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Philip Glass and Steve Reich worked together as removals men. For some reason I find it fascinating that the two greats of minimalist composing did this. It sho

by louthy 2y ago

Philip Glass and Steve Reich worked together as removals men. For some reason I find it fascinating that the two greats of minimalist composing did this. It shouldn’t be that strange, I have plenty of struggling musician friends who work day jobs together. Perhaps it’s the fact that they both became greats, or just my reverence for them that makes it seem fascinating (or perhaps it's just the mental image of Philip Glass and Steve Reich moving a sofa up some stairs!)

thenthenthen 2y ago
Removal sounds right up their alley
- louthy 2y ago
  There’s a deep philosophical question there: did they remove items or were the items never there in the first place?
gnulinux 2y ago
The reason is simple, Western classical music was extremely, extremely (and it's impossible to stress this enough: extremely) conservative in late 20th century. Anything that's not part of the canon Schoenbergian atonalism, or Mahlerian Romanticism was considered "wrong", "illogical" etc. Believe it or not WCM had a just as rich of a history and stream of movements as any other tradition of art, but by mid-to-late 20th century academia -- one by one -- killed every single vehicle of creativity for simply being "incorrect". Here is a theory from 1880s and 1920s from a German musicologist that "proves" mathematically that this music is incorrect and should be rewritten. No artist can make rent money in that atmosphere. Artists like Steve Reich and Philip Glass were gigantic innovators, they were iconoclasts, they wanted WCM to go way beyond what it was stuck at in 1970s. Of course they spent decades being considered a charlatan by their colleagues. Philip Glass in an interview explains how, when he founded the Philip Glass Ensemble and started producing his early (brutally minimalist) music people tried "helping" him by teaching basic musical composition, and told him that he needs to learn basics first before writing music like that. It's a farce really, from 2020s having listened to 21st century post-minimalism, if you go back and listen to early minimalism in 1970s and 1980s (think, Music for 18 musicians, Music in 12 parts, Einstein on the beach, in C, Glass Violin Concerto, De Stijl etc) it's just haunting how creative their music is. They had to invent everything from scratch! You have to go all the way back to 1640s Froberger to find anything that remotely sounds idiomatic within the tradition, while aggressively responding to their contemporaries like the extreme-complexity of Boulez etc. It's really unfortunate, my sense is, modern music education creates very conservative, robotic craftsmen who play technically perfectly but are unable to see innovation and artistic response. I would like to say 21st century WCM is in a much better situation and there is more creativity, but I would say it's likely a marginal improvement over late 20th century, rather than a significant transformation.

by louthy 2y ago

thenthenthen 2y ago

Removal sounds right up their alley

louthy 2y ago
There’s a deep philosophical question there: did they remove items or were the items never there in the first place?

gnulinux 2y ago

The reason is simple, Western classical music was extremely, extremely (and it's impossible to stress this enough: extremely) conservative in late 20th century. Anything that's not part of the canon Schoenbergian atonalism, or Mahlerian Romanticism was considered "wrong", "illogical" etc. Believe it or not WCM had a just as rich of a history and stream of movements as any other tradition of art, but by mid-to-late 20th century academia -- one by one -- killed every single vehicle of creativity for simply being "incorrect". Here is a theory from 1880s and 1920s from a German musicologist that "proves" mathematically that this music is incorrect and should be rewritten. No artist can make rent money in that atmosphere. Artists like Steve Reich and Philip Glass were gigantic innovators, they were iconoclasts, they wanted WCM to go way beyond what it was stuck at in 1970s. Of course they spent decades being considered a charlatan by their colleagues. Philip Glass in an interview explains how, when he founded the Philip Glass Ensemble and started producing his early (brutally minimalist) music people tried "helping" him by teaching basic musical composition, and told him that he needs to learn basics first before writing music like that. It's a farce really, from 2020s having listened to 21st century post-minimalism, if you go back and listen to early minimalism in 1970s and 1980s (think, Music for 18 musicians, Music in 12 parts, Einstein on the beach, in C, Glass Violin Concerto, De Stijl etc) it's just haunting how creative their music is. They had to invent everything from scratch! You have to go all the way back to 1640s Froberger to find anything that remotely sounds idiomatic within the tradition, while aggressively responding to their contemporaries like the extreme-complexity of Boulez etc. It's really unfortunate, my sense is, modern music education creates very conservative, robotic craftsmen who play technically perfectly but are unable to see innovation and artistic response. I would like to say 21st century WCM is in a much better situation and there is more creativity, but I would say it's likely a marginal improvement over late 20th century, rather than a significant transformation.