andrew discourses on [m,M]inimalism, thousands cheer

[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