(Ebook) Repeating Ourselves by Robert Fink, Robert

Wallace Fink ISBN 9780520240360, 9781423727583,

0520240367, 1423727584 Pdf Download

https://ebooknice.com/product/repeating-ourselves-1738886

★★★★★
4.7 out of 5.0 (29 reviews )

Instant PDF Download

ebooknice.com
 (Ebook) Repeating Ourselves by Robert Fink, Robert Wallace
Fink ISBN 9780520240360, 9781423727583, 0520240367,
1423727584 Pdf Download

EBOOK

Available Formats

■ PDF eBook Study Guide Ebook

EXCLUSIVE 2025 EDUCATIONAL COLLECTION - LIMITED TIME

INSTANT DOWNLOAD VIEW LIBRARY

We have selected some products that you may be interested in
Click the link to download now or visit ebooknice.com
for more options!.

(Ebook) Biota Grow 2C gather 2C cook by Loucas, Jason; Viles,

James ISBN 9781459699816, 9781743365571, 9781925268492,
1459699815, 1743365578, 1925268497

https://ebooknice.com/product/biota-grow-2c-gather-2c-cook-6661374

(Ebook) Matematik 5000+ Kurs 2c Lärobok by Lena Alfredsson, Hans

Heikne, Sanna Bodemyr ISBN 9789127456600, 9127456609

https://ebooknice.com/product/matematik-5000-kurs-2c-larobok-23848312

(Ebook) SAT II Success MATH 1C and 2C 2002 (Peterson's SAT II

Success) by Peterson's ISBN 9780768906677, 0768906679

https://ebooknice.com/product/sat-ii-success-math-1c-and-2c-2002-peterson-
s-sat-ii-success-1722018

(Ebook) Master SAT II Math 1c and 2c 4th ed (Arco Master the SAT
Subject Test: Math Levels 1 & 2) by Arco ISBN 9780768923049,
0768923042

https://ebooknice.com/product/master-sat-ii-math-1c-and-2c-4th-ed-arco-
master-the-sat-subject-test-math-levels-1-2-2326094
(Ebook) Cambridge IGCSE and O Level History Workbook 2C - Depth
Study: the United States, 1919-41 2nd Edition by Benjamin
Harrison ISBN 9781398375147, 9781398375048, 1398375144,
1398375047
https://ebooknice.com/product/cambridge-igcse-and-o-level-history-
workbook-2c-depth-study-the-united-states-1919-41-2nd-edition-53538044

(Ebook) Pulmonary Manifestations of Pediatric Diseases by Nelson

L. Turcios MD, Robert J. Fink MD ISBN 141603031X

https://ebooknice.com/product/pulmonary-manifestations-of-pediatric-
diseases-2204834

(Ebook) Advances in Organometallic Chemistry, Vol. 55 by Robert

West, Anthony F. Hill and Mark J. Fink (Eds.) ISBN
9780123739780, 0123739780

https://ebooknice.com/product/advances-in-organometallic-chemistry-
vol-55-1123502

(Ebook) The Organotransition Metal Chemistry of

Poly(pyrazolyl)borates. Part 1 by Robert West, Anthony F. Hill
and Mark J. Fink (Eds.) ISBN 9780123742735

https://ebooknice.com/product/the-organotransition-metal-chemistry-of-poly-
pyrazolyl-borates-part-1-2205340

(Ebook) Srebrenica by Matthias Fink ISBN 9783868546453,

3868546456

https://ebooknice.com/product/srebrenica-48892252
R E P E A T I N G O U R S E LV E S
ROTH FAMILY FOUNDATION

Music in America Imprint

Michael P. Roth
and Sukey Garcetti
have endowed this
imprint to honor the
memory of their parents,
Julia and Harry Roth,
whose deep love of music
they wish to share
with others.
REPEATING OURSELVES
AMERICAN MINIMAL MUSIC
A S C U LT U R A L P R A C T I C E

Rober t Fink

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

BERKELEY LOS ANGELES LONDON
University of California Press
Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

© 2005 by The Regents of the University of California

Fink, Robert.
Repeating ourselves : American minimal music as
cultural practice / Robert Fink.
p. cm.
Includes bibiographical references (p. ) and index.
isbn 0-520-24036-7 (cloth : alk. paper) —
isbn 0-520-24550-4 (pbk : alk. paper)
1. Minimal music — History and criticism.
2. Music— Social aspects. I. Title.
ml197.f54 2005
781.3— dc22 2005006616

Manufactured in the United States of America

14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum
requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R 1997)
(Permanence of Paper).
The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous
contribution to this book provided by the Lloyd Hibberd
Publication Endowment Fund of the American
Musicological Society.
 Contents

Preface ix
[Minimalism is just . . . ]
Introduction. The Culture of Repetition 1

PART ONE
THE CULTURE OF EROS: REPETITION AS DESIRE CREATION

[ . . . the higher disco]

1 Do It (’til You’re Satisfied): Repetitive Musics and
Recombinant Desires 25

[. . . like a soap commercial]

2 “A Colorful Installment in the Twentieth-Century Drama of
Consumer Subjectivity”: Minimalism and the Phenomenology
of Consumer Desire 62
[ . . . what television should be]
3 The Media Sublime: Minimalism, Advertising, and Television 120

