Minimalism Vs Postminimalism

Jonathan Glazer raises an interesting point about how art can be created for a purpose and not for its own sake. By taking greater risks, music will changes over time and new genres can take shape. Modern day artists can take risks in their expression of music through the insertion of elements such as raising awareness of the implications of change and innovation through their work. One such scientific and technical innovation is cell culture. Cell culture and science in general has many parallels to the evolution of music and more specifically, the evolution of minimalism to postminimalism to totalism. In this essay, I will compare and contrast how these subjects relate to each other in terms of their history, art form, concepts and processes.

In the words of Kyle Gann, “Who wants to be limited to one idea, one texture, one sound-concept, in every work? Not very many composers. And so the young listened critically, absorbing minimalist strategies but meanwhile planning new ones of their own.” (Kyle Gann, 1998). Post Minimalists sought to create a consistent musical language in which to compose. This involved the use of a steady pulse, usually continuing throughout a work or movement; a diatonic pitch language, tonal in effect but avoiding traditional functional tonality; general evenness of dynamics, without strong climaxes or nuanced emotionalism; and unlike minimalism, an avoidance of obvious or linear formal design. While post minimalism is recognised as a musical movement, it remains largely unknown to the public as most post minimalist composers lived in different geological locations and were not aware of each other's existence until the movement was over. Composers such as William Duckworth, Janice Giteck and Daniel Lentz all lived in different states in America and thus lead to the “lack” of a scene for post minimalism (Kyle Gann, 1998). However, there was an advantage to this as each post minimalist composer developed their own unique style and interpretation of minimalist

This will be discussed later. The pitch and rhythm content of Prelude 14 is highly regimented and it can be seen in bars 1–92, a monophonic melody doubled by an octave and bars 93–116, in which the left hand drones the accented Ds of each string. The number of cells in each string is governed by the Fibonacci series: 5, 8, 13, and 21. This is based around the central idea of the album which is relating the convergence of time to mathematical processes such as the Fibonacci series. I numbered these strings 1 (m. 93), 2 (mm. 94–95), 3 (mm. 96–98), and 4 (mm. 99–103). It uses the minimalistic compositional device of note addition and subtraction by splitting each of the strings in half and filled in with new—but related—material by the next string. The picture below demonstrates the construction of each string, with special attention to the transposition (t), inversion (I) and retrograde inversion (RI) of quarter-note