“It is commonly accepted in Europe, and widely known here, that the originators of minimalism are Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and Phil Glass,” begins a column published in the Village Voice in July 1982, by the composer and music critic Tom Johnson.Footnote 1 Johnson was a crucial presence in the New York experimental music scene—and perhaps the central voice in identifying the nascent aesthetic of musical minimalism—but was dissatisfied with how narrowly this movement of drone- and repetition-based musics had come to be defined. Though Johnson expressed sympathy with the tendency to “reduce music history to a rather short list of Great Men,” he also interrogated the notion of list-making, and the problematic framework of “original minimalist,” providing 27 names that might better elucidate the category—knowing also that, as he put it, “more accurate lists get too long and bulky.”
If not necessarily aligning with our contemporary understanding of “inclusion”—oftentimes, as the I in “DEI”—Johnson was certainly contending with the question of whom could be included, and why, in the history of minimalist music. Popular writings in this period tended to focus on Glass, Reich, and Riley, the central actors in the “commonly accepted” and “widely known” narrative to which Johnson alludes; the first minimalism scholarship in the 1980s included a fourth composer, La Monte Young, whom Johnson also credited as an “originator.”Footnote 2 Since Johnson’s essay, and the period in which the idea of “minimalist music” was first disseminated in publications like the Village Voice, but also the New York Times and Time Magazine, many studies of musical minimalism have continued to focus on Young, Riley, Reich, and Glass (often called the “Big Four”).Footnote 3 But a more recent wave of musicological work has decentered, deconstructed, and problematized the Big Four narrative, either seeking to expand our understanding of what musical minimalism could be, or trying to move beyond it entirely.Footnote 4 One important theme in this scholarship is that of inclusion: first, in the mundane sense, of how to open up the idea of minimalism beyond a canon of just a handful of composers; and second, and more urgently, in the sense of grappling with the whiteness and maleness of Big Four minimalism, and shifting some of the focus to non-male and non-white musicians.
Four decades after Johnson’s essay, it is clear that minimalism still matters—not just within academia, where it is often the final “ism” tackled within music history surveys, and a continued source for musicological inquiry—but also in musical life, as the curatorial impetus for concert programming and record production. It is not just that the composers most associated with the phrase continue to endure in their importance and popularity (and some, like Julius Eastman, have received new levels of attention) but that the term to describe them remains stubbornly salient, and perhaps even useful.
That salience motivated one example of this new wave of scholarship: On Minimalism: Documenting a Musical Movement, a primary source reader edited by Kerry O’Brien and myself.Footnote 5 Through reprinting rare and familiar historical documents, we intended to challenge the centrality of the Big Four—by introducing many additional musical voices, and organizing our study by theme, rather than by composer—while also continuing to foreground their significance. Telling the history of minimalist music through anthologizing sources, rather than writing a monograph, meant that our efforts were, first and foremost, curatorial: Rather than problematizing or deconstructing the idea of minimalism, we had to decide, in a seemingly definitive manner, whom and what the term did and did not encompass.
Some of our work to expand minimalism beyond its canonic figures was relatively easy to implement: Though not always featured in histories of minimalist music, composers such as Meredith Monk, Yoshi Wada, Éliane Radigue, Pauline Oliveros, and Alvin Lucier all experimented with harmonic stasis or rhythmic repetition, and worked in the same avant-garde artistic communities as the Big Four. The more difficult intellectual labor of the project lay in our attempt to address minimalism’s (arguably appropriative) exchange with jazz, popular, and non-Western musics. Young’s drones would not have been possible without Ali Akbar Khan’s ragas, Steve Reich’s rhythmic phasing without West African drumming, Terry Riley’s psychedelic loops without the modal improvisations of John Coltrane, Philip Glass’s undulating melodies without his collaborations with Ravi Shankar. In turn, the music of the Big Four inspired rock acts like The Who and David Bowie, techno acts like The Orb, and ambient artists like Brian Eno and Midori Takada.
