Mikel Rouse (born Michael Rouse; January 26, 1957 in Saint Louis, Missouri, United States) is an American composer. He has been associated with a Downtown New York City movement known as totalism, and is best known for his operas, including Dennis Cleveland , about a television talk show host, which Rouse wrote and starred in.
Rouse writes music that is idiomatically and stylistically indebted to popular music, yet he uses complex rhythmic techniques derived from world music, the avant-garde and minimalism, including a technique he calls "counterpoetry" in which separate lines of a song sung by separate characters or groups are set to phrases of differing lengths (such as 9 and 10 beats) and often played over a background time signature of 4/4. Metric sleight of hand, simple in concept but often complex in perception, is common. One of the basic rhythms of Rouse's opera Failing Kansas is a five-beat isorhythm (rhythmic ostinato) against which either the harmony or drum pattern often reinforces the four- or eight-beat meter.
The son of a Missouri state trooper, Rouse grew up in Poplar Bluff, in the state's Bootheel region. Early in life, he decided to change the spelling of his first name to "Mikel," to more accurately represent the name's pronunciation. He studied painting and film at the Kansas City Art Institute as well as music at the University of Missouri–Kansas City. When the avant-garde rock band Talking Heads played in Kansas City in 1978, Rouse's band Tirez Tirez was the only local band progressive enough to open for them. Tirez Tirez relocated to New York City in 1979 and continued performing until 1987. Meanwhile, Rouse absorbed African rhythmic techniques from A. M. Jones's Studies in African Music, and studied Schillinger technique with Jerome Walman, one of the few "Certified" Schillinger Teachers in America; both influences came to inform his music. In addition to Tirez Tirez he formed a new ensemble, Mikel Rouse Broken Consort, to work out his new rhythmic language in the context of rock-based instrumentation, making him one of the first composers to notate intricate music for rock group. Rouse's association with Ben Neill and Kyle Gann in New York in the early 1990s led to the recognition of a new rhythmic complexity in minimalist-based music that came to be referred to as totalism.
Frustrated by the lack of institutional support for Downtown music, Rouse has made an ambitious bid for composer self-sufficiency. In 1995 he premiered a one-man "opera" Failing Kansas, based on the same story as Truman Capote's In Cold Blood , and in 2000 he produced an entire film with music by himself, rather pointedly titled Funding. In an opposite direction, he premiered a technologically innovative opera called Dennis Cleveland at the Kitchen in 1996, based on a talk show format and with some of the singers/actors spread out among the audience, though with a dense libretto drawn from John Ralston Saul's critique of Western society in the latter's book Voltaire's Bastards . In 2002 the opera was presented at Lincoln Center.
He collaborated with Ben Neill on The Demo, based on The Mother of All Demos, a technological demonstration of 1968. It was performed in 2015 at the Bing Concert Hall of Stanford University. [1] [2] [3] He received a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants for Artists award (2001). [4]
Benjamin Burwell Johnston Jr. was an American contemporary music composer, known for his use of just intonation. He was called "one of the foremost composers of microtonal music" by Philip Bush and "one of the best non-famous composers this country has to offer" by John Rockwell.
Kyle Eugene Gann is an American composer, professor of music, critic, analyst, and musicologist who has worked primarily in the New York City area. As a music critic for The Village Voice and other publications, he has supported progressive music, including such "downtown" movements as postminimalism and totalism.
Ben Neill is an American composer, trumpeter, producer, and educator. He is the inventor of the "Mutantrumpet", a hybrid electro-acoustic instrument.
Downtown music is a subdivision of American music, closely related to experimental music, which developed in downtown Manhattan in the 1960s.
Minimal music is a form of art music or other compositional practice that employs limited or minimal musical materials. Prominent features of minimalist music include repetitive patterns or pulses, steady drones, consonant harmony, and reiteration of musical phrases or smaller units. It may include features such as phase shifting, resulting in what is termed phase music, or process techniques that follow strict rules, usually described as process music. The approach is marked by a non-narrative, non-teleological, and non-representational approach, and calls attention to the activity of listening by focusing on the internal processes of the music.
Kevin Volans is a South African born Irish composer and pianist. He studied with Karlheinz Stockhausen and Mauricio Kagel in Cologne in the 1970s and later became associated with the Neue Einfacheit movement in the city. In the late 1970s he became interested in the indigenous music of his homeland and began a series of pieces which attempted to combine aspects of African and contemporary European music. Although Volans later moved away from any direct engagement with African music, certain residual elements such as interlocking rhythms, repetition and open forms are still detectable in his music since the early 1990s which takes a new direction more redolent of certain schools of abstract art. He settled in Ireland permanently in 1986 and was granted Irish citizenship in 1994.
