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more interesting minimalism undermines the idea of repetition--steve reich's music up to "music for 18 musicians." glass i never found interesting, but he doesn't come out of nowhere.
i'm kinda surprised at the way this thread has gone--given the enormous amount of new music that's out there--and the problems much of it creates for the category of "classical" music--which is what exactly?---that folk are talking about billy fucking joel is kinda depressing.
one thing that is the case with newer music--stuff that comes out of 12-tone directly and (there's way more of this) indirectly is that it violates the main modes of patterning typical of 19th century euro-classical music--most pop does not. you have to train your hearing to get into it--but you also had to train your hearing to tolerate the continuous monotony of 19th century euro-classical music. you just forget that you had to do it.
there are alot of gateway drugs, i suppose--late debussy (the wonderful world of 4ths) or scriabin's later piano sonatas---but listening to schoenberg's piano music is better. the use of silence and/or placement is quite different from what preceded it. and it still sounds new-ish--which is remarkable, but mostly as an indication of the extent to which folk are submerged in 19th century ways of patterning, thinking and hearing.
hell, the early mixes by the bomb squad (public enemy before copyright lawsuits shut down the approach to sample use they pioneered) has alot more to do with contemporary classical music than does billy joel.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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