Piano Circus - Fitkin, Nyman, Seddon, Rackham (1992)

There are, I would contend, two types of minimalism: the repetitive one, which took its lead from Riley's "In C" and Reich's "Music for 18 musicians". The basic elements on which those repetitive compositions are built, those which precisely they obsessively repeat, may be indeed minimal, but the result, thanks to processes of rhythmic delay, layering and tiling, may be all but minimal, and in fact very busy: that's the whole point of the music, in fact.

And then, there is the truly "minimal" minimalism, in which the very few musical events move very slowly, and the listener is asked to revel in the protracted unfolding of single tones, and in which a rare new musical even might acquire great dramatic impact, because of its very rarity . That's the minimalism of Cage, Feldman, Scelsi, Sciarrino.

These two branches of minimalism are represented here, more or less. The compositions of Chris Fitkin and Tim Seddon illustrate the first, repetitive branch. Their processes are similar. Fitkin's "Sextet" is more graceful, Seddon's "16" more dynamic, but they are both pretty, sweet and charming, evolving along undemanding and unruffling tonal harmonies - I don't necessarily mean it as a compliment: I find them pretty inconsequential. They are also the short pieces on the disc: respectively 7-minutes and 4:40.

Conversely, it should come as no wonder that the two other compositions should be much longer: that's the time it takes for their minimalist processes to unfold and repeat. No wonder also that they should make a constant use of the sustained pedal and the resonance it produces. I don't usually like the music of Michael Nyman (usually repetitive of the first kind) but "100" is quite fascinating. Composed in 1976, its compositional and performing processes are brilliant: each pianist (it is scored for "multiple pianos") is to play a rigidly notated series of 100 sustained chords slowly spiralling down from the upper reaches of the keyboards to the lower ones; but each pianist plays independently and the synchronism between all the pianists is random, the rule being that each pianist may play the next chord only when the sound of the previous one has decayed; so it all depends on how the pianists touch and how they hear. The frequency of the chord succession also slows down as the lower registers are reached, since the time of decay becomes longer in the spectrum's lower frequencies. The result is a slow 22-minute, atmospheric, dreamy, slightly jagged (because of the rhythmic desynchronisations) descent from high-to-low.

No ensemble would be better equipped than Piano Circus to perform these pieces: the ensemble was formed in 1989 to play Reich's seminal Six Pianos, and they have since created a repertoire of more than a hundred works. Simon Rackham's "Which ever way your nose bends" - at 31' the longest on the disc - was in fact written in 1989 for a concert including Reich's Six Pianos. In Rackham's own words, "whereas Six pianos has been described as `high energy', `Which ever way your nose bends' maintains a very slow pulse, and could be described as low to no energy". Rackham wrote a slow-moving, processional, atmospheric piece (thanks to the resonance produced by depressed sustaining pedals) in the key of A flat major, attributing one note of the scales seven diatonic ones to each piano, and dividing the last remaining one to all six. Again the composition is sweet and tonally unadventurous, but here I tend to agree with Rackham's description: "with the use of a confined tonality and the sustaining pedals held down throughout, themusic has (or may have) a kind of hypnotic effect on the listener". It also becomes very obsessive and, well, repetitive in the course of its slow-moving 30+ minutes.

The disc is a must for amateurs of minimalism (repetitive or not) and well-worth a try even for the others.