Radicalism is relative. By the nineteen-fifties, the dissonances that had seared the ears of concertgoers before the First World War had become the lingua franca of international modernism. As music moved toward maximum complexity, composers in various countries rebelled against the rebellion, reclaiming elemental harmonies. The most famous gesture of simplification came in 1964, in the form of Terry Riley’s “In C,” a founding work of minimalism. In the same period, Henryk Górecki, in Poland, and Arvo Pärt, in Estonia, began to deploy ancient-sounding tonality in a sacred context. And in Denmark composers who had assembled under the banner “New Simplicity” treated major and minor triads as found objects—beautiful debris amid the sonic ruins.
No composer reclaimed triads more brazenly than Olivier Messiaen, the devoutly Catholic French master. After the Second…
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The New Yorker (Digital) - 1 Issue, February 22, 2016