EVERY GENRE PROJECT - May 28 - Post-Minimalism
Genre of the Day - Post-Minimalism
Album of the Day - Promises by Floating Points & Pharoah Sanders (2021)
May 28, 2024
You can strip back music to its bare essentials, to pensive, drawn-out compositions that aim to convey more emotion in the negative space of spareness than in unnecessary density. But what happens after? Does it stay small forever? Music never stands still so long, and all music that once seemed to promise a bold new future gives way to novel ideas. Like burning the leaves of a forest to promote new growth, post-minimalist music aims to broaden minimalism’s scope and compositional tactics, and avoids some of the scrupulousness of serialism, another modern classical school of thought.
Today’s genre makes me think of the old adage that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, so I already feel chummy with post-modernism’s take. I kid, I kid: one of my primary aims in this column that sustains my exploration is to avoid making value judgments about musical quality and see music in a holistic frame, so there’s honestly nothing I can recall in this column as being ‘bad.’ However, just three days into the project after the pleasant forays of dub and southern soul, I was confronted by Schoenberg’s serialism and his anxiety-inducing string delirium in an exorbitantly long two-hour album. It remains the least listenable genre I’ve encountered. Months removed, I welcome serialism’s counterpart with open arms.
In the fancy, art music sphere of classical music beginning in the 20th century, composers like Schoenberg began to fixate on the most pragmatic way of tonally composing music, leading to his practice of twelve-tone tonality taking off in which notes are played at a fixed, equal number of instances. This arguably comes at the expense of basic musical factors like rhythm as well as, you know, the necessary human capacity to absorb and feel the music. Though serialism and minimalism are not the same, they evolved as peers in the same period of classical music. Post-minimalism emerged in the 1980s as a new generation of composers applied new textures and rhythmic emphases to the modern classical landscape.
Like the minimalism that comes before it, with these artsy classical genres there’s certainly less concrete musical conventions that define the genre, and understandably so: with such a complex, bird’s eye of musical creation, there are endless ways you can mathematically compose a piece. Composer Kyle Gann explains here how a post-minimalist piece can be composed via Fibonacci pattern, for example. Post-minimalism eschews puritanism of structure, though, allowing for more flow and the innate human touch that drives our love for musical creations. It’s a balancing act between unique, meticulous structures and playful creativity that earlier minimalist composers may not have embraced.
In today’s post-minimalist delegate, the legendary jazz saxophonist Pharaoh Sanders decided to bless young English DJ Floating Points with a collaborative, ambitious effort with the London Symphony Orchestra in what would constitute the last body of work of his prolific life after being ensnared by the producer’s first project. I can only imagine Floating Points’ head actually exploding at Sanders reaching out to him for this project. In a home studio in Los Angeles, the pair set to work at crafting a shared vision. With the stakes as high as the talent of these musical minds, the results do not disappoint. Centered around a wistful celesta melody as its home base, it winds through, below, above, and around it in nine meditative movements. With its varying shifts and kaleidoscopic range of emotional colors, it somehow manages to make an album that took months of musical effort feel like it reflects the mood shifts of a single day. It’s one of those albums for which words can do so little compared to you listening for yourself; there’s no anticipating the changes between movements, from the scintillating glimmers of electricity in Movement 3, the sumptuous drama of Movement 6’s strings, and the rich, undulating electronic soundscapes of Movement 7 Sanders quietly sits back and appreciates until jumping into their climactic chorus with gusto. This album is an excellent stamp on post-minimalism’s penchant for music that is both artfully, thoughtfully crafted and stirringly gorgeous and enhanced by incorporating non-classical influences like jazz and folk music.