Stuart Dummit

So good I’ll repeat it:

mejoe:

“In traditional music, repetition is used in a preeminently narrative and teleological frame, so that musical components like rhythm, melody, harmony and so on are used in a causal, pre-figured way, so that a musical perspective emerges that gives the listener a non-ambivalent orientation and that…

American minimalist music (and to a certain extent, postminimalism) owes its existence to Cagean and post-serialist interests in indeterminacy and non-subjectivity. For this reason most proto-Minimalist pieces and meta-Minimalist pieces (like Feldman, for example) explore things like timbre and harmony. The other half it owes to earlier movements, such as Baroque music (as if being reset by post-modernism, see Luciano Berio’s remarks about Steve Reich). Most ostinati patterns were widespread in the early Modern period, and several notable pieces (Colin McPhee’s 1936 Tabuh-tabuhan, has an entire section dedicated to it), variously borrowed from musical traditions. The immediate influences of minimalism came ostensibly from world musics, especially West African drumming and Balinese gamelan, as well as American folk song, which has a variety of repetition. Repetition is a fundamental theme in folk music, used to hammer in patterns and harmonies with each new performance, and to strengthen social bonds and meanings among musical groups.