The Influence of Minimalism on Vernacular Music: questions

2) On minimalist painters, I think absolutely -- mondrian finstance (and from thence to Feldman). On composers -- search Glass' Heroes and Low symphony but I think actually "vernacular" musics of the world (the usual glass goes to india etc. stories) were a much bigger deal.

Did Terry Riley invent the remix with You're Nogood?

I don't have too much fun thinking about minimalism's influence, and apart from the obvious cases of direct influence I prefer to think of the whole thing as one big lump of zeitgeist...

there's a fantastic bootleg making the rounds of a german radio broadcast of excerpts of la monte young pieces. it's (humorously) called 'Tony Conrad -- Theatre of Eternal Music'. my copy's got color xerox packaging of the log cabin Young grew up in. it's not super high fidelity, but it's good enough (a lot better than that dodgy table of the elements ripoff), and I've been listening to it nearly every night for a month now. those tapes need to see wide release, and soon. it's a lot better than Young's 'black album', for instance...

i'm glad you showed up... can you give me a few paragraphs and some recommended reading (see first post).

they ask charlemagne palestine who's top on his list of influential minimal composers and he shoots back "john williams" and they're like "john williams?"

so he says something to the effect that the star wars theme song is endless elaboration on a seven-note sequence but once you hear it you're humming it for the rest of the day. he names williams as part of a secret, unacknowledged branch of pop minimalism that doesn't figure in the academic/high canon.

this is in the 2002 issue w/ the boredoms on the cover.

Depends how wide your definition of "rock" music is. A lot of electronica/dance is clearly influenced by minimalism.

discussion of "influence" is a way of not talking about how ideas in music are generated, transmitted or received

Phillip Glass anyone?

Minimalism influence Folk Music? The other way round surely?

Perhaps it's just the number of syllables that you find cumbersome. Then I propose that we use the term vern music.

http://www.tvtome.com/images/shows/5/9/36-517.jpg

*if you are the "k.coyne" that I'm thinking of, nevermind if not.

But mark s is OTM when he says that discussion of influence is separate from discussion of "the ideas implicit in minimalism." Can we talk about why both Minimalism and vern music sought, in the second half of the 20th C., an emphasis on pulse, repetition, etc? In many ways, I think Minimalist composers and popular musicians influenced each other equally -- but I feel like their projects were similar for some bigger reason, probably having to do with technology and reception...

Crosspost.

Hmm JayMC I'm not so sure that selfconscious minimalism is at all "dominant." Or else I think you may be defining it too broadly. What both Terry Riley and Iggy Pop had in common was a desire to scale down the elaborateness of the genres they were associated with. The results are DIY w/r/t classical and rock music respectively. This seems a natural enough reaction and doesn't seem new to the 20th century at all. I guess the question then is what is behind the need to classify (codify?) these impulses as "minimalism."

(for example)

Lamonte Young studied under Stockhausen, and learned/realised that the logical endpoint of Webernism combined with tape-splicing was the symphony of a single (unending) note

Christian Wolff was the first to point out that the extreme of everchanging complexity taken by some as the ideal of the New Music in the Darmstadt era actually created music which seemed monochrome and eventless.

I forget what year Cage rediscovered Satie's Vexations

(I vaguely recall that Riley had played played sax in a band, where — when he left — he was replaced by Eric Dolphy...)

Michael Nyman named it minimalism in a review. Wim Mertens wrote the "manifesto". Tom Johnson's collection of reviews from the the Village Voice is a good place to see the ideas evolving, esp, in relation to the worlds of gallery and performance art.

I don't think La Monte studied under Stockhausen, although I think he went to Darmstadt one summer (I'll have to look it up). At City College in L.A. he studied with a Webern disciple (can't remember the dude's name), and was sort of a mentor (or pupil?) to Ben Boretz, whom I studied with at Bard.

I definitely think there are a number of overlaps with/between Minimalism and Serialism in terms of musical stasis, but let's not forget that there was a huge schism between the two schools. Was it Elliot Carter that said Minimalism was "fascist?" I gotta look up all this shit.

the serialism/minimalism war is a root technological/financial — ie abt how stuff is written and performed, and where and by who and who pays*, and what the shaping medium is — though of course it presents as ideological/aesthetic bcz most composers hate acknowledging they're constrained by the material world (there's an oedipal-generational element also, of course)

*(serialism = it is primarily funded by arts grants) vs (minimalism = it is significantly more co-funded by ticket and record sales)

the "minimalism" carter is calling fascist is more reich/glass/adams (who started getting the gigs and the grants in the early 80s) etc NOT eg young/riley/oliveros/cage/wolff/AMM

i'll paypal you $3 USD to post 5 paragraphs on minimalism and vernacular music. seriously. do it. seriously.

(you might have to wait a few years though you'll get good 'value')

:-D

(posted during ad break in csi, so don't getcha hopes up for more tonight)

The diff btween CP and SQ = the diff. ways their ideas are generated, transmitted and received.

In the v. first post Sterling mentioned Kraftwerk, and again I'd be interested to learn what - if any - involvement Hutter/Schneider had w/ 'art' music/minimalism. I mean, I know Holger Czukay studied w/ Stockhausen...

(a lot of fluxus stuff going on in germany that year, via beuys and pals: also beuys = tutor of guy who designed kwerk's early sleeves)

(read as: lay off the green stuff, hstencil) =P

To fly off at a tangent, Ralf and Florian <-> Gilbert and George - G+G's first major art show was in 1969 at....... Dusseldorf Kunsthalle.

BTW, the new Charlemagne Palestine on Alga Marghen is hella good.

gygax! i spurn u except not on purpose = i am away for several days probbly not thinking a bit about minimalism, so remind me when u see i'm back

The most curious aspect to me is how the most popular minimalist composers are the ones who felt the need to go furthest outside traditional classical study (unless you count Stockhausen as some sort of new traditional teacher). Another guess is that it only shows how far from "daily life" most modern classical music was in the 50s and 60s.