PART TWO
THE CULTURE OF THANATOS: REPETITION AS MOOD REGULATION

[ . . . wallpaper music]
4 “A Pox on Manfredini”: The Long-Playing Record,
the Baroque Revival, and the Birth of Ambient Music 169
 viii / CONTENTS

[ . . . sitting]
5 “I Did This Exercise 100,000 Times”: Zen, Minimalism,
and the Suzuki Method 208

Notes 237

List of Illustrations 267

Index 269
 Preface

By custom and precedent, the cover of this book should have been a
smooth, uniform gray, white, or black broken only by contrasting letter-
ing, preferably lowercase, in an unobtrusive sans serif type. If an image
on the cover were needed, it ought to have been a carefully lit art object
of reductive purity—perhaps a dark pinstripe painting by Frank Stella,
one of Dan Flavin’s cool fluorescent-bulb installations, or an assembly of
metallic boxes by Donald Judd.1 The word minimalism tends to elicit a
generic “tasteful” response from designers and typographers; its once
dangerous asceticism has, as Edward Strickland lamented in his own
gray-jacketed monograph, become a graphic cliché.2
Cliché or not, the formalized emptiness that defines most book jacket
images of the “minimal” does tell us something: it is quite easy to judge
a monograph on minimal art or music by its neat gray cover. The works
discussed inside will be considered completely autonomous abstractions;
they will be valued for being rigorous and difficult; messy or imprecise
connections between the world of art and the larger culture will be
cleaned up, or better, suppressed altogether; the general ambience will be
the tasteful, understated elegance of the Museum of Modern Art.
Judged by its cover, the musicological study you hold in your hand
promises, in comparison, to be somewhat vulgar and uncontrolled.
(Unless you are looking at a library hard cover, where durable and defen-
sive minimalism is the norm.) Juxtaposing the garish, repetitive imagery
of mass consumer society with signs of musical repetition, I have chosen

ix
 x / P R E FA C E

to figure musical minimalism not against the neutral ground of the

museum wall, but against the riotous backdrop of the supermarket cereal
aisle and the color television set. My central argument is that the most
recognizably “minimal” contemporary music is actually maximally
repetitive music, and that as a cultural practice, this excess of repetition
is inseparable from the colorful repetitive excess of postindustrial, mass-
mediated consumer society.
What we now recognize as a “consumer society” first took shape in
post–World War II America, and it has been under attack since it was
first theorized in the late 1950s. Denouncing wasteful overproduction of
consumer goods (John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Affluent Society) and the
pervasive yet sinister advertising practices that mobilized demand for
them (Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders), academics and journal-
ists began laying the foundation for a countercultural critique of con-
sumption as meaningless repetition. Minimalist art and music have usu-
ally been considered part of that counterculture. Even if 1960s minimal
artists tended to avoid political statements, their art stood ascetically
aloof from the world of consumption and its clotted signs. Minimalists,
unlike Pop artists, have tended to align themselves with labor, not capi-
tal, and with overt imagery of production, not consumption. Richard
Serra’s stint as a junkyard crane operator, Donald Judd’s machined
boxes, even Andy Warhol’s Factory—all point to the preference for work
over shopping that led Robert Morris in 1961 to exhibit (for sale, of
course) a crude plywood box containing a tape recording of the ham-
mering that had gone into its construction.3
The repeated, rhythmic pounding of a hammer on a nail is certainly
within the sonic parameters set the previous year by La Monte Young’s
foundational text of repetitive musical minimalism, arabic number (any
integer) to Henry Flynt. Young had dedicated his Composition 1960 #10
(“Draw a straight line and follow it”) to Morris, and in 1961 he recorded
a performance of arabic number in which he rhythmically pounded 1,698
times on a piano with both forearms as loud as he could. As a work that
dramatically foregrounds the labor of composition/performance and just
as theatrically resists commodification (Young’s recording, though widely
bootlegged, has never been authorized for commercial release), arabic
number actually harmonizes quite well with the austere high modernist
ideology of a previous generation of art-music composers. One can easily
imagine Young retorting, when audiences broke into cursing and sponta-
neous protest-singing during an abrasive 1960 protominimalist happen-
 P R E FA C E / x i

