| minimalism is intensity. or sometimes it's just a slow burn that transforms one idea into something totally different..if you are just willing to wait. back in the 1960's, the minimalist movement began in painting and sculpture. in the preceding years, abstract impressionism was the way to go..a very romantic type of style using a good amount of paint and canvas and all kinds of textures. minimalism was the opposite reaction to this style, with its deliberate starkness and impersonality. |
| soon after this movement in art started, a similar movement in music followed. the idea was to use the smallest amount of musical material possible, repeating it and changing it ever so slightly over time. for example, a piece could start out with two instruments (or tapes) playing the same figure. then, one of the instruments would begin to speed up or slow down just a tiny little bit. and as time went on, the two instruments would become more and more out of sync with each other..they would begin to phase. imagine sitting at a traffic light and watching both your turn signal and the one of the car in front of you. for a few seconds, the signals will blink exactly together, and then they will slowly drift apart until they are alternating with each other. after that, they will once again drift apart until they are blinking together again. this is a major idea behind much of this music...development. |
| a great deal of minimalist music, like that of steve reich, takes that simple turn signal idea and puts it on an enormous scale. some of these phases might last forty-five minutes long! you might be thinking, "that would drive me insane, listening to the same thing over and over for that long." many people don't like minimalism because of this reason, saying it's boring, or nervewracking, or the ever popular "not music at all", as a die-hard drum corp kid in my music history class once said. partly, he is right. if you listen to minimalist music in the way you would listen to other kinds of music, it makes absolutely no sense. unlike other music, minimalist works are not organized with a "melody" in mind. the organization is on a larger, more structural level...the individual notes in the repeated musical figure are not the focal point of the music; instead, they are merely the building blocks. the importance in the work lies in how these notes interact..what kind of structure they combine to produce. in fact, the simple ideas such as phasing can be made into entire minimalist operas, such as einstein on the beach by philip glass. |
| the really amazing part about minimalist music is the way it can draw in the listener. listened to the right way, this music can send a person off into another world..a trance even. and as the phase returns to its original form, the listener comes back as well, absolutely amazed and saying, "whoa. that was -really- cool.." minimalist music, like any music, can have all kinds of different effects on different people. whenever i listen to it, for example, i just concentrate. i think, i feel, and i focus...so hard my eyes turn black and blurry. each thought becomes steeped in so much intensity and even the tiniest details are magnified into absolute clarity. let's just say, i have solved some of the hardest math problems i have ever seen while listening to minimalist music. |
| so, how exactly does one start listening to this type of music? if a new listener were to just pop steve reich's violin phase into the cd player, it would most likely drive that person insane by the end of the first minute. if you want to appreciate this type of music as much as possible, you should probably build up to it gradually. first, you can start by listening to some good ol' fashioned techno..it's a direct descendant of minimalism. if you listen to some good electronica, you'll hear some of the same principles as in minimalist music..sampling, repetition, and a gradual change in musical ideas. there are a few cd's which have various dj's remixing the original minimalist recordings and rebuilding them into new music. a good recording is reich remixed, released by nonesuch records in 1999 and featuring dj's from america, japan, and the uk. it's a great way to get your feet wet before you plunge in and listen to drumming all the way through. : ) |
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some other minimalist places...go and learn more a tribute to minimalism* minimalism in brief* john adams* tony conrad/early minimalism* philip glass* steve reich* terry riley* southern's minimalist page* hypnos records* multimood records* nonesuch records* |
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