Repetition & minimalism

[Sean]

While I'm at it, revised thoughts on Indian philosophy and minimalism etc, Pt.1

Repetition and minimalism

Repetition and juxtaposition are key aspects of folk musics and their proper use of improvization that align with the gunas' fundamental potentials: they are also hence of the highest art music reflective of life before a genuine folk music continuous with genuine life that can negate art. Self-reference is the nature of the absolute, consciousness and the field of the gunas and its logic that interfaces with the relative: the unitary absolute relates only to itself, contrasting with the relative, or the relative's relative value, which relates to other elements of the relative.

Stasis and intellectual stillness and silence yet inner dynamism are also characteristics of important repetitious and holographically conceived musics where the whole is implicated in every part; moreover the holistic Veda and centrally the Gita are products of the hum of the self-referential knower, knowing and known aspects of consciousness. Vedanta is concerned with the return of the Self or the attention back on itself before being lost in the objects of the senses or thoughts, involving a reference of the thinking mind to the Self so that there is conscious understanding and aesthetic experience.

Repetitious processes in music then provide key expression of the absolute by isolating the aesthetic experience or the gunas' logic in giving the representation back to the attention before it has chance to try and necessarily fail to reconcile or make sense of it rationally: instead of relating one element to another in a false explanation couched in relative arbitrary terms, the mind is flooded with the purity of reality in its distilled transcendent reference, providing a sense of ecstatic drowning as the delusory intellect gives way to spiritual devotion.

Postmodernism's concern for surfaces and homogeneity in place of traditional depth structure, teleology and narrative then provides an important base for repetitious music, particularly minimalism: the incredulity towards overarching principles or authority from without parallels the contemptibly, laughably misplaced activity of the intellect working with relative relations without absolute reference, and its resulting structures. The intellect needs only alignment with the intuitive aesthetic- depth is in fact to be found in surface, not on it but within it.

Repetition also reflects the use of repeated mantras in meditation for the mind to find unity with itself, moving from 3rd state of consciousness where the attention attends to concepts and objects of the senses, to 4th where it's left only with its absolute Self: with its nature providing for no relationships with anything beyond itself there's no critical context but only a constant tireless focus or being. Self-referentiality fixes the attention at every moment and on every fractal level, no matter how closely one attends to the music, negating perspicuous framing that distracts the attention between structural points.

Repetition prevents the attention losing its footing in thought or sensation per se and instead always retaining its Self through emphasis on the material's detached aesthetic content- the attention is given back to itself before it can be lost to itself. The Self's subject-subject nature or self-reference of the three part structure of consciousness of knower, process of knowing and known is paralleled by the self-reference of the return of the attention from the aesthetic object before the attention can get lost in Apollonian framing- underlined in repetitious musics. Self-reference is the nataraja's circularity and closure but distinct from the confused circular thought and formal closure of the uncoordinated conceptual mind, trapped in itself in the wrong way and lost in the senses.

The clarity and naturalness of self-referral 5th state of consciousness where the attention returns back to itself before reaching the objects of the senses, the knower established as separate from action and objects in an unaffected relation with them and the gunas, is the first stage of perceiving the absolute value of the relative and the relative's real nature as included within the absolute: the relative as a whole is a holistically contained realm and hence really only referring to itself in the same way does the Self. Repetitious music encapsulates the attention's return in its re-presentation of similar or the same aesthetic material before the intellect can lose itself in confused reconciliation attempts, allowing intuitive logic to emerge per se.

In repetition the cognitive faculties have a clear play relationship with their sensory information, the interface between subject and object as rational construction losing definition: the attention's return before reaching the object also means it relates to it unaffectedly, and ultimately hence containing it within itself, in 7th state. So though repetitious workings aren't always obvious in great music they shed light on the source of its aesthetic value, and indeed if there is hope for the rediscovery of tonality and any future for art music, it's to be found in these workings and particularly minimalism.

Repetition is the essential practice for accessing the content of any music- though the aesthetic is immediate, music needs to be listened to at least five times in order to assimilate and resolve the intellectual complexities its aesthetic meaning or inner life of tones is couched in, to reveal it to the individual mind's intuition; aesthetic experience, as with the Self, is inter-subjective and universal, and not ostensive or external. Western civilization however has serious problems with the decline of its energy base, rise of the aesthetically insensitive masses and loss of art, and minimalism points to a different future world in harmony with nature where art's balance to life is less necessary and the reflectivity of and continuity with life, relative and absolute, have been combined and even transcended.

Repetition along with juxtaposition and drone brings stasis from loss of teleology and produce an ecstatic flow of surface material through the attention's focus on it per se, and thus submerge any formal rationalizing architectonics and framing; indeed stasis or a sense of stillness itself can also provide for the attention's return on itself. Little music since the medieval along with some non-Western folk musics have used stasis rather than development structurally; the structure of minimalism and other repetitious forms is often directly dependent on content and its non-linear alterations, content and form in union, but even with highly and pre-compositionally architectonic structure the aesthetic interest is in the repetitions and initial material's evolving characteristics per se rather than argument and symmetries.

Aesthetic material is for-itself rather than for set outlines and traditional linearity, moving only on the basis of inner intuitive connections between the successive presentations: the aesthetic is the unity of the underlying logic of the mind and the logic of the noumenal in-itself or reality behind appearances, and needs no external guidance; the repetitions are for-themselves rather than for other relational linear or teleological reasons where reality is deferred and lost. Repetitious and juxtapositional musics have more homogeneity and less depth-structure in the intellectual sense, and less stratification between foreground and background or even between upper and lower parts, providing a holism, immanence and euphoric lucidity, and sense of the transcendent and divine.

These musics prioritize concern for inner detail and the mind's seeking of possible options and directions the music must go in, finding transcendental rightness in the good composer's decisions: insight is in intuitively right selections out of an array of possibilities, where the logic not being intellectually defined or eliminable perennially enriches the mind: holistic reality collapses to a point, absolute and relative together.

As in the nataraja and its dance and play, freedom and infinity are paradoxically found through remaining within unstated aesthetic logic and what is right- embodied by repetition and development of material by small degrees and within limits, and within tonal harmony. For instance among the greatest of all music, the Bach Cello suites show it's through repetitious structures such as series of arpeggios that are expansive but contained in gesture, harmony and rhythm, that music can find great depth and inwardness, not through supposed hidden intellectually transparent principles that modernism can foreground and dialectically build on.