In attempting to represent minimalist music’s problematic but crucial omnivory, we took inspiration from scholars who had already made provocative points about the boundaries of the movement. In the 2015 foreword to the edited volume Gay Guerrilla, George E. Lewis pointed out that, despite being a seismic influence on Big Four minimalism through creating music steeped in hypnotic repetition, “in histories of musical minimalism, [John] Coltrane (if he is mentioned at all) is largely portrayed as an outside source rather than an insider member.”Footnote 6 On Minimalism places Coltrane on the inside: Our opening chapter, focused on early ’60s experimentation, includes an excerpt from the classic DownBeat article “Coltrane on Coltrane” as well as liner notes for the album Africa/Brass, in which the saxophonist declares “I wanted the band to have a drone.”Footnote 7 At the same time, there are obvious limits to this approach. Although we do feature Alice Coltrane’s spiritual jazz later in the book, we do not ultimately track John Coltrane’s music beyond this initial chapter. (Even our decision to highlight Africa/Brass was tied to the Big Four; Steve Reich has long cited it as an influence.) The first document we print in our book is Amiri Baraka’s description of Miles Davis’s “penchant for minimalism.”Footnote 8 Making the case for Miles Davis as a foundational figure in minimalist music was another way to address Lewis’s critique; but such inclusion might ultimately do more for the legacy of minimalism than it does for the legacy of Davis.Footnote 9
Similarly, taking seriously Robert Fink’s now-classic analysis of the resonances between Donna Summer and Giorgio Moroder’s “Love to Love You Baby” and Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians might mean incorporating disco into the history of musical minimalism.Footnote 10 But “inviting” Summer and Moroder and, by proxy, a history of queer, Black dance music into our book could also come across as condescending, a pedantic “elevation” of “pop” into “art” (not unlike those who proclaimed Kendrick Lamar’s 2018 Pulitzer Prize a victory for hip-hop, as if the global phenomenon really needed the recognition of Columbia University’s journalism board). At the same time, leaving disco out of minimalism’s story would do a disservice to very real aesthetic and philosophical connections between the musics, made explicit not just by Fink’s analysis but also by genre-bridging musicians like Arthur Russell. It is one thing to problematize the cultural politics that has kept these two musics from existing in a single historical narrative; it is another to try to actually “solve” the problem in an anthology of primary sources. Ultimately, we represent disco with a 1979 High Fidelity column, as part of a chapter on popular culture, with the hope that our readers can parse these resonances without buying into the myth that Timothy Rutherford-Johnson critiques as a “trickle-down theory of musical influence, in which the best bits of popular music are presented as originating only in high (white, Western) art.”Footnote 11
Creating a new, revisionist history, we hoped, would raise as many questions and critiques as the foundational work that first drew scholarly attention to minimalism. Hence, this colloquy: in the wake of many conversations that our book provoked, these essays represent an attempt to think through what “minimalist music”—as an aesthetic category, subgenre, network, and/or musical movement—might include.Footnote 12 If On Minimalism was a curatorial project focused on expanding academic and public understandings of “minimalist music,” our peers in minimalist studies have different aims: to question, confront, and perhaps abolish the idea of minimalism entirely. In the following essays, Patrick Nickleson ruminates on how the politics of authorship and colonialism in minimalist music represent the problems of musicology more broadly; Sumanth Gopinath examines the prevailing whiteness of minimalism, and how it might shape the reception of Black composers; Victor Szabo provocatively asks whether it makes more sense to include “minimalism” within “techno,” rather than include “techno” as part of “minimalism”; and Kerry O’Brien lays out how On Minimalism challenges the epistemology of musical canons, but also biases inherent in historical sources. Though minimalism is global, we focus primarily on developments in the United States, and especially on Black/white racial politics.
The four essays printed here provide distinct viewpoints on what the future of scholarship on minimalism could, and should, look like. What should be clear is that there is no right answer to the questions we’ve raised; there are implicit and explicit disagreements within this colloquy (and even between the two co-editors of On Minimalism). But our perspectives have broader implications for the study of American music: We are wrestling with the inheritance of well-established musical category, and trying to decide how useful or effective it might ultimately be. As we build new musical histories, should we continue to propagate well established yet problematic categorizations; imagine new, perhaps more inclusive categories; or abandon the idea of categorization entirely?
Competing Interest Statement
None
William Robin is an associate professor of musicology at the University of Maryland’s School of Music. His research and writing untangle the complex cultural and institutional histories of contemporary classical music in the United States. His first book, Industry: Bang on a Can and New Music in the Marketplace (Oxford University Press, 2021), examines the new-music festival Bang on a Can and their participation in major shifts in the 1980s and 1990s as the American avant-garde pivoted towards the marketplace. His second book, in collaboration with Kerry O’Brien, is On Minimalism: Documenting a Musical Movement (University of California Press, 2023), a revisionist history of musical minimalism told through the presentation and contextualization of more than a hundred primary sources. As a public musicologist, Robin contributes to The New York Times and hosts the podcast Sound Expertise.
Abstract
Why should we want any more minimalists? In this essay I engage with canonic minimalism’s dangerous capacity to appropriate musical traditions in light of my own anxieties about the perhaps necessary work of adding new sounds, figures, and stories to its history.
