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Book Review
Mar. 24th, 2012 02:28 pmRepeating Ourselves: American Minimal Music as Cultural Practice
by Robert Fink
Fink's book was endlessly fascinating, and made me think about minimal music in a way I never had before. (It also made me listen to all 17 minutes of Donna Summer's "Love to Love You Baby", but that's a different story.) Clearly taking cues from Greil Marcus' brilliant Lipstick Traces, Fink explores the relationships between minimalist music, mass-produced consumer culture, 70s disco, advertising, and the Suzuki method of violin pedagogy. Especially interesting is Fink's discussion of the rise of the LP and hi-fi, the culture of repetitive listening it engendered, and how that fed into the development of minimalism. Fink is emphatically not demonizing minimalism - on the contrary, he is offering a compelling perspective on minimalism as both an outgrowth of and response to the repetitive media overload of postwar American culture. Minimalism can be a powerful way of reinterpreting and re-experiencing that culture.
by Robert Fink
Fink's book was endlessly fascinating, and made me think about minimal music in a way I never had before. (It also made me listen to all 17 minutes of Donna Summer's "Love to Love You Baby", but that's a different story.) Clearly taking cues from Greil Marcus' brilliant Lipstick Traces, Fink explores the relationships between minimalist music, mass-produced consumer culture, 70s disco, advertising, and the Suzuki method of violin pedagogy. Especially interesting is Fink's discussion of the rise of the LP and hi-fi, the culture of repetitive listening it engendered, and how that fed into the development of minimalism. Fink is emphatically not demonizing minimalism - on the contrary, he is offering a compelling perspective on minimalism as both an outgrowth of and response to the repetitive media overload of postwar American culture. Minimalism can be a powerful way of reinterpreting and re-experiencing that culture.
