Rivista di Estetica (Apr 2016)

Minimalismo e Rave music attraverso Adorno. Ripetizione ed eterno ritorno dell’identico nella musica contemporanea

  • Alessandro Alfieri

DOI
https://doi.org/10.4000/estetica.1031
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 61
pp. 3 – 16

Abstract

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The paper proposes a focus upon two tendencies of contemporary music; the first is Minimalism, movement represented by musicians like La Monte Young, Philip Glass and Steve Reich, the second one is the rave music (like techno), feature of popular culture and postmodernist age. Through Adorno’s thought, and starting from his dialectical analysis about the dualism Schönberg-Stravinskij, this essay aims a philosophical understanding of concepts like “repetition” and “lack of transcendence”; the absence of development in a lot of musical production of the last decades, in popular music as much as in classical music, is demonstration of a loss of subject, where the “eternal return” of the rhythmic structure can be understood in terms of “eternal return of the same” and not in terms of “eternal return of possibility”.

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