Minimalism as “Another Image in its Place”
At some point in the latter half of 1962, Amiri Baraka recorded an interview with the saxophonist Archie Shepp. Whether because he did not have a blank tape on hand or whether as a form of direct response, Baraka recorded their conversation over a tape that was labelled “La Monte Young Concert August 26, 1962 7.5. I.P.S. Half Track First Hour” in pencil.Footnote 1 Young had recently moved to New York from Berkeley after completing a Masters in composition; in school, Young’s days were spent writing serialist pieces—including his Trio for Strings (1958)—before evening performances in clubs with players like Billy Higgins, later associated with Ornette Coleman. The tape was from one of a series of concerts at the 10–4 Gallery in which Young performed extended saxophone improvisations supported by the hand drums of Angus MacLise, Marian Zazeela’s droning voice, and acoustic guitar played by Billy Linich. It’s unclear whether Baraka was at the 10–4 Gallery, though he was an active music critic at the time, and had worked with Marian Zazeela in a 1961 production of his play Eighth Ditch, so it’s possible he attended. Young has long recorded all of his performances and rehearsals, and the designation “[COPY]” in black ink on the tape cover suggests that Young or Zazeela gave Baraka a copy of the recording following the performance.
In form and content, the interview suggests that Baraka was not very enthusiastic about Young’s music. First, because recording over the tape suggests at least a disinterest in if not an outright rejection of the material. Second, because Shepp comments on, if not directly Young’s performance, then at least the scene within which it was positioned. Baraka’s voice is difficult to hear on the recording, but at one point he clearly asks Shepp for his thoughts on “Happenings,” to which Shepp responds: “As far as Happenings are concerned, I feel free to talk about them and I think that’s anti-jazz. And I think that it’s being created, for the most part, by people who realize, unfortunately, that they’ll never be able to play jazz. They try to create another image in its place.”Footnote 2 It seems fair to infer that in using the term “Happenings,” Shepp was referencing the overlapping space between—among other things—Young’s Fluxus leanings and his improvisatory practice as at the 10–4 Gallery. The label “anti-jazz” is very particular to that moment; here Shepp turns around the language of white critics eager to disparage the “New Thing” work of Shepp, Ornette Coleman, and John Coltrane, to ironically suit his own needs. His description of Happenings as an effort to “create another image in [jazz’s] place,” I want to argue, is an astute comment on the cultural dimensions of this moment as they would play into what would later be called musical minimalism. Even if the label minimalism was not yet in circulation in 1962, it is around this moment that we retroactively recognize the style’s earliest compositional precedents and cultural pre-history. Shepp clearly felt that Young’s performance at 10–4 was something jazz-like built on the same terrain and perhaps attempting to displace the work of Black improvisers.
As I argue in an article that addresses the Baraka tape at length, these 10–4 performances have become part of that pre-history. When a blog post on the Columbia Rare Books & Manuscripts Library website drew my attention to the tape, I hoped that it might provide access to a more comprehensive early history of American musical minimalism. The 10–4 concerts have become a mythical point of origin, with Tony Conrad describing them as “formless, expostulatory, meandering; vaguely modal, arrhythmic, and very unusual.”Footnote 3 Digging into the performance recording—what little exists of it, barely more than ten minutes on either side of the Shepp interview—I was glad to have my hopes dashed. The insight provided into the nature of musical minimalism was not the sound of an early iteration of what would become the Theatre of Eternal Music, I realized, but rather Shepp’s apt observation about Happenings as an instance of white experimentalists attempting to make something else in place of Black experimentalist practice. Anti-jazz, as Shepp frames it, is not a white dismissal of vanguard performance, as it had been in Down Beat and similar publications, but a mode of performing that seeks to draw attention, resources, perhaps even respect away from developments in the “New Thing.”Footnote 4 The music provided less insight than the historical accident of a conversation placed on top of it.
Minimalism’s Inside/Outside Split
Shepp’s image of Happenings displacing the New Thing brings me into dialogue with the theme of this colloquy. I am drawn to the ways that minimalism stages a complex (and often troubling) dramaturgy of insides and outsides, inclusions and exclusions, proximities and distances. In my book The Names of Minimalism: Authorship, Art Music, and Historiography in Dispute, I argued that “Minimalism is not an absolute list or collection [of stylistic traits] that is minimized to its fewest possible elements, but rather a relational distance that is reduced to near proximity.” This spatial metaphor helped me understand minimal as a verb; the distance between presumed binaristic relationships are minimized “to clashing, humming, buzzing, proximities,” which, following Davide Panagia, I called “resonant adjacencies.”Footnote 5 This framing helped me explore authorial disputes in minimalism—like the one between Young and Conrad, over the possibility of anyone “owning” the drones of the Theatre of Eternal Music—not through arbitration between two sides, but rather by reading through collaboration in the buzzing intervals of communicative misunderstanding. I tried not to take sides in the disputes, but explored instead how the framing of “dispute” too often invites an almost Hollywood teleology of effective collaboration breaking down in petty rivalry. If there is any cohesive definition of minimalism, I argued in my book, it is found less in a compositional emphasis on repetition, drone, or gradual process, and more in the messy politics of a collectivist compositional practice later disrupted by the musicological expectation that composers’ practices will fit into the conceptual containers and headings that we call upon when we write their histories.
