Reich- Eight Lines
A nice excerpt.
posted by Arturo Vasquez @ 7:46 PM
Thursday, December 07, 2006
About Me
- Name: Arturo Vasquez
- Location: Berkeley, California, United States
A Roman Catholic still trying to seek God through the light and the dark; the small, the broken, and the beautiful.
Previous Posts
- The Myth of Anglo-Saxon, Middle Class Catholicism
- Sobre Mi Relación Con La Iglesia Católica
- An Appreciation
- Editorial Note
- Comments, Comments, Comments
- Orthodoxy, the Papacy and Stuff
- Tune in, turn on......
- Waking Up, Little by Little
- A New Addition to My Collection
- I Was Having a Mexican Moment.....
2 Comments:
Wow, a sincerely religious Reich fan. I think that makes two or three total that I know of. Two years ago, after investing in the hefty Nonesuch box set, I found his work to exemplify--and I'm ripping off a phrase from someone here--the "aesthetic of boredom." I'll admit, I love Music for 18 Musicians (the ECM recording, not the later ones) as much as the next guy, but minimalism rarely does it for me anymore. Maybe part of that has to do with seeing John Adams speak at Northwestern (also two years ago) and then conduct a couple of his shorter works. It was all terribly pretentious, banal, and unsatisfying. For the life of me, I can't figure out how most of that genre is in any way superior to, say, what Aphex Twin, Autechre, or Boards of Canada produce. Maybe it isn't.
I have to disagree, of course. My favorite composer is Philip Glass, mostly due to his early work, but he still puts out some good stuff these days as well. Reich is a bit pretentious for me; critics treat him as a god but I fail to see how his music has evolved since the early 1970's. Glass' music, for all you can say about it, has changed; Reich seems to be stuck in the same musical obsessions. (Glass could write a lullaby, Reich could not, ergo, Glass is a better composer, at least for me.)
As for minimalism in general, you have to approach listening to music differently than say listening to a Beethoven string quartet. In the end, you don't analyze the music, you have to let the music flow over you and transform your enviorment. Okay, that sounded very "New Age-ish" but it is the same principle as that of Indian raga or other Eastern forms of music.
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