minimalism in music

Here’s a must-see Pitchfork.TV video of Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore talking with Steve Reich at last year’s SXSW conference.

While Reich is best known for his acoustic works, his early electroacoustic works have been some of his most influential. Read more…

Milkcrate is an interesting site/project, maintained by Sebastian Tomczak, that explores making music with minimal source materials:

Milkcrate is not a band or a particular group of people. Milkcrate adds a further set of constraints of space, time and materials to create music within.

The rules…

• The objective of milkcrate is to write, record and produce as much music as possible, creating a completely finished product within twenty-four hours of beginning the session
• No member of the group is to leave the environment, within reason
• All materials and raw sources used to create music must be explicitly non- musical
• All the materials must fit inside or on a milkcrate
• There is a limit of one milkcrate per person
• At least one member of the group must be productive at all times

These rules are modular in nature; milkcrate sessions may have additional constraints, so long as they do not break the existing ones.

The results are very interesting, with a huge amount of variety. Use the site as a source of inspiration or just download some great free electronic music.

I’ve put a few previews below as teasers – but check out the site for some real inspiration.

 

 Singapura - uses only glass as source material [0:58m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

 

 Dawn Bells - uses only a blank sheet of paper as source material: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

 

 Of Daedalus, Part A - Empty, solo milkcrate: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

The Second International Conference on Music and Minimalism will occur September 2-6, 2009, at the University of Missouri at Kansas City, directed by Kyle Gann and David McIntire.

All scholars in this area are invited to submit papers. Relevant topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

• both American and European (and other) minimalist music;
• early minimalism of the 1950s and ?60s;
• outgrowths of minimalism into postminimalism, totalism, and oher movements;
• minimalist music?s relation to pop music or visual art;
• performance problems in minimalist music;
• analyses or investigation of music by La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Arvo Pärt, Louis Andriessen, Gavin Bryars;
• especially encouraged are papers on crucial but less public figures such as Tony Conrad, Phill Niblock, Jon Gibson, Eliane Radigue, Rhys Chatham, Barbara Benary, Julius Eastman, and so on.

Contributions are welcomed in the form of individual papers (20 minutes). Abstracts containing a maximum of 500 words should be sent as email attachments, by October 31, 2008, to kgann@earthlink.net and compositeurkc@sbcglobal.net.

The Society for Minimalist Music exists to promote the intellectual and scholarly study of the music known as minimalism, and originating in the 1960s activities of composers La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Tony Conrad, Terry Jennings, Jon Gibson, Charlemagne Palestine, Phill Niblock, Barbara Benary, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, and others. The Society’s interests are not limited to the music of that period, but also to ensuing streams of music developed from minimalist origins, and also in the relationship of music to minimalism in the other arts. Specifically, the Society recognizes minimalism not only in its familiar idiom of motivic repetition, but also its more general concern with drones and stasis.

Image: Martin Captures

In this classic clip, South Park Elementary presents the happy, non-offensive, non-denominational school play, with compositions by Philip Glass.

Bogus, but funny!