If authorship disputes testify to relationships of buzzing proximity and quarrelling distance, minimalism also conventionally sets up assertive distinctions between insides and outsides. Decades of scholarship on minimalism have made clear how the canonic composers, in the words of Elaine Mitchener, “became household names by their musical appropriation of non-western cultures.”Footnote 6 In the collection Rethinking Reich, a pair of essays by Michael Tenzer and Martin Scherzinger do exceptional work to make this point. For Tenzer, Steve Reich “cherry-picked” ideas from Balinese music in creating his compositional style and, more importantly, his model of ensemble interaction in Steve Reich and Musicians.Footnote 7 Scherzinger on the other hand explores the impact of a variety of regional African musics on Reich’s style, particularly in showing that Electric Counterpoint (1987) is essentially a direct transcription of the polyphony of the central African Banda Linda via Reich’s reading of the French-Israeli ethnomusicologist Simha Arom’s 1985 book Polyphonies et Polyrhythmies Instrumentales d’Afrique Centrale. In all, Scherzinger shows that Reich’s interest in “African music” did not begin and end with the landmark 1971 Drumming, but is already evident in the ’60s tape experiments Come Out and It’s Gonna Rain and carries over into Electric Counterpoint.Footnote 8
Reich was not alone; such appropriations have long been definitive of minimalism. As O’Brien and Robin make clear in On Minimalism, US American experimentalism of the 1960s and 1970s was led by musicians that “eagerly absorbed an assortment of global music traditions.”Footnote 9 There is a sharp and definitive irony to these appropriations marked by the “inside” into which they were claimed. On the one hand, minimalist appropriations from global musical traditions only registered as novelties within the context of a Western art music tradition too guarded and myopic to already include them; on the other hand, the canonic early minimalists rejected Western art music’s material and institutional norms. Steve Reich’s 1968 essay “Music as a Gradual Process” asserts what Johann Girard calls a “double rejection” of both serialism and chance, the two dominant compositional trends of the moment.Footnote 10 After finishing a graduate degree in composition at Berkeley, Young for example did not pursue academic employment, but moved to New York to perform saxophone improvisations in an art gallery with a quartet consisting of primarily visual artists. The canonic works of minimalism refused the dominant conventions of Western art music: the score as originating text, the orchestra as a medium and institution, the division of labour between composer and performer, and so on.
In short, an insatiable drive to colonize the musical ideas of other cultures on the one hand, and a steadfast refusal of the privileged tradition in relation to which those ideas might register as innovative on the other. Western art music was at once the context within which the best-known minimalists had been trained, and the only aesthetic community insular enough to register their appropriations—whether from the Banda Linda, Balinese gamelan, or free jazz—as formal innovations. The canonic minimalists thus took a kind of jaded, ironic stance to the tradition of Western art music, as they took a dispossessive stance towards the musical cultures outside of it. We name the mode of authorship at the buzzing intersection of these two stances minimalist.
Minimalism’s “Capacity to Appropriate”
In the relatively short time since I finished my book, I have come to view minimalism as a major problem in musicology because of this appropriative-ironic stance. Much of my focus now is on settler-colonialism in music studies, the formation of an idea of private property in music, Indigenous experimentalisms, and modes of collectivist collaboration that avoid what Brenna Bhandar, Aileen Moreton-Robinson, and Cheryl Harris have each differently engaged as a critique of the possessive dimension of whiteness.Footnote 11 To paraphrase Bhandar, the modern white composer’s subjectivity is in part defined by their “capacity to appropriate.”Footnote 12 As a white-settler scholar of this repertoire, I have developed a paranoia about the dangers of minimalism’s ongoing capacity to appropriate, a style that can expand to claim anything as its own. Reich’s capacity to place the image of Electric Counterpoint in place of the underrecognized image of Banda Linda polyphony feels like a continuation of the work that Shepp accused Young of doing at the 10–4 Gallery. Why should we want or need any more minimalists? If their work is widely recognized as operating in a very particular domain of appropriation—“external” and elided influences absorbed “into” an institutionally privileged musical context that is only identified with ironically by composers granted the capacity to appropriate—shouldn’t we aspire to contain that work rather than spreading its possessive claim onto other repertoires? I have become stuck on the idea that we should not want to expand its repertoire lists but rather allow minimalism to starve or destroy itself. This was part of the goal of The Names of Minimalism: dig deep into the authorial disputes—what I at one point call “pissing contests”—between the canonic male composers of minimalism so that the whole thing collapses on itself, leaving behind not just a body of music that might operate in different discursive and historical contexts but, more importantly, a problematic concept of white, patriarchal authorship grounded in ownership and appropriation that we, in music studies, have been dominant forces in sustaining.