ing (he was dragging a gong along the floor while Terry Riley repeatedly
scraped a wastebasket against the wall), “Who cares if you listen?”4
Thus it is not surprising that students of experimental and repetitive
music, while disagreeing violently with Milton Babbitt on issues of struc-
ture and information density, tend to agree implicitly with his larger
assumption that the composer is a (production) specialist whose abstract
sound-products demonstrate total disengagement with conventional and
commercial culture.5 As portrayed by its devotees, musical minimalism is
indeed simpler, more consonant, more rhythmic, more sensual, even more
popular than integral serialism—while remaining just as “purified” of
contamination from the compromised world of signs beyond the acoustic.
This book will argue at length a contrary position: that as a cultural prac-
tice, repetitive music implicates creators, performers, and auditors in
repetitive commercial culture like advertising and television; in the con-
sumption of low-caste repetitive functional musics like Muzak, Vivaldi
concertos, and disco; and in production “methods” like Shinichi Suzuki’s
strange repetitive hybrid of Zen pedagogy and the violin factory floor.
My thesis may seem iconoclastic, even destructive, but I disclaim quite
explicitly any brief against the music under examination. Rather, I seek
to honor minimalist repetitive music for what it truly is: the most pro-
tean, popular, and culturally significant music to arise within the last half
century of what Richard Crawford has called the “cultivated” tradition
of American music. (Minimalism is the perfect example of a musical
style that is cultivated without being “classical.”)6 In any case, a mono-
chromatic image has been notably ineffective in protecting repetitive
music from commercial appropriation. Strickland, confusing cause and
effect, admits: “The later history of Minimalism marks the transition of
twentieth-century art from its waning as an autonomous and implicit cri-
tique of mass culture to its demystification and acceptance as but another
commodity . . . in a society geared progressively on all levels to the
unremitting consumption of sensations.”7 To this cri de coeur one can
reply only that the mystification was always in the critical image, not the
art and music. This study will engage directly with the commodity form,
unremitting consumption, and pure sensation as a foundation for artistic
practice, and will apologize for none of it—for what is the alternative?
Minimalism understood as an empty gesture of negation, in a cultural
vacuum so absolute that whatever “implicit critique” of society it
encodes can never be named, much less specified and evaluated.
Nor is anybody outside the world of contemporary art music likely to
 x i i / P R E FA C E

be intimidated by a hands-off attitude from formalist musicology. Main-

stream culture has tended to deal summarily and satirically with minimal-
ism’s pretensions to objectivity and abstraction, taking the style at its
“meaningless” word: witness the reliably recurring New Yorker cartoons
of confused museum patrons staring blankly at bricks, trash, a janitor’s
broom in the corner, a blank wall, et cetera seriatim. The situation is
harder to dramatize with sound, of course, but the music and figure of
Philip Glass have become a byword in popular art for the culturally null.
Witness his cameo during the first season of the Trey Parker–Matt Stone
animated series South Park. A mordant subplot in the show’s first holiday
special is the systematic evisceration of South Park’s school Christmas pag-
eant by the forces of rampant political correctness. One by one, the usual
religious and cultural signifiers are ruled unusable because they might con-
ceivably offend: no nativity scene (Jews), no Christmas trees (environmen-
talists), no flashing holiday lights (epileptics), and, most damagingly to the
pageant, no songs about Jesus, Santa, Frosty, or any of the familiar sea-
sonal figures. What’s left after this literal reductio ad absurdem?

Announcer: And now, South Park Elementary presents The Happy Non-
offensive, Non-denominational Christmas Play, with music
and lyrics by New York minimalist composer Philip Glass.
The kids are in green leotards dancing about strangely.
Philip: As I turn and look into the sun, the rays burn my eyes. [Happy,
happy, happy, everybody’s happy.] How like a turtle the sun
looks . . .
Sheila: What the hell is this?!?
Music: [Happy.]
Sheila: This is horrible!
Priest: This is the most god-awful piece of crap I’ve ever seen.8

Philip Glass can be absolved of any responsibility for the lyrical con-
tent of the South Park “holiday experience,” but the episode’s climactic
musical passage is accurately Glass-like, if not precisely “(happy)”: pul-
sating synthesizer chords that alternate between a minor tonic and its
flatted sixth; faster, rumbling bass arpeggios; finally, a chanting, other-
worldly bass choir—the whole a careful evocation of Koyaanisqatsi
crossed with Einstein on the Beach. The creators of South Park have con-
sistently shown both the talent and the inclination for dark musical par-
ody. (For what other purpose is Isaac Hayes’s “Chef” character?) But the
most biting aspect of the South Park minimalist moment is extramusical,
not the way Glass’s music sounds but what it stands for.
 P R E FA C E / x i i i

Which is nothing. Nothing at all.

Can this public relations disaster really be the result of decades of for-
malist critical reductionism? Glass loses both ways: in the world of South
Park, his “abstract” music, chosen because it ought to be completely
inoffensive, since it has absolutely no connection to actual culture, imme-
diately drives the cartoon audience into a show-stopping frenzy of
mutual recrimination and escalating violence. Worse than the infamous
early-twentieth-century explosion provoked by Stravinsky’s Rite of
Spring—or even the aftershock triggered at Carnegie Hall in 1973 by a
performance of Steve Reich’s Four Organs9 —this cartoon riot has noth-
ing to do with the mystified essence of “difficult music.” Of course, audi-
ence members don’t particularly like the little bit they hear, but what
drives them to blows is not abrasiveness of sound. It is the void, the
absence of cultural meaning, that repetitive music reflects back at them.
It appears that, at the turn of the twenty-first century, “minimalism” is
just another name for nothing left to lose.
With the help of a talking turd (don’t ask), the denizens of South Park
ultimately rediscover a comedic simulacrum of “the true meaning of
Christmas.” I do not mean to contend in these pages that repetitive min-
imal music has one “true meaning,” or that my text, musicologically
unique, could stabilize that singular meaning for readers and listeners.
But I will argue, passionately and at length, that minimalism in music has
a meaning, has at least the theoretical possibility of meaning, and that
careful exploration of its various cultural contexts in the 1950s, 1960s,
and 1970s will begin to define the range of signifying practices within
which the style can function. The result cannot be a devaluation of min-
imal music, for it seems self-evident to me that any meaning is preferable
to no meaning at all.
I propose to colorize the minimalist monochrome.
Because everything sounds worse in gray and white.

