[microsound] minimalism

[Ian Andrews <i.andrews@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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.' 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.
 
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.

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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