If, rather than breaking down the problematic model of authorship in play in minimalism, we try to expand it to a more diverse and inclusive repertoire list, are we not risking exacerbating that problem? Philip Ewell’s work on the white racial frame has been valuable here in showing how the cynical call for diversity can in fact support the white racial frame rather than breaking with it.Footnote 13 I approach minimalism, then, from a simultaneously abolitionist and anarchic perspective: wanting to critique and abandon its exclusionary, appropriative discursive status in the old “Big Four” image, rather than allowing it to be expanded, renewed, and repaired by a newly inclusive roster of musicians. Minimalism, for me, has come to stand in for all of the major structural failings of musicology, and any effort to expand it with new repertoires, new bodies, and new voices felt to me like a parasitic task of providing fresh sustenance to a dying historical institution.
Minimalism’s Capacities/Capacious Minimalism
I was finally shaken out of my anarchic fatalism on this issue by overhearing someone use the word capacious to describe a particularly warm, generous, and benevolent relationship in their life. Capacious is linguistically related to our capacities in general, but with a particular twist of usage. Capacity and capacious model, for me, an emblematic dissensual homonym in the sense mobilized by the philosopher Jacques Rancière.Footnote 14 While capacity is a quantitative limit on what a container can hold—as when I worry that minimalism might be an infinitely expansive container for enclosing new resources—describing something as capacious always suggests a kind or roominess, a gracious warmth. I think both meanings—an internal capacity and an external capaciousness—resonate well with their shared Latin origin in to take, or to hold. Is minimalism an analytic heading that takes to fill its own (perhaps infinite!) drive to contain, to replace with its own? Or is it a discourse emblematic for its ability to minimize itself, a capacious reaching out to hold and support without claiming property in what it reaches towards?
The answer, probably, is that minimalism has both its capacity for infinite hunger and its capacious dimension: minimalism is nothing more or less than how we—musicians, scholars, critics, historians, listeners—engage with it, as with any evolving discourse. What I want to argue is that we must prioritize the capacious dimension—or, perhaps I don’t even need to argue, but merely remind myself to attend to that dimension. Canonic minimalism still demands critical engagement that names its “capacity to appropriate.” In trying to better recognize minimalism’s capacious engagements, I was struck by how much the discourse of minimalism has changed for a listener approaching it today in light of the two decades of work that have appeared since I first turned my attention to it as a student. While my earliest disciplinary training happened in the context of, for example, the rediscovery of Julius Eastman, he is now assertively an established figure staging a capacious dimension within scholarship in and around minimalism. I have at times been made nervous by efforts to “claim” Eastman as a minimalist in particular rather than an important Black experimentalist, broadly. Much of the scholarship on Eastman, however, is precisely about resisting such capture. Kodwo Eshun quotes George Lewis’s description of the “uncomfortable nature of the recovery project,” writing himself of how “the recovery of Eastman is informed by an undeclared apology for the erasure of Eastman’s work… [it] seeks to atone for the ‘perhaps unconscious formulation’ of ongoing anti-blackness that sustains the coherence of North America and Europe’s cultural institutions.”Footnote 15 Jace Clayton criticizes the “performative wokeness” of any canonization process, noting that it “confers a kind of sideways ethical blessing on all involved.”Footnote 16
I do not want to abandon my reflexive anxiety about participating in this search for a “sideways… blessing,” but in the course of writing this short essay, I came to recognize how much my cynicism was limiting my ability to recognize powerful developments. Jace Clayton in particular is insistent that Eastman’s is not a canonization project: “his multi-sited oeuvre doesn’t ask to be accepted in a canon—despite all the championing doing precisely that—it asks that we rethink historiography itself.”Footnote 17 We need to honour that Eastman’s work set out to “frustrate his own institutional legibility,” his “absence from the historical record [could be understood] as a complex sign of success”—an “invest[ment] in the agency of (self-destruction).”Footnote 18 What Eshun calls Eastman’s “ascesis… required neither his music nor his life to be remembered.” Eastman’s presence challenges our historiography to recognize the possible desire for self-destruction in a field obsessed with preservation, tradition, audibility, and prestige.Footnote 19
I recall first reading canonic, important texts like Robert Fink’s Repeating Ourselves or Keith Potter’s Four Musical Minimalists during my undergraduate degree and finding it hard to recognize in their analyses of music by Young, Riley, Reich, and Glass what I admired in the music I had stolen off Napster. I heard that music as scrappy, collectivist, harsh, self-generating, sometimes even groovy; in contrast, under scholarly scrutiny, the music felt like it had been forced into a tuxedo and shoved on stage against its will (an image that I had a particular distaste for at the moment that I stopped performing classical guitar recitals during my undergraduate degree). The 3-CD Eastman set Unjust Malaise came out around the same time and Stay On It, not to mention the project of recovery narrated in the liner notes, felt more definitively minimalist to my early disciplinary formation.Footnote 20 Eastman’s career, however, made a case that the label “minimalism” did some appropriative work that had to be addressed before we simply added new figures. That everyone already clearly knows this is