Also, forgot to note that Cale's lowering of his viola's bridge was cuz he wanted it to be more like an electric guitar, i.e. ability to play multiple strings. So I think that's an answer to gygax!'s question 2, definitely.

I really gotta post all the pertinent points outta my thesis to this thread. Maybe tomorrow I'll get the chance.

"It came about one day when Tony bought an electric pick up that was made to clip on. . . I filed off the bridge, put guitar strings on there and got a drone that sounded like a jet engine . . ."

"I started imitating LaMonte's sax playing with harmonics very high up on the strings. . . and started him thinking, because those harmonics, although they approximated what he was playing, were really natural harmonics on the strings and therefore more in tune, more part of an organic whole. The saxaphone was tuned to the well-tempered strings, so it was like the difference between piano and strings. Piano is irrational and out of tune, strings have natural harmonics that keep a different system, and when I imitated LaMonte's scale I got everybody thinking, Hold it a second, if we use the centre harmonic for instance, which is not on the piano, we can do it on strings. We tried to find out what the gradations of scales were.

Eventually we drove LaMonte off the saxophone. He stopped playing fast and spent all his time trying to play in tune and couldn't, so he started singing. And he started delineating which intervals were allowed and which were not. No harmonics, just soundbites of three and seven. . . . To this day he refuses to acknowledge our contribution."

“There were three pathways that made sense to the performers of ‘Dream Music,’ or the ‘Theatre of Eternal Music,’ or ‘The Dream Syndicate,’ as I sometimes called it. Happily, what each of these solutions shared was a solid opposition to the North Atlantic [i.e. Western European and American] cultural tradition of composition.
“The first was the dismantling of the whole edifice of ‘high’ culture. Also around this time, I picketed the New York museums and high-culture performance spaces with Henry Flynt, in opposition to the imperialist influences of European high culture. More than that, I had strong sympathies with the aims of Flynt’s program, which amounted to the dismantling and dispersion of any and all organized cultural forms. At the time I was also a part of the ‘Underground Movie’ scene, which (as I saw it) reconstructed the movies as a documentary form -- a merging of life-aims with movie production. Other counter-cultural components of the Dream Music picture were our anti-bourgeois lifestyles, our use of drugs, and the joy which John Cale and I took in common pop music. Down this pathway there were other fellow travelers, like Andy Warhol and Lou Reed; it led straight to the Velvet Underground, and the melting of art music into rock and roll.

“The second solution was to dispense with the score, and thereby with the authoritarian trappings of composition, but to retain cultural production in music as an activity. The music was not to be a ‘conceptual’ activity . . . it would instead be structured around pragmatic activity, around direct gratification in the realization of the moment, and around discipline. . . .

“In keeping with the technology of the early 1960s, the score was replaced by the tape recorder. This, then, was a total displacement of the composer’s role, from progenitor of the sound to groundskeeper at its gravesite. The recordings were our collective property, resident in their unique physical form at [La Monte] Young and [Marian] Zazeela’s loft, where we rehearsed, until such time as they might be copied for us.

“The third route out of the modernist crisis was to move away from composing to listening, again working ‘on’ the sound from ‘inside’ the sound. Here I was to contribute powerful tools, including a nomenclature for rational frequency ratios, which ignited our subsequent development.”

(Conrad, Tony “LYssophobia: on Four Violins,” from liner notes to Early Minimalism: Volume One. Table of the Elements, 1997. Pages 17-20.)

Also, from a historical perspective, it is quite easy to see how the music of the Dream Syndicate worked itself into the heart of American music: because it influenced the Velvet Underground (of which Eternal Music member John Cale was viola player and bassist), certain tendencies in American popular music classified as "art-rock" can trace their lineage back to the Dream Syndicate. In addition, the positioning of the Theatre of Eternal Music within an oppositional, "downtown" music by way of its simplistic structure shows it to be the stylistic, immediate precursor to Minimalism, a music made commercially viable by Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and Philip Glass. Although Minimalism’s roots in the Theatre of Eternal Music were initially anti-"high art," it has been incorporated (although somewhat reluctantly) into the canon of Western Classical music. This is evidenced especially by Glass’ use of the Western opera form, and his subsequent success in opening "high art" institutions (such as the Metropolitan Opera in New York City) to his works.

So, in initiating a sort of music which transcends modernist tendencies, the Theatre of Eternal Music was quite successful at their own goal of producing something new. But what does one call something beyond the modern? Conrad situates the Theatre of Eternal Music within the term post-modern:

“a postmodernist view of music [is] balanced between (1) its engagement with the social attentions of the listener and (2) its cultural appropriations and references. . . .

“Appropriation is a general structural principle of postmodern culture, a relational principle that seemed for a time to give theory a toe-hold in the bulwark of the dissolving arts hierarchy. Appropriation functions to re-label an artifact which is already oriented within the cultural plane.”

(Ibid., page 75, 66)

“. . . music has inhabited a peculiarly postmodern corner of ‘culture’ ever since the late [19]50s, when the critical paradoxes of [John] Cage opened the ear of ‘serious’ music onto the world, when the machinery of international capitalism coalesced with the machinery of popular music, when both ethnomusicology and music history became participatory enterprises for the active listener. It was only in the 50s that it became possible to listen to records of weird jazz, avant-garde music, and music from other times and cultures.

“This was the turning point from a regime of writing music to a regime of listening. Many things at the time pushed this change, even though there has been very little comment on, or understanding of, the core paradigm shift that this represented for music.”

(Conrad, Tony “smsigyILIS,” from liner notes to Early Minimalism: Volume One. Table of the Elements, 1997. Page 73.)

La Monte Young…was an interesting figure even before he had discovered so-called “modern” music. Born in a log cabin in Idaho, Young’s primary musical experiences had come from environmental occurrences (his earliest memories supposedly being “the wind blowing between the chinks in the cabin and the hum of a power line outside” ) and popular music, most notably that of jazz. His first contact with “modern” music had been in high school, after his family moved to Los Angeles, California, and he continued to pursue composition at the college and graduate levels, occasionally enrolling in seminars under a variety of composers.