Successful repetitious works then include Glass's Dance No.1, Satyagraha, Powaqqatsi, Einstein on the beach, Belle et la Bete and Music in twelve parts, Reich's Six pianos, Variations and Eight lines, Adams's Nixon in China and Grand pianola music, Nyman's The Man who mistook his wife for a hat, Part's Spiegel im Spiegel, Litany and Credo, Bax's Paean, Ustvolskaya's Fourth symphony, Stockhausen's Stimmung, the second movement of Beethoven's Seventh symphony and last movements of the Pastoral symphony and Violin concerto, the fugue of Bach's Toccata and fugue BWV.565, most of Scarlatti's harpsichord sonatas, and Wagner's Rheingold prelude and most of his operas; Stravinsky's Rite of spring and Les Noces like Antheil's Ballet mechanique underline the commonsensical pre-eminence of the Dionysiac over any Apollonian formal framing, through its repetitious organized destruction. The effects are also shadowed in some pop and folk, for instance Senegalese and other West African musics and their accentuated and endless drumming rhythms.

The sense of direction retained within the stasis, homogeneity and holism of repetition, out of the material's inner processes and potentials or gunas allowed by the intellectually silent but dynamic background, formal schemes often being submerged in a lack of articulation, is further exampled by Bryars' Violin concerto 'Bulls of Bashan', Eno's Music for airports, Part's St. John passion, Kancheli's Third symphony, Tavener's Akathist of Thanksgiving, Gorecki's Miserere, Ligeti's Atmospheres and Lux aeterna, Cage's 4'33'' and Solo for piano, Feldman's Coptic light and Rothko chapel, Ustvolskaya's Octet, Messiaen's Et exspecto, the closing movements of Quartet for the end of time, the title alluding to an end to formally symmetrical metre, and La nativity, Sibelius's Fourth, Bax's Christmas eve, Koechlin's The Jungle book- Law of the jungle, Poulenc's Horn elegie, the piano music of Poulenc, Mompou and Satie such as the three Gymnopedies with their stillness, dispatch and interest in the moment rather than high minded architecture, Ives's Central park in the dark and The Unanswered question, Ravel's Bolero and Daphnis et Chloe, Delius's In a summer garden, the sequential ends of Strauss's Death and transfiguration and slow movement of Mahler's Fourth, Bruckner's symphonies, the slow movements of Dvorak's Fourth, and of Beethoven's last seven string quartets, Purcell's Chacony, Schutz's St. John passion, Tallis's Spem in alium, Ockeghem's sacred work and its constant change within lines of focus as reflecting God's multiplicity in unity, and most renaissance polyphony and plainchant. Specific examples in Wagner also include the Rheingold opening scene, Siegfried concluding duet, Tristan Liebestod, Meistersinger overture, and Parsifal prelude and Good Friday music. Also Webern's Bagatelles or Five Pieces despite their rationality, with Five Movements for orchestra more transparently finding the aesthetic logic inhering within the movement of material in traditional form- the movement's contours are pared down past the point where closed Apollonian sense can be made of them yet the inevitability remains.

All have an uncertainty over where the music is going next yet combined with powerful, inevitable forward movement, the music extending itself and luminously reaching into and realizing further realms- creation ex nihilo but with its own deep logic. The focus is on the aesthetic and the gunas themselves, meaning issuing from within the material freed from rational direction from without: the blind on-edge quality reflects the passions, particularly sex with its sensation and procreation ex nihilo, but also our natural, effective, focussed but unformulated approach to all life where the moment is justified by itself rather than by past, future or architectonics.

Containment within oneself is real freedom because reality issues outwards from the absolute and the realm of gunas within the relative. The sense of inner movement or following in music arising from repetition and circumscribed consciousness in place of rationalized relative direction is the same as that in seduction and sex: the gunas are separate from intellectual mind and activity and provide transcendental grounding only for it to follow.

Particular instances of the fascinating inner movement in repetition include the sets of chords of similar character in Reich's Six Pianos, Glass's Third Dance, Scelsi's Fifth String quartet, many climactic points in Bruckner, near the start of Stravinsky's Petrushka and ends of Symphony of psalms and Firebird, and the comparable last movement of Messiaen's La Transfiguration.

Though not repetitious the chordal writing in Haydn's piano works has the same mesmerizing quality, and along with Messiaen's juxtapositional piano music and its vertical harmony initially for its own sake, and much minimalism, ask for hearing at a higher volume to bring out the fabulous inner detail. In each case the attention narrows down to concentrate on the intuitive, presuppositional cognitive faculties' reciprocal involvement in the art-recipient relation, or the aesthetic in isolation.

Intellectually one might expect repetitive music to be dull, based on its low information content and high redundancy in terms of intellectual thought, but the aesthetic is self-justifying and inexhaustible, all as the light of the Self is self-effulgent and independent on intellectual deliberation or anything in the relative. Aesthetic play of content needs no outward framework to play within because its nature is intuitive not critical- it's a self-corroborating, reason-obliterating realm of meaning incredulous towards dialectics and their lack of foundation; indeed repetition's effectiveness confirms traditional linear intellectual analysis of any music as misplaced, as the absolute can only be accessed in a direct way that bypasses the intellect and lets go of relational contexts and historical situatedness.

There needs to be a unity of form and content in art and life to avoid loss of Self, groundless theorizing and absurdity: NBs however don't have all their intellectual minds underwritten by Self and can think groundlessly without meaningful internal contradiction, having limited Dionysian intuitive aesthetic experience and in poor social conditions creating reflective, detached art and its architectonics, instead of living fullness of IB life.

An early example of repetition in Wagner is the thematic Rule Britannia overture, the score of which was rejected by a London evaluating panel doubtless as it can look too simple on paper, where the theme is presented such that it becomes ever more rich and interesting the more it's heard. Also Bellini is one earlier figure who finds space within long structural lines for the attention's ecstatic return on itself, illuminating the material's content and power per se.

In the late operas the motifs all relate to underlying configurations or sets of notes that are never stated in the music, and the resulting holistic, hermetic structure that keeps within initial conditions is all as keeping within the circular nataraja or keeping the unstated Self within the attention, the absolute hidden in the relative. Similarly a perfect circle doesn't exist in the world but it can be understood in the mind, with imperfect worldly ones hinting at it.

The Rheingold prelude is the first mature music in this revolutionary step into the amazing involvement, exhilaration and forward movement issuing from repetition and the exploration of the relations and logic of the inner characteristics of strong material per se. Wagner's motifs aren't developed but new ones generated out of their characteristics, with their possibilities and surrounding textures explored up to set levels of complexity, and right artistic decisions on which direction the material moves in being made at each point: this along with the unstated seminal material behind the motivic network parallels the immutability of the Self yet proliferating evolution and gain in relative life, itself hermetic and holistic on the large scale.

It's the emphasis on the Dionysian aesthetic here, undiluted by disingenuous Apollonian formalism that causes people's aversion to Wagner, living in the repressed West where art developed as an objectifying, reflective repository of the Dionysiac, following loss of real Dionysian life and increasing alienation in the modern period: Wagner's passion and intensity moves away from art and closer to life again, fundamentally conflicting with current culture and normative systems.

Wagner uses not only networks of repeating undeveloped motifs but at times immediate repetition: at one point in the Gotterdammerung prologue for instance the redemption motif is repeated several times in increasingly rich harmony, orchestration and volume to focus the mind on its aesthetic content, drawing the attention back until the motif is enlivened to shine in utter radiance and inward power, the Dionysiac exultant in both fullness and order.