made evident in the wonderful essays by filmmakers, artists, and scholars gathered in We Have Delivered Ourselves from the Tonal, where multimedia responses to Eastman frame his work as a “problem” to be explored capaciously.Footnote 21 Similarly, in Ryan Dohoney’s essay in Gay Guerilla, we read Eastman’s compositional work in close relation with his ensemble collaborations at SUNY Buffalo and his presence (as musician or dancer) in downtown New York’s gay clubs alongside Arthur Russell and others.Footnote 22 That is, work on Eastman is clearly aware of the capacious dimension; it does not set out to clearly define why he is a minimalist, but uses his exemplary proximity to minimalism as a problem to create more capacious historiographies of New York experimentalism. Sumanth Gopinath expertly captures this in his own homonymic formulation, writing that Eastman was against minimalism in a pair of ways: both opposing it with “modernist dissonance and complexity” and “leaning up” against it, “perhaps even relying upon it as a support.”Footnote 23
I still harbour some worries about how minimalism’s efforts to claim more artists can create problems, but much of the expanded work, I need to remind myself, is productively breaking with such an image precisely by drawing a complex, ascetic figure like Eastman into adjacency with the discourse of minimalism. (And of course Eastman is only the most visible, the most explored figure; we can draw upon others, much as we can ask, over and over, what the differing claims to a “first” minimalist piece attest to as its newness in that cultural moment: In C as the foundation tells a much different story than Young’s Trio for Strings.) We need to keep nourishing the capacious historiographic messes, staging the “problem” of such figures, and resist our disciplinary tendencies to absorb new sounds and figures into the same old appropriative structural capacities. It is harder to claim property in new territories and resources if we hold the appropriative structures in their own unsettled state of disorder.
Competing Interest Statement
None
Patrick Nickleson is Assistant Professor of Musicology at the University of Alberta. Patrick’s research focuses on disputed claims of property in experimental and popular musics under settler-colonialism. He is the author of The Names of Minimalism, articles on minimalism in Journal of the Royal Musical Association and Twentieth-Century Music, and is the editor of What Music Did: The Story of Numerocracy in the West (Michigan, 2026), a history of European music and mathematics by Tony Conrad left unfinished when he passed away in 2016. Patrick’s new project, How Music Renders Property Under Colonial Copyright, is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Abstract
This essay counteracts the supposition that techno, on the basis of shared musical techniques and aesthetics, should be understood simply as a form of minimalism. While these musical forms are clearly related, music scholars’ well-meaning inclusion of techno under the umbrella of minimalism falsely inflates classical minimalism’s importance and originality relative to the milieux of Afrodiasporic and electrified dance musics from which techno sprung. With attention to the proleptic politics of Afrofuturism in classic Detroit techno and the writings of Kodwo Eshun, this article makes the case for understanding canonical minimalism as techno, at least insofar as techno is, in different ways, a sort of minimalism.
“[John] Cage is not the original Cut Creator—for this would be to confuse the banal fact of prior birth with precedence and creative priority. Pop always retroactively rescues unpop from the prison of its admirers: here [Grandmaster] Flash comes to Cage’s aid. Skratchadelia releases the avant garde from its citational cells by liquefying its sanctioning institutions. Now you can hear Cage in ’37 as a lonely turntablist with no audience to play for….” —Kodwo EshunFootnote 1
Is techno a form of minimalism? The last quarter-century of revisionism in musicological scholarship seems to suggest as much. Today, one just as frequently finds anglophone music writers acknowledging, if not also demonstrating, the resemblances between classical minimalism and electronic dance music. Susan McClary and Robert Fink boldly insisted upon minimalism’s close kinship with popular dance music around the turn of the twenty-first century, a time when doing so was still anathema in US academic musicology.Footnote 2 A steady stream of scholarship on similar parallels soon followed.Footnote 3 Yet as Kerry O’Brien and William Robin’s reader On Minimalism makes evident, these academic trendsetters were slow to observe what critics, journalists, and pop musicians had noticed all along—that avant-garde minimalism and disco (and punk… and ambient… and new age… and R&B… and jazz… and the blues…) alike engaged listeners through looping repetitions and droning tones, at great length and great volume, toward states of meditation, trance, and ecstasy. Techno might therewith be included among the “many things that are minimalism but haven’t been called minimalism.”Footnote 4
O’Brien and Robin’s revisionism is more nuanced than the above paragraph suggests, but I raise their pithy phrasing in order to make a counterintuitive (but not contradictory) counter-suggestion: that minimalism is techno but hasn’t been called techno. Indeed, minimalism can and should be understood as a form of techno insofar as techno is, from a different angle and in different ways, a form of minimalism. Without acknowledging minimalism’s debt to the historical milieux of electrified dance music from which techno sprung, and for which this term commonly stands, simply including techno in minimalist scholarship posits minimalism as the more fundamental milieu of the two. To echo cultural theorist Kodwo Eshun, as quoted above from his landmark 1998 theorization of late-twentieth-century electronic music: To regard techno as a form of minimalism, but not the other way around, confuses the banal fact of minimalism’s prior birth with its precedence and creative priority.