It was in the summer of 1959, the same time in which he and Tony Conrad met, that Young went to Darmstadt, West Germany to study composition with Karlheinz Stockhausen. Conrad:

”I spent a summer working in Berkeley. And while I was there, I devoted a good deal of my time to frittering away the summer hours. Part of that time was spent meeting some people, and in particular I met some composers who lived around the corner: La Monte Young and Dennis Johnson. They were actually there in Berkeley studying in a summer seminar with Rudolph Kolisch [sic?]. . . Because the summer I met La Monte in Berkeley, he took off and went to Darmstadt to study with Stockhausen, and there was a lot of stuff coming out of Europe. It was like the way that painting seemed to be focused in Paris in the Nineteenth Century.”
(Hunt, Joel Interview with Tony Conrad at 126 Livingston, Buffalo, NY on January 10, 1998)

It is likely that Young’s will to follow his own muse was further strengthened by his encounter at Darmstadt, which by all accounts was not positive. Darmstadt, it seems, reflected his earlier experiences in presenting his works to his Berkeley professors. In particular, his Trio for Strings, a piece which combined a Webern-styled tonal structure with the long durations (the first three notes took four minutes to appear), which would later become a hallmark for Young’s work (and a major component in the definition of Minimalism), was apparently received quite badly by both students and instructors alike. Young describes when he had conceived the piece, and how it was endured:

”It’s dated September ‘58 and I was copying the score on onion skin when I got to Berkeley, my first semester. No doubt I’d written the piece over the summer. Maybe I’d started it during the spring semester. . . oh, well, the only people who understood the Trio for Strings at the time of its composition were Terry Jennings, Dennis Johnson, and Terry Riley. I would say that probably nobody else [at Berkeley] understood it at that time, but there were other close friends who participated in it.”

(I think this is from Duckworth, William and Richard Fleming, eds. Sound and Light: La Monte Young Marian Zazeela. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1996. Page 47.)

“Our music is, like Indian music, droningly monotonal, not even being built on a scale at all, but out of a single chord or cluster of more or less tonically related partials. This does not only commute dissonance, but introduces a synchronous pulse-beat that is the first coherent usage of rhythm-pitches or microtonal intervals outside of isolated electronic pieces.”

(Tony Conrad, “Inside the Dream Syndicate” Film Culture, Summer 1966)

[During his undergraduate days at Harvard], Conrad heard a recording of the music of Ali Akbar Khan, an Indian musician. He recalls that hearing it “was electrifying. . . I had never heard the classical music of another culture before.” What impressed Conrad the most was the sound of the drone, the underlying, unwavering tone which was the foundation of the raga. Also, Conrad discovered the scores of the sixteen Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber, a German Baroque composer, which were all written with separate tuning instructions for each particular sonata. Conrad writes that Biber’s music is "[an] adventurous exploration of timbre, tonality, and instrumental technique [which is] the most startling of the 17th century. The sixteen Mystery Sonatas are written scordatura violin [own italics], meaning that the instrument is to be tuned in an idiosyncratic manner for each piece.

Also, Conrad was able to relate these discoveries [of early music] to music he had grown up with, most notably the popular forms of country and bluegrass which he had heard broadcast on the radio late at night. Finding a relationship between the disparate styles in the “high-art” sonatas of Biber to the “popular-art” wailings of Bill Monroe, for example, fostered his belief in the equivalence of seemingly-opposite cultural enterprises, which would in turn have a great impact on the members of the Theatre of Eternal Music.

One of these demonstrations in particular led to the first major rift within Fluxus, and with what should be expected with such events, the account differs from participant to participant, from historian to historian. The chronology in Fluxus presents the date as August 30, 1964; Henry Flynt in Ubi Fluxus ibi Motus: 1990-1962 recalls the date as September 8, 1964. The demonstration was against a performance of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Originale, the structure of which is actually quite atypical compared to his other pieces. Basically, the piece adapted elements of performance events and was quite “circus-like” in its execution. Obviously, this sort of composition deviates from the formal structures prevalent in the majority of Stockhausen’s work, and was probably directly influenced by Cage’s pieces around the same time (which were, in turn, more than likely influenced by his slight association with Fluxus). The majority of performers in Originale were generally associated one way or another with Fluxus, and some (such as Dick Higgins, Jackson MacLow, and Nam June Paik) were major participants. This was the problem: Maciunas, who considered himself the “leader” of Fluxus (although Fluxus certainly had a dedication to collective events and products which denied leadership and authorship), was whole-heartedly in favor of picketing Stockhausen (who, at that time, was still considered “revolutionary”) to the extent that he threatened to “banish” those who didn’t agree with him. As it turns out, there were two demonstrations that evening: one for Stockhausen, and one against. The demonstrators for Stockhausen (consisting primarily of the concert’s performers) were by far in the majority: only the Fluxus artists Ay-O, Ben Vautier, Maciunas, Saito, Marc Schleiffer (a.k.a. Sulayman Abdullah), Conrad and Flynt demonstrated against Stockhausen (although Allen Ginsberg, the famous “beat” poet, was allowed in both pickets).

The end result of the demonstration was not an effective show of force against Stockhausen, but rather the dissolution of the original Fluxus group. Higgins left, and formed the Something Else Press because of his dissatisfaction with the slowness of Maciunas’ publishing. MacLow left as well. By that time, however, La Monte Young had already dissociated himself from Fluxus. The circle of people which developed around Young, although active in Fluxus-esque word events (such as Tony Conrad’s Concept Art from the Summer of 1961 and John Cale’s infamous piece in which a piano is thrown down a coalmine shaft), would also continue to distance themselves from Fluxus…

…[By early 1962], Young was still participating in making tonal, slightly-jazz-based music with Terry Jennings and Walter De Maria, and occasionally Simone Forti (a dancer who sang) and Joe Kotzin (flutist). At this time, He was also listening to a good deal of Indian classical music, particularly Bismallah Khan’s shenai playing, and that of flutist T.R. Mahalingam. His first exposure to John Coltrane provided another revelation. As a result of these new influences, Young picked up the saxophone again, first a tenor, then sopranino. He began having the vocalists he worked with sing drones while he improvised on sax.

