contrabandwidth
Last Songs Played
Top Songs This Month
Similar MOGs' Top Songs This Week
Songs You Should Be Listening To
Posts
Donald Judd Untitled (1990)
The interesting thing about minimalism is that it is secretly complex. Is this intentionally ironic? I don't believe so. Minimalism is about striping away at an idea or thought, until you expose just the frame work that props it up. It's the distilation of an idea. An omlette without any ingredients is an egg, and an egg uncracked is a white smooth orb like object. Minimalism is the egg. Simple sompared to an omlette, complex when you consider what is in it or what it can become. Just think of all teh recipes eggs are the catalyst for...
Here are Eno's thoughts on minimalist composer Steve Reich and his seminal piece of minimalist composition using tape delays It's Gonna Rain (1965), taken from an interview by Anthony Korner called "Aurora Musicalis," Artforum 24:10 (Summer 1986), 79.
"There’s an essay called "What the Frog’s Eye Tells the Frog’s Brain,"
by Warren McCulloch, who discovered that a frog’s eyes don’t work
like ours. Ours are always moving: we blink, we scan. We move our
heads. But a frog fixes its eyes on a scene and leaves them there. It
stops seeing all the static parts of the environment, which become invisible,
but as soon as one element moves, which could be what it
wants to eat – the fly – it is seen in very high contrast to the rest of the
environment. It’s the only thing the frog sees and the tongue comes out
and takes it. Well, I realized that what happens with the Reich piece is
that our ears behave like a frog’s eyes. Since the material is common to
both tapes, what you begin to notice are not the repeating parts but the
sort of ephemeral interference patterns between them. Your ear telescopes
into more and more fine detail until you’re hearing what to me
seems like atoms of sound. That piece absolutely thrilled me, because I
realized then that I understood what minimalism was about. The creative
operation is listening. It isn’t just a question of a presentation
feeding into a passive audience. People will sometimes say about
Reich’s piece, "Oh yes, that one with that voice which keeps hammer-
ing into your head," and indeed, if you’re not especially listening to it
that’s exactly what it is."
This comes courtesy of Eric Tamm's Brian Eno: His Music and the Vertical Color of Sound
Here's a great piece Fresh Air did on Reich on his 70th birthday
You may wonder why I'm having you listen to 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence. Perhaps you'll notice the clicking of mice around you as you work, the hum of the AC, your co-worker chewing loudly. I so this to illustrate the rythyms of nature, of the mundane. John Cage actually played (or rather didn't play) this piece in concert. He didn't explain himself, and it lent to great situationalist theater. What are our expectations about music after all. Cage is a modernist post modernist, through and through. Source for this quote is Eric Tamm's book Brian Eno: His Music and the Vertical Color of Sound.
"Nevertheless, we must bring about a music which is like furniture – a
music, that is, which will be part of the noises of the environment, will
take them into consideration. I think of it as melodious, softening the
noises of the knives and forks, not dominating them, not imposing it-
self. It would fill up those heavy silences that sometimes fall between
friends dining together. It would spare them the trouble of paying attention
to their own banal remarks. And at the same time it would neutralize
the street noises which so indiscretely enter into the play of
conversation. To make such music would be to respond to a need."
14 Cage, Silence, 54.
Brian Eno is more of a post modernist, his taking Cages lead and is "making furniture" from Cages instructions. Eno may have coined the term "Ambient Music" when he released Music For Airports, but this is some ground breaking stuff, even if it is intentionally breaking that stuff in the background.
Comments
The whole "silence" as a "sound art" concept is always a sticky one. Even Sonic Youth did it as "The Ciccone Youth"
I pose yet another question - what is more challenging to listen to - one of these "silent" pieces - or something like Lou Reed's "Metal Machine Music"?
Hmmmmmm
I admidtedly have never heard MMM in it's entirety. It's not that I haven't been interested, it was just unavailable for a long time. I'd give it a listen, but I doubt it would get more than that. I've listened to a lot of "avante garde" compositions, and some is better than others. I like Steve Reich, some Phillip Glass, Merideth Monk, some Terry Riley.
I look at it this way, there's idea guys, and there's workers. You have the Buckminster Fuller's who never actually built a lot (as far as actual working architects go) but they develope a philosophy. I think of Cage like that. He did do lots of pieces, but most straddled the line between music and art theory (I would say they were more in the realm of Art Theory). Cage coincidentally cut his teeth at Black Mountain in North Carolina with Bucky Fuller, Merce Cunningham, Robert Rauschenburg, and other's who are the who's who of post modern art.
Groon kicked off the Brian Eno love fest by posting a track from Brian Eno/David Byrnes new colaboration Everything That Happens Will Happen Today. I believe Eno to be one of the most important people working in popular music today - but probably one of the hardest to pin down as to what exactly he does. Frankly, Eno is a renaissance man, making music, writing, creating art instalations, and producing albums. He is a Rock n' Roll Marcel Duchamp. But he is extremely eloquent in explaining his thoughts on music, and is able to synthesize his somethimes theory heavy ideas into ways that everyone can understand. So I hope to do a few posts, maybe many more, leting quotes from Eno explain Eno. I have been reading the wonderful book Brian Eno: His Music and the Vertical Color of Sound by Eric Tamm. (Here's a link to download the tree free version (Word) or a PDF version of the book). This quote was taken from that book.
"I suppose people here [in the U.S.] might think it’s strange to regard
doo-wop as magical music, but I did, because in England we had no
tradition of it whatsoever ... It could have been from another galaxy for
all I knew. I was absolutely entranced by it, from the age of seven or
eight, when I first heard those early songs like "Get A Job" [The Silhouettes,
1958]. I thought, "This is just beautiful." I had never heard
music like this, and one of the reasons it was beautiful was because it
came without a context. It plopped from outer space, in a sense. Now,
in later life I realized that this removal of context was an important
point in the magic of music. One of the things I’ve been concerned
with quite a lot is to deliberately dismantle or shift contexts around so
that something comes from an area where you didn’t expect it, or
something appears and it has a certain mysteriousness to it."
(Jim Aikin, "Brian Eno," Keyboard 7 (July 1981), 62.)
Comments
Eno has been a hero of mine for a quarter of a decade now.
He's beyond simply "creative". A true innovator.
Fascinating quote. The removal and shifting of context is a really interesting idea. I've a couple of his ambient albums and am eager to check out more of his work. Ta for the link.
I would reccomend "Another Green World", "Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy", and "Here Come The Warm Jets" which are his "rock" albums. Kinda pick up where he was going with Roxy, but it goes more into the stratosphere. This is beyond Glam - I'm not really sure how you'd describe it, because it's Art Rock, but not the played stereotypical Prog Rock (like later ELP or what have you). Some periods of his music are just so different than others, it's interesting it came from the same person.
MOG Meter
Comments
This is very interesting. Minimalist type music has always been interesting to me . . . for about the first five minutes or so. Then, usually, I get bored. I think I see what Eno is saying, though. I'll have to go bakc and listen with "frog ears."
I find pieces like Reich's very interesting because they have an almost meditative feel. The repetition creates a sort of "Ohm" like vibration that you lose yourself in. It's definitely a different way to listen to music, you have to hear it differently and not concentrate on the notes but rather the patterns forming in the sound. I would recomend Music for 18 Musicians. Check it out of your library if you don't feel daring enough.
Thanks for the suggestion-I will do that.