ExtremeMelodicMinimalism

Context : SublimeLoop, PhilsMusic

What fascinates me about this kind of extreme melodic minimalism is this. When I come up with a good tune, perhaps only a couple of bars long, I know that the right thing to do is to put it as the highlight of a longer build-up of something else ... more basic ... a longer period of a single chord rather than the four chord loop. Or a sophisticated excursion into variations on the theme etc. But even though these give a kind of contrast and a tension and a context against which the big tune can stand out ... all these things are "worse" in some sense, than the big tune itself. Why should you want a piece of music with "worse" simply to make the big tune sound more impressive? Why wouldn't you just want more of the big tune ... even at the cost of it sounding repetitive?

This is a dilemma I haven't really solved in my own mind. I want to explore with more sophisticated and complex variations. But when I invent something I like I find it hard to pull back from it. Extreme melodic minimalism is, I guess, a way to challenge the assumption and ask what happens if we just give in to playing the best bit again and again. If we just gorge on it rather than go for a "balanced diet" of tune and non-tune.