Re: [microsound] minimalism

[Bill Jarboe <billjarboe@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

on 3/4/04 7:37 PM, Ian Andrews at i.andrews@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

> I'm at the moment looking at the term minimalism and trying to explore some
> issues around that term. I want to begin by first looking at the
> a-historical concept of minimalism, minimalism as a tendency, rather than
> Minimalism as a specific art movement by a specific group of artists at a
> specific moment in time. In other words small-m minimalism as opposed to
> capital-M minimalism.
> 
> I have found Julian Knowles' comments (on this list and elsewhere) useful.
> 
> Julian Knowleswrote:
> 
>> To a lesser extent you could delve into Keith Potter's Book "four
>> musical minimalists" which deals with 60s minimalist music in what I
>> would call the 'repetitionist' sense (terry riley, steve reich etc...)
>> - which i see as being markedly different from tone/drone/silence based
>> minimalism. The repetitionist end of 60s/70s minimalism is the 'pop'
>> end and the one which is most likely to be documented in general books
>> on music history. I would argue, however, that the tone/drone/silence
>> end was far more influential, at least in the electronic music scene.
> 
> This division is quite interesting but I would like to broaden it and make
> it even more inclusive.  As I see it, the 'repetitionists' belong to a much
> wider category which includes many other composers not usually even
> associated with the word 'minimalism.'

  Oh Yes. I like it. It has sometimes bothered me when someone refers to
repetitionists; especially if there are many compositional ideas repeated ;
as minimalists. 

  I've resisted the tendency to say"Fuck you" and walk off , usually because
that person was buying me a drink and I was thirsty.


> I would call this type 'self
> -reflexive minimalism.' By this I mean that the primary concept of the work
> involves a foregrounding of the work's underlying processes, and that in
> order to achieve this a certain amount of minimalist reduction becomes a
> necessity.  In other words, in these works, minimalism is a consequence
> rather than a goal in itself. The aim of the 'repetitionsists', who might
> also be called 'systems' composers, was to enable the work to show its
> underlying mathematical structure in the act of its own performance (without
> any reference to external material). Something, they argued, that Serialism
> failed to do.  In order to do this successfully the basic elements of the
> work needed to be extremely simple, sparse or cyclic.  I would argue that a
> significant amount of work that is concerned above all with process could
> also be described described as minimalist - the work of Lucier for example.
 How about a minimal amount of process , or a minimal amount of thought (put
into a composition)? Come to think of it , there is really alot of minmalism
going on in life , isn't there?





 dos  someone want to give it a flink

 Does someone   want  to flink  me?  am   I   in   a    form   that   is
flingable   and   which   part   do i   want   to be flung/   which   parts
to I want   to be   flung   and   by whom   ? and wahat  for and how much do
I want the flinger to be fussed over?And whom shall decide how much the
flinger is fussed over and how   focused that fling shall be ? or if   the
fling perhaps isn't acknowledged as    such  perhaps the (secret) flinging
shalll be more genuine and organic
> 
> The second type of minimalism, the pure-tone/silence type of minimalism
> exemplified by John Cage and La Monte Young, I would call 'boundary
> minimalism.' This type of minimalism seeks to map the limits of music by
> asking the question: "how much content can be removed from a the work before
> the work ceases to be a piece of music?" Boundary minimalism seems to be
> more allied to conceptual art movements.
> 
> To these two distinct types of minimalism we could perhaps add a third type
> of minimalism that might be called 'aesthetic minimalism.' This type of
> minimalism is not primarily concerned with the foregrounding of structures,
> background processes and the media substrate, nor is it concerned with
> interrogating the boundaries of music.  Rather it is concerned with the
> development of a finely tuned minimalist aesthetic sensibility (perhaps
> itself derived form the other minimalisms) - a kind of 'less is more'
> approach - without the need to go to extremes. I would put most drone based
> music and techno/glitch type minimalism in this category.
> 
> There are clearly works which could be ambiguous, falling into more than one
> of these classifications. My intention here is not to create solid
> definitions and classifications but rather to construct working categories
> in order to examine the relation between post-digital music(s) (and
> post-digital aesthetics) and minimalism.
 
 Then there's a minmal amount of control
> 
> The first two types of minimalism could be described as formalist although
> each relates to a different type of formalism.  Boundary minimalism by
> definition, should always be short lived.  Once it has established its
> limits it really has nowhere else to go.  Its continuation along a linear
> trajectory veers toward essentialism. It attempts to occupy a position which
> is both at the extremities and at the origin. I find this type of
> essentialism - of "pure art" - which finds its voice in the writings of
> Greenberg, Fried, et al. - extremely problematic. I agree with Julian that
> the much of the new (boundary) minimalism, including his example of Taku
> Sugimoto, does not offer anything new, does not push the boundaries any
> further, and in my opinion gets mired in a kind of Zen essentialism.
> 
> I'd be interested to hear any comments.  Julian?
> 


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