[microsound] Re: [mcrosound] mnmalsm

["tobias c. van Veen" <tobias@xxxxxxxxx>]

[  - ] : subtractions ,without the "i"


> Exactly. I think the problem is that good aesthetic minimalism sounds
> deceptively simple.  It sounds like its easy.  This combined with fashion
> results in an abundance of second rate work. I think that some aesthetic
> minimalism can be quite beautiful and highly engaging. But its is not an
> easy discipline to master.


What constitutes an analytic definition of "fashion" in this context and how
does it differ from practices that are apparently fashionless, zero degree
fashion, i.e. "out of fashion"?

Isn't "mastery" a modernist, if not metaphysical category that should be
assessed as such and not a priori given to judge all categorization of
minimalism(s)?

What constitutes the qualifiers from "first" to "second" rate work?


I think these sorts of questions need to be pursued; otherwise,

- minimalism's influences from non-Western forms of thought and practice are
negated, effaced

- a history is written using concepts developed during a "history" to
postulate the framework of the "history" (mastery, fashion, discipline, the
beautiful (why not the sublime?), and the concept of "category" itself)

- the point of _rupture_ within any history is negated, effaced in favour of
including all manifestations of an apparent "minimalism" as "minimalism" in
a linear, uninterruptable narrative that struggles for, in this case,
"addition": "Thirty to forty years on, we need to have something to add to
that body of work."

How does this contrast vis-à-vis Richie Hawtin's publicized notion of
"subtraction" when he began M_Nus records in the late 90s, shortly after the
Concept:96 series?

What does it mean to "add" to a "history" of possible movements of
"subtraction"?

Isn't the DJ a minimalist insofar s/he doesn't "add," but remixed in a flow,
via a recombinant logic, the archives of music?

Shouldn't today's "fashionable" minimalism be investigated as to how it has
developed its (diverse) concepts, or subtracts from the concept(s) (or
"histories") to forge sound possibly for reasons other than what the
framework of this analysis will allow, including but not able to include
minimalism which would proceed by no "concept" whatsoever?

Thus, is a minimalism without a concept wrought through critical reason
"fashionable"?




tV


ps. Sure sure, I'm being rough: but the question is, why write a history of
minimalisms that seeks to inscribe it into a logical ordering of categories
and back into the narratives of Western music? This seems to appropriate for
Western music's sing-song the very extra-categorial movements and
incorporation of non-Western themeatics, thought and sound that forms of
minimalism (forms which would constitute entirely different "minimal/isms")
sought to share with cultures perhaps less obsessed by the same
monumentalizations.




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