Minimalism and Post-rock in
the music of
Godspeed You! Black Emperor
& A Silver mt. Zion
Hallvardur Asgeirsson
A Silver Mt. Zion was born as an offshoot of the
post-rock orchestra Godspeed You! Black Emperor. Efrim
Menuck, the co-founder of GYBE, had some ideas that he
felt did not fit the collective spirit of GYBE, where
everyone wrote music together. When his dog Wanda died
while GYBE was on tour, he decided to make an album in
memory of the dog. The album is called ‘He Has Left Us
Alone but Shafts of Light Sometimes Grace the Corner of
Our Rooms…’. It includes the song ‘Movie (Never Made)’
which is the first song in the GYBE/Mt.Zion ouvre to make
use of Menuck's singing voice. A Silver Mt. Zion consists
of a few members from GYBE. At first, Menuck felt
uncertain about using his voice in this context and being
the vocalist and front man of the ensemble.
Menuck had originally intended to make Zion an
ensemble where he could learn how to score music. But
this idea was abandoned for ‘playing whatever sounds
best’. However, the first album has a composed feel to
it, which is remarkable given the way in which it was
created. It holds a special place in the GYBE/Silver Mt.
Zion ouevre. The atmosphere is set here by Efrim’s
minimalistic piano playing. It is indeed safe to classify
the music of Godspeed You! Black Emperor and A Silver Mt.
Zion as post-rock.
Menuck has been noted to have a strong influence from
modern classical music. In an interview in the magazine
The Wire (2002), he describes walking into a church where
Olivier Messaien was playing. He described how ‘the
church was shaking along with the music’1. He seems to
have been influenced by modern classical music, as well
as by the minimalists and the avant-garde. This is an
influence not often heard in rock music, especially not
to the extent evident here.
The song ‘13 Angels Standing Guard 'Round The Side Of
Your Bed’ is a good example of this. The song starts with
a simple phrase of 4 chords, played on a sampler, which
seems to be playing back some kind of a vocal sample.
Then a bassline is added, which quietly conforms with the
root notes. The violin enters, and seems to somehow play
around the main chord progression, which is repeated and
grows into a mournful hymn. The rest of the song is a
sort of exercise in dynamics, where the volume rises and
falls again in the end. While most of rock music falls
into the category of verse-chorus song forms, the music
of A Silver Mt. Zion is not at all concerned with this.
Instead Efrim Menuch chooses to approach his music from a
minimalistic standpoint. The song is based around the
following chord progression, which is expanded upon, much
in the form of a canon.
Keenan, D. Godspeed You Black Emperor! the Wire,
195., p. 36.
1
The year 1997 was an important year for post-rock.
It was the year of the release of the EP Slow Riot For
Zero Canada, one of the cornerstones of the genre. This
album includes the track Moya, which is a good example
of the post-rock build up that characterizes most of
the later bands of the genre. This track had the
working title ‘Gorecki’ by which it is still referred
to in concerts. The actual piece by Gorecki which the
musicians are inspired by here is not clear. However,
listening to The 3rd Symphony, a symphony of
sorrowful songs, I cannot but come to the conclusion
that it could have exerted a strong influence on this
track.
If not directly evident in the musical theme of
the track, one can hear the basic ingredient of the
music of Godspeed in Gorecki's symphony. Extremely
atmospheric landscapes of drawn out melodies, and
droning deep bass notes. A fundamentally
contemplative mood, which by some would be called
melancholic.
Gorecki’s symphony starts off with rumbling
bass, playing an otherworldly slow ambient line,
which then builds into the violas and violins upwards
and onwards. On a similar note, the Dead Flag Blues
of Godspeed starts off with rumbling drums, and a
slow guitar/violin melody.
„Post-rock is charistically defined as use of
rock instruments for non-rock purposes.‘Post-rock
brought together a host of mostly experimental genres
-- Kraut-rock, ambient, prog-rock, space rock, math
rock, tape music, minimalist classical, British IDM,
jazz (both avant-garde and cool), and dub reggae, to
name the most prevalent -- with results that were
largely based in rock, but didn't rock per se.’“2
Post-rock/Experimental. (2007, December 12). In
Modern Music. Retrieved 00:42, December 21, 2007,
2
The inclusion of minimalist classical music
might seem surprising, but is really not if one takes
into account where the classical composers of the
late 20th century are coming from. These days most
classical composers grow up with rock in their ears
all day long as well as classical music. They draw
from a breadth of available resources previoUsly
quite unknown to composers. Whereas Bach only had the
choice of listening to his own music, either self
composed, or played by himself or some nearby
instrumentalist, or of taking a walk down to the pub
where the local troubadour would play some drinking
songs, the modern composer has an endless amount of
resources to choose from, from tribal music to rock,
and to the classical music of the ages.
The music of the 20th century minimalists
includes such different voices as Steve Reich, Philip
Glass, Arvo Pärt, Henryk Gorecki, LaMonte Young and
Terry Riley. These seemingly different composers have
some things in common. They all choose to streamline
their compositions to simplicity. This not only
recalls rocks musical language, but also the return
of classical music as sounding pleasing to the ear..
