Minimalism is arguably the most popular style of concert music that the late-twentieth century has produced, appealing to the widest possible audience - fans of rock, jazz and classical music. But the minimalist aesthetic has not been lacking in controversy. To its detractors, it is maddeningly repetitive and single-minded, no better than pop music masquerading as art. To its adherents, it is ecstatic and vibrant, combining classical, popular and non-Western elements to create a style that restores the severed link between composer and audience. The two best-known minimalist composers, Americans Philip Glass and Steve Reich, are world-famous figures. But they can only properly be understood in the context of their predecessors (La Mome Young and Terry Riley) and their successors (John Adams, Meredith Monk, and Europeans such as Michael Nyman, Louis Andriessen, and Arvo Part). This book, the first overview of minimalism aimed at a general public, traces the lives of the minimalist composers, discusses their most significant works, and examines the artistic milieu from which they emerged.
Experimental music has been mostly unrecognised in Australia, but it is in this "underground" area that the major innovations and creative developments in music occur. Through testing perceived boundaries, breaking rules and creating new forms, the artists in this field force us to question what, in fact, music is. Written by artists who have been actively engaged in the areas they are covering, Experimental music explores the development of forms, ideas and scenes from the 1970s to the present.
Descriptive, critical and comparative notes on 1,000 works on painting, sculpture, architecture, decorative arts, illustration and music. Classed, with author and subject index. – – A.L.A.Catalog 1904
"Although modern African literature and music have become well known in the West, through the contributions of such famous authors as Chinua Achebe and Bessie Head and such popular musicians as King Sunny Ade and Ladysmith Black Mambazo, the continent's vast body of modern visual arts has been little explored." "In New Currents, Ancient Rivers Jean Kennedy surveys African art of the last fifty years, offering an expansive perspective on the visual arts of the continent. Just as ancient rivers flow through the modern African landscape, so too do the rituals and traditions of the past run deeply through modern African art. The past is able to coexist in vibrant synthesis with the present largely because of a critical constant in African culture, the acceptance of change." "The culmination of twenty years' research, New Currents, Ancient Rivers is the largest survey of contemporary African art, presenting nearly 150 artists of sub-Saharan Africa, primarily from Nigeria, Senegal, Ethiopia, Sudan, Zimbabwe, and South Africa--painters, sculptors, fiber artists, printmakers, and filmmakers. As Kennedy examines their artistic development, she shows the many ways the artists meld elements from modern life, the legacy of colonialism, foreign technology, the natural world, and the past to create art that may be divorced from the original purposes of ritual but that still embraces traditional rhythms. The author also briefly discusses the influence of the oral and literary traditions on the visual arts." "New Currents, Ancient Rivers is a tribute to the vitality and diversity of a continent and its peoples. This progressive book recognizes individual artists, many of whom are virtually unknown in Europe and the United States."--Jacket.
This is the first critical biography of Laurence Binyon (1869-1943), one of the most remarkable scholar-artists in British cultural history. Binyon is best remembered today for his 1914 Great War elegy 'For the Fallen', carved on countless war graves and recited annually at Remembrance Sunday services, but his importance extends well beyond this one famous poem. In fact, Binyon was a poet, dramatist, translator, art historian, and critic, whose influence in a wide range of fields is only now beginning to be recognized. During his forty-year career at the British Museum, he built a world reputation as a pioneering scholar and interpreter of Eastern art, one of the first to challenge the West's myopic assumption that it held a monopoly on beauty and truth. Revealing the subtle continuities between the poet and East West mediator, this fascinating study of his life and work restores Binyon to his rightful place in British cultural history, as one of the most benign and quietly influential voices of the early twentieth century.
Minimalists by K. Robert Schwarz | Literally Just Books