Wagner also expresses on the wider scales the on-edge sense of keeping the Self and not being lost in theory in his immense long term intuitive control despite passion in the moment- the absolute and relative together. Similarly in the Walkure second act opening, at the point where the initial motif must be furthered, instead of new material being provided in a form leaning on balance and intellectual satisfaction, it's simply replayed but again at increased volume: it works superbly through attending to the increasingly emerging infinite aesthetic resource in the quality material, traditional development by implication being unnecessary and ultimately misguided.

The wider form by motivic web is grounded in stasis and architectonic asymmetry but like minimalism new motifs are generated and structure developed out of their plastic-ended recombinability, the whole contained in and extrapolable from every point. Other Wagner-minimalism parallels include sectional working through the areas of the material's possibilities, through-composition and elimination of points of rest and reflection with the attention transfixed by onward movement and elation, whether via the return of the attention back on itself before it can attend intellectually to the material or via introduction of new harmony and dissonance as the existing is resolved, and as in sex concern for the moment and its closed inner freedom over closed extended melody and its groundless overbearing formal presuppositions.

There's similar loss of the play possible within architectonics and thus of intellectual critical distance in Wagner and minimalism, the content framed by no traditional context but again by intuitive movement in the material and Self- there is unity of form and content, and subject and object, the gunas in art being those of life. Minimalism may be architectonically or at least pre-compositionally structured but not independently of the material and process and as in Wagner the repetitions disorientate the intellect, prevent perspicuity and undermine pillars, with transitional bridges to successive regions constantly built and burnt.

Yet the internal logic allows the music to levitate, with play self-validating through ecstasy of the moment in place of outer logic: as with orgasm and in line with postmodernism, the moment and the inner imperatives issuing from it obliterate any surrounding intellectual construction and notions of its necessity; the end of Tallis's Spem in alium is an early case of a key note in a repetitive context succeeding over all else, Glass providing several particularly close parallels, the in-itself Dionysiac and real truth hidden behind a search for Apollonian closure.

After these historically dead-end musics there is no need for more art but only for life, architectonic contrivances being central to art but no longer necessary: unity of the gunas with their own frame free of affected relation is our unity with life. Art music generally and minimalism, and life generally and seduction, reflect sex and orgasm, the aesthetic Dionysian base being present throughout but most clearly revealed in its more purified expressions: a culture built on and continuous with the Dionysiac is needed to avoid the bad faith of arbitrary Apollonian formal structures above.

Slower minimalism that reduces down the iterations can illuminate to beautiful effect the attention's inward movement to underlying logic, for instance in Glass's Violin concerto, Company, Facades from Glassworks or the First piano concerto: thematic possibilities are suggested in the mind by the honed down material but not selected because not quite appropriate, the mind maintained within the nataraja. The dazzle, glitter and disorientation of higher densities of repetitious material cause similar suggested connections from the array of working possibilities, unsuperfluously squashed by the present selection.

However there's similar aesthetic logic, moving only in the moment, self-justifying and referenced to no structure outside itself, in any good melody as couched in terms of tonality's transcendent consonant logic, such as variously in the Bach keyboard music, Beethoven quartets, Chopin nocturnes, Shostakovich or Dvorak symphonies or Puccini or Sullivan numbers. It's present in examples of juxtaposition over linear architectonics like the Messiaen and Schumann piano works or Strauss and Bax orchestral works, and in motivic writing in Beethoven's Eroica symphony first movement and the Grosse fuge, as well as Wagner. In all cases the right selection from an evolving array of possibilities is made based on that moment's logic, the movement being unpredictable yet in great music inevitable and commanding.

In slow and rapid minimalism the flux and movement is the same, just that more of the possibilities are foregrounded on the surface in rapid and more only in the mind in slow, but key decisions are made with the same poised intuitive control and inner form. In slow, complex options for material to take are analysed via intuition by the mind and wrong ones discarded as unnecessary and kept under the surface, all in the same time that the music takes to make its decisions, and thus providing beauty: the regressions of analysis via the intellect disappear off harmlessly. There's the dynamism and infinite possibility of the silence of the Self yet right action and unsuperfluousness at any one point, equivalent to the self in lived life aligned with the logic in the dynamism or the gunas' rightness.

Stasis can also arise from a drone, with long intense notes giving time for the attention to return back on itself in re-engaging with them, exalting in aesthetic awareness of one's own Self, beginningless and endless in its featureless yet all encompassing nature. As with the focus on aesthetic content in repetitious music, the mind transcends the intellect for aesthetic life, retaining the Self and finding the absolute in the relative; the drone as with repetition is a representation in sound of the dynamic silence and eternity of the Self.

Examples include Part's Cantus for Benjamin Britten particularly the dissolving of all into the drone at the end, and the second section of his Tabula Rasa, along with the first movement of the Pastoral symphony, Young's Seventh composition (a two note chord held for a long time), some Hildegard of Bingen and other medieval music, the opening note of Rheingold and singingly intense held notes throughout Wagner.

Also in both the improvisatory Hindustani Gandharvaved and Scottish piobaireachd bagpipe musics there are constant base notes, intersected respectively by the bamboo flute with complex rapid melody within a raga or chanter with isolated groups of grace notes. The Indian melody reflects the mind's thought and intellectual wanderings while periodic attention to the magnetic hypnotic drone reflects self-referral consciousness, the returning mantra in meditation and accompanying stress release; much Indian folk and manic popular musics though have a richly textured ongoing, invigorating character with interest in the instrumental sound per se. Bagpipes further have only nine notes but this limitation increases rather than decreases the fascination: the expressive idiom is accordingly repetitious both within works and across its repertory while the music within these bounds is complex and unpredictable. Moreover effective film music can be static, ambient and non-melodic, for example Cliff Martinez's for Solaris of 2002.

Many classical, baroque and renaissance composers among others wrote large numbers of similar works, centrally Scarlatti's ecstatic sonatas, also using repetitious devices, exampling the exploration of the same small scale form 560 times, and Bach's 200 cantatas similarly exploring with endless, luxuriant inward imagination their narrow expressive idiom, illuminating the mind from within rather than without in the constant return to a chosen angle or oblique search for the transcendent: only occasionally did he bother to write staggering individual masterpieces.

Further in both cases there's no linear stylistic development and only accomplished homogeneous variety- both are extraordinary monolithic achievements of consistent interest and invention, in Scarlatti's case also very memorable. Birtwistle is a recent example with his series of similar extended orchestral canvasses developing under the contained dynamics of their particular material: in each artist's case the angle seems almost unimportant, all as with the chosen path to the divine.

