Repeating Ourselves: American Minimal Music as Cultural PracticeWhere did musical minimalism come from—and what does it mean? In this significant revisionist account of minimalist music, Robert Fink connects repetitive music to the postwar evolution of an American mass consumer society. Abandoning the ingrained formalism of minimalist aesthetics, Repeating Ourselves considers the cultural significance of American repetitive music exemplified by composers such as Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and Philip Glass. Fink juxtaposes repetitive minimal music with 1970s disco; assesses it in relation to the selling structure of mass-media advertising campaigns; traces it back to the innovations in hi-fi technology that turned baroque concertos into ambient "easy listening"; and appraises its meditative kinship to the spiritual path of musical mastery offered by Japan's Suzuki Method of Talent Education. |
Contents
The Culture of Repetition | 1 |
The Culture of Eros Repetition as Desire Creation | 23 |
The Culture of Thanatos Repetition as Mood Regulation | 167 |
Notes | 237 |
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actually advertising aesthetic American Minimal Music avant-garde Bach barococo Baroque music bass Baudrillard beat Beethoven chord classical music commercial complex composers concertos consumer desire consumer society consumption countercultural create critical culture of repetition dance desiring-production disco Donna Summer effect Eighteen Musicians epigraph experience experimental hermeneutic High Fidelity industrial Japanese jouissance kind Krugman Love to Love Love You Baby Mallet Instruments Manfredini mass mass-media mass-produced media plan melodic minimal music minimalist music Modules Mozart Music for Eighteen Music for Mallet orgasm pattern performance Philip Glass Piano Phase piece play pleasure practice precisely process music production pulse radio recombinant teleology record changer repetitive listening repetitive music rhythm rhythmic Robbins Landon sexual shift Shinichi Suzuki sound Steve Reich structure style subjectivity sublime Susan McClary Suzuki Method system of objects Talent Education teleology television tion tonal trance trope University Press violin Vivaldi voices York