Totalism is a style of art music that arose in the 1980s and 1990s as a response to minimalism. It paralleled postminimalism but involved a younger generation of creators, born in the 1950s. This term, invented by writer and composer Kyle Gann, has not been adopted by contemporary musicology and generally still refers only to Gann's use of it in his writings. It is also used to refer to a radically economically left and authoritarian political ideology in the fictional Hearts of Iron IV mod "Kaiserreich", although the two are unrelated.
Systems music is music with sound continua which evolve gradually, often over very long periods of time. Historically, the American minimalists Steve Reich, La Monte Young and Philip Glass are considered the principal proponents of this compositional approach. Works by this group of composers are often characterized by features such as stasis or repetitiveness.
The Rhythmicon—also known as the Polyrhythmophone—was an electro-mechanical musical instrument designed and built by Leon Theremin for composer Henry Cowell, intended to reveal connections between rhythms, pitches and the harmonic series. It used a series of perforated spinning disks, similar to a Nipkow disk, to interrupt the flow of light between bulbs and phototoreceptors aligned with the disk perforations. The interrupted signals created oscillations which were perceived as rhythms or tones depending on the speed of the disks. Although it generated both pitches and rhythms, it has often been described as the world's first drum machine.
Tirez Tirez was an American rock band led by composer/performer Mikel Rouse, the band's only constant member. The group was active from 1978 through 1988, and had a new wave/art rock sensibility that was strongly influenced by minimalism.
Rosa, A Horse Drama also called Rosa – The Death of a Composer is an opera in 12 scenes by Dutch composer, Louis Andriessen with a libretto by English film maker Peter Greenaway. The libretto was the sixth in Greenaway's Death of a Composer series which explores the deaths of ten 20th-century composers, two real, and the remaining eight fictional. It premiered at the Dutch National Opera on 2 November 1994 in a production co-directed by Greenaway and Saskia Boddeke. A recording of the opera was released on the Nonesuch label in 1998; Asko/Schönberg, conductor Reinbert de Leeuw..
Dennis Báthory-Kitsz is a Hungarian-American author and composer.
John McGuire is an American composer, pianist, organist, and music editor.
The term polytempo or polytempic is used to describe music in which two or more tempi occur simultaneously.
Randolph 'Randy' Coleman is an American composer and educator. He was the first chairman of the national council of the American Society of University Composers, now called The Society of Composers, Inc.
Petr Kotik is a composer, conductor and flutist living in New York City. He was educated in Europe. From 1960 to 1963, Kotik studied composition privately with Jan Rychlík in Prague, and from 1963 to 1966 at the Music Academy in Vienna with Karl Schieske, Hans Jelinek, and Friedrich Cerha. In Prague, he founded and directed Musica Viva Pragensis (1961–64) and the QUAX Ensemble (1966–69). He came to the United States in 1969 at the invitation of Lukas Foss and Lejaren Hiller to join the Center for Creative and Performing Arts at the University at Buffalo.
The Well-Tuned Piano is an ongoing improvisatory solo piano work begun in 1964 by La Monte Young. Young has never considered the composition or performance of this piece finished, and he has performed it differently several times since its debut in 1974. The composition requires a piano tuned in just intonation. A 1987 performance of the piece was released on DVD in 2000.
Phase music is a form of music that uses phasing as a primary compositional process. It is an approach to musical composition that is often associated with minimal music, as it shares similar characteristics, but some commentators prefer to treat phase music as a separate category. Phasing is a compositional technique in which the same part is played on two musical instruments, in steady but not identical tempi. Thus, the two instruments gradually shift out of unison, creating first a slight echo as one instrument plays a little behind the other, then a doubling effect with each note heard twice, then a complex ringing effect, and eventually coming back through doubling and echo into unison.
The Time Curve Preludes is a minimalist composition for piano solo by William Duckworth written between 1977 and 1978. This piece is credited as the first postminimal piece of music, and is his most frequently heard work. The Time Curve Preludes were composed between 1977 and 1978 on a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. They were premiered at Wesleyan University in 1979 by pianist Neely Bruce. Duckworth used elements of Minimalism, including repetition and accessible harmonies, yet also embraced more quickly changing structures; wide-ranging, complex melodies; and colorful dissonances.
Dennis Lee Johnson was a mathematician and minimal composer. He is the namesake of the Johnson homomorphism in the study of mapping class groups of surfaces.