In the case of Steve Reich and Philip Glass, their
approach relies heavily on the use of ostinatos. They
are used building up polyrythmic tensions and
resolving them as a foundation of their music. But
they both for the most part shun completely
traditional chord and melody progression. Reich is
from http://www.themodernmusic.com/2006/02/postrockexperimental.html
heavily influenced by African drum music, where the
tension is built up mostly with polyrhythms. The
music of Arvo Pärt, Henryk Gorecki and Lamonte Young
along with Gavin Bryars is more connected to the
aesthetic of GYBE and A Silver Mt. Zion. Here,
instead of ostinatos we have longer notes which fade
one into another, much like a hymn, or Gregorian
singing in an empty church. Arvo Pärt for one calls
his approach ‘bell tone’, due to the fact that when
one note is held for an extended amount of time along
with its corresponding 3rd or 6th, different overtones
of the notes start to become more audible to the
ear.3 Just as Western harmony was born in empty
churches where monks singing Gregorian chants could
hear the reverberation of the notes echoing back into
each other. The rockers of the modern era draw this
influence back into their music, and return it to
popular culture.
Reynolds expanded upon the idea later in the May
1994 issue of The Wire.[1][5] He used the term to
describe music "using rock instrumentation for nonrock purposes, using guitars as facilitators of
timbre and textures rather than riffs and power
chords." He further expounds on the term:
“Perhaps the really provocative area for future
development lies... in cyborg rock; not the
wholehearted embrace of Techno's methodology, but
some kind of interface between real time, hands-on
3
Paull Hilliel, Arvo Pärt
playing and the use of digital effects and
enhancement."
4
In Post-Rock, electronics are used along with
traditional rock instruments and more classically
rooted instruments like violins, choir and wind
instruments. Post-rock can be quite droney,
especially as played by guitar-driven bands. But the
more pop oriented bands sound atmospheric as well.
They are all commonly the antithesis of rock, since
rock, having become only a market formula, could not
be rebellious anymore. The emergence of Post-Rock was
a sort of silent rebellion.
The first movement of Gorecki’s 3rd symphony
starts off with this simple bass line:
It’s in the key of E eolian. This then builds up in
register over a time span of a few minutes, and
starts to cascade into higher voices:
Reynolds, Simon. Simon Reynolds' article on postrock. The Wire. Retrieved on 2006-11-28.
4
Notice that the higher voice starts from a note a
3rd higher than the first voice, which is to say
it’s the same line only transposed up a 3rd.
Moya starts off with a drone, borrowing the idea
of a static beginning. It states the key of Bb.
This is then followed by the simple guitar/violin
melody, accompanied by a cello drone:
The theme is played a few times in rubato, and then
elaborated upon. Then we get the chord progression
played by a guitar:
This is then followed by the other instruments joining
in little by little, until the result is a wall of
sound. Thus, the rock sound has become just another
device available to the modern classical composer.
The new generation of rockers is sometimes labeled
“cute” but when more closely looked at, one sees that
this is simply an act of subverting the power of rock
to itself. When rock ceased to be a real rebellion and
became just another marketing device, the new rockers
started to look elsewhere for inspiration. Post-rock
was like an alternative to the alternative rock. When
rock instruments were used to play music that is not
rock, a new type of music emerged. But this music was
like an archeological dig, rediscovering something that
had always been there, in the light of rock’s raw power
and directness. Much as modern classical music seems to
have lost its way to the desperate escape from its
tradition, which suffocates any new music being born,
perhaps rock is the only musical form that can save it?
After all, Beethoven, Mozart and other composers can be
said to have lived and died like rock stars do. In the
era in which classical music was being born, Beethoven
and Mozart would both be known for improvising pieces
of amazing beauty and grace, much like rockers “jam”.
However, unlike jazzers who like to encode everything
in complexity and suggestivity, this type of jamming
could well have been closer to The Grateful Dead sound
than to Charlie Parker. Bach was known to improvise
during church service, and theories have been made that
Air on a G-String is in fact an improvisation that
somebody transcribed while listening to him, thus
explaining its difference from all his other work.
I believe that the real new classical music is not
only the one being made in academies, and spearheaded
by professors, but also the raw instrumental music of
post-rock, which has reached a level of sophistication
which rivals that of classical music. This music is
made with the rawness and energy of something new being
born, and as rock has not lost the connection with its
listeners, like so much 20th century classical music
did, it stays close to the human spirit, and its
infinite complexity.
New York, December 20, 2007
Hallvardur Asgeirsson
The live version of Moya, which goes by the working
title ‘Gorecki’ and can be found on the internet at
http://www.archive.org/details/gybe2000-10-31
Citations:
1. Post-rock. (2007, December 12). In Wikipedia, The
Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 00:42, December 21,
2007, from
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Postrock&oldid=177330456
2. Post-rock/Experimental. (2007, December 12). In
Modern Music. Retrieved 00:42, December 21, 2007,
from http://www.themodernmusic.com/2006/02/postrockexperimental.html
3.
Hilliel, P. (1997). Arvo Pärt. Oxford University
Press.
4. Reynolds, Simon. Simon Reynolds' article on postrock. The Wire. Retrieved on 2006-11-28.