Minimalism and Electronic Dance Music
After listening to Glass’ violin concerto more than once but less than a bunch of times in the last for days, I’ve finally accepted the zeitgeisty suspicion that modern dance music was heavily influenced by minimalism (I should have said heavily informed by minimalism, that sounds so much more professional. Oh well, guess I blew it). Whether this is a good or a bad thing, or totally, completely neutral is something I am trying to decide on.
Before I switched to classical my tendencies were tending pretty strictly toward IDMey type stuff, and I always kind of suspected that the slow-developing, relatively through-composed nature kinda eased me into classical stuff. It’s only just recently, after hearing Glass, that the similarities really really really jump out.
The thing is, now that I’m mostly off of the dance it mostly sounds a bit… dull. Repetitive. Like there’s one or two good ideas and they are repeated again and again and again. It’s a little early at this juncture (sound professional now, don’t I?) to pass too much judgment, but I’m not convinced it’s gonna have enough staying power. It definitely seems like a completely different kind of musical offspring then the majority of classical.
November 17th, 2007 at 11:23 pm
I know nothing about the dance music you refer to, though I have opportunities to hear it from time to time, of course. However, I suspect that the composers (? - I’m not sure that’s the appropriate word here) of it actually do only have one or two ideas they repeat over and over again. After all, the purpose of it is presumably to provide a steady beat to dance to — it doesn’t have to do anything else. Glass, though, is a little more subtle than that, I would say. (I don’t care for him as much as, say, Mahler or LvB or Wolfgang A. or JSB, but he’s OK.)