As similarly with Wagnerian motivic holism and its interrelations particularly the Ring series of four works as providing four angles on one evolving set of shared motifs, these sets of works provide endlessly varied, unique and internally consistent yet similar descriptions and combinations of ideas in the same way the four Vedas illuminate Brahman. Examples in painting include by Whister, Van Gogh, Monet, Cezanne and Rothko reproducing the same or similar scene or scheme numerous times: in each case a specific form is explored with endless depth and interest, again staying within the nataraja.

These works provide endlessly varied, unique and internally consistent yet similar descriptions and combinations of ideas that illuminate Brahman- all as with Vedic discussions of Brahman, or fresh yet the same sexual experience or thoughts about sex or trying to understand it: the mind is irreconcilably circumscribed by the system and instead needs to transcend the whole not make sense of parts in terms of other parts.

Moreover op art and Bridget Riley's repetitive geometrical schemes create mesmerizing, disorientating effects and movement in stillness through explicitly drawing in the self-referential nature of consciousness via the cognitive faculties- a similar process to the Dionysian aleatory associations of incident in minimalism the individual mind makes. In all cases energy and movement issue from a seething background stasis, all as right and powerful action issues from the Self's dynamic stillness. Repetition's containment and trancing effect embodies the constant but directionless focus of 5th or circumscribing the Self within itself away from unsupported thought, the aesthetic centre constantly maintained, and its exhilaration the infinity of achievement residing in consciousness: the issue is the gunas not the fruits of action or teleology per se.

All achievement is essentially already accomplished because all relations are with the unitary absolute, the lack of relative relations meaning the ecstatic answer to all problems is that there is no problem. Repetitious music's self-referentiality and the undermining of subject-object distinction from the impossibility of situating numerous iterations individually in wider frameworks, everything instead being contained within consciousness, bring loss of distance for critical or individual subjectivity: externally conceived framing and depth structure or foreground-background contrast for material or thought to play in are negated, this also being an expression of postmodernism. Minimalism however doesn't share postmodernism's nihilism towards the critical on all levels and has the open-ended logic of holistic form that characterizes life anywhere, thus paralleling 5th state of consciousness and through internal space is simultaneously critical and lived, relative and absolute together.

It is framing for intellectual critical space that is seen as contrived and indeed simple-minded, and it's misplaced to dismiss what is in intellectual terms minimalism's regressively simple harmony as for instance expressive of increasingly uncritical material culture. Repetition merely isolates and illuminates the aesthetic's essence of any art by focussing on its for-itself nature, it's justification arising from the immanent absolute plane within and not arbitrary intellectual goal-directed structure without; there is an inner Dionysian rather than Apollonian form to correspond with the Dionysian content.

Only conceptual criticality and individuality are lost in repetition and instead true collective subjectivity emerges; in both the aesthetic and sexual, private subjectivity transcends to the intersubjective and universal, repetition distilling art's intuitive aesthetic content and freeing the mind from cerebration to be its natural undifferentiated Self. Minimalism's for-itself purity and lack of Apollonian relativity and structure isn't so understood in the West, indeed similar to India's for-itself independent culture not being understood, minimalism originating in Indian thought and music.

Cognizance is a matter of self-referentiality not intellectual deliberation, external reality intimately relating to the absolute in us: quantum physics indeed implies that the most distant galaxies only come into existence as billions of years old when observed, their photons behaving in the same observer-dependent way in experiments as all others. And as post-foundationist epistemology and the impossibility of intellectual demonstration of the outside world's existence shows, there's no reality external to us, or to the nataraja, or to our topologically closed universe we can see: everything's contained within our awareness.

There's likewise no need to look beyond the aesthetic per se to arbitrary architectonics, theoretical castles in the sky and endlessly revised critical positioning: only the aesthetic or the gunas' level, or life itself, leads the way. And self-referential 5th state of consciousness is bliss-consciousness, happiness being our underlying natural state and provided for nothing by the aesthetic, not something we have to create from scratch or work towards dialectically.

Further, sleeping and waking states necessarily alternate for the brain's functioning, the core of our lived experience a matter of repetition. As well as procreation, creation or material reality has fine repetitious nature, from theories of vibrating superstring base to cymatics and the generation through forms of sound of various structures from sand dunes to galaxies, material shaping itself depending on resonance between its inner characteristics and the frequency. Even the world and all worlds rotate daily and orbit annually again and again, their natural repeating cycles.

Moreover mordent-type movement parallels self-reference and vibration itself in its departure from and back to a note, and characterizes some of the greatest music, for instance in Bach's Fifth cello suite sarabande, Bruckner's Eighth symphony slow movements or Wagner's soaring redemption through love Ring motif, as well as some folk musics; also Pachelbel's Canon. This orgasmic self-referentiality also encapsulates music's and art's various overall movements away from and back to their points of departure: in the mordent the relative finds the absolute within itself and expresses meaning lying in the gaps between logical propositions, or musical repetitions, as the mind refers to its level of intuitive perception or Self to obtain understanding.

Repetition exults in itself, reflecting consciousness's emergence of understanding out of itself, including ethical understanding in one's desire rising to support that of others and delighting in the happiness of others desiring it: similarly smiling at others or laughing, they smile or laugh because they see the same happiness integral to them, and a self-sustaining and all-embracing loop develops, also as with smiling to a mirror. We smile because we smile, the absolute depending on nothing beyond itself, generating and perpetuating itself all as aesthetic return for the individual lacks justification. Similarly the Hindu sighting of the idol in its enclosure to refer the attention back on itself evokes the higher qualities and abilities in us that the god is, and likewise the fascination and inward meaning of the puja ceremony is the same attention to oneself, uniting self with Self.

Knowledge, ethics and aesthetics inhere complete within us and repetition's fascination is reflected in core Dionysian human activities such as art, sex and friendship and their retaining of interest for us independently of our exposure to them: the objectivity for any critical justification for them would involve separating ourselves from ourselves, impossible as our basis is a unity transcending the intellect concerned with dualities. Computers' functioning may be split up but we are alive with unitary consciousness- the base necessarily can't move to be looked at critically by shifting position elsewhere: God is one and there can be no talk of other Gods.

Repetition eliminates the confused pursuit of intellectual reconciliation by overwhelming the mind with the Dionysiac, all as sex makes clear that the conceptual mind must relinquish any abstracted ideas and evaluations about sensation and that holding onto a sense of critical distance between oneself and the senses is misguided, particularly as the repetitive movements persist towards their conclusion; approaches to life based on detailed reason and contingent, contextualised systems of thought are negated by a grounded, triumphant immediacy.

Moreover minimalism as with Wagner is accused of being unrelenting, wilful or monotonous when it's just a focus on the constantly underlying truth or Self, which never tires and should always be retained in the attention: there's often one elated idea after another, a manic onward drive lacking pause and rest for reflection, but with inner logic and space within its own processes. Nyman's work frequently examples constant line and focus, such as the Second string quartet or A Handshake in the dark.

