The styles of interaction under discussion here owe much to the downtown New York arts scene of the 1980s, by many accounts the heyday of pre-academic postmodernism in the United States. Prefacing Abigail Child's book, Tom Gunning provides a helpful overview of the context giving rise to this community of Ivy League expatriates:
The crashing of the romantic and idealist aspiration of the sixties counter-culture led many American avant-garde artists to look for a rigor of analysis to replace the highly individualistic and 'personalized' aspects of the Beats and of the youth culture the Beats in part inspired. Painting, as it moved into Minimalism, provided one alternative model. Just as important was a rediscovery of the art and theory of the Soviet literary avant-garde of the twenties, the constructivist ethos which proclaimed the importance of the revolutionary political context of artistic practice, and proposed a scientific analysis of the laws of art... (1)
The music group Bang on a Can was formed in New York in 1987 by Michael Gordon and some fellow recent graduates from the Yale School of Music, because their own musical experiences and needs were not reflected in the culture of "new music"--that is, contemporary composition in the academic conservatory tradition, what some might term "post-classical." The working methods of their "band" were similar to those of the rock groups they had listened to since childhood, and they favored a pluralist mentality over fragmenting and isolating style wars. They also embraced improvisation and electronics, as well as the repetitious long durations of "process" music. Usually called minimalism, this genre has been celebrated as "a purely American art, free of modernist angst and inflected with pop optimism." (2) It was partly inspired by the danceable rock grooves of the 1960s. Later, the direction of influence reversed: "... minimalism has marked rock, pop, and dance music from the Velvet Underground onward." (3) Eventually, a style came to be associated with the highly successful, influential, and controversial Bang on a Can: a maximal approach to minimalism, in which very subtle details of timbre are used to articulate and enliven the surfaces of large structures based on very simple harmonic progressions. Morrison's film Decasia, written in close dialogue with Michael Cordon and his music score, is also exemplary of minimalism's slow and repetitious processes.
The crashing of the romantic and idealist aspiration of the sixties counter-culture led many American avant-garde artists to look for a rigor of analysis to replace the highly individualistic and 'personalized' aspects of the Beats and of the youth culture the Beats in part inspired. Painting, as it moved into Minimalism, provided one alternative model. Just as important was a rediscovery of the art and theory of the Soviet literary avant-garde of the twenties, the constructivist ethos which proclaimed the importance of the revolutionary political context of artistic practice, and proposed a scientific analysis of the laws of art... (1)
The music group Bang on a Can was formed in New York in 1987 by Michael Gordon and some fellow recent graduates from the Yale School of Music, because their own musical experiences and needs were not reflected in the culture of "new music"--that is, contemporary composition in the academic conservatory tradition, what some might term "post-classical." The working methods of their "band" were similar to those of the rock groups they had listened to since childhood, and they favored a pluralist mentality over fragmenting and isolating style wars. They also embraced improvisation and electronics, as well as the repetitious long durations of "process" music. Usually called minimalism, this genre has been celebrated as "a purely American art, free of modernist angst and inflected with pop optimism." (2) It was partly inspired by the danceable rock grooves of the 1960s. Later, the direction of influence reversed: "... minimalism has marked rock, pop, and dance music from the Velvet Underground onward." (3) Eventually, a style came to be associated with the highly successful, influential, and controversial Bang on a Can: a maximal approach to minimalism, in which very subtle details of timbre are used to articulate and enliven the surfaces of large structures based on very simple harmonic progressions. Morrison's film Decasia, written in close dialogue with Michael Cordon and his music score, is also exemplary of minimalism's slow and repetitious processes.
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