Love-Hounds-request@EDDIE.MIT.EDU.UUCP (02/20/87)
Really-From: rutgers!uwvax!astroatc!gtaylor (Mais, ou sont les neiges d'antan?) >>We'll avoid for the moment the point that andrew seems to have >>confused Minimalism as a compositional category (to which we >>might well appeal to Eno's releases on the Obscure label in the >>min-70s..a then relatively unknown bunch who have since become >>well known and identified as Minimalists: Gavin Bryars, John Adams, >>John White, Michael Nyman, and Eno's own "Discreet Music") with >>minimalism. >It is your definition which is arbitrary, not IED's. Your perspective >is very narrow indeed if you think that the term minimalism, even >with a capital M, had never been used before Bryars and his ilk >discovered it. And the allegation which IED was refuting specified >minimalism's "RE-birth", anyway, remember? Silly me. I have forgotten in such a short time that your definitions are never arbitrary-it is only the rest of us who make silly distinctions like that. You know-serialism and Serialism. impressionist and Impressionist. I've thought it over and decided that you're right-my perspective is indeed narrow. The term Minimalist does seem to have been used to describe composers before Bryars and his ilk-as far back as *1965*, in fact. Here I was thinking that Rob was referring to a renewal of interest on the part of pop music types in Minimalism in the middle seventies following an initial burst of interest in Minimalism in the late sixties and very early seventies (mostly from players influenced by LaMonte Young, and not a few of whom were electronic composers-Like Tonto's expanding Head Band in the late 60's) that died down when a lot of the experimentalism associated with the late sixties gave way to Glam, Progressive, etc. The distinction which I attempt to draw between minimalism and Minimalism (the new Grove Encyclopaedia uses the capital letter, too. Are they as narrow as I am, I wonder?) is a simple one, andrew: one word describes a kind of perceived economy of use, and the other refers to a specific critical label which is specifically and descriptively applied to a body of composition and a number of composers located in this century-the earliest references I can account for refer to the work of LaMonte Young and the Theatre of Eternal Music in the mid-sixties and beyond. Although such a distinction may seem arbitrary to you, I do think you might have a little trouble finding a critic who would describe Bach as a Minimalist. I'll check it out in this nifty Ninth Collegiate Dictionary that has seen fit to include dates for entry of what it concludes are new usages in English: minimalist: adj (1967): of, relating to, or done in the style of minimalism. I'd have assumed that it made its way into the language through the visual arts first, although there's some contemporary writing on the Fluxus group (63-64) that makes mention of the ism as well. On another note of somewhat similar interest (that is, Rob's bit on RE-birth): There is an interesting line of argument that says that that initial burst of interest in Minimalism is in some way directly connected with technology (Steve Reich's early Phase-Gate boxes, LaMonte Young's week-long oscillator pieces, David Borden's early stuff on the then-young Moogs (he and Bobby Moog were neighbors in Trumansburg, NY back then) in its initial run, and that the German school of electronic music-Ash Ra and Michael Hoenig, Schulze, TD-really represents the flowering of that initial technologically-oriented wave. The second wave was of a more conceptual nature, more directly connected to the notion of "Systems" compositions (this is where Bryars started out) than the technology itself (the Obscure Catalog would seem to bear this out), and thus succeeded the second time out because it was more broadly applied and pursued-resulting in the current situation where we can lump a quite disparate group of composers in the same boat. Oh well, it happened with Serialism as well. -- it was a slow day/and the sun was beating/on the soldiers by the side of the road/there was a bright light/a shattering of shop windows/the bomb in the baby carriage was wired to the radio/these are the days of miracle and wonder....Gregory Alan Taylor......!uwvax!astroatc!gtaylor