Though regular architectonic, teleological art music can be readily listened to while also engaged in something else, art and worldly activity involving different intuitive and intellectual parts of the mind, good repetitious music is uniquely compelling and engaging, making other activity almost impossible- the focus on the aesthetic leaves no unsupported intellectual activity to run alongside a formal frame. The listener doesn't want to miss a single split second, contrasting with other musics where they can be assimilated and internalized partly by reference to pre-given schemes: repetitious music, similar to the narrow idioms of folk or pop, is getting closer to life and away from art reflective of and distanced from life. Its abstracted focus indeed provides for an alignment with life, looking to a genuine Western folk music beyond the falseness of the culture and its pop music.

Uncritical folk and pop including the postmodern rise of the mindless interest in the moment of techno music may be altogether ignorable, but repetitious art music can unify folk's continuity with life with criticality and outwardness through inner form and seething dynamics, aligned with the gunas. Through intuitive critique, repetitious musics bridge the gap between the identity thinking of contextualized life, along with architectonically critical art trying to expose and move cultural inconsistencies dialectically forward, and fullness of aesthetic reference or alignment with the gunas.

[Sean]

Pt.2

Repetitious music provides no specific points of change for the intellect to shape an understanding around but instead a constant slow rate of change, and thus only the intuition finds itself at one with the evolving landscapes; in Wagner the sophisticated ongoing transition processes and contrapuntal virtuosity enhance the bridge-burning. This may occur to the intellect as suspicious change by stealth but it's more keeping the mind in the ever fresh moment and avoiding loss to account or theory.

Sunsets work in exactly this way, changing imperceptibly to provide constantly refreshed magnificent, aesthetic vistas and clarifying the unity of nature with the perceiving mind- 'I am That': change continually takes place just as one's interest would be sated, similar to watching faces experiencing the Dionysiac; also every sunset is very different but within the same expressive terms. Academics have argued that minimalism's submerging of pre-given structure is deceptive in the same way that contemporary consumer culture dulls the mind's perception of the wider system and prompts it with uncritical desire for new but essentially the same goods, but the real source of insight and freedom is from within, not more framing from without.

In sex the mind's attention to the repetitions has self-referentiality in the your Self to other's Self relations, their Self being the same as yours: sex unifies Self via sensation in you both being from and providing it in the other, your perceptions of their experience unifying with yours and so on, stimulation stimulating further stimulation and intoxicating the mind. Minimalism encompasses this in its unfathomably proliferating, interrelating vortex of repetitions given back to the mind; minimalism, sex and the Self are simple yet sophisticated.

Sex has a background stasis in its reference only to itself and nothing out in the world and taking place in one location, combined with intense involving activity making clear the Dionysiac is all there is; sexual activity stimulates itself as it proceeds, the passion and interest increasing with the repetitions- all as in music. Offspring are produced by sex out of the finest foundations of its for-itself nature, all as the absolute connects with the relative out of its isolated and hidden nature via the Self and the gunas, by comprising the relative's underlying structure. Great forward movement paradoxically issues out of static, for-themselves repetitious systems with inherent necessary, pre-rational dynamics and logic: by contrast direction issuing from imposed dynamics is uncertain and weak.

The decline in production of quality art music as a result of post-tonality and postmodernism's levelling environment may be countered via the inner dynamics of non-teleological, post-narrative minimalism- although the tensions in the West particularly as its primary energy source declines may be increasing to a point where a much simpler, less alienated life is re-established, thus eliminating the need for a critical art tradition altogether. Minimalism's success in linking life and art while remaining critical displaces redundant framing as externally conceived beginning, middle and end, or in society as metanarratives or overarching sets of principles.

If development and evolution are to be authentic they must proceed along self-generating lines not based on gaining the fruit of action but located in the moment, as with walking up steps in the dark and using a torch for each, one at a time- then there is the unpredictable inevitability of intuitive form in unity with not dominating content, relative and absolute together. Moreover the reduced reliance on architectonics and intellectual framing of the aesthetic in minimalism, and links with pop, make its assimilation easier.

With the loss of classical concern for imposed balance of form and elegance, romantic music and particularly Wagner allow art's inner dynamics to flourish, with critical distance and objectivity given in the Self's self-referral processes rather than relative separation from the aesthetic content. There's unquenchable absorption in good Wagner and minimalism, endless melody and lack of symmetrical rest points meaning the listener never wants to relinquish the music's hold on the attention; linearity is expressed only in the Dionysiac's own hypnotic forward movement and surge, in a unity of relative and absolute that leads to Self-based thought and action in life. Moreover as minimalism is nearer to popular music Wagner moves towards cinema, in each case closer to life than architectonic art.

Minimalism is a valuable expression of the postmodern concern for surface and textural consistency as a reapplication of the confused modernist process of foregrounding structural elements and material in trying to make intellectual sense of the necessarily hidden aesthetic. Minimalism's features are anti-authoritarian in their apparent reversion to simpler states yet its formal processes and control parallel serialism in constricting the material's development.

It further parallels serialism in its holism, homogeneity, interrelations and non-hierarchical ordering, little concern for historical paradigm, and pre-compositional design and autonomy that undermines individual subjectivity and personality in the composer and listener- except that the disregard for depth-structure allows universal Dionysian subjectivity, and its directed onward movement of a non-architectonically grounded teleology, to emerge instead.

Serialism's principle-based intellectual holism and all points being both equally meaningful yet meaningless, there being little aesthetic logic to perceive in the relations, is transformed in minimalism to intuition-based tonal holism and all points being both equally but infinitely meaningful: the logic of the material's relations comes immanently from itself as expressive of the Self's self-reference, and tonality has similar transcendent reference in its given and non-dialectical correspondence with acoustic physics. Boundlessness issues from boundedness of the right kind, all as in the nataraja: nothing is swapped for everything under the faith of real attention in the moment, divine not cerebral.

Traditional formal music's closure and resulting objectivity and autonomy furnish the sense of separation or self or identity but which is unstable due to the dialectical process: minimalism instead locates the self in a more intimate relationship with itself where it recognizes its inner rather than outer critical nature in the material's sealed off step by step movement. Life has neither closure nor definite answers on the intellectual level and hence music emphasizing life's aesthetic essence over formal frames is more authentic; spiritual faith in the unstated gunas makes it unnecessary to abstract them away in a formal autonomous sphere of meaning purely reflective of life. Life questions cannot be answered nor reality and truth begin to be accessed by Western rational philosophy but only by open-ended Vedic philosophy, or art.

Reference of minimalism's development to Indian traditions includes in music, for instance in the rapid melody over a drone along with complex rhythmic and metrical schemes, in philosophy in interconnection and concern for subjective experience, and in religion in sensuality and exultation. Also minimalism's paradoxical nature of being small scale repetition and constant change within large scale forms and background stasis, reflects the Self's dynamic silence and the combination of richness yet nothingness of the Veda- the sophisticated relations it details are essentially intuitively obvious, and for a realized person as a well with water all around.

