Well, Mark, those guys do bother you. And you sound a more experienced and
demanding listner than I am--music's importance to me has come and gone.
Certainly Glass and Reich haven't bored me, but then I've not followed them
closely (last thing I bought was Glass's music for Khundun and I liked
that--and the movie) As you'll be aware I follow art more closely, and your
response to Glass and Reich reminds me of my own to Sol LeWitt's
retrospective at the Whitney a few years back; the idea that set Le Witt's
project going just didn't allow for enough development for the work to
become major and big picture turned out to be  a show of large wallpapers
samples. Maybe it is a feature of the tradition of the new, that the quality
of early work that seems crucial to a shift in an art's direction is
accidental, a feature of the zeigeist and not necessarily the foundation of
a major oeuvre.

I ran into their music in the mid to late 70s, when what had been my great
musical love--the jazz of the 1940s-60s--seemed tragically to have stopped
in its tracks, 'the music died' and so-called serious music as I was then
aware of it was still so given over to modernist disjuncture that I couldn't
engage with it. Perhaps ignorantly I thought it had become academicized.
Glass and Reich, particularly in performance, seemed very fresh and exciting
to my ears. This climaxed with seeing Einstein on the Beach at the Met;
Glass's music was central to the emotional tone of Wilson's piece. I know
what you are saying about the salsa band, Stravinsky, and Coltrane's late
groups,but isn't there an idea of rhythm in early Glass and Reich that is
different from what you have in those examples?

There are varieties of boredom. Your boredom is that of a  listener whose
interest has been (too readily)
Exhausted, another kind (which I was associating with a kind of initial
'difficulty') is that which can find no
interest to begin with. Boredom of this kind contains the promise of a new
mode of attention. If the work
Can't go on sustaining that mode, then I grant your boredom kicks in. I
don't know whether any of this makes
Sense to you, but I'd be intrigued to hear.

                Wystan






-----Original Message-----
From: Mark Weiss [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Friday, 5 December 2003 5:27 p.m.
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Minimalists (was Re: Ives at first hearing)


Oh please, Wystan, these guys didn't invent complex rhythm. Any salsa band
in Havana puts them to shame, not to speak of Stravinsky or Elliot Carter.

Their compositional strategies don't take very long to figure out, and then
there's nothing more. Great music is endless.

As to complexity, I'm a pretty good listener, and hardly averse to
"difficulty." I am averse to falling asleep in my seat. I don't care what
it's called, it's for the most part bloody boring.

How much of the audience for Glass and Reich is capable of listening to
anything as difficult as say Mozart, let alone Boulez or Webern or a Bartok
quartet?

Survival of the music will depend, finally, on whether musicians are
interested in learning and playing it. By that standard it's not doing too
well.

But hey, nobody's forcing me to listen to it.

Mark


At 05:02 PM 12/5/2003 +1300, Wystan Curnow (FOA ENG) wrote:
>  Come on folks, this talk of minimalism, godfathers of etc is
>extremely vulgar. What would you say to those
>  who call Creeley a minimalist?  Is Silliman a minimalist?--Reich was
>an early model. Their proceduralism is
>  the key, to a building of new complexities, not reducing to nothing.
>The vulgarity is partly the misreading
>  of this work as a replay of modernist abstraction, a reduction of the
>real to its essentials, Mondrian style.
>  It's partly the same issue the thread began with--difficulty. Seeing
>the presence of new content only as ther  displacement of old content.
>In the case of Reich as Glass, the presence of rhythm for example. Like
>so many terms
>  that come from the visual arts who's aptness applies to the reception
>rather than to the nature of the work.
>
>            Wystan
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Halvard Johnson [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
>Sent: Friday, 5 December 2003 3:25 p.m.
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: Re: Minimalists (was Re: Ives at first hearing)
>
>
>{    I've never thought of LaMonte Young as minimalist.
>
>Young is the Godfather of minimalism. Heard four trumpeters playing one
>tone (alternating breathers) for upwards of two hours once at the
>Kennedy Center in Washington. Quite marvellous, after one settles into
>it and the sissies have left.
>
>{    Glass I think is simply a charlatan.
>
>Could be, but not bad for a reformed taxi-cab driver. I've sat through
>*Music in Twelve Parts* in live performance twice now, and would
>happily do so again.
>
>Hal, who can happily listen to Mahler and Wagner as well
>
>Hal                El chofer no carga dinero
>
>Halvard Johnson
>===============
>email: [log in to unmask]
>website: http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard