Different ways of looking and listening, maybe. One experiences most 
paintings temporally, I think, tho the sequence and tempo vary. This was 
one of Cezanne's great realizations, but it's true of earlier work as well. 
To the extent that one understands how the paint is laid down one also 
experiences the sequence of their making.

And one of the the wonders of Indian music is that it manages to sustain 
the harmonic tension that creates the drive towards resolution for such a 
long stretch. Cyclical patterning means that those who wander in and out 
also get something, but those who remain attentive first to last get 
something more.

In the old days Italian families would bring meals with them to the local 
opera house, and there'd be lots of walking and (kids) crawling around 
during performances. There's a limit to how instructive the behavior of 
audiences can be. But there were always favorite arias to latch onto, as I 
do myself when the music's playing while I'm occupied cooking a meal.

An American jazz musician I knew slightly had a gig at a very good Parisian 
club. There's a very serious jazz audience in France. The audience listened 
in total silence. The musician didn't get it--he thought they weren't 
listening--no clinking glasses, no applause or cheers after solos--and he 
actually berated the audience, telling them that they ignored even their 
own greats--something about Stefan Grappelli being a national treasure and 
they didn't know who he was, which was simply absurd. During the 
intermission between sets I told him that the reason they were so silent 
was that they were listening to every note, that's the way French audiences 
listen. He was much nicer the second set. But it was hard for him--he was 
used to feeding on the audience's somewhat distracted energy.

As to the minimalists, I guess I'm a quick study--it doesn't take very long 
to "get" the attack-sustain of an organ, or the modular strategy. Once I do 
the rest seems to be telling the same story over and over.

Mark


At 07:55 AM 11/16/2005, you wrote:
><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
>______________________________________________________
>
>I am always doing what I cannot do yet in order to learn how to do it
>(van Gogh)