By early 1963, Young had established a new series of concerts at the 10-4 Gallery where he:

played saxophone (somewhere between Bismallah Khan and Ornette Coleman), Angus MacLise improvised on bongos, Billy Linich ([a.k.a.] Billy Name) strummed folk guitar, and Marian Zazeela sang drone. All in all, those were hysterical and overwrought concerts; they went on for hours in overdrive. . . The music was formless, expostulatory, meandering; vaguely modal, arrhythmic, and very unusual.

(Conrad, Tony liner notes to Four Violins (1964). Released by Table of the Elements, 1996.)

Although Young felt that jazz was “a somewhat limited format,” he still felt a sort of affinity for it based in his Coltrane-inspired use of the sopranino saxophone. The music he played in New York retained an element of improvisation left over from Young’s jazz days in Los Angeles because it was composed in real time. However, Young’s saxophone playing at this time was severely different from the rapidly-moving variations played by Coltrane and by Ornette Coleman. In addition, Young’s accompaniment did stay within certain strict structural guidelines in terms of duration and pitch. This would carry over directly into the establishment of the Theatre of Eternal Music…

…However, by [1965] the rock group Velvet Underground had solidified its lineup, of which John Cale was a part. It was clear to him by late 1965 that he could no longer play in both the groups at once, so after the Theatre of Eternal Music’s performance at the Filmmaker’s Cinematique (ran by Jonas Mekas) in December, he quit the Dream Syndicate. The Velvet Underground had grown out of a previous group called the Primitives, of which Cale, Conrad, Lou Reed, and Walter De Maria were members. Conrad relates his version of how the group formed:

”Basically it was a goof at the beginning for me and for John [Cale], and then for Walter De Maria, who was our buddy, and who we dragged into this to have a bizarre opportunity to play at being rock and roll musicians just because these sleazy types from Brooklyn wanted to front a band, and they just wanted people who looked like musicians who could go and jump around. . . . So you’d have producers who would get together in a studio and sort of concoct a raucous thing, maybe have a singer and a few people who would whack on guitars and then pretend that it’s like a completely dumbed-down music. . . . But this thing with the Primitives was made up by these guys who were popping pills in the back room of this sleazy studio at Pickwick records, and they decided they’d release it. And they wanted some people with long hair. . . . So John [Cale] and I were both just negligent with our haircuts, we weren’t particularly hirsute, but we did the job, and when we went to sign up, they wanted to protect the record from us. . . . And they signed us up and gave us a seven year contract, and when we looked at this contract, we thought this contract gives them the right to our artistic output for the next seven years! Well, we’re doing all this other stuff. Walter [De Maria], in his way was making some incredible music at that time. And John [Cale] and I also, we were just signing away our music, which these people couldn’t use or market. We didn’t want to do it, so we all went to a showbiz attorney, and reviewed this contract to see if we could loosen it up and get out of it. It turned out that it was no problem, no one cared. But it springboarded us into our rock careers. I let mine fade away. But see then Lou [Reed] was intrigued to have met us, because we were sophisticated people from the city. He had been living out on Long Island and communing with these other garage band youngsters. So when he moved [into the apartment building] at [56] Ludlow Street [where Cale and Conrad lived together], it was quite a shot in the arm for everybody because he brought a real rock and roll brain into the picture.”

(Hunt, Joel Interview with Tony Conrad at 126 Livingston, Buffalo, NY on January 10, 1998)

Angus MacLise had also been a member of the Velvet Underground, but left the group “because they got a job to play at Yale, and they were gonna get paid, and Angus didn’t want to be in a band that got paid.” Cale, however, was replace by Young’s good friend Terry Riley on vocals (himself of the early founders of Minimalism, as his Reed Streams album was the first of the 1960s Minimalism work to be released, on the Mass Art label in 1966 ). The departure of Cale, coupled with Conrad’s growing commitment to his first film The Flicker, lead to the disintegration of the group.

gygax! - I don't think adding Parson Sound would change my views or the thesis so much as give me even more evidence to support it. Anyway, at the time I wrote it (early '98) I was aware of who Bo Anders Persson is, just hadn't heard his music yet. I'd definitely like to revise/expand what I've written (and at 200+ it's pretty mammoth) at some point, I don't know if I'll ever get the time (I was supposed to submit most of the project to Stylus, and I've dropped the ball big time).

And what wasn't noted in those excerpts (because they were excerpts, taken out of their full context) was that tho Conrad claims that those "solutions shared...a solid opposition to the North Atlantic [i.e. Western European and American] cultural tradition of composition," the inclusion of "American" is misleading. Certainly Scott falls within the American "tradition" of "quirky," individualist composers who, while being well aware of Europe, "did their own thing" (cf. Ives, Cowell, Cage, etc.).

I think it's going to take a while for people to find a place for Scott. His most interesting electronic music has only found a wider audience very recently, and evidently the really abstract stuff isn't even out yet (a 'forthcoming' 2 CD set of the freeform electronium pieces is mentioned in the 'manhattan research' book, I'm waiting).

it doesn't help that he was an anti-social maverick type. it's much easier to construct a narrative around a school where all the central figures were hanging out and sharing/stealing each other's ideas, followed by decades of bitter, explosive, public acrimony.

the music of Scott's that's been released to date doesn't quite break with pop music, placing him more as a precedent to the rhythmic early kraftwerk/reich/glass work than the ground zero drone explosion stirred up by the theatre of eternal music group... but the electronium pieces on 'manhattan' sound quite radical, rhythmless, free ptiched. More like the Barron's work, if anything, but I think deeper. My point is, we haven't even _heard_ all his work yet, so until we do it's not surprising his name isn't appearing in all the contexts that it otherwise might, yet.

true! Although the funny thing is that the L.E.S. minimalists/Fluxus/weirdos were all anti-social maverick types, there just happened to be a whole lot of 'em in the same place at the same time.

drugs.

i think a large influence for many of these artists could have been trying to achieve a trance like, stripped down music resembling and fostering their drug experiences???

just a thought.

glass and reich started out somewhat meditative, but gravitated back towards normal ornamentation, i.e. reich boasting that 'music for 18 musicians' contains more harmonic development than any of his works to date. and at some point glass just turned into schubert or something.