“Techno is music that sounds like technology, and not technology that sounds like music, meaning that most of the music you listen to is made with technology, whether you know it or not. But with techno music, you know it.”
—Juan AtkinsFootnote 5Whereas many English speakers colloquially use “techno” as a catchall for beat-based electronic music, most electronic music insiders and writers more narrowly identify techno as a relatively spare, machinic, and textural style with roots in 1980s Detroit and strong ties to Chicago, New York, and British and German scenes. “Minimalism” meanwhile enjoys a flexibility of expansion and contraction in music scholarship not usually reserved for techno; musicologists prefer “electronic dance music” or “EDM” to the colloquially general “techno.” But “techno” deserves the capaciousness normally granted to “minimalism,” a term that just as often describes a transhistorical aesthetic, set of compositional techniques, or modality of musicking as it specifically refers to a school of composition started in 1960s California and New York. Besides as a stand-in for EDM, techno might be understood, to riff off Detroit DJ/producer Juan Atkins, as an entire modality of “sounding like technology” or machinic mimesis that extends before and beyond techno “proper.” To the extent that classical minimalism engages “machine aesthetics”—think all those loops, delays, drones, automated systems, and continuous processes—techno is a modality in which minimalism partook and partakes.Footnote 6
One might additionally, like Eshun, locate techno as an element of Black Atlantic Futurism, a heterogeneity of machine-oriented techniques and strategies connected to Afrodiasporic life. Electronic musicking functions here as a techne or conditional “sonic fiction” of the musicking self, including the fiction of escape from racialized identity entirely.Footnote 7 According to Eshun, technologized sound provided Detroit techno’s Black originators sonic subterfuge amid classed and commodified expectations of “street” culture and “ghetto” blackness.Footnote 8 The alien techno-logic of the machine interface empowered techno’s producers to “alienate themselves from sonic identity and to feel at home in alienation” and enabled DJs to “intensify estrangement” from a “compulsory black condition.”Footnote 9
Although Eshun initially described techno’s obscurantism as superseding racial categories, he, along with scholars such as Alexander Weheliye, Sean Albiez, and DeForrest Brown Jr., have since situated techno’s “post-soul” post-humanism squarely within the cultural history of the Black Atlantic.Footnote 10 This scholarship illustrates musical Afrofuturism as a centrifugal force within the multiracial transatlantic history of “remixing” subjectivity and altering consciousness through overtly technological music. This history includes classical minimalism; for minimalism’s entrancements, much like techno’s, were conditioned by “sonic blackness” and the potential for depersonalized sound to undergird and override various senses of self.Footnote 11 That many of its earliest innovators were not Black should only augment, not diminish, our sense of techno’s historiographic fundamentality. More emphatically, describing minimalism as techno retrospectively affirms the intertwining of Black Atlantic and electronic musicking as the most consequential development in music globally at least since World War II.
Of course, not all classical minimalism can be well understood as techno, much as Detroit techno cannot be fully apprehended as minimalism; these mutual categorizations are inapposite in several ways, as I’ll later explain. However, there are many reasons to compare classical minimalism with Detroit techno, and even to hear the latter as an echo of the former: both are connected to psychedelic countercultures and experimental avant-gardes, frequently compositionally structured with loops and cycles to create interlocking rhythmic patterns, formally developed using gradual and continuous processes, dramatized via the long accumulation and sudden tiering of texture and volume, spatialized through amplification, and commonly performed over great durations (frequently hours on end), with the effect of altering or mediating listener consciousness and promoting hypnotic states.Footnote 12 Moreover, the idea of minimalism as an aesthetic or style has been directly influential on techno writing and culture; first as a way of describing techno as more austere, impersonal, and/or uniform than other styles of EDM, and secondly as a modifier (“minimal techno”) to denote a whole subgenre of techno and translocal club scene popularized during the late 1990s and 2000s.Footnote 13
Relevantly to the preceding discussion, both styles also promote a sort of “liberation” of the musicking self by way of the music’s impersonal appearance. Much as Steve Reich famously described creating and listening to gradual processes as promoting a “shift of attention” away from the social and toward sound-qua-sound, Detroit techno DJ/producers such as Juan Atkins, Jeff Mills, and Mike Banks have in various ways emphasized abstraction and anonymity as means of promoting musical involvement. As Banks, speaking of shrouding his face in performances and refusing to be photographed, explained, “There was no reason for you to know what we look like, you just concentrate more on what the sound was.”Footnote 14 Eshun summed the resultant sound thus: “Machine Music therefore arrives as unblack, unpopular and uncultural, an Unidentified Audio Object with no ground, no roots and no culture.”Footnote 15 To make and listen to techno, by this logic, is to find universality in anonymity rather than in recognition: “instead of pleading for inclusion and integration,” he wrote of Detroit techno, “it moves further into the dark.”Footnote 16
