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.
Music I want to get my grubby mitts on
After (not really) splurging on a Naxos radio subscription, I’ve been spending my lab days sucking new music up through my ears. Absorbing it - maybe that’s a more sensical choice of words, the ear-suction imagery is a bit too disturbing. Anyway, regardless of the transferral mechanism I’ve been introduced to a whole host of new music which is now highly in demand by me. This includes:
Balada - Wikipedia page here, personal webpage here, sound samples here.
Ryabov - This guy is hard to find anything on. The Naxos page is here.
Brusa - Wikipedia page, personal page, sound samples.
I also wanna get some stuff by some not so new fellows: Myaskovsky and Glass. Or maybe we should just get around to watching that copy of Koyaanisqatsi we got on Netflix flippin’ ages ago and never returned.