Thread: Minimalists

What do you think about minimalism?
I think it gives you so much space to listen to the music, unlike the rest(I'm not saying that the rest is bad) where you just have to sit and listen. For example: Arvo Pärt,Philip Glass,Steve Reich etc.

Originally Posted by MilanStevanovich

What do you think about minimalism?
I think it gives you so much space to listen to the music, unlike the rest(I'm not saying that the rest is bad) where you just have to sit and listen. For example: Arvo Pärt,Philip Glass,Steve Reich etc.

I personally love the aesthetic of minimalsim. I can understand how others would not like it, though. I would never try to tell someone how stupid they are for not liking something that I do.

I think I'll stick with maximalism. Thank you

Originally Posted by TrazomGangflow

I think I'll stick with maximalism. Thank you

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Minimalsim is great, Arvo Pärt is one of my favorite composers. I also like Terry Riley and Miachel Gordon, oh and John Adams... can't forget about him.

Originally Posted by Tapkaara

I personally love the aesthetic of minimalsim. I can understand how others would not like it, though. I would never try to tell someone how stupid they are for not liking something that I do.

Is minimalism related to budget? LOL

Martin

I feel that, unlike other works, minimalism gets right to the core of music and expresses emotions more deeply, take Arvo Part's Cantus in memoriam Benjamin Britten for example. That is one of the most profound, expressive works I have heard, yet it is basically just a descending A minor scale. And Spiegel im Spiegel as well. Beautiful.

I try to refrain from expressing negative opinions on composers here, but I find minimalism quite boring and wonder what the point is.

I can enjoy it in small doses, and I like Eric Satie and Federico Mompou for minimalistic elements, but Glass is not my bag and Part, though there is something entrancing, doesn't really click with me.

I'm listening to minimalistic compositions to try and prove to myself that its ridiculous, but I must be extra sensitive today, its ridiculous that I should be feeling things over such simple and stupid music, its like they have a formula to pull your heart strings with patterns and they just do it over and over, its stupid. But I guess it kind of works. Part is better at it than Glass.

I'm over it, I think its just boring.

Y'all keep referring to "it," but it's really "them." And the thems are quite different from each other.

Plus, many of the composers mentioned don't think of themselves as minimalists, but you knew that already, didn't you? I don't think anyone in the business has ever thought of John Coolidge Adams as a minimalist, including J.C. himself. But he uses some tropes from one of the many strands of minimalism and so quickly became labelled as such by journalists, and listeners picked that up. (A musicican friend of mine once mentioned that Adams was the first minimalist, if you can imagine. The first he had heard of was all. And wrong besides, eh?)

Think of what "minimal" means in all other contexts (including the visual arts, where the term originated). Does it mean "repetitious"? Not really. Odd that its meaning for music should have been so firmly and so universally considered to be "repetitious" music. (That strand of minimalism is not even the oldest one.)

Oh well. And even though I've done this before, and it's done no good at all, here's an essay by someone who does identify himself as a minimalist.

www.editions75.com/Articles/Minimalism%20in%20music.pdf

Originally Posted by MilanStevanovich

What do you think about minimalism?

The silent type of fart.

My view of minimalism focused mostly on repetitive music from composers such as Reich and Glass. The only other type I have heard is what some call drone minimalism where a constant note is played as background to the other music. The drone music reminds me of bagpipes which I do not enjoy. I do enjoy some music of Reich and Glass, but often I find the music less interesting over time and do not want to finish listening.

I do enjoy much of John Adams work. I had heard he was a minimalist, but his music did not seem minimalist to me other than in certain small parts.

Originally Posted by some guy

Oh well. And even though I've done this before, and it's done no good at all, here's an essay by someone who does identify himself as a minimalist.

Tom Johnson's paper on minimalism was informative and describes many other minimalist music besides repetitive music. The most interesting to me were what Johnson refers to as silent music. Of course Cage's 4'33" is referenced, but many other (more interesting IMO) types of silent music are discussed. These are works that cannot be played in a practical way.

Marchetti wrote a work for 8 orchestras or organs. Since it's rather unlikely that anyone will get 8 orchestras together or find a hall with 8 organs, this work will almost certainly never be played although it theoretically could be.

Barlow wrote a computer program that output 300 pages of random piano music. The music contains random combinations of notes and durations. One portion requires a rest of over 109 billion years between notes. Another portion has chords requiring 3 or 4 hands to play. Again theoretically possible, but practically impossible.

These works do not seem minimalist to me since they are not simple in any way except that they lead to no actual music being played.

When I was a child, my father liked to ask “if you call the tail of a dog a leg, how many legs has it got?” (It was that sort of family.)

Of course, the answer is four, because calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it one. However, in my maturity, I recognise that it is a matter of classification: if all the things you call legs are legs by definition, that is as valid as defining something as a leg in terms of its ability to do the things you expect a leg to do.

So, my contention is that there is actually very little minimalist music, as originally conceived of by Nyman when he coined the term. Glass’s Music in twelve parts is an example, as is Reich’s Drumming. But Akhnaten and The desert music (for example) are examples of the same composers doing something else.

There is nothing minimalistic about these works. Let alone, say, John Adams’s Harmonium. These are works which are consciously simple harmonically and melodically; but which are anything but simple in terms of structure (any movement of Harmonium is at least as complex as any movement of, say, the Brahms Requiem); and which demand an emotional engagement from performers and audience not possible or required in early Glass and Reich.

So I would like to label almost everything which is actually called ‘minimalist’ as ‘post-minimalist’ in order to recognise the specialness of a small number of literally ground breaking works.

Minimalist works make the minimalist techniques what the music is about (Glass expressed this forever by having the chorus count the beats and sing solfège in Einstein on the beach).

Post-minimalist works typically use minimalist techniques gesturally. Here, these techniques are, ultimately, dispensable if they do not serve the greater vision, which is surely how it should be.

The trouble is that, all these composers writing post-minimalistically (in my terms) – whether Pärt, Taverner, Glass, Reich, Nyman – put themselves up against the mainstream European serious music tradition – and inevitably usually fall short because they have voluntarily crippled themselves with a poverty of artistic invention due to the materials they choose to deploy. The real compositional quality (as I see it) of Adams’s Shaker Loops or Harmonium just emphasises the thinness of invention in many of his other works, and so many other "minimalist" works - such as Harmonielehre (and worse).

It’s like everyone wants to be Carl Orff.

I like Reich a lot, and the others pretty well. But I wouldn't consider myself qualified to pass judgment.