Guest Post: In C, The Gospel According to Dylan Mattingly

You simply have to relax and trust in that flow, let the music fill you and believe that it will take you places.  Because it will.

—Dylan Mattingly

—Post by Dylan Mattingly

The thing about In C that is so incredible to me is that it is completely radically different every time it's played.  In C is a byproduct of its performers and location to the extreme.  The performers have control over how many repetitions they give each cell (little chunk of repeated music), they have control over how loud, how soft, what octave, how slow/fast, and yes, how harshly/smoothly they play.

I hadn't personally listened to the original recording in a long time, and I had forgotten how driving and indeed piercing it begins.  But then once you get to 3 minutes and 45 seconds in, that all changes.

To me, the trick to listening to something like In C, or really anything long, is to be able to give yourself over to the music in an uncomfortably complete way. It can be very difficult to trust journey-music, particularly if you don't like the beginning, or if you are already dubious of the composer for whatever reason, etc.  But often that sense of trust is crucial.

Of course, I can tell you now that that trust will pay off in a piece like In C, and still you might be dubious (and perhaps justly so, it's a big undertaking, often over an hour!), and I certainly understand the unwillingness to give oneself over to an hour of their life that might end up not being worthwhile!  Certainly if there is no track record, no friend to tell you to hold on, then what do you have to pull you through?  Sometimes with new music, therefore, it takes a true explorer (looking at you, Sue).

But my experience is that the moment you find yourself wishing for something different, anything different ("change already!" is the typical line in minimalism), you've missed out.

With In C, the first great joy is the incredible change that occurs over the course of the piece.  Just what I mentioned above, going from that harsh mechanical to such a broad, grand arrival just before the 4 minute mark I find fairly shocking.  And then there's the fact that despite the piece's title, the entire thing is not actually in C . . .  It travels across e minor, G major, even arguably ends in g minor.  One of the repeated "phrases" is just an F#!

But the other great thing about In C, which doesn't come across as much in the recording is this fact that it is NEVER an untimely piece of music when performed live.  Whether it's the conscious understanding of an audience by the performers or more likely the minute unfathomable bits of chaos that shape intuition, In C is a giant effervescent ceremony when performed live, the combination of the desires of everybody participating (audience and performers) into something that is always a very direct reflection of its time and place.

Thus the difference in any two performances is extraordinary!  (This is the reason that Contemporaneous performs In C twice a year, in a different location every time.)

Have a look at a couple different performances on YouTube to see what I mean:

This one is played by an orchestra (did I mention the amount and type of instruments are completely left up to the performers . . .?), and I SWEAR this could have been written by Wagner:



Here's Contemporaneous' performance in the local punk-rock venue at Bard College (by the way, if you have perfect pitch you might notice that this section of the piece is clearly in G!):



Here's a version of In C at Le Poisson Rouge, NYC's hip new music/indie-rock night club.  Tell me this doesn't sounds like house music?!



Here's an interesting one, for four acoustic guitars.  Man is this one relaxed (this won't be "hurting anyone's ears"!):



The thing is, In C is so incredibly fabricated, these little "cells" are so well put together, that the piece ALWAYS works.  And not only does it work, but allows people to express themselves, their position, their place, and a beautiful framework, and a perfect arc.  The simplicity of the piece is groundbreaking, but what is really incredible about it to me, is that it gives a voice to so much, time and again.  Perhaps that is because of the simplicity of its elements, perhaps because it is simply in C (even if it's not quite).  To see it or play it live is an unforgettable group experience, even religious.

When talking about how to listen to minimalism, I like to mention Alex Ross' description of listening to Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians, one of the other great masterworks of the genre.  He says that listening to Music for 18 Musicians is like listening to a river flow.  To me this is the perfect analogy. You can't follow each drop of water, and despite how it might seem the river is never the same.  You simply have to relax and trust in that flow, let the music fill you and believe that it will take you places.  Because it will.

David Bloom, Finnegan Shanahan & Dylan Mattingly at Indeterminate Meltdown:  In C Jam

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Postscript:  Dylan Mattingly originally offered this piece as a comment to Prufrock’s post on In C (the original version of In C about which he writes can be found by clicking here).  Grateful thanks to Dylan for allowing me to post this as a guest post.  For more about Dylan Mattingly, click here.  For more about Contemporaneous, click here.

Further Postscript:  As George Wallace noted in his comment to my original post about In C, here is a choral version of In C by Ars Nova Copenhagen (for more on Ars Nova Copenhagen, click here):



Another just in from George Wallace:  In C by The Gertrudes:



Credits:  The image at the head of the post is of the score for In C, which can be found in its entirety, including performing directions, here.  The photograph of Bloom, Shanahan, and Mattingly can be found here.