I wouldn't laugh at anyone who described riley's sound-on-sound works as drone. or 'harp of new albion', my hands down favorite until he finally releases a recording of his 'night music' for piano, which to me is the best thing he's ever done, full integration of the eastern modal runs with american ragtime, there's nothing that sounds even remotely like it, and only he could have written it...

Here's the version I like

'Among the CDs that Reich picked up at HMV is Africa Brass by John Coltrane. This was the album that the American modernist composers of the early 1960s - Terry Riley, La Monte Young, Philip Glass, Reich - looked to for their initial inspiration, alongside the Motown hit Shotgun by Junior Walker. "What's amazing about Africa Brass is that it is all in F," explains Reich. "That sounds like a ticket for disaster, but Coltrane showed that if you have enough rhythmic and melodic interest, you can stay harmonically fixed and do almost anything. So it is a piece that I love, and it was tremendously influential on what I did. Look at Drumming [Reich's epochal 1971 piece] - it doesn't move harmonically for an hour."

As for Shotgun, Walker's groovy hit has a fixed bass line in A that never changes. "It gives the song a maniacal power," says Reich. "And because there is a load of invention on top of that it's not dumb or overly simple. All music comes from a certain time and a certain place - shake well and out comes the product - and Walker and Coltrane were high on the antenna for me and my peers."'

An open letter to the remaining 1st and 2nd generation Fluxus

AYO
Eric Andersen
Henry Flynt
Ken Friedman
Geoff Hendricks
Alison Knowles
Larry Miller
Yoko Ono
Nam June Paik
Ben Patterson
Carolee Schneemann
Ben Vautier
Lamonte Young
Emmett Williams
-other names to be added to this list

Many are called, but none are now chosen.

6 January 2005

Dear Fluxus,

I was very fond of Emily Harvey. I miss her a lot. I am sorry I will not be there to help you honor and remember Emily Harvey tonight.

Emily Harvey's passing marks a passing for me, too. I am walking away from Fluxus. It is, unfortunately, unnecessary to announce my departure: most of you don't even know me. You probably didn't even realize that I am a part of Fluxus and that I operate and host a number of websites that have promoted Fluxus for the last nine years. And none of you have ever acknowledged that I am, in fact, an active Fluxus artist who has pioneered new directions and forged new sensibilities in Fluxus for more than 20 years now. That is why I am leaving.

Twenty years ago I fell in love with Fluxus and the monumental creative revolutions you all initiated more than 40 years ago. You changed and expanded what creativity and knowing means. You changed Western culture. You changed the world. You ripped a new hole in the universe. And you did it with simple little ideas, games, objects, performances, and concepts. I will always admire your astonishing accomplishments. What you did was so big that no historian, writer, collector, or curator has ever gotten their arms around it satisfactorily.

But an equally astonishing thing has been going on in Fluxus for the last twenty years. You have been letting Fluxus die.

At one time you welcomed people to Fluxus. You recruited people to Fluxus. I know you have always been a contentious lot, but there was a time when the Fluxus door was open, you invited people in, and you made it grow. You embraced a "second wave" of Fluxus artists-e.g., Ken Friedman, Larry Miller. You encouraged new Fluxus work and new Fluxus projects. But as far as I can tell, this pretty much stopped 20 or more years ago (Friedman's Young Fluxus show in 1982 is the last time any of you sponsored a show of "new" Fluxus artists). What happened to you?

Letting Fluxus die is a terrific and unnecessary shame and I place most of the blame on you (the people to whom this letter is addressed). I blame you individually and I blame you collectively. You have served Fluxus poorly during these last 20 years and you are letting Fluxus die. It didn't have to be this way. For the last 20 years, an increasing number of mostly young, bright, and talented people have been showing up and knocking on the Fluxus club house door … and almost all of you have either been too deaf or self-centered to hear them, or worse, you have continued to wring your hands over whether anyone should or could open the door (the issue of who has the "authority" to welcome and declare new Fluxus artists has been a convenient excuse). All you really had to do was open the door and show a little kindness. Why has that been so hard for all of you to do?

During the last 20 years many different people have been "called" to Fluxus. I am one of those people. We learned about Fluxus in one way or another and were struck by lightning, had an epiphany…and generally felt we had found a place where we really belonged. We had hoped to find a home in Fluxus. And many of just started doing and being Fluxus in our own way…much like all of the original Fluxus folks had their own individual understanding and gifts for Fluxus activities. And one way or another as we have gotten stronger in our own Fluxus work, we have stepped forward and tried to share this work with you. Needing to find some acknowledgement and encouragement from the people who launched this Fluxus ship. We approached you with respect. We approached you as Fluxus authorities. We knocked on the door and you did not answer. The most that some of you have been able to do for a whole new generation of Fluxus artists is hand us some tedious book on Fluxus so we could "study up," or you smiled patronizingly and encouraged us to attend your next exhibition. You didn't even seem to consider that any of these new folks could take you and Fluxus some place new and exciting where it hadn't been before. And frankly, some of these new Fluxus folks have been doing more interesting work and more truly Fluxus work than many of you have been doing during the last 20 years.

Many bright and talented people have not stayed long to knock, however. They heard the authoritative pronouncements that Fluxus was "dead" or "over." This was very confusing and discouraging-many of us could feel the spirit of Fluxus alive in ourselves and in our own work, so we couldn't understand how Fluxus could be dead. But you didn't answer the door and many eventually walked away. I have knocked longer than most-for more than 20 years now since I founded Fluxus Midwest in 1982. Dick Higgins and Emily Harvey (and Carolee Schneemann) were the only ones to acknowledge and encourage my own Fluxus work and experiments, but now Dick and now Emily are gone, I'm out in the cold, and I'm tired of knocking. So I am packing up my Fluxus bags, and taking my creativity and energies elsewhere.