These relations are also comparable with the seething virtual quantum events of a vacuum, and with the inner movement yet non-relation to anything else of sex, both fundamental to reality and life. Moreover dynamic silence and all polarities are in pure form in the 4th of transcendental meditation with the mind observing itself without thoughts, immobile in circumscribed attention; minimalism's subtly changing motifs moreover reflect the changing experienced character of the mantra during its repetition.

Minimalism's focus on the aesthetic in isolation means of course it may lack the same depth of interest and complexity as music generating it from wider means, but its value is in containing the attention in a similar way to the intuition keeping back from unreferenced intellectual thought. As in Shiva's dance in the nataraja, bliss consciousness, freedom and boundlessness are really found within intellectual limitation because they're already given and contained within us: they have core expression in the closed down nature of sex and its subject-object unity where the attention moves back on itself in meeting itself in another, with no physical or critical distance between subject and the object that is another subject.

The contained state in life is of unsuperfluous thought and action, not doing what isn't necessary and acting silently as required by anonymous, unpossessed underlying dynamics of the gunas. Architectonic and dialectical structures in art, at most subservient in minimalism, do however embody circularity or coming back but in long term, reflecting the culture's state of loss rather than immediate return of the Self to itself where one can be oneself and fully live life rather than reflect on it.

Art isn't symbolic or representative of anything to be made intellectually transparent in life or society and instead presents unmediated, if reflective because abstracted, access to underlying irratio-nal dynamics and truth necessarily hidden behind propositional regressions: the repetition in series of endless justifying, changing premises is replaced by that of the same premise but which has aesthetic rather than attempted intellectual access to truth. Repetition goes nowhere as it self-justifies in focusing on the aesthetic in non-directional, non-dramatic, non-dynamic structure that avoids hierarchies, transitions, tension, relaxation and climax, with change quantitative rather than qualitative.

Harmonic movement away from and back to the tonic particularly reflects keeping the Self and self realization after a period of self-consciousness and lost thought, and the realization that of course you just have to be yourself: the most sophisticated and complex life activities are common sense. Indeed almost all Shakespeare's plays conclude with the return of the king, the real authoritative, divine ruler within us.

The development of material only out of its own characteristics and level of the gunas brings the thrilling sense of creation ex nihilo, for instance in Glass's Satyagraha opening scene or Wagner's Rheingold prelude with ideas cutting into an undeveloped harmonic base seething with potential. Both composers use interconnected holistic form, for Glass becoming an entirely static, non-dramatic montage, abstract and surreal and going far beyond direct representation of events; Nyman's The Man who mistook his wife for a hat libretto also concerns a shifted perspective on life and a logic beneath its surface and arbitrary structures and levels of order, as given expression by music in general or its aesthetic gunas, without which we are lost.

Adams's opera Nixon in China by contrast is an example of postmodernism's Dionysian play, non-intellectual critique and incredulity towards overarching schemes and authority. Nixon's 1972 visit to China is recent history to relate to closely and within personal memory, and as often with Glass and other minimalists the music is drenched in marvellous nostalgia as expressing the great tonal repertory's recession; the libretto comprises poetic couplets, complementing the surrealism and iconoclastic repetition of music and words, and indeed famous people not normally singing to each other.

Singing though captures the Dionysiac and the sense of being carried by deeper forces in life, as indeed in Greek tragedy. The opening two acts have more clearly delineated statements and melodic sequences but in the third these are spliced and juxtaposed such that they are taken less seriously, being treated nihilistically or hypercritically- both the closed sections and what emerges to have been the overly high tone of Nixon's and Mao's ideological stances are mocked. Indeed with such irreconcilable differences the only option is to transcend them to a state of play without attempting dialectical critique: the protagonists slide into personal reminiscences aligned with postmodern concern for subjective response.

Intellectually constructed subjective viewpoints are no route to underlying truth but with subject and object blended in the reciprocal relationship between Self and artwork, the absolute and its self-reference underlying both, an intersubjective, universalizable intuition is. Furthermore most of the best music is in the first half followed by a gradual anti-climax, disrupting linear development and reflective of reactionary postmodern equality. And the on-off character of minimalism's rapid, short motivic writing and frequent sense of wistfulness and loss may be reflected in the rise of postmodern simulative binary digital technology and the loss of modern direct unitary analogue.

Moreover Glass's operas target architectonics with The Voyage's music and libretto having particularly holistic form, whereas Adams's Century rolls forms a dreamy commentary on the romantic piano concerto, its disbelief in definite structure and content letting the music slide into surface effect, glitter and garish colour and similarly critiquing the whole modernist paradigm of determinate components. Ives' early use of non-structural tonality with unexpected placement of triads also brings a critical position moving behind dialectics to look on them with detachment, serenity and humour, and again encapsulating American ghostly mysteriousness and unreality lying behind massive materialism.

Thought is closed down by architectonic rather than intuitive, material-led form in that bondage and boundary come from external imposition not the internal containment of self-referentiality and necessary right action. Freedom and ecstasy issue from within, also as expressed in sex for the girl in bondage, and the man giving himself to her without reservation, as much a prisoner: the for-other rational but uselessly free Apollonian is relinquished to leave for-itself locked-on Dionysiac, the field of gunas and given truth, and senses and passions at the interface of relative experience and absolute reality.

For-other and love then issue from the all-encompassing Self-Self relations of for-itself sex as having and being had and object and subject dissolve, all as the Dionysiac and intuitive material-led form provide movement out of their inherent gunas and aesthetics structures. The same disappearing insatiable quality and impossibility of complete familiarity of sex and its rightness and independence is at its artistic height in music of successful intuitive form, such as variously in minimalism and Wagner, with instead it being in closed architectonic sequences where sated familiarity and restriction is found. Inscrutable aesthetics offer greater liberation couched in their own fixed logic than in perspicuous frames for the intellect's fearful attempts at determinate reconciliation and satisfaction.

Moreover the aesthetic's inscrutability relates to the indeterminate foundation of knowledge and impossibility of its intellectual grounding: the epistemological search for certainty and intellectual transparency of the 17th to 20th centuries was inconcludable and misguided, only complementing ever-shifting modernist perspectives and metanarratives. Rather than the basis of our experience being knowable and graspable in a foregrounded intellectual way it has transcendental and divine reference beyond the thinking mind, its holism infinitely leading onwards to more knowledge, as in minimalism and Wagner. Instead of limiting frames, systems or principles in life there is only on-edge experience as guided by its inner form, with the intellectual mind aligned to and never foolishly replacing it.

The fascination of the Dionysiac and aesthetic in minimalism is paralleled by the fascination in the facial expressions of those either experiencing sexual sensation or led to execution or being tortured in 3rd, with the more Self content to interface with the relative, as suggested by intelligence and attractiveness, the better: both move towards the absolute of orgasm or death. In art, the passions, sex and death, the absolute in the relative and dissolution of duality have core expression or realization- and it is this coordination that the whole mind achieves in 5th.

