Scale for sure counts, and in more complex ways than we're dealing with.
But it can be pretty hollow if there's not much going on.
I've been to several full-length Indian music concerts, both northern and
southern. What they do have in common with Beethoven concerts is that most
of the audience doesn't attend much to the thought process. What they also
have in common is that it's a very complex and compelling thought process.
Which neither have in common with Terry Riley, as far as I can tell.
On the other hand, Wagner's Ring Cycle, which I understand as one piece of
music, is longer than most other things and endlessly fascinating as
musical thought, though unlikely to be confused with wallpaper.
Ditto Les Troyens.
Ditto Gance's Napoleon.
I'm not sure there's a very profound disagreement between us.
Mark
><snip>
>Sorry: I misunderstood. [MW]
><snip>
>
>Understandable since I put it very badly. (And in similar vein, the
>musicians playing for 'Moroccan soldiers' were also Moroccan, which I didn't
>exactly make clear. But they had lost all *instinct* and were playing as
>though from a score. Hence the comparison.)
>
>Back, though, to Indian music if I may...
>
>One of the things linking Satie, Indian music, minimalism and one part of
>60s aesthetics is how length interacts with attention. Whilst an Indian
>audience knows its tuning up from its alap by and large, unlike the
>Woodstock audience, people don't all sit in an Indian concert hall
>identifying the sam, enacting tali and khali with their hands and shouting
>'vah!' at appropriate points, though some do. Others turn up very, very
>late, discuss the price of dhal and leave in the middle. And concerts may,
>of course, go on for very, very many hours. As to following the thought
>process, a Kathakali performance I attended in a Kerala temple some years
>ago, though not admittedly a concert, sets the tone: the invocatory dance
>behind the curtain (thirasseela), which you cannot actually see, usually
>lasts a few minutes whenever kathakali is presented in the West; here it
>lasted for rather more than two hours. A mass in the days of Latin witnessed
>by peasants, as it were.
>
>So what am I saying? Only (again) that 12 hours or so of *Vexations*, an all
>night concert by Terry Riley and an all night Khyal or Dhrupad concert have
>something in common in how they are attended to which they will _never_ have
>in common with Beethoven. Ditto late Feldman, of course.
>
><snip>
>I'll report back when I've had a chance to get up to Beacon or out
>to Marfa, both of which are planned. [MW]
><snip>
>
>Yes indeed. Please do.
>
>CW
>______________________________________________________
>
>I am always doing what I cannot do yet in order to learn how to do it
>(van Gogh)
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