Minimalism in Music

[Mutatis-Mutandis]

As I listen to Gorecki's 3rd Symphony, it strikes me as beautiful, stirring, and extremely emotional. It's also so damn boring.

It seems I keep having this problem when I attempt to listen to minimalistic composers. It's neat sounding, but no matter how hard I try, I can't get into it. It just builds and builds and builds, recedes, and builds again. Now, if this took place over a few minutes, that's fine. But 23? It just doesn't work for me.

What are your thoughts?

[MystyrMystyry]

For me it generally has to match what I'm doing. If I'm trying to sleep I don't listen to Throbbing Gristle, or if I'm relaxing in the bath I don't want any pub rock.

Boring minimal is just for a bit of peace while reading or surfing the art and photography sites, though I'll probably opt for Eno tronic over sedate orchestral, which is more likely to be for napping.

Then there's the classical classics - when does one actually get to listen to them? While riding my bike or shopping usually. Big band is for Litnet and similarly literary places (at least for the moment - I had a thing with Tangerine dream going when I first came here, and then Scott Joplin, and then George Gershwin etc)

I guess I just let the styles flow and evolve with the mood of what interests me, and vice versa

[Panglossian]

As I listen to Gorecki's 3rd Symphony, it strikes me as beautiful, stirring, and extremely emotional. It's also so damn boring.

I agree. I'm not a fan of *minimalistic music*. Philip Glass is another composer who at first I thought yeah I like it, then after a short while I realised that I didn't. Repetition seems to play a big role in minimalism, and I think it's that what makes me dislike it. Having said that I've downloaded a few discs by American composer George Crumb and I like his stuff. More experimental and eccentric than most, though I'm not sure if he would be classed as minimalist.

[stlukesguild]

Actually, I quite like Minimalism... Philip Glass, Arvo Part, Henryck Gorecki, John Adams, Steve Reich, etc... but then again... I already had had an admiration for various modal forms of music (Byzantine and Gregorian chant, Indian ragas, Middle-Eastern music) that are similar in form or structure. When one becomes acclimated to the works they become atmospheric and even hypnotic... like an aural mandala... as opposed to the more usual "narrative" structures of Western music. I understand how some could be initially attracted... and then disappointed in Minimalism. Minimalism represents a return to tonality after 60 or 80 years of Modernism and the dominance of atonality. But as usual in art, that which initially seems reactionary... a return to the past that we are comfortable with... ultimately goes of in a direction that one never would have imagined. Minimalism came upon the scene at the height of the debate between the hard-core Modernists who proclaimed that tonality was dead, and the reactionaries who proclaimed that Romanticism represented the natural voice of music. The Minimalist essentially avoided taking either side in the dispute turning instead to music that was far older: medieval and Renaissance... as well as non-Western sources. Not surprisingly, there are many on both side of the traditional tonality/atonality dispute that hate Minimalism. The Modernists proclaim it reactionary and deride the popularity of Philip Glass, Arvo Part, and Gorecki's 3rd as proof that it offers little more than pandering to the masses (as if Stravinsky, Bartok, and other Modernists were never equally popular). The neo-Romantics are disappointed in that while Minimalism offered a return to tonality... it wasn't the tonality they were familiar with.