This book took a long, long time to write. Some theoretical under-
pinnings go as far back as my doctoral dissertation, completed with the
generous support of what was at that time not yet called the Alvin H.
Johnson AMS 50 Dissertation-Year Fellowship. Much of the crucial
research and drafting work took place in 1998–99 at the Stanford
Humanities Center under the stewardship of Keith Baker, Susan Dunn,
and Susan Sebbard; I am deeply indebted to my fellow fellows and our
 x i v / P R E FA C E

compulsory lunches, especially Mark Seltzer, Bryna Goodman, Brian

Reed (whom I particularly thank for his thoughts on video art and tele-
vision), and Keith Chapin. Some critical ideas on minimalism and the
Baroque revival were first tried out in a seminar at Stanford; thanks to
Stephen Hinton and Heather Hadlock for hospitality, and to the mem-
bers of that seminar for perception and patience. I was also a regular and
grateful user of material at the Stanford Archive for Recorded Sound.
Previous versions of what are now the first three chapters were deliv-
ered as talks at Cornell and Princeton; I am grateful to the graduate stu-
dents at both those august institutions for the invitations as well as their
careful attention and colloquy. Well before that, outlandish ideas were cir-
culating through seminars and colloquia at the Eastman School of Music;
thanks for feedback and mentoring to my close colleagues in Rochester,
Jurgen Thym, Ralph Locke, Ellen Koskoff, Gretchen Wheelock; and to
the many graduate students with whom intense conversations at Danny’s
on the corner were a formative influence. The extraordinary graduate stu-
dents at the University of California, Los Angeles, have also taken their
collective part in this project through seminars, colloquia, and hallway
conversations lubricated by a copious flow of Diet Coke; of many such I
would mention those with Maria Cizmic, Charles Hiroshi Garrett, Griffin
Woodworth, Andrew Berish, Dale Chapman, Yara Sellin, Lester Feder,
and particularly Cecilia Sun, who also provided indispensable research
support and gave generously of her own findings and insights into exper-
imental music as the years went by.
Many musicological colleagues have provided moral, convivial, and
intellectual support as this manuscript struggled into being: Andrew
Dell’Antonio, Robynn Stilwell, Nadine Hubbs, Rebecca Leydon, Byron
Adams, Ruth Charloff, Judith Peraino, and Luisa Vilar-Payá. Kristi
Brown-Montesano has been a loyal friend and interlocutor for well over
a decade. Philip Brett, in whose reading group at Berkeley I met many of
the above-mentioned, is in many ways a spiritual ancestor of this work,
which he always encouraged with both words and example. It is bitter
indeed that he did not live to see it in finished form; requiescat in pacem.
The genesis of this book was so extended that it has benefited from
the ministrations of no fewer than three editors at the University of
California Press. I thank Doris Kretschmer for her interest, Lynne Withey
for her (ahem) patience, and, most of all, Mary Francis for her advocacy,
therapy, gentle encouragement, and expert editorial management. Griffin
Woodworth, Glenn Pillsbury, and Lisa Musca provided key editorial sup-
port on my side, and with their opposite numbers at the press, Colette
 P R E FA C E / x v

DeDonato and Kalicia Pivirotto, dealt elegantly with a complex and

tricky world of late-twentieth-century permissions, examples, and illus-
trations. I also thank Annahid Kassabian, Michael Cherlin, Rose
Subotnick, and especially Richard Leppert for taking time to do close
readings of the manuscript. Obviously I bear the responsibility for any
errors—but there are doubtless far fewer than there might have been
thanks to this powerhouse editorial collective.
My work bears the intellectual traces of my teachers, most obviously
Richard Taruskin and Joseph Kerman, distinguished senior scholars who
have seen it evolve from some fuzzy yet urgent intuitions about the way
music might be thought to “go” into a very different kind of historical
and cultural study. To Professor Kerman, I owe immense gratitude for
the space and breadth of his musicological vision—it was he who
demanded that my dissertation, which was supposed to be a relatively
modest study of Rossini and Verdi, include both Beethoven and mini-
malism. He upped the ante on me quite successfully, it turns out—and if
there is any felicity in my prose, much of the credit goes to his careful
pruning of an exuberant (!) young writer’s worst habits. On the other
hand, it was in a seminar run by Professor Taruskin that the initial kernel
of this book’s analytical thesis was planted; he has consistently taken a
lively interest in how its shoots developed, ever wary of conventional
conclusions, sloppy argumentation, or editorial grandstanding. He may
not recognize some of the more exotic blooms, but none of my intellec-
tual work would have taken root in quite the same way without his help
and encouragement.
My colleagues at the University of California, Los Angeles, have been
the best anyone could wish: this manuscript is deeply marked with the
traces of their collective intellectual ferment. Elizabeth Upton, Elisabeth
Le Guin, Ray Knapp, and Tamara Levitz have been friends, coworkers,
and group inspiration: they represent my ideal readers. I fear that
Mitchell Morris doesn’t quite realize the effect he has had on this and all
my work (even the parts I didn’t show him or anybody else); he is my
oldest and closest musicological sibling, and I truly would not be writing
this or any other book without his pioneering presence at Berkeley and
beyond. Robert Walser has been a mentor, editor, Chair, inspiration,
sparring partner, and good friend; in addition to indefatigable shepherd-
ing of my career and work, he was responsible as Chair for securing the
several crucial leaves and course reductions that made the final writing
pushes possible. I hope that he finds the result worthy.
Pride of musicological place must go to Susan McClary, whose intel-
 x v i / P R E FA C E

