Minimalism: Origins

Rating:
Summary: wonderful book on What Was
Review: Strickland has situated Minimal Music within a useful context here that of the visual arts, and the bridges found is a well proven one, for there really is no direct parallel between the two. The visual arts was an early support to this music, the various galleries in New York is where it was born.Musical minimalism never quite made the pathways into the establishment venues, only opera, and now the fashionable circuits mixed with the strains of expression of the popular avant-garde, obsessed with the market and popular culture, the buzz and being loved, by a dwindling audience,or one that continaully demands the new for the new. So the visual arts and conceptual artists,having first a much more vigorous pallette of concepts and achievments is a good reference poiunt here for Strickland's narrative; such geometrical creations by Donald Judd,identical size boxes descending downward along a wall,or simply cubes of varying shapes or the aluminum,plexi-glass,cubes,boxes situated as for eternity in Marfa Texas, a minimalist shrine in an old Army Base he purchased has no real equivalent in music. Likewise the powerful spirituality of the florescent lighting schemes of Dan Flavin or the steel plates, and torqued ellipses of Richard Serra orfloor covering, and fifty yards long wood planks and floor steel tiles of Carl Andre, not to mention the committed painters as Ellsworth Kelly, Frank Stella, or Bridget Riley again cannot find equivalents in music.I beleive there are equivalents but it is on a case by case basisi. I consider the first piece to be Erik Satie's "Vexations, a 9 Hour work of the same thorny quasi-atonal phrase for piano solo, repeated incessantly at the same tempo or Cage's "Etudes Australes" a piece of minimalism for its static-ness,even orchestral pieces of Xenakis have a "stasis" dimension to it. These diverse kinds of works are really never viewed from this perspecitve.
Strickland however keeps his narrativwe close to this visual world.But as close as one got to vigorously conceived works when all this began in the Seventies was Philip Glass who went by way of opera and that was a good vigorous start to place the minimalist musical canons within establishment venues,with a great stuctural pallette in place now to test its scope and longevity/ With text, theatre, peformance art and concept all now had to work within the minimalist context. It did but Glass hadn't the theoretical ambition to nurture this music,for he then simply fell prey to opera's complaisant seductions relying on tried and tested forms within opera's clostered structural genres, as duets, trios,interludes as in Aknahten, and latter works the one with the simplistic use of the text of Doris Lessing.Where is the affinity for innovation and musical experimentalism? so prevalent in Glass's early ensemble Farfisa Organ works. So minimalism in ascendancy was quickly left to the market to consume it, Hollywood,wealth and power were safe havens for its musical language. Again Strickland adheres to the visual arts in order to buffer a safe zone within it, and to see where the two meet. Thet never really do. For these paralells, have an academic content to it, But as time wore on past the Seventies and Eighties minimalism found fewer and fewer similar conceptual and expressive features with the visual arts theoretical paradigms of reference. Musical minimalism became homogenized, where even rockers found service in its percolating pulses,as Blondie,and Devo,and the Techno,studio cadres. Strickland here thinks this is one of minimalism staying powers, a longevity factor which proves its profound content, when in fact it was part of its demise into greater forms of homogenizations, and now fodder for least common denominators of expression subjected to it in the forms of accompaniments to videos as virtualizations and digitalizations through the necessities of the advertisement behemoths.

La Monte Young however, a post-Cage artist long a recluse creator also found an affinity for the music of the East and mounted hours long performances of electronic drones, with Marian Zazeela,at blasted decible levels. He however,never a market price, (no commercial potential as Frank Zappa would say) came closest toward finding equivalents to the visual arts conceptual world. The concept of the long dureational length is something that minimal music should have found from its start, not at the end of its demise. Strickland gives good space to this real father of musical minimalsim, and of course the latter works of Morton Feldman the 6 Hour "Second String Quartet", the various piano solos "For Bunita Marcus", and "Triadic Memories", and the hours log "For Philip Guston, and "For Christian Wolff", for Flute and Piano are surely masterworks within musical minimalism.