Acoustic Guitar for Beginners - Premium Wooden Guitar with Full Accessories | Perfect for Campfires, Music Lessons & Home Practice
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Product Description
The classic minimal music album, available again on vinyl for the first time since the '70s. Primed with a glass of cognac, Charlemagne Palestine sits at the keyboard of a Bösendorfer Imperial grand piano. One foot firmly holds down the sustain pedal while both hands perform an insistent strum-like alternation on the keys. Soon Palestine and his Bösendorfer are enveloped in sound and bathed in a shimmering haze of multi-colored overtones. For 45 minutes, this rich pulsating music swells and intensifies, filling the air. When Strumming Music first appeared on the adventurous French label Shandar during the mid-1970s, it seemed a straightforward matter to place Charlemagne Palestine in the so-called minimalist company of La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and Philip Glass, whose work also featured in the Shandar catalog. Palestine too used a deliberately restricted range of materials and a repetitive technique, but as he has often pointed out in more recent times, the opulent fullness of his music would more accurately be described as maximalist. Strumming Music, recorded in Palestine's own loft in Manhattan, has no written score. In an age of recorded sound he still feels no need for traditional notation. The surging energy of this particular recording stands comparison with the improvising of jazz visionaries who impressed and inspired him while living in New York as a young man. But, as Palestine himself has made clear, primarily he brings to music-making the sensibility of an artist rather than a musician. Although the technique of the piece has roots in Palestine's daily practice, when a teenager, of playing the carillon at a church, hammering sonorous chimes from a rack of tuned bells, it also draws on his later work as a body artist, staging vigorously muscular, physically demanding and often reckless performances. In addition, Strumming Music can be heard as a sculptural tour de force, while it's textures connect with the color moods, plastic rhythms, and tactile space of Mark Rothko's abstract expressionist canvases. Strumming Music remains the essential index of Palestine's singular creative vision. Fundamentally this fascinating piece is a collaboration between an artist and an instrument. Palestine had first encountered the Bösendorfer Imperial back in 1969. "The Bösendorfer at it's best is a very noisy, thick molasses piano," he has remarked. Charlemagne Palestine embraced it's clinging sonorousness, it's clangorous resonance and out of that embrace came the voluptuous sonic fabric of Strumming Music.
Customer Reviews
again yes this is one of the few remaining high points for(what was)Hardcore minimalism,(as opposed to Softcore, or No-Core, orOpportunist-Core, or Wish-I-had-A-Core Minimalism)where did it go wrong?What's suppose to happen with Minimal Music,or Rpertitive Patternings-Music is that either you are interested in listening, and what timbre or sound does, what is noise,what is a beautiful sound and then when something, a sound may transform itself; or you are not, you are more interested in associating this process of listening with other objects for contemplation and those which may render, put you in a position to sell minimalism within the lifeworld,And I guess there wouldn;t be much music I suspect if composers followed this latter quip;, but I cannot help but agree with Palestine's conviction that the "other" minimalists simply went by way of making money,popularizing, homogenizing, now digitalizing,and globalizing the cause the process anyway possible, and this brings to mind Charles Ives(he was successful in insurance) that if your music is dependant upon you putting food on the table, well it is better, and we are better off if you sell pizzas instead or derivative securities or real estate. I suspect the other minimalist composers as Reich, and Adams, Riley and Glass would have in fact done thatl but they had no skills as such, and no academic degrees for such business.So here you listen and the performing is incredible to sustain fairly a steady tempo throughout, an endurance test really; there are large wavering if you follow or care to follow a metronome. The piece begins somewheres around 90-92-96 to the Quarter note value for about the first 15 minutes, then gradually increases, to 120-122-128 and you have an incredible sense of time if you can tell the difference between 120 and 122 on the metronome, still there are music games I;m sure this music encourages, you are also encouraged to sing or hum of you want to, minor sevenths are gorgeous sounding against the open E and B here below Middle C. A and G are also good tones to get out of yourself and enter new realms. As you work your way through this canvas of timbre, the piano seems to sound harsher,at about 45 minutes at about 34 minutes is where like a break occurs and you return to lesser tones, the diminution of density not ugly, perhaps the piano is tired itself of all this pummeling although Palestine plays with a gentle demeanor, never really striking an un-beautiful tone, it is the resounding reverberations that come to sound harsh the repetition. Another interesting aspect is that the piece limits itself to one register more-or-less the octave below Middle C, the tones E,G,A,B,D; for the tones that are struck, of course if you can hear it the entire keyboard is brought into the field of play with the pedal being left down throughout. So minimalism is about listening first about how timbre is suppose to work and what it may do in and by-itself without reference to nothing outside itself; other cultures have been practicing this kind of listening for centuries, here we had to wait and only if you lived in New York City were you the first in the Seventies to be able to practice this listening,Where?, at The Idea Warehouse 22 Reade Street in New York where this was recorded. Joan La Barbara in the sleevebox notes gives a good summary of her experience of this with Palestine and his usual accoutrements of stuffed fluffy animals, bunnies and bears sitting on top of the Bosendorfer Piano,it must get lonely playing this music and there is nothing to watch;Bosendorfer is the only one Palestine (Charles Martin) cares to use; then, then I suspect minimalism became popular within underground avant-garde then art galleries and then the globe;and large cities in the USA followed.The piece does actually sound or suggests like a banjo strumming away, very Americana.Terry Riley's "The Harp of New Albion, and La Monte Young's "Well=Tuned Piano" are the other piano solo seminal works with this one. Goodbye to Minimalism we will miss you very much.
