minimalism: Origins (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1993), 143.

5. In an interesting twist, John Adams recently used rock as a means of distancing himself from minimalism. At a pre-concert lecture for the premiere of his Naive and Sentimental Music, he discussed the piece's opening, a rather lengthy guitar solo featuring little more than a single chord strummed in quarter notes. "This could be minimalism," he noted, demonstrating this part on the piano, "but it could also be Joni Mitchell." (Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Los Angeles, Ca., 20 February 1999)

6. Joe Stuessy and Scott Lipscomb, Rock and Roll: Its History and Stylistic Development, 3^rd ed. (Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1999), 313.

7. Ibid. 328.

8. Gilmore 23.

9. Quoted in Gilmore 23.

10. Gilmore 23.

11. Ibid.

12. Scott Isler, "How Can Talking Heads Be Three Places at Once and Still Be a Better, Tighter Band?" Musician 85, November 1985, 54.

13. Schwarz 124.

14. Mikal Gilmore and Spotiswood Erving, "Brian Eno," Musician, Player, and Listener 32, April 1981, 50.

15. Michael Nyman, Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond, 2^nd ed, with a foreword by Brian Eno (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), xiii.

16. Robin Tolleson, "Talking Heads," Guitar Player 171, March 1984, 65.

17. Roy Trakin, "Intellectual Dance Music: Talking Heads and The B-52's incorporate both teenage nostalgia and adult angst into their danceable odes to the Apocalypse," Musician, Player, and Listener 21, November 1979, 14.

18. Ibid.

19. Gilmore 23.

20. Robert Farris Thompson, "David Byrne: The Rolling Stone Interview," Rolling Stone 524, 21 April 1988, 48.

21. Gilmore 23.

22. Thompson 48.

23. Jonathan Cott, "Interview with Steve Reich," in booklet for Steve Reich: Works, 1965-1995, Nonesuch 79451-2, 29.

24. Einstein on the Beach was given its New York City premiere at the Met in 1976, and it is likely, given their involvement in the New York experimental music scene, that some or all of the Heads saw one of the performances, though I have been unable to find any hard evidence of this.

25. Edward Macan, Rocking the Classics: English Progressive Rock and the Counterculture, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 139.

Selected Bibliography

Bangs, Lester. "Eno." Musician, Player, and Listener 21 (November 1979); 38-44.

Bloch, Gregory. "Philip Glass and Popular Music: Influence and Representation." TM (photocopy), 2000.

Breskin, David. "Talking Heads." Musician, Player, and Listener 32 (April 1981); 40-46, 106.

Cott, Jonathan. "Interview with Steve Reich." In booklet for Steve Reich: Works, 1965-1995, Nonesuch 79451-2.

Gilmore, Mikal. "Talking Heads: psychodramas you can dance to." Rolling Stone 305 (29 November 1979); 9, 20, 23-24.

Gilmore, Mikal, and Spotiswood Erving. "Brian Eno." Musician, Player, and Listener 32 (April 1981); 48-52.

Harrison, Jerry. "Straight Talk from a Talking Head." Keyboard 115 (November 1985); 52-54, 56, 58, 60, 64, 66, 68, 70, 72, 74, 77, 79-81.

Isler, Scott. "How Can Talking Heads Be Three Places at Once and Still Be a Better, Tighter Band?" Musician 85 (November 1985); 52, 54-56, 58, 60, 62.

Macan, Edward. Rocking the Classics: English Progressive Rock and the Counterculture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Nyman, Michael. Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond, 2^nd ed. With a foreword by Brian Eno. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Schwarz, K. Robert. Minimalists. London: Phaidon, 1996.

Simms, Bryan R. Music of the Twentieth Century: Style and Structure, 2^nd ed. New York: Schirmer, 1996.

Strickland, Edward. Minimalism: Origins. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1993.

Stuessy, Joe, and Scott Lipscomb. Rock and Roll: Its History and Stylistic Development, 3^rd ed. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1999.

Talking Heads. Fear of Music. Sire 6076-2.

Talking Heads. Remain in Light. Sire 6095-2.

Thompson, Robert Farris. "David Byrne: The Rolling Stone Interview." Rolling Stone 524 (21 April 1988); 42, 44, 48-51, 116.

Tolleson, Robin. "Talking Heads." Guitar Player 171 (March 1984); 65-66, 68, 70, 73-74, 76, 110.

Trakin, Roy. "Intellectual Dance Music: Talking Heads and The B-52's incorporate both teenage nostalgia and adult angst into their danceable odes to the Apocalypse." Musician, Player, and Listener 21 (November 1979); 14, 26.