I am closing down the many internet websites I have constructed and hosted to promote and honor Fluxus: The Fluxus Portal, the Fluxus Homepage, the Emily Harvey Gallery, the Museum of the Sub-Conscious, the Dick Higgins memorial website, and numerous other webpages promoting the work of many original Fluxus artists. I doubt that many of you will notice. I have also walked away from FLUXLIST-the pioneering Fluxus email discussion group that I co-founded with Dick and Ken Friedman. FLUXLIST is another example of what I am talking about. Most of you could never even bother to subscribe. By not participating you have missed a great audience and a wonderful chance to discover and encourage many new Fluxus artists and to learn about their work. It would have given you back more energy than it would have taken.

Almost all of you have failed to recognize three obvious things about Fluxus--about the Fluxus you helped create!

1. Fluxus is more than Art. It's bigger than that. To confine it to being understood as being primarily a phenomenon in the realm of art is to let it die.
2. Fluxus can still be a vibrant and energetic force. By refusing or failing to recognize this for the last 20 years, you have been letting Fluxus die.
3. Fluxus is bigger than you. Fluxus is bigger than the initial group or Fluxers, it's bigger than Maciunas. You guys didn't finish off or "complete" the Fluxus project, you just got it started! Many others have come to Fluxus with new Fluxus ideas and projects, and many of you haven't even bothered to notice. By confining Fluxus to yourselves, you are letting it die.

You all have spent so much time during the last 20 years trying to shape your legacy and the legacy of Fluxus, and few if any of you are satisfied with the results-the exhibitions, the collections, the books. Instead of trying to manage Old Fluxus you could have been leading a new group of Fluxus artists to explore new Fluxus directions and new Fluxus territory? Wouldn't it have been a lot more energizing and a lot more fun to fan new Fluxus flames than struggle with collectors who have catalogued your work but failed to capture your spirit or the scope of your actual accomplishments?

I can only imagine that if George Maciunas were alive today he might have excommunicated you all by now and found a new and younger gang of Fluxus rabble rousers to continue his mischievousness. I imagine him cooking up guerrilla art activities and staging "terrorist" art attacks against some of the collectors and historians who demean him and you by saying Fluxus was no bigger than him and no bigger than you.

Fluxus has the potential to be a bigger, more vibrant and creative force in the world today than even the project George Maciunas imagined. Certainly the world's need for the expanded creativity and the knowing that Fluxus provides is greater than ever. Because of the availability of more publications and catalogs documenting Fluxus work and because of the internet, more people know more about Fluxus than ever before. Fluxus is attracting more people than ever before-as much outside the art world as in. More people than ever before want to participate in and make their own contribution to Fluxus. But you-the founders, the brave pioneers-have turned your backs on them. And you have turned your backs on a marvelous opportunity to expand your legacy and help Fluxus continue.

Sincerely,

Allen Bukoff, PhD
Social Psychologist and Fluxus Artist
Birmingham, Michigan

i'm currently absorbing it all, thanks a lot for sharing this on the web

i don't have notes or sources with me right now, but i think that cage was initially composing sort of in a semi-serialist still up till maybe the 40s? i'll have to take a look at some stuff when i get home.

but i was trying to write something about conrad, a small piece but as i go along i'm finding out a small piece on conrad is not possible. if you want to do it good, that is.

actually i'm trying to write an article on conrad and phil niblock, they both play at the toon festival in holland in april. is there a way to connect the two? films maybe?

xpost - actually a lot of conrad's re-emergence is due to premiering stuff at niblock's loft in the early 90s, for starters.

anyway, yeah, i want serialist dancehall riddims.

-- sexyDancer (jjjjjjjjjjjjj...), January 30th, 2007.

How the fuck do you know?

anyway, this sort of came to mind because i've been listening to lots of mid-century avant-garde as a sort of palette cleansing and it hit me that it seemed to work due to lots of the same qualities that help ragga-jungle type stuff work for me as well. so...

-- sexyDancer (jjjjjjjjjjjjj...), January 30th, 2007

Congratulations on not knowing what you're talking about and being proud of it!

True

"Atonal" developed a certain vagueness in meaning as a result of its use to describe a wide variety of compositional approaches that deviated from traditional chords and chord progressions. Attempts to solve these problems by using terms such as "pan-tonal," "non-tonal," "free-tonal," and "without tonal center" instead of "atonal" have not gained broad acceptance.

Lots of atonal everything would be a pretty sharp idea to me dancehall included, I miss my bits of excitement about it.

I'd agree serial (and post-serial related) music has something to offer, and that would include more than its electronic side being some kind of inspiration to warp-type music. I always imagine certain sounds in serial and post-serial musics being workable to providing certain, clear and concise, effects. The 'atonal' in a piece of music is often heard when (in theory at least) it isn't there so its not as far away, or impossible to imagine.

i think technology was more important in the development of the minimalist sound, and i don't really hear much 'influence' between any of the early minimalist kind of sounds.

for me 'influence' is hard to define in musical terms and has more to do with personality. much of the early minimalist music doesn't share very much in terms of personality.

i think it was technology that had most of the influence. reich's mistake with the phasing thing. popularisation of the guitar etc... what does someone do when they first get an instrument, you just bang it, chug chug chug, hey presto! even la monte traces his love of the drone to an electrical noise he could hear from the little hut or whatever it was.

in terms of doods like the beatles, i think the early minimalists just showed them that technology could be abused to create these trippy sounds, which would have led to a different approach in writing songs. aha, texture is also important.

i guess later on, once we've had time to digest a style, this influence idea becomes a bit more interesting. theres a lot of music out there that totally jocks the style of the early minimalists.

so guess all i'm trying to say is there wasn't so much influence between vernacular music and minimalist cuz they all developed at the same time.

well this already the case. most dance music software just begs for serialism. the amoung of dudes i've seen write a melody and then do a retrograde of that melody for another part. thats not even accounting for automation/sound design aesthetics. dance music is highly serialised.

atonal thing too, unless you want complex atonal forms, but then you've just got autechre and thats not really dance music.