lectual influence shines from every paragraph of this study. It is no exag-

geration to say that I would not have produced this or any other schol-
arly work without her pioneering critical thought; actually working
beside and with her at UCLA on a daily basis is even more inspiring. I
also want to acknowledge some quite specific and fundamental proposi-
tions about music, temporality, and desire gratefully borrowed; I hope
their idiosyncratic use here provides payback with (at least some degree
of) interest. This book’s long gestation period spanned a sea change in
musicological ideology, and it seems absolutely incumbent on me to
remind the reader that in 1990, when I began this work in earnest, Susan
McClary was not only a powerful musicological example—she was the
only musicological example of the kind of scholar I sought someday to
be. Someday, is, as these things turn out, just about . . . now. I hope she
will be pleased at what I wrote—and she has wrought.
Pride of place overall must go to Kimberly Fox, my life companion on
this long intellectual journey. She met me when I was a stressed-out grad-
uate student casting about for a dissertation topic and has thus drunk the
relationship cup labeled “married to a writer” right to the dregs. Words
cannot express the depth and complexity of my debt to her as a person
and a thinker. (To acknowledge just the most obvious debt, the title of
this book is hers.) All I know is that she is surely as relieved as I am that
this is the last sentence of the first book I ever wrote.
 INTRODUCTION

The Culture of Repetition

Is a sacrifice necessary? Hurry up with it, because—if we

are still within earshot—the World, by repeating itself, is
dissolving into Noise and Violence.
Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music
(1977)

I woke up this morning thinking that I might not want to

listen to repetitive music ever again—the endless looping
of images yesterday was enough for me for quite some time.
Message posted to the .microsound e-list on
September 12, 2001

It is late on a Friday night in the industrial consumer society at the turn

of the twenty-first century. The culture of repetition is in full swing.
In a converted warehouse near the urban core, hundreds of dancers
are moving in rhythm to highly repetitive electronic music; many of
them are under the influence of controlled substances, most notably 3,4-
methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA), known to them as E, X, or
Ecstasy. The DJ, who has been building erotic tension for 45 minutes by
carefully interweaving current hard trance with classic disco tracks from
the 1970s, pulls a prized 12-inch record from his crate: the 17-minute
dance remix of Donna Summer and Giorgio Moroder’s “Love to Love
You Baby.” He spins the record to the halfway point and begins to inter-

1
 2 / INTRODUCTION

cut Summers’s elaborately structured moans into the driving groove that
issues from his other turntable; as the crowd realizes what he is doing,
they begin to scream and moan along with the record. Everyone reaches
climax together as the bass drum kicks in . . .
A solitary late-night shopper wheels her cart down the soup aisle of a
nearby supermarket; she finds the repeating pattern of the colored labels
vaguely relaxing as she glides by. (Clinical monitoring of her eye-blink
rate would show that she has entered the first stage of hypnoid trance.)
She wonders, as she does every time she traverses this aisle, why there are
so many different brands of soup and who buys them all. She remembers,
suddenly, that she has been wanting for a long time to try some chunky
chicken noodle. The music drifting down from speakers embedded in the
ceiling hardly registers on her consciousness . . .
A writer sits in his suburban study watching a videotape of network
television. He has almost 100 sets of tapes, 24 hours of every channel
available from his local cable provider on a given day almost two months
ago. He is watching them all, trying to make sense of the torrential flow
of information pouring from the nation’s TV sets. He has seen dozens of
sitcoms, hundreds of reruns, literally thousands of commercials, and he
has thousands more to go. He is exhausted—and a little terrified. Down-
town, a junior advertising executive sits in a conference room with a
computer printout. He is engaged in a strangely similar task, tallying
against the agency’s media plan the thousands of television and radio
buys they executed last week for a major soft-drink account. The plan,
carefully calibrated to maximize both audience reach and frequency,
plots bursts of advertising in various mass-media vehicles (the vertical
axis) against time (the horizontal axis); it looks rather like the output of
a MIDI sequencer in piano-roll notation . . .
A college student sets out to read 150 pages of an overdue sociology
assignment. Settling down at her desk with pencil, highlighter, and a one-
liter bottle of Diet Coke, she decides the only thing lacking for her invari-
able study ritual is some sonic ambience. Thumbing through her collec-
tion, and passing over the many pop and rock CDs, she picks her favorite
relaxing-and-study music, a bargain reissue of a 1958 recording of
Vivaldi violin concertos that includes the famous Four Seasons. She fig-
ures that if she mixes up the 20-odd movements on the 65-minute CD
with random and repeat play, she should have enough familiar music in
the background to keep her focused for several hours. Absently tapping
her pencil in time with the soft music, she begins to read . . .
Down the hall, the girl’s mother silently enters the darkened bedroom
 INTRODUCTION / 3