This focus of the attention to something narrow in scope is all as in minimalism, often particularly when the subject keeps expressions to a contained minimum so they count for more in indicating their experience and approach to the absolute: the interest is in the switching, paralleled by minimalism's repetitions, between failing to intellectually reconcile what's happening in terms of the relative, because the absolute and its immediacy and reality is involved, and failing to reconcile the absolute per se.

Inward transcendence beyond the vortex of dualities and their aesthetic play to the oneness of the absolute or Brahman is the only reconciliation possible, encompassing absolute and relative together. There's the same riveted fascination in the smallest, finest details in minimalism or faces, indicating the Dionysiac and the directness and irreconcilability of the aesthetic reference in sensation or intuition, sometimes for instance prompting rewinding either recording.

The listener and watcher are stilled with the intensity and focus of their awareness, their Self as seen in the Dionysiac given back to itself: both minimalism and the passions indicate consciousness's encompassing of the external world, or the absolute as inhering in the relative, and unite subject and object in dissolving vicarious and all external experience into oneself. Indeed the fascination as in good minimalism just in pace with the attention becoming sated is all as watching sunsets.

Outwardly rational Apollonian activity underwritten and subsumed by the Dionysiac in 5th allows the attention's smooth movement from one to the other without disjunction, grounding it and giving it meaning. The emergence of sexual sensation into the mind, as with visceral physical contact's emergence into the seemingly Platonic in seduction, makes evident the unity of the two but a substantive transition nonetheless appears to exist in the affectation of 3rd, where the attention isn't already located in the Dionysiac and on the level of orgasm; Western culture and NB unsupported intellectual mind also normalizes a transition.

The unity of the two encompassed by the mind is all as musical movement along aesthetic lines at key points or denouements where recombination of material takes place seamlessly due to the new dynamics already being in place under the surface, for instance in Glass's Second and Fourth dances. Perception here of other legitimate aesthetic angles on the system also enhances real intuitive critical insight into pre-rational cultural presuppositions, and thence the forms of life built on them.

Glass's Dance No.1 is a good example of minimalism's parallel of the aesthetic focus in sex- it has truly incredible magnetism, creating an insatiable fascination and desire with the attention transfixed and mesmerized by every last detail: possibly the most unturnoffable, compulsive thing ever written its returns are almost unique in music. It's music of sheer ascent and euphoria with strong onward lines, rhythmic intoxication, fleeting motivic fragments, glittering disappearing edges and understated radiance, all paralleling sexual and narcotic experience and complemented by the sung solfage syllables' erotic overtones.

Febrility combines with stillness and serenity as intensely singing repeated notes focus, still and daze the attention in sensory ecstasy, revelling in the inner illumination the intonation's narrow accuracy and focus provides. Bass keyboard notes become increasingly rapid as the work progresses with as in much pop music the starts of bars or short phrases accented, all as increasing heartbeat and inner rush towards orgasm with the thrusting rhythm increasing more slowly; mordent-type intervals parallel the momentary movement to orgasm and the absolute, from and back to the relative.

There's further the elation of good jazz group improvisation on the same material, blending fabulously in high colour; emphasis is on the unmediated experiential aesthetic, the non-theoretical base level of reality. This is a work to listen to more than any other in the history of music. Repeated movements in sex parallel those in minimalism and the repeated return to sex parallels the return to minimalism or good examples of it; you can't attend to sex closely enough nor attend to minimalism closely enough, even to the individual notes and their particular singing quality enough, nor have sex nor listen to the same piece enough.

Repetitive actions and circumscribed attention in minimalism, sex and various religious chant intoxicate due to the correspondence with consciousness's divine self-referral nature, needing to refer to nothing beyond itself. The self-referential experiences in sex of yourself and your sensation and of the other person and theirs are centred on repeated action at the crotch by the crotch- the body's aesthetic centre or mind's absolute reference or ratio point as expressed in the relative form, referring only to itself: body and mind and object and subject are dissolved and any ratio-nal intellectual activity eradicated.

The relative all makes reference ultimately to the transcendent absolute but the absolute only to itself, this having purest expression in the orgasm within sex's hermeticism: the crotch's stimulation is for-itself and similarly minimalism's aesthetic content has no framing reference for wider analysis, the material and its repetition justifying itself, like the Self by itself for itself. There is repeated emphasis on musical tonal logic, the aesthetic centre of the body, the unitary Self and life.

Orgasm follows when the repetitions continue until the mind attends to nothing else and is located only in the moment, with the reality of the timeless spaceless absolute obliterating remaining ratio-nality or relative reference to anything beyond; the fascination in musical repetition of aesthetic content is the absolute accessed in the relative, all as orgasm is accessed by repetitions. Despite sex and minimalism being confined and narrow and intellectually empty, they can paradoxically be of utmost meaning, interest and exhilaration, focussed on the visceral Dionysiac and its logic, the essence of art and life.

The ever-fresh interest in minimalism's re-introduced material is all as that in seduction and sex, and life, being via the constant reference to the absolute and fundamental gunas or imperatives operating in motiveless silence, free of relativizing, proportioning and dismissal: one kisses because this action in the relative refers to the subject-subject nature of the absolute, one continuing and proceeding under dynamics independent of ratios with anything else.

Reasoning and reconciliation stops seduction, there being only self-justification and kissing, which stops talking, because of kissing: the actions involved in kissing and sex are simple and repetitive but like minimalism not boring, instead deriving infinite meaning and interest from immanent inner interrelations of transcendent reference; the moment to moment renewal of interest in the gunas leading in these reflects 5th immediacy and the natural approach to all things afresh, independent of baseless reasons or ideas. Moreover works like Reich's Variations and Music for mallet instruments and their long underlying waves overlaid with repeating insistent material parallel Tristan and the striving sexual character of all Wagner's mature music.

Self-referral processes are also central to tonality and its structural parallel in concord and discord of the correspondence between acoustics or consonance and dissonance, and subjective sensation: Tonality as the main force shaping aesthetically meaningful musical content has transcendental reference in its end of phenomenology basic equation of subjective with acoustic consonance, neutralizing the infinite epistemological regress of premises and arbitrary dialectical reasoning behind the justifying propositions that attempt to account for alternate harmonies.

The justification of minimalism's repetitions rest on tonality's justification, with the acoustic-subjective relationship reflecting through the least mediated of the senses reality's given intellectual-intuitive parallel- it sounds right because it sounds right and works because it works because it works, requiring no further intellectually justifying premises. Narrow repetitions parallel tonality's narrowness and inward self-reference in focussing on two scales based on intuitively experienced consonance, rather than more in the modal and serial harmonies with their outward intellectual schemes and contrivances. Basic tonal triads and patterns are emphasized, exulting in their legitimacy: like sex tonality is of inexhaustible return, the transcendent reference to the Self in both the corporeal or heart of life, and harmonic or heart of art.

