<snip>
What [Indian concerts] do have in common with Beethoven concerts is that
most of the audience doesn't attend much to the thought process.
I'm not sure there's a very profound disagreement between us. [MW]
<snip>
Yes. There's a good deal in common. But the inattentive Indian audience and
the inattentive Western audience, like their attentive counterparts, behave
in different ways.
Another way of delineating what may not be common between us might be to
bring together the sort of defamilarisation (related to but not the same as
an altered sense of scale) induced by an Oldenburg clothes peg or lipstick
and the sort of unfocussed attention whereby the viewer is able to parse
much of Rauschenberg's material. (I'm thinking here of something beyond the
usual but related *vernacular glance* explanation of what happens. Broadly,
a canvas is a spatial medium: it's all there at the same time. But R impedes
spatial ordering in favour of something temporal. So we are encouraged to
read through time; but without a sense of direction, in the case of single
canvases, because he also insists upon disjunction. If that makes any
sense.)
All very broad brush, I know, but Indian classical music seems to me to
reverse this process. By using time in a cyclical way, by applying discrete
*treatments* (ragam-tanam-pallavi etc) to the same basic material a temporal
reading (because music happens through time) is returned to the sort of
spatial condition in which one may walk around the object with one's ears.
(The linking analogy might be Cunningham, and Rauschenberg danced at one
stage.) Of course, this very crude distinction between Western and Indian
approaches has its limitations: Bach, for example. But the turning away from
one sort of listening towards another is part of what informs minimalism,
with its refusal of any but the most banal temporality (in the case of both
Reich and Riley), its modularity (in the case of Riley and Glass) and its
determined sense of stasis (in the case of Young)..
As to defamiliarisation, that's most obvious in Lucier's *I am Sitting in a
Room*, which exploits and draws attention to the roominess of rooms (the
individual echoic twang which each room has) rather as O draws attention to
the peginess of pegs and the pluginess of plugs. Muddier parallels might be
Ashley's *Wolfman* and Reich's *Come Out*. As regards more *musical*
materials, it's the distinctive attack/sustain of an organ that's drawn
attention to in Reich's *Four Organs*. And Nyman, who may have been the
first to apply the term 'minimalism' to certain kinds of musical practice,
draws attention to the compositional elements used by Purcell, Mozart et al
through excerpt and variation (rather than development of any kind).
Rather than taking any particular critical stance with respect to
minimalism, this is merely an attempt to identify how some elements of the
aesthetic may have changed during the 60s, quality of listener
notwithstanding. I may or may not have succeeded.
CW
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I am always doing what I cannot do yet in order to learn how to do it
(van Gogh)
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