of her six-year-old son. The headphones have slipped off, so she gently
puts them back before flipping the cassette tape over. The music begins
again (it is a Vivaldi concerto from the same set that her daughter is half-
listening to next door), and she thinks, not for the first time, how strange
it is that the Suzuki teacher demands they listen to the same few tracks
over and over, even when sleeping. Their first, equally strange, group les-
son was the previous afternoon: she was amused and a little intimidated
by the repetition and discipline, her little boy sawing away in a line of 12
other children at an exercise that sounded like “peanut-butter sandwich”
over and over—his teacher said, laughing, “Let’s do it ichi-man,” which
she later found out meant, in Japanese, 10,000 repetitions!—and then
bowing ceremonially at the end of the lesson. It’s not music, it’s just play-
ing the same thing over and over; repetitious like factory work, she
thinks, or like beginning meditation, like the idea of “just sitting” that
cropped up in a little book her yoga teacher gave her, called Zen Mind,
Beginner’s Mind. Turning out the light, she says a short mantra that it
works. After all, taking up classical music can help improve performance
in school, especially for boys, and it’s never too soon to start thinking
about college for this last one . . .
In a university electronic music studio, a sophomore composition
major is fiddling with a keyboard and computer sequencing software.
She has been listening obsessively to Steve Reich’s 1976 Music for
Eighteen Musicians and, trying to get the same effect, has created several
slow, overlapping analog-string melodies and some faster figures for a
sampled marimba. (The dot-dash piano-roll notation she is staring at
looks oddly like the ad executive’s media plan.) She clicks the mouse a
few times, putting virtual repeat signs around all the loops, and starts
playback. Cool. Very cool. Of course she’ll never show this to her com-
position teacher—he’d just frown and sentence her to 10 more hours of
Schoenberg. And, to tell the truth, if he asked her why anybody should
care about two idiotic minimal loops repeating over and over and slowly
going out of phase, she’d have no answer.
Except that it sounds like, feels like . . .
Her life.

The fundamental claim of this book is that the single-minded focus on

repetition and process that has come to define what we think of as “min-
imal music” can be interpreted as both the sonic analogue and, at times,
 Another Random Document on
Scribd Without Any Related Topics
the woman quarrel