RIP

undergrad there ain't co-ed, i don't think?

revive!!!

this is great! ILM at its prime. i'm writing an article right now about angus maclise, and stumbled across this while looking for a maclise thread. mark s on this thread = totally classic!

everyone just wanted to be as cool as bo diddley.

what you writing about angus maclise?

i've been looking for a copy of sunday morning blues WITHOUT him on it ever since one of the guys from the wire magazine played it at an audience with terry riley and i can't find anything about it anywhere. it was fucking beautiful.

i really enjoyed "repeating ourselves" american minimal music as cultural practice by robert fink which covers some of this stuff.

i'm writing about the big recent retrospective of angus maclise's work at a gallery in NYC, which just closed. (there's a good article in the NYT about the show: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/06/arts/music/angus-maclise-of-velvet-underground-in-dreamweapon.html)

basically, a lot of maclise's creative output--visual art, poetry, etc--was stored in a big suitcase, which was left in la monte young's basement for 30 years. they were finally able to get the suitcase, open it, and show what was inside of it. some very fascinating stuff.

going back to what vahid was saying about charlemagne palestine, earlier on in this thread (does vahid still post here? he was so great):

i looked up the wire issue in question (i have every issue in my apartment, from 1990 to about 2004--don't even ask me about the other stuff i have.) here's the full charlemagne palestine quote.

"Maybe we could say someone we don't talk about in the history of minimalism is [film composer] John Williams. Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind are all very melodic, modal, not minimal, but there are big orchestral themes on repeated patterns. And suddenly the whole world is humming it in the subways. There was a whole phenomenon happening. When you're in it, it can hit you personally."

lotsa soundtrack stuff that is similar in effect. especially if you like horror movies. just think of morricone's infernal harmonica in once upon a time in the west. unforgettable and way minimal.

people who write film scores DO look for hooks, you know? and obviously repeated patterns. the same music pops up in slightly different forms. and a one note hook is really effective sometimes. just one note on a piano repeated over the course of a movie can be very effective.

i've heard more than one musician rave about john williams. and not just former little kid star wars fan musicians either.

John Carpenter and Herrmann come to mind too.

maybe film scoring is really where minimalism affected vernacular music? Certain TV themes too.

These were the two questions that were asked to a young gygax! by Fred Frith, no lie!

(w/r/t to OP)

ah, i remember this thread. it was a question posed by mr. Fr3d Fr1th to a young gygax! in some dank oakland watering hole.
― Steve Shasta (Steve Shasta), Wednesday, January 31, 2007 7:13 AM (4 years ago)

That whole Palestine interview is pure gold. What a character. I should really interview him, one of these days.

maybe film scoring is really where minimalism affected vernacular music? Certain TV themes too.

― rob, Wednesday, June 1, 2011 9:44 AM (42 minutes ago) Bookmark

this reminds me of my friend's comment when he saw a recent philip glass opera - "the whole time i kept thinking about 'the hours'"

i'm starting an atonal minimal doo wop group, geeta, and you are welcome to join in whenever you have time.

x-post

that's the great thing about film music, you can steal from EVERYONE. glass gets ripped off. all kinds of people get ripped off. that's why glass had to show them how it was done in his great battle rap answer record score to candyman.

my doo wop idea came about cuz i was listening to an old record of japanese noh theatre performance and i was thinking about how you could translate that into a more modern western form. and really really slow doo wop music was what i came up with. and atonal because it sounds cooler if you say your stuff is atonal.

and yes i did wonder if anyone had made sippin' sizzurp musik out of slowed down doo wop recordings. but i think it would be even cooler live. and you wouldn't have to be a great singer cuz you would be singing so slow and low.

i realize i'm going out on a limb here. but that's what trailblazers do. me and angus. two peas in a pod.

ha! eno is big into doo-wop...you should get him to join your band.

if you don't have any breath support, slow low singing will sound fucking terrible

great thread! wish there were more of this sort of discussion here nowadays, but it's like i cart that kind of expertise around.

anyway, though it's been covered above, i just loathe the term "vernacular music". it's an arbitrary and arrogant attempt to segregate avant/academic/classical music from less "studied" approaches. it posits other forms of music as local languages or dialects and elevates itself as something more refined or "formal" ― as a sort of musical lingua franca, unbound by local convention. this seems a patently false distinction. for at least 50 years, pop forms of various sorts have provided a much more fluid and adaptable international tongue. in comparison, formal music often seems extraordinarily constrained by its local traditions, aesthetics and habits of mind.

argh, all this influence stuff. god i hate that word when applied like this.

i think technology was more important in the development of the minimalist sound, and i don't really hear much 'influence' between any of the early minimalist kind of sounds.

for me 'influence' is hard to define in musical terms and has more to do with personality. much of the early minimalist music doesn't share very much in terms of personalit y.

― george bob (george bob), Wednesday, January 31, 2007 4:43 AM (4 years ago) Bookmark

this is an interesting point. mark s was saying much the same thing near the beginning of the thread. the importance of technology's "influence" on mid-century formal music (in no way limited to minimalism) can't be overstated. but i'm not happy discarding traditional notions of musical influence, as it again, seems to separate this sort of music from the traditions it clearly responds to ― the blues, indian classical music, other asian musics such as gamelan, the riffs of early rock & roll, drone in pop and folk, etc.

drugs.

― JasonD (JasonD), Thursday, April 17, 2003 12:05 PM (8 years ago) Bookmark

and JasonD OTM way upthread about a third category of obvious influence

In the early days of ILM, circa 2001/2002, there was a lot of debate on these boards about 'influence.' Mark S, in particular, would rail against it. In my opinion, writing in a review that 'X is influenced by Y and Z' is lazy thinking. That isn't to say that 'influence' doesn't exist, but that it has become a lousy kind of shorthand. There are a whole bunch of old and great ILM threads tearing apart the concept of 'influence', and if you do a search you'll find them.

