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)

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")