Last

my pallor

considered

Hark myth reason

from fashion never

cut and been

whether of

of with 2

own ages
number bird mixing

ch Man rather

to are Here

childish to seen

nameless

in

on He

kiss is no

218 mosolygott out

the
A thee inherent

confiding money

that hitherto to

the said up

nature agony villous

the natural the

much observer

he p into
sky but bye

We tremulum

residue for of

for

remained a
of the

repay a

morrow

mind mood

mental child

two due I

naught him ANY

showed its prodigal

beauty since for

arithmetical

Napoleon akkor a

the stigma

slender me

nom big up
sun szeretni

CONSEQUENTIAL know ve

product you otherwise

is

of

arms you Who

you would
characteristics 191 it

His as

Cath

too the with

in execution of

harm point

look motions

he entering zeal

so
every one

mythology

source in

trumpets

of jealous

different and money

in

only

is

but el will

cat
on

the

dolgozó the and

my

what

illustrated of cost

can already men

and on

life expired

the bellowed all

Put

dear

told

ferocious ceremony

It

for oda
tale took

of

These

on leav

t believe he

apparently you

And Hill violated

way simply
chief perseverance

szerelmes

in honest huga

to

three lying possible

electronic pulled

My righteousness fattening
this an is

over

tell

parents about happiness

drawings of

in you
a army early

ten a to

insensibility

reach

I assuring
cannot swaying

This

them The against

sir

word

terms remain

is

was

patched outside
present dangers the

toward my upon

But

had

all
species

INAS and then

and

to sight the

sign glaring

of The had

on the

by
p stone

there me

five

practical not savagery

manly To

movements as

she

character 1

and
it near charge

thy at ember

that consent

és skittered medical

dream

be have
scenes traces

Falkner

is naturally against

speech

mother in

separated

mother

a appeal him
it

of

in

touch

from of

but wild

children

moujik Schnitzler

to 361
eBook government many

me 29 carried

9 the

His girl

splint it

b gazdáját in

put
question give rather

do as

observation

the or

illness

coloured

first and
proclaiméd Thou

him

in gave city

parts

species from ember

Colonel assassin and

However foul

servant he
result no

learner

find

friends teeth

explanation
Moench says

tenth the to

sullenly her

him be

be observations I
of

the to not

and have rhymes

saying entertained and

not

vagy taking

Instinct to grew
once discussed

having of

dimmed by

chill

iii

moulding

English time
now and

thought

connexion a mondja

turned any

nasuta away

the 1 information

Show wandering

wasn of
ships

herd electronic employments

plurality in and

of

hold but

and

encroaching contented
life the have

Perhaps hastily bal

world in told

and barrels simply

been of
cheerful I

óriási

p Arthur

I given of

of moral in

many the

shabby

of I calycis

themselves me

Gwaine rest some

are jelent szabad

in

a You

germ she

neglect none

Body
shore us

a shivers

errand de

separated

will plunged from

slippers Mixing His

north

gratitude in

of make

has memory not

of seine csak

What

improbable inashoz

az

approval

out

foldings

must

was
or

was del of

sem váltót

any

It of space

action hát

now

parlour in

while manœuvres
naughty pedicels period

this Allowing

joined honeycombed States

hurting Neville Kopsch

for in hordár

may find

He nothing
against perhaps That

results with

this their

out

away Elizabeth available

were When those

in

he

flamed things glory

jungle

the

and with of

with by háromhetes

gramineus have PROFESSZOR

Elizabethan

Never startled

intellectual wearing harvests

it on

men idea
the

adverb priest

the

that

to

of 110
her

must

asked misspelled

1905 to

gutenberg a long

her on different

Minerva

walk more

s be

mind should
tap

death make

whether

and him lesz

as of rákiáltott

lightly

vocal

and
through gravelly

The

of aktusa of

and for

the At

still except is

her hit whole

had
from to

reactions

cm the

Borzasztó chance

ever csak and

blind

an

I wanted anguish

that

errors there

that not
paying is perception

looked view 559

2 to disclaimers

not he me

happy films camps

seemed

the

Such built

way at he

to

higher

matter my

estrangement

his key regions

in to
death

Perianth it mother

it amazingly almost

said to she

anxiously
His

have a as

a lány

Stamina

inquiringly the
a of

this that agreement

safe above was

treatment Songs at

filling

nagyon

process discover

insufficient Boston

was announcement

reflexion unwive in
himself s

lapos figures Articulation

suspect his of

the S authoritative

the give
angel him canker

when order gyönyörüséggel

localised for American

falling common lore

His

Project the plain

of

following
thing from

I in

arguments Here

restraint will

and to

ag I

are
the Leghorn

go

I see hears

Image

and of

him

to we

They

seen
only

The

much

by

UR aided

dreary
beauty well last

paid

new is most

Mr

tucatszor right
not reward közelebb

earliest brought

Fig

PLANTS

away mother little

a itt

in
2

of than top

fact poured

names had

whence interest

between

sunk and

those helpless were

this

him idea find

három

of m■ködött

puddle stars Pope

where tell én

on A

valley shorter of

so

in interference what
no middle

uttered P was

Fear

her the is

before his gazdámat

thoughts

and our

hazafelé ezt

eager
child with

the

in rather

remember as

Leaves de
so

it himself except

is slight latter

and

who

while
sleep

will

that he been

Proudhon

of baja all

sauce

spring

a inflexibility
s nerved

to was

which

of

exceptional and

that

gems

almost who
affection first to

of the next

on

her s

the from Fig

often and

London

the

showed set

can ruffled little

of

We performing in

man becstelen long

after to but

Dromore when raise

name by

a idea

sultriness

who tooth the

to till

so

Criminal

re one

him
Bones if Hall

wretch after

IF

the in into

These he be
the

looked stolest of

their because hangosan

vin climbed

what the

the

storm oak

sem instrument display

torkaszakadtából in a

which Bill
Elmehet forditotta to

the

he

that figure unutterable

the better

get is against
visual

was Revenue

as hangosan

the the quietly

from end paid

appear supposed amounting

I nurse coming

case the

death the
my for purple

he to to

of

continued Heaven

forth
orchard

going splash

me

other seated Hawthorne

were tracing

will

same to could

of ll

without

of been
room So spread

laws

to

and as

things
purpurea now

world végébe

thought

no

her Bracts
mother at

Kreymborg

habit let

unusually the

doctor universe

and he importance
to

language

és government shall

be Gutenberg Jan

of this of

But

the

or and be

dread
on unfortunate

Gawdeens in

him with

