Reconceptualizing and expanding minimalism: drones, totalism, spectral postminimalism, and post-totalism
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Zavorskas, Michael.
Reconceptualizing and expanding minimalism: drones, totalism, spectral postminimalism, and post-totalism. Retrieved from
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TitleReconceptualizing and expanding minimalism: drones, totalism, spectral postminimalism, and post-totalism
Date Created2023
Other Date2023-01 (degree)
Extent182 pages : illustrations
DescriptionThis dissertation synthesizes journalistic criticism, theoretical concepts of musical time, and original music analyses to broaden the conception of minimalism. I argue that most scholarly and public perceptions of minimalism focus on the pulse-based style of Philip Glass, Steve Reich, and Terry Riley, while significantly less attention is paid to the drone-based style of La Monte Young and his followers. Chapter one serves as an introduction, highlighting the imbalance in a few primary writings on minimalism and postminimalism. In chapter two, I create a taxonomy of minimalist and postminimalist styles. I draw primarily from the contemporaneous critical writings of Tom Johnson, who was active in the New York new music scene that was a hotbed for American minimalism. Johnson was drawn to the new meditative listening experience created by this music, an experience he discussed often in his reviews of minimalist concerts. In continuing the emphasis of this new listening experience, I reconceptualize minimalism as “objective music of limited materials,” stripping it of any terms that would preference pulse- or drone-based styles. This allows me to create a more balanced view of minimalism, with drone-based minimalism no longer the idiosyncratic purview of Young. In chapter three, I examine some theoretical writings on the new listening experience that minimalism and related styles can offer. Central to this chapter are Jonathan Kramer’s concept of moment time, Robert Fink’s concept of recombinant teleologies, and Mark J. Butler’s musical technologies. I then use these concepts as a framework for analyzing two works of totalism, Mikel Rouse’s Hope Chest (1991) and Julia Wolfe’s Tell Me Everything (1994). In chapters four and five, I follow my reconceptualization of minimalism in order to establish two new postminimalist subgenres, which I call spectral postminimalism and post-totalism. The former develops Robert A. Wannamaker’s concept of the North American Spectralist Tradition. I contrast spectral postminimalism with European spectralism, as discussed in the writings of Joshua Fineberg, Gérard Grisey, and Tristan Murail. Fineberg and Grisey in particular present spectralism as a restoration of teleology, which distinguishes it from spectral postminimalism’s preference for static states. In chapter five I present post-totalism as a subgenre of post-rock that exhibits totalism’s focus on rhythmic complexity. I argue that post-totalism is a particularly noisy subgenre of post-rock, using Paul Hegarty’s writings on noise as a guide.
NotePh.D.
NoteIncludes bibliographical references
Genretheses
LanguageEnglish
CollectionSchool of Graduate Studies Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Organization NameRutgers, The State University of New Jersey
RightsThe author owns the copyright to this work.
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