I've always been interested in minimalist music, although this label can encompass very different styles.
Among my favorite musicians are Morton Feldman, Pauline Oliveiros, La Monte Young, Steve Reich, Terry Riley, Toru Takemitsu, Harold Budd, Brian Eno, Peter Michael Hamel (non-exhaustive list...).
In my personal musical practice, I have been led to reflect more precisely on this concept of minimalism.
It seems to me that there are two ways of approaching it: from the musician's point of view, and from the listener's point of view.
From the musician's point of view, first of all. The sophistication of today's instruments and the multitrack recording capabilities of DAWs encourage overload, both in terms of instrumental tracks and sound processing levels. The natural inclination of the electronic musician is to achieve “big sound”, by superimposing tracks, multiplying rhythmic lines, drums and sequences, saturating sound space, and fearing emptiness and a drop in tension.
In my own musical practice, as I've already written, the main step consists in erasing, purifying, emptying, slipping in silence - in short, letting sound and silence breathe together.
This minimalism is also that of some painters, architects or sculptors, who avoid overload and filler to concentrate on the essence.
We could call this procedure “subtractive composition”. It can be governed by various rules, mathematical combinatorics, crossed time scales, or by the intuition of creative and reflexive listening, of a floating attention that recomposes the sound spectrum of a composition by successive withdrawals of all that is secondary and accessory.
Toshi Ichiyanagi “Stanzas for Kenji Kobayashi” (1961)
Secondly, from the listener's point of view.
We need to learn to listen to music from a minimalist perspective: for example, to discern the thread or threads running through the musical composition and follow them in their continuity, to perceive the scansion of silences, to discern the sound planes and their architecture, in short, to unfold in listening the space-time of a composition, in terms of volumes, surfaces, lines and vectoriality.
The listener can also choose this minimalist listening approach with compositions that are not specifically minimal. I've often listened to an album by Tangerine Dream or Klaus Schulze, for example, and become attached to a polyphonic or melodic line in particular, the punctuation of a bass, the loops of a sequence, and give that particular element a particular relief, recreating and modifying my perception of the whole piece. The same goes for listening to a jazz standard or a classical composition: I like to isolate, for example, Gary Peacock's bass playing in Keith Jarrett's trio, or to follow a particular melodic line in a Bach concerto, then gradually integrate a second, then a third.
The listener's ear is thus a musical instrument in its own right, with its own sensitivity and settings, its own memory and culture: it adds the final touch to the musical composition, bringing it into the realm of both physical materiality and intersubjective communication.
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