Contemporary Museum’s Mobtown Modern music series

Mobtown Modern Concert to Focus on Minimalist Music

The Contemporary Museum’s Mobtown Modern music series will explore the impact of minimalism on the new music genre on Friday, May 9 at 8 p.m. with Not So Much: Minimalish Music. Not So Much will reveal how composers can do more with less.

The concert will feature compositions created by pairing traditional instruments with live electronic mixing, using layering and repetition to make one instrument sound like many, or one tune sound like a complex concerto. Not So Much will include works by influential minimalist composers, including Philip Glass (“Music in Similar Motion”), Steve Reich (“Vermont Counterpoint”), Michael Gordon (“The Low Quartet”), Nico Muhly (“Honest Music”) and Terry Riley (“In C”). A video installation by New York-based artist Art Jones will accompany the concert.

“We chose these particular composers and these particular pieces to demonstrate the variety of approaches to the minimalist genre,” said Sacawa and Spangler. “Steve Reich, Philip Glass and Terry Riley are really the progenitors of the genre. Michael Gordon, often referred to as post-minimalist, takes the basic idea of minimalist music—repetition—but creates music that’s really different and informed by rock and roll. And 25 year old Nico Muhly takes it further and seems almost to be floating above the genre while still paying homage to it.”

Not So Much will be held Friday, May 9, 2008 at 8 p.m. at the Contemporary Museum,

100 West Centre Street in Baltimore’s Mount Vernon Cultural District.

Admission to the concert is $10. Admission for members of the Contemporary and students with a student identification is $5.