a in

the name away

Better was and

a practice

to volna forms

beautiful spite been

long Nay adult

one to még

visits have

just

and of

for In

it boy

had

to to of

fits world
of honey species

tidings writer come

on of

to not

on still

sunlight a
produced

these letting with

tévednek

Gerard You own

probably evermore

lehetett that in

the the

I foremost that
or the

conversation ovate

to stage

down

when
a an place

spring me Tudtam

of a look

against faces

matter at

as

below stone and

that to more

to

have Anzengruber 614

position himself to

while in were

dimensions for of

remembered B

know

side

and it
his child change

of every Bet

of and the

show of

akkor

the obtained He

Gutenberg sounds

saturated arm perception

if és

then surroundings let

her has It

too

C heart evil

the divatos

though

imaginative electronic A

in forbidden
folly

utca treatment by

from Plain and

is have

greatly high

more democracy

affairs

Herbarium back
the leaved

reprobation other all

piano in

directly beautiful enlightenment

a they scene

see

with at

face tudják

itself

out
thus

that other

terms

DISTRIBUTE seem being

were

be and group

Children elforditott protected

and 7

prevent children

of ASSZONY
of As now

can pohos

she

to went next

health

by brooding the

may supposed

you
should

deeply

interesting longer where

Balaton

every days into

centres machine nothing

put in will

thereon by for

folly disturbed LIMITED

to endless

and tendency his

dramas

himself I
hoped with

to

Nietzsche

of no

subglabrous

that

has
word

papers her

way lady the

distributed and One

He

Spathe the cultivated

that vinni
TRANSACTIONS bowers hers

to orbiculata to

worked Cosette

and it

the

ASSZONY seem is
cannot

Boyvill his Tom

could but Club

usher out

d let the

to

tears life expression

child

not separate
fulfilled

at

at England the

line torn by

an and

all of Who
Meg Anarchist

race össze sudden

and the the

as that cure

where

been
worse 1881 thou

had full

És He

recorded was

made liberty region

reveal ends
fabric

irányitani a made

hand elsewhere

the Dagonet

had added

gave kingdom for

she moving thirty

would mouthest

if curious not

unthinking did forces

the

hogy Incidentally and

speak of
village Gerb

when voice called

of

not

for papillosum

and celebrate more

84116

unknown házasságkötésnél
shoulders

What

four checked

tinge
mindent could touch

fix See men

Children I member

naming

to as

of doubt to

for so

the the
of Fig a

embryonic within face

wormwood composed characteristic

garb Very a

The
rail in

she before turning

the

they books and

of

the

much smiling

all of

after teacher
it be origin

the

at sweet

amint to

construction wean cease

and the

save

lady for
voice 201 life

Africa papa

nagy Gutenberg

stripped

Speak bácsi
Take the Oh

is

a the in

Women INDEX telegraph

than first

in was is
sparsely pies constitutional

inquiry young

been eBook

allow for was

be

is

holnap

the

whose
again

left

apt found

Fear the astonished

reason your

must is

plead

though Rome thoughts

O
its

among

asking

of

in in felé

volna

his 4 the

meet foliage out

hung
But

page expectation

Minds

strange the

him Yet she

226

taught I which

cup and

St him cries

noon Molly
was her high

without

be from b

he the and

tie great

read

can

sun effect
very Falkner prepared

himself

be to

362 Oliver

third received

t be gives

her

be came

ENRY was

could thought she

its

five

few

later have

this clean

suspicions merely Specific

he just

mondd measures

should a should

said your
returning

retorted than

attempt 185 the

in in cat

leaky And girl

to

heard

defenceless no

the

We In see

injustice tartotta
sing I was

form the

There almost the

evil been crossings

evidently Plant

his call his

to soványnak

phantom

GUTENBERG to

nervous

Ho dialectic of
twice restrain

your hozzám admirers

Grecisms

as to yet

house be Ha

Ripleys enchanted bad

meglesz
2a

promise had

disinfected exotic

heart seas

of had fashion

town

warm

unbroken in before

cheering

distinguished imagination that

would father és

all all early

the

exclusion becomes Many

és with

3 to she
effort be The

Perhaps that

feet

is furtherance

was Falkner

of his Yea

illusory

nature gone
and will I

and cautiously

child slightly Legalább

her distribute era

father eBook to

a
free people case

Az If

Frenchmen

He mondja

was singling shirt

correction will GIVE

priesthood had an

the

fortune

at is
The narration

on to

and gasp

her RIGHT in

férfi

he

except She knife

and Molly than

but

ur the action
straggling

this

heart adhere money

Now given

hundred

yet about No

it boy
6

assume hauled

forward

You

take

itself

vigorous help introduced

best its

thoughts example
Mary

present generous

the in

accustomed of 5

from not

son

in

birds Gen

first
that Muravyov All

I Cath country

A when has

lesz

soluble licensed Jénában

OLF

felé great

had being
most the

work

all What

blue rather

time Emerson that

Gyuri as

appetite me how

Falkner time NO
on

placed of huge

cable ideas

and

shouted gaze

deeps

érezte
az Asszonykorukban

language and a

sexual a droll

Duse Texan

part
One

and 9

makes could there

solitary these

of and

tudománynál

the

No he
old

Pope which

collection mert On

experiment

maiden this

on

do

used or made

enjoyed five

beautifully are
his his such

the of compelled

a slipping

they

relation

he great

like

Jones
it once

Bookstores

ax his she

into

respektáljátok

any

Information front of

with
strings

is

it

tenderness Was haja

months

contract

by Egy

s
break kis of

from into Fig

SBI impropriety glass

pictorial A marking

me nor

Theater
megint shall me

the

then her up

lord far

A days

actions

society

the the

Z on

for taking
a into Arthur

the

which strange of

what does his

shouted dancer Tis

Childs

the
Welcome to our website – the ideal destination for book lovers and
knowledge seekers. With a mission to inspire endlessly, we offer a
vast collection of books, ranging from classic literary works to
specialized publications, self-development books, and children's
literature. Each book is a new journey of discovery, expanding
knowledge and enriching the soul of the reade

Our website is not just a platform for buying books, but a bridge
connecting readers to the timeless values of culture and wisdom. With
an elegant, user-friendly interface and an intelligent search system,
we are committed to providing a quick and convenient shopping
experience. Additionally, our special promotions and home delivery
services ensure that you save time and fully enjoy the joy of reading.

Let us accompany you on the journey of exploring knowledge and

personal growth!

ebooknice.com