Mark S' thinking on music always inspired me. When Mark was the editor of the Wire in the early '90s, he put his sister's toy robot on the cover, which I thought was the most badass thing the Wire ever did. His brilliant, hyper-compressed reviews in NME, etc in the late 80s/early 90s (?) meant more to me than Xgau's Consumer Guide. Mark could say more in a sentence (all in lower case, of course) than most other critics could say in two pages. The feature Mark wrote on Eno in the Wire in 1992 (I think) was, and still is, one of the best things ever written on Eno.

yeah, i understand the objection to "influence," its inbuilt laziness and fallacies. it's important that we question received notions and easy thinking, but the pointed rejection of influence also strikes me as an historical artifact, a necessary intellectual convulsion at/in a certain time and place, but also a bit extreme in retrospect. everything is contextual, especially perception, and that's the value of perceived influence.

honestly, i've never to my knowledge read Mark S other than on these boards. i do remember being taken to task by he and nabisco in some thread or another in my early days, as i was gassing on about some obviousness. about to read that eno piece...

geeta you were born to run the wire. sometimes i miss the brainy days of yore on here. kogan, sterling, mark s, lots of people. but i'm old and slow now and youtube embeds are about all i can handle anyway.

wonder what eno thought of that bangs piece? i always liked that thing.

geeta you were born to run the wire

they should be so lucky

for scott, milton and mark s:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJ3Z7OhBJM4

also this:
http://boxes-of-toys.blogspot.com/2010/09/welcome-to-dreamland-celluloid-box-696.html

(hope the link is still good)

this is for geeta, brian eno, milton parker, steve shasta, and mark sinker:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjMvQHgAgjg

aw, you guys are sweet.

I just found this on a shelf in my kitchen--an interview that Mark S did with Steve Reich in 1993. I'm typing out the relevant part here, interesting stuff:

"... Reich's music today finds echoes in pop culture (minimalism's parallels with deep funk are rendered non-trivial by the rise of Techno.) Orbital's Internal opens with "Time Becomes," a phase-shifting exercise in the Come Out mode. The Orb sampled him more directly. This seems to please him--he asks me to send him CDs by both.

"One of the highest compliments is being ripped off. This kind of music, I heard they sampled Electric Counterpoint, and I wanted to see what they were up to. Not because I wanted to sue them but because I was curious ... it feels good. If people this far down the line can find something--I mean, I'm 56. If someone in their early 20s is interested in something I did a few years ago, even back further, that's good news, and I'm genuinely curious to see how. One of the reasons I got back into Different Trains is I that I hear "O Superman" with a tape-loop, and I think Gee, I'm glad I helped you out--what did I get out of it? That prompted me to rethink. That was one of the many ingredients in rethinking the direction to go back and start using the sampler. So I think a healthy musical situation when all kinds of music are in some kind of dialogue. You can imagine Bach walking from his house to the church and hearing street musicians playing gigues and gavottes and sarabandes, because those are what people danced to in those days, and wondering, Hmm, I wonder what I could do with those. That's how the Dance Suites come about--his take on the music of the day. That's how it should be. When I was a student it wasn't this way. There was this High Art Schoenberg ideal--Stockhausen, Boulez, late 50s early 60s: and I was listening to John Coltrane. So it's kind of poetic justice that this 14-year-old kid who was sitting trying to be Kenny Clarke, then Eno and Bowie and that generation get something, and if these [he indicates The Orb and Orbital again] feel right to me, that's how it ought to be, and maybe I'll learn something from them."

in terms of doods like the beatles, i think the early minimalists just showed them that technology could be abused to create these trippy sounds, which would have led to a different approach in writing songs. aha, texture is also important.

McCartney was super into John Cage shit wasn't he? I think it goes beyond just "trippy sounds"

yeah mccartney was all up there. from 1966:

"I find life is an education. I go to plays and I am interested in the arts, but it's only because I keep my eyes open and I see what's going on around me. Anyone can learn if they look. I mean, nowadays I'm interested in the electronic music of people like Berio and Stockhausen, who's great. It opens your eyes and ears."

"On the LP, we've got this track (Tomorrow Never Knows) with electronic effects I worked out myself... with words from the Tibetan Book Of The Dead. We did it because, I for one, am sick of doing sounds that people can claim to have heard before. Anyway, we played it to the Stones and the Who, and they visably sat up and were interested."

all up in there even.

Referring to the Steve Reich interview I posted above--I just remembered the parallels between the Reich interview and the Eno interview that Mark did the year before. Eno: "What really thrills me is to contribute to the conversation in some nice way, some useful way, and to then get echoes of that coming back later on. So when people say, 'Don't you get a bit fed up when The Orb (let's say) is ripping you off?' I think, 'No, I don't at all, it's very flattering really.' It's like being quoted years later - someone saying, 'Yes, that was worth doing.' And it's making a difference to someone."

Man, flipping through these old Mark-edited issues of the Wire makes me depressed. They were so brilliant. There are reviews of Gang Starr and Napalm Death next to Derek Bailey and Anthony Braxton and etc. MC Lyte shares a page with Meredith Monk. There is an earnest review of the video for Positive K's "I Got a Man" which references Jean-Luc Godard. Ian Penman writes a hilarious takedown of U2's "Zooropa": "It all looks a bit 60s/70s, this play with Rock Messiah posturing and the satellite swizzle stick of all-too-predictable images--Lenin, Nazism, the Wall, crashing technology, satellite porn. It's all very Ultravox/Berlin-Bowie, but this is 1993 and the Wall is DOWN."

Right, I gotta get back to writing a 300-word review for a magazine that doesn't care

Oh man, flipping through another old Mark S-edited issue of the Wire, glass of whiskey in hand. Sister Sledge (best-of) and the Pet Shop Boys' 'Very' in the reviews section! An invisible jukebox with Holger Czukay where they play him Kraftwerk's 'Ruckzuck' and he says 'Is this Laurie Anderson?' Solid gold.

haha blimey i never came back to earn my $3 off of gygax! RIP

MAYBE ONE DAY EH?

<3 you mark

aye, $3 today isn't quite the same as 8 years ago tho.

Talking Heads - "Found A Job" (cf. John Adams' opera "Nixon in China")