And course the reply:
I found Aphex Twin's reply disappointing.
Like a petulant child he essentially
negated Stockhausen's points, without engaging with them. It seems to
me that Stockhausen was trying to be helpful -- after all he had been
a music teacher for nearly 1/2 century with academic offspring like
Kraftwerk and Can. Aphex Twin seemingly was unable/unwilling to see that there
are other approaches to music than the orthodoxy of 1990s dance music. Aphex Twin's main musical
criterion seems to be dancablility:
you can't dance to. Do you
reckon he can dance? You could
dance to Song of the Youth, but
it hasn't got a groove in it,
there's no bassline."
I would argue to the contrary: dance music -- whatever its merits for
dancing -- cannot be interesting as art music. Why? Because dancing,
specially dancing well, is itself demanding: most brain capacity is
used for moving the body along to the music in the right way, and that
capacity is missing for listening to and analysind the fine points of
the music.
Reich, Glass et al. might disagree.
Of course the
art music tradition of American mimimalism that you refer to, does change tempi and changing rhythms quite a great deal. It does so in novel ways that had not been explored in previous classical traditions. That's the main novelty that American mimimalism gave to the world.
Periodicity is what ...
I agree with that, and add that modern pop-music errs on the side of too much periodicity, which renders it uninteresting as art-music, but useful as aural background and for dancing.