Music for 18 Musicians (1974-76). Steve Reich /generational transfer/

Martin Filler has an article in the New York Review of Books on the architecture of the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York:

The result might have been boring to the point of nothingness were it not for the exhilarating lightness and unexpected warmness.

I'd suggest Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians as the minimalist music equivalent.

Filler goes on to say:

What constitutes "contemporary" art is an interesting question in itself. The big international auction houses now define contemporary art as works made during the past thirty-five years, with earlier pieces designated as "modern."

Whew, Reich's piece barely makes the cut. But for example, Riley's In C is clearly pre-1972 although I never thought of it as "modern" until now.

I've also spent the weekend assimilating the idea of a president from a generation younger than mine. Obama was only born two years after me but I think we are on different sides of a generational divide. Standard generational theory attempts to illustrate. For example, the boomer/prophet archetype emphasizes vision, values, and religion; the gen x/nomad archetype liberty, survival, and honor. I may be, politically at least, pessimistic and skeptical while Gen X is inherently pragmatic out of necessity. So while I match up well with Obama's positions as seen in this political blog quiz, I still don't feel the pull of the candidate, despite his fine speaking skills and his politically savvy approach. It's possible I may have underestimated the man.

I just hope my vote in the February California primary will still have meaning by then, regardless of whatever I end up deciding.

All this political pondering does make me want to pay more attention to composers younger than the silent generation i.e. beyond the usual elders Glass, Reich, and Riley.

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• OpenLeft: All of this should render California a key battleground that might very well decide the nomination.
• Right Wing Nut House: I am bereft today. What was once unthinkable has now become slightly more realistic. The odds of Huckaboob getting the nomination are still pretty long. /this is a conservative blog, by the way/
• Lance Mannion: And one of my points here is that Fineman's column is a product of his profession's rejection of self-examination.
• Mick LaSalle: My fear with Obama is that he gets elected president as an inspirational abstraction and as soon as he tries to do something concrete, he finds himself with no mandate and with an alienated public.
• MyDD: Every eighty years a "Civic" generation, like the GI Generation and now the Millennials, comes along with a determination to use their size and their facility with communication technology to change the political culture of America.
• Andrew Sullivan: And Edwards' siding with Obama against Clinton was a pivotal moment in the generational transfer of power in the Democratic Party.

Comments

[Herb Levy]

I have a couple of thoughts in response to this post.

The first & most general is that for art auction houses, the main issue revolves around sales rather than any kind of critical analysis. The idea of a shifting cutoff (whether it's 35 years or some other number) for what constitutes "contemporary" may make sense in some ways (& not simply as a market niche), but for me there's no getting around the fact that some time in the mid-20th century, there was a big change in how "serious music" worked.

A chronological cutoff that forces you to consider, say, "In C" as a modernist work solely because it was composed before some arbitrary date doesn't seem to me to be a very strong analytic model. Riley's work has more in common with any of the pieces it has influenced in the last 40 years than it does with most any composition from the early 20th century.

Further, while there are certainly many younger composers worth checking out (at least some of whom you've mentioned previously) I'm somewhat bemused by your discussion of boomers vs gen-x in music. Not that there may not be some useful distinctions between composers of these two loose generations, but because the three composers you cite as elders are neither boomers or gen-x. Glass, Reich, and Riley were all born in the 1930s.

[Beatles Chords]

Herb makes a great point regarding sales being the priority in art auction houses. Atthe end of the day, like any form of art, the classification or what not, is in the eye of the beholder.