[Florestan]

Inward transcendence beyond the vortex of dualities and their aesthetic play to the oneness of the absolute or Brahman is the only reconciliation possible, encompassing absolute and relative together. There's the same riveted fascination in the smallest, finest details in minimalism or faces, indicating the Dionysiac and the directness and irreconcilability of the aesthetic reference in sensation or intuition, sometimes for instance prompting rewinding either recording.

This is a valid point. However, the microscopic dualities inherently contained in a purely intellectual attempt at deriving strictly monadic paralipomena from the abstracted, reflective inner self stands in stark contrast with the imanently intuitive basis of the inner self's harmonization of the auto-reflexive experience. This nexus of potentially recessive intricacies can be internalized and modulated only within the frame of a pseudo-Dyonisiac quantum-scale decomposition and reassessment of the traditional Apollinian tonality.

[Sean]

This is a valid point. However, the microscopic dualities inherently contained in a purely intellectual attempt at deriving strictly monadic paralipomena from the abstracted, reflective inner self stands in stark contrast with the imanently intuitive basis of the inner self's harmonization of the auto-reflexive experience. This nexus of potentially recessive intricacies can be internalized and modulated only within the frame of a pseudo-Dyonisiac quantum-scale decomposition and reassessment of the traditional Apollinian tonality.

Florestan, I don't think I had a great reason for posting this stuff. However the links between minimalism and sexuality are strong, and ultimately the Dionysiac obliterates the Apollonian, as you know... I have much wilder stuff to talk about on file actually, but I'm trying to be a touch less wild just at the moment. Do you care for any minimalism?? I think its classic period is over...

[jowcol]

It's going to take me a few days to parse and ponder all of the points made here-- although I am a pretty big fan of Hindistani music, and a lot of the  "minimalists", although I tend to equate this music with more of an "transcendental state of consciousness" than sex/orgasm.  (I see a difference, but your mileage may vary).   

Music in this category doesn't appeal to everyone because it may provoke a psychological reaction they aren't looking for, and can seem lacking in key reference points such as harmony and thematic development.   Often, however, this music (depending on the practicitioner) can use the harmonic stasis to explore in more depth elements such as rhythm and microtonal elements. 

It's also interesting that the "discovery" of Indian classical by the west in the 50's and 60s coincided with the development of the minimalist school, "cool" (modal) jazz, and also psychedelic rock, which, by simplifying the harmonic structure, explored other elements. 

I've mentioned this point a few times in other threads, but the biggest appeal to this music for me is that it gives me a lot of room to create my own melodic lines/structures in my head while listening.  WHen I'm not in the mood to do that, the music tends to seem more "empty"-- I really need to be up for it.  But when I am, it scratches an itch that really needs to be scratched.

[Josquin des Prez]

although I tend to equate this music with more of an "transcendental state of consciousness"

How so? Consciousness is precisely the first thing that is obliterated here.

[DavidW]

Will someone give me a cliff notes version like last time?

[DavidRoss]

Whoops.  I saw DavidW's name in the topic and failed to note it was something by Sean.  I'm outta here!  [Insert emoticon for needing a shower here]

[Sean]

jowcol & others, sure, thanks. Minimalism gets the mind working and making connection all on its own within the surface dazzle and glitter...

[Scarpia]

Will someone give me a cliff notes version like last time?

Essentially, boring music is like sex.

[jowcol]

How so? Consciousness is precisely the first thing that is obliterated here.

You've answered your own question.... very perceptive!

[karlhenning]

I haven't heard the music yet which could obliterate my consciousness. We've got a bunch of wusses here, I trow.

[jowcol]

I haven't heard the music yet which could obliterate my consciousness. We've got a bunch of wusses here, I trow.

Or maybe, grasshopper, you are holding too tightly to your consciousness, and are wussing out on a metaphysical level.    

On a tangent, (no-- I never have those), one of my treasured Nonesuch albums from the vinyl days was of a Tibetan Buddhist ritual that was supposed to conjure up a diety of negation that would obliterate your sense of identity.  And that was only the first side-- the second side was supposed to turn you into that diety.

If that fails you, I'd recommend the Kevin Federline album at maximum volume. There shouldn't be very much of you left after that.

[karlhenning]

Or maybe, grasshopper, you are holding too tightly to your consciousness, and are wussing out on a metaphysical level.    

Damn braces, bless relaxes.  No, no consciousness-clenching here ; )

[Josquin des Prez]

You've answered your own question.... very perceptive!

Transcendence implies obliteration?

[jowcol]

Transcendence implies obliteration?

In some world views--transcendence is a a surrender of self or the "normal" consciousness-- or its also phrased in terms of death and rebirth of the self.   

Of course, one person's transcendence is likely another person's boredom.  Your mileage may vary.

[greg]

This is a valid point. However, the microscopic dualities inherently contained in a purely intellectual attempt at deriving strictly monadic paralipomena from the abstracted, reflective inner self stands in stark contrast with the imanently intuitive basis of the inner self's harmonization of the auto-reflexive experience. This nexus of potentially recessive intricacies can be internalized and modulated only within the frame of a pseudo-Dyonisiac quantum-scale decomposition and reassessment of the traditional Apollinian tonality.

LOL
I just discovered the lyrics for the next Meshuggah song.

[Florestan]

LOL
I just discovered the lyrics for the next Meshuggah song.

Take them, you'll make them famous! 

[jochanaan]

Sean, I haven't had time to read your entire essays, but here are some brief thoughts of my own:

Repetition is indeed one of the life principles of music.  (The others are variation and contrast, as many of you know.)  But the repetition, although it may be literal many times, should not be continually literal; that would mean the music merely goes in a circle.  What fascinates me about the minimalists, at least the ones I like, is how repetition is combined with slow movement, so that instead of a single circle, it creates an ascending spiral.  And that indeed is the point of the repetition in ragas and minimalism, and indeed in things like praying the rosary and mantra chanting; the repetition takes your mind and spirit and even your body into a much different place than you began.

[Sean]

Sean, I haven't had time to read your entire essays, but here are some brief thoughts of my own:

Repetition is indeed one of the life principles of music.  (The others are variation and contrast, as many of you know.)  But the repetition, although it may be literal many times, should not be continually literal; that would mean the music merely goes in a circle.  What fascinates me about the minimalists, at least the ones I like, is how repetition is combined with slow movement, so that instead of a single circle, it creates an ascending spiral.  And that indeed is the point of the repetition in ragas and minimalism, and indeed in things like praying the rosary and mantra chanting; the repetition takes your mind and spirit and even your body into a much different place than you began.

Thanks. Yes indeed this is the interesting thing, when these immanent connections inhering in the material itself, rather than imposed architecturally from without, guide the music's movement. As you say, there's a very curious difference between good examples of minimalist repetition and repetition for its own sake: if only more academics understood this. The essay above by the way is a few years old but recently fairly carefully revised to make a bit more readable.