gtaylor@cornell.UUCP (04/27/84)
There is a new book out by a Belgian named Wim Mertens (you may know him through the punk label "Led Disques du Crepuscule"-he helped put together a tape from the NEW Music America festival in Chicago which features a wonderful interview/argument with John Cage on the merits of Glen Branca's music) which is currently only available in Dutch. I understand that Michael Nyman is preparing an English translation of it, though. Mertens' book is on what he calls "Repetitive Music." He takes great pains to distinguish this from Minimal stuff, which he seems more likely to attribute to LaMonte Young or Alvin Lucier's stuff. The split seems based on a sort of cognitive model for how we hear music. In the minimal enterprise, we have our attention directed by the composer's choice of what we hear, and the emphasis is one of choice and relative weighting of events. For Mertens, the Repetitive notion (in which he would include most of the composers usually associated with "Minimalism"-Reich,Glass, Adams,Borden,Reilly)concentrates on the process of listening over the course of an entire single experience. I think you'll find a similar notion in the aplit between the Structuralist who is merely content to study the minutiae of patterning in culture vs. the Structuralist who is interested in the "why" of it. THis way of thinking bears some interesting fruit when you apply it to the general models we use to describe the course of 20th century music. BY Mertens' formulation, Young and Lucier are in some sense truly in the tradition of 20 century music in the sense of claiming that choice, ordering and structuring are sufficient to produce the preception of order in the listener (cf. the serialist claim that permutations of the tone row ARE, in fact, understood in some subliminal sense in even the most rigourous serialism). Cage of course, figures in here pretty prominently as well. It is more program than method. The repetitive notion would seem at first to be an outgrowth in the notions of system and permutation from serialism.In Mertens' terminology it becomes an investigation of method in light of a sort of paradigm shift on the part of the "educated listener", who is acquainted enough with the fine art tradition, world musics, and popular musics (the "hook" as retetitive fragment) to begin listening "across" traditions. Such a listener is presumably interested in HOW he hears. Some of the German stuff that's now come to be called "New Age" music also fits into this category as well. What I find interesting about all this is to consider his notions as it currently affects the changes in the work of Minimal composers over the last several years. Terry Riley(oops, I misspelled it above) has a new album out of "songs"-produced with the technology we know so well, but with words, texts, and a strong raga base. Philip Glass' Akhenaton is certainly the most "classical of his stuff I've heard"-Twyla Tharp used some of it on her last tour, and I've yet to hear any of Reich's setting of William Carlos Williams, but if Telhilleem is any indication, he's personalized the stuff quite a lot. Sadly, David Borden remains obscure, still. His new work uses the minimal "Block and Layer" technique with the techniques of Renaissance counterpint, and produces this gorgeous "Brandenburgs on the Beach" stuff. Mertens' formulation of repetitive music as method would certain seem to lend it a certain freedom for readaptation and individuation apart from some formal "program". I'll close this bit of pedantic whoopee with the official "Minimalist Knock-knock Joke (as told by Philip Glass at Aspen): "Knock-knock" "WHo's there?" "Knock-knock"...... r/re/reg/rega/regar/regard/regards/egards/gards/ards/rds/ds/s, gtaylor@cornell (gregory taylor)