Meet The Post-Maximalists

About the Post-Maximalists

They love the Minimalists & the Post-Minimalists.
But they love doing stuff. The 20th C. is the Burgess Shale of compositional techniques.

from Wikipedia on “Burgess Shale”

“Stephen Jay Gould’s book Wonderful Life, published in 1989, brought the Burgess Shale fossils to the public’s attention. Gould suggests that the extraordinary diversity of the fossils indicates that life forms at the time were much more disparate in body form than those that survive today, and that many of the unique lineages were evolutionary experiments that became extinct. Gould’s interpretation of the diversity of Cambrian fauna relied heavily on Simon Conway Morris’ reinterpretation of Charles Walcott’s original publications. However, Conway Morris strongly disagreed with Gould’s conclusions, arguing that almost all the Cambrian fauna could be classified into modern day phyla.[6]”

I don’t mean to be scientistic, but the 20th C. saw all kinds of musical “body forms”. Yet, these musical possibilities are not extinct. They are just not sexy at the moment because the people who discovered them were too proud and felt that the ideas were more important than the realization. We now know that the quality of the realization is everything. There are bad maximalist works and bad minimalist works.

The Post-Maximalists are *humble maximalists*. They are loving schmoos, eager to please.

De-coupling

The Post-Maximalists understand that a technique can be de-coupled from a tired sound.
Post-maximalists are syncretists, finding ways to reconcile sounds that were once thought to be incompatible, incapable of manifesting convincingly in one coherent work.