Comments on: M50: Minimalism Turns Fifty

By: zeno

zeno — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 19:53:42 +0000

“There are also a number of works by Loren Rush of the same era (Rush was improvising with Riley and Oliveros in 1958!) which are critical to later developments but have, until very recently, been more or less erased from historical accounts.”

– Daniel Wolf

Speaking of new music from 1958 to about 1967 (and for those who haven’t yet seen it), David W. Bernstein’s new “The San Francisco Tape Music Center: 1960s Counterculture and the Avant-Garde” appears to do a remarkable job of resurrecting works and ideas of Pauline Oliveros, Morton Subotnick, Ramon Sender, William Maginnis, and Tony Martin.

I haven’t yet had time to view the two-hour, enclosed DVD of the Rensselaer ‘Wow and Flutter Festival’ from two years back (though I bet Steve Layton and others have):

Pauline Oliveros and Tony Martin, Circuitry for 5 percussionists and lights

Morton Subotnick, Until Spring Revisited for laptop and 8-channel audio

Tony Martin, Silent Light with images and light projections

Ramon Sender, Tropical Fish Opera for fish and four musicians

Morton Subotnick, Mandolin for viola, piano, tape with visual composition and performance by Tony Martin

Pauline Oliveros, Bye, bye Butterfly for tape with visual composition and performance by Tony Martin

Ramon Sender, Great Grandpa Lemuel’s Death-Rattle Reincarnation Blues

Pauline Oliveros, Apple Box Double

Ramon Sender, Kore for tape with with visual composition and performance by Tony Martin

Ramon Sender, Desert Ambulance for accordion, tape, with visual composition and performance by Tony Martin

Morton Subotnick, Release for clarinet, violin, cello, piano and 8-channel computer

Pauline Oliveros, Pauline’s Solo for accordion and eight channel Expanded Instrument System (EIS)

http://www.amazon.com/Francisco-Tape-Music-Center-Counterculture/dp/0520256174

By: johnny

johnny — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 19:01:01 +0000

hmm i love the terry jennings piano piece, which i had the pleasure of hearing at one of the wandelweiser concerts in düsseldorf, played by john mcalpine

By: Combs

Combs — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 19:27:09 +0000

Better celebrate it while its still here. 50 huh? Hmm.

By: Steve Layton

Steve Layton — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 16:13:00 +0000

All sound like good candidates for when it can become a festival rather than a single concert! I wonder if there are any other “Minimalism at 50″ concerts happening elsewhere? (& I’m sure that date is going to vary widely, depending on what people define as the seminal moment.)

By: Daniel Wolf

Daniel Wolf — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 15:47:08 +0000

Galen, the works by the composers I named that I was thinking of all date from around 1958-61, for example Joseph Byrd's Fish (1961), in which several elements prescient of In C appear or Leedy's pieces(1960) for piano four-hand in which an atonal texture is thins to long isolated tones and passages with small tonal groups. There are also a number of works by Loren Rush of the same era (Rush was improvising with Riley and Oliveros in 1958!) which are critical to later developments but have, until very recently, been more or less erased from historical accounts.

By: Galen H. Brown

Galen H. Brown — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 15:29:49 +0000

Daniel– I certainly take your point, but programming any concert like this necessarily involves a lot of tradeoffs and priority setting. We limited ourselves to Minimalist music composed in the first 10 years (1958 to 1968) and we were limited to a single concert of reasonable length. Reich and Glass are such giants in the genre, and their influence on thousands of composers over the past 50 years has been so profound that we felt it was important to include them. In C was a watershed moment, the transition from the long-tone Minimalism that Young had been doing that, again, an anniversary celebration would have seemed incomplete without him. But we really did want to represent lesser-known but also very important music, and Jennings was the ideal candidate. He’s known primarily by reputation, but it was with his 1958 “Piano Piece” that Minimalism went from some-wierd-stuff-La-Monte-Young-was-doing to a movement. Plus, they’re beautiful little pieces that almost nobody has heard. I would have loved to program Dennis Johnson as well, but for a variety of reasons it just wasn’t practical.

Anyway, I don’t know if that helps, but that’s how the sausage was made. Ultimately, I’m very happy with the program–I love everything on it, I think it accomplishes what we wanted it to accomplish, and I’m looking forward to it

-Galen

By: Daniel Wolf

Daniel Wolf — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 08:51:50 +0000

As welcome as it is to have the Jennings performances, there are other examples of the radical West Coast music that were critical to what would become, later, identified as minimal music. These include works by Richard Maxfield, Joseph Byrd, Loren Rush, Dennis Johnson, and Douglas Leedy.