Nik Bärtsch’s Special Fusion Approach to Minimal Music: Analysis of His Works and Aesthetic Evaluation
Ulli Götte · 2024
The Swiss musician and composer Nik Bärtsch personifies a current form of musical minimalism similar to that developed by the Swiss saxophonist and composer Don Li in the 1990s. With his formation Ronin, with which he has been giving concerts worldwide since 2001, Bärtsch develops repetitive processes that are unthinkable without the model of minimal music; but he deliberately avoids this term so as not to evoke the continuation of a tradition on which one is resting, as it were. Bärtsch’s music, which he characteristically calls ‘Zen Funk’ or ‘Ritual Groove Music’, avoiding the term ‘minimal music’ revolves around the aesthetic and compositional values of reduction, repetition, pattern and module. Bärtsch focuses on the concept of reduction which he regards as a philosophically connoted guideline, which is very decidedly reflected in his music. Bärtsch’s music can also be described as a combination of complex rhythmic patterns. The fact that (the pianist) Bärtsch presents his music primarily in the band line-up: piano, electric bass, bass clarinet and drums, is to be understood less as a localisation in the genre of ‘popular’ music, but rather as an expression of an extremely collective way of playing. In this chapter, Bärtsch’s music will be presented analytically in order to substantiate the thesis that a specific further development of musical minimalism has been established here, especially in the aesthetic sense of repetition as a strategy for making musical depth perceptible.