Comments on: September’s New Encounters

By: David Toub

David Toub — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 19:30:00 +0000

Yes David, you would be wrong.

Young and Riley continue to have an influence over composers, myself included.

And development is in the ear of the beholder.

By: Steve Layton

Steve Layton — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 18:41:31 +0000

Slowing of development is right, up to a point, but wrong as well. Development might be happening within each and every repetition, or even within very “static” events. By the standard thematic view, things may seem to stay the same for long stretches, but the moment is never the same. The perceptual scale can be quite different, too.

As to Young and Riley being over and Reich and Glass dominating, I’d actually say that the Young and Riley influence has been ascendent for some years. You don’t find it as much in the traditional score/ensemble/concert hall composers though; it’s in the musicians who create without worrying much about the standard path (and who happen to outnumber the more traditional-path composers by quite a bit).

By: David Salvage

David Salvage — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 18:02:39 +0000

In the mood to be provocative….

Would I be wrong to say that the era of La Monte Young and Terry Riley’s influence (beyond the latter’s “In C”) is over—and has been over for a while? The legacy of minimalism is absolutely dominated by Reich and Glass. Add to them influences from jazz, pop, and world music and—presto!

By: David Salvage

David Salvage — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 17:57:18 +0000

The fundamental contribution to music made by minimalism is the radical slowing of thematic development. All the arpeggios, eighth-note pulses, and diatonicism are very much secondary matters.

Am I wrong?

By: Alan Theisen

Alan Theisen — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 02:11:39 +0000

I’ve always thought that the Bernstein Second Symphony (“Age of Anxiety”) is totally uneven. The first half (the variations part) is wonderful, but the second half is really creaky and second-rate film music.

(Nothing against film music, of course. Check out Lenny’s “On the Waterfront”!)

By: david toub

david toub — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 02:05:17 +0000

Most folks think of minimalism as either repetitive phase pieces/canons or the arpeggii that has come to typify Glass’s early music. But early Young and Jennings (and I believe, even Terry Riley in an early string work I’ve heard about) concentrated on long tones and silences. You might think of this as Webern taken really really slowly, and in some ways that’s true. But like Cage’s string qt in four parts, there is a paucity of material (even though Young and Jennings did 12-tone rows very strictly) alternating with silence, but all of this taken to great extremes compared with predecessors like the Cage work I mentioned.

By: Steve Layton

Steve Layton — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 00:18:39 +0000

This is why someone can someday write a very colorful and rich history of minimalism. The folk who think it’s all just arpeggios, riffs and “pattern music” have as sorry a grasp of the area as someone who thinks the whole classical era is all “Eine kleine Nachtmusik”.

By: David Salvage

David Salvage — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 22:30:45 +0000

Actually, I did… I couldn’t find my program while writing this. But, dude, WHAT? I know he and LaMonte Young were associated with one another and so on. But… what was the “perceptual process” being enacted by Jennings? Now that I think of it, Jennings seems more in line with Feldman from what I heard: the sense of great spaciousness outweighs the sense of gradual thematic development.

By: Galen H. Brown

Galen H. Brown — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 16:46:40 +0000

“. Now, what Jennings’s music has to do with minimalism as we know it beats me.”

Sounds like _somebody_ didn’t read the program notes. . .