“Because of European visual culture’s history of tanking up at Africa’s filling station, one more often experiences déjà vu than shock-of-the-new when confronted with the uses academically trained African-American artists make of African visual materials. By the time Black artists returned to Africa, its most common forms and processes had virtually become art-world clichés; Picasso had already been both blue and ‘black.’” —Greg TateFootnote 17
In an oft-cited 1994 article, music theorist Timothy A. Johnson seemed to have inclusion and integration in mind when he defined minimalism by compositional technique, rather than by style or aesthetics, in order to “reflect the continuing influence of minimalism” on several “post-minimalist” composers. “Thus,” Johnson concluded, “pieces featuring two or more minimalist features—continuous form, texture consisting of interlocking rhythmic patterns and pulses, simple (often diatonic) harmonic materials, slow harmonic rhythm, a lack of extended melody, and repetitive rhythmic patterns—may be identified as minimalist in terms of technique.”Footnote 18 Although Johnson made no mention of popular or electronic musics, later scholars picked up where he left off, pulling them under minimalism’s umbrella on the basis of technique. Joanna Demers, for example, in her 2010 book on electronic experimentalism: “Minimalist music has become synonymous with predominantly American music featuring rhythmic and melodic repetition, tonal harmonies, and textural transformations that unfold slowly through a process of accretion.”Footnote 19 Or Robert Fink, in his 2005 monograph Repeating Ourselves, going far beyond compositional technique: “Certain ways of performing, recording, disseminating, and consuming music can be considered to be forms of musical minimalism—insofar as ‘minimalism’ is the name we give to musicking implicated in contemporary cultures of repetition—even if the music involved has little to do with the experimental avant-garde. Disco and electronic dance music are ‘minimalist’ in this way.”Footnote 20
How did “minimalism” and not “techno” come to stand in for “the entire cultural matrix” of long-form repetitive musical entrancements that, for better and worse, once held association with the commercial, mechanical, and Afrological underpinnings of US American dance music—a “cult of the machine which is represented by unabating jazz beats,” as Theodor Adorno complained back in 1941?Footnote 21 Did techno move too far into the dark?
My understanding of the revisionism situation resonates with what musicologist Tim Rutherford-Johnson calls the “influence engine” around minimalism. Much as classical-music programmers, broadcasters, and critics focused on Reich and his ilk as influential “saviors” of western art music, some musicologists took the relative popularity of minimalism as evidence of its applicability to a great deal of popular culture. And why wouldn’t they? “Popular music appears to gain credibility; new music appears to gain relevance,” as Rutherford-Johnson concisely states. And yet, Reich, disco DJs, and John Coltrane alike “were attuned to similar musical and technological currents: Afro-diasporic beats; the technology of the turntable, tape loop and cross-fader; and the possibilities of accumulative and layered musical forms.”Footnote 22 Composer and critic David Toop has similarly criticized the reductiveness of identifying repetitive and accumulative techniques as minimalism when their appearance in concert music points further back to minstrelsy, jazz, Tin Pan Alley, and marching tunes.Footnote 23 McClary, in her pathbreaking lecture describing minimalism’s cultural debts, concluded with an even longer list of the “overdetermined” roots of cyclic structures in US classical music: not just the sweeping “African-Americanization” of US musical culture, but a more “convoluted genealogy” including Asian musical traditions and “the aggressive international music business which makes the world’s music available as a commodity, simultaneously homogenizing and diversifying cultural forms.”Footnote 24 Given how the aggressively neoliberalized academy rewards the tidy packaging and popularizing of research expertise in similar fashion, it is no wonder scholars of western art music have gassed up minimalism’s influence engine. Ironically, minimalism has been at once homogenized and diversified in music scholarship (including, admittedly, my own) by being equated with the techniques that made classical minimalism sound most “like technology” and like western pop music—i.e. like techno.
So how to account for the multiplying meanings of minimalism without overfueling the proverbial influence engine? “Minimalism as techno” answers this question in two ways. First, it suggests that, when formally comparing other styles to minimalism, historical priority (i.e. earlier appearance) should not necessarily take historiographic precedence. A similar argument for prochronism in music historiography inheres in Eshun’s writings on musical futurism; for Eshun, futurist music is inherently proleptic, meaning not only that it conditions its own futures in the musicking world, but that its futures, in loop-like fashion, retroactively condition the music’s existence across time. Later descriptors, conceptualizations, and categorizations might hence supersede earlier ones, depending on the thrust of the comparison. Secondly, it proposes a formulation equally as counterintuitive to a classical or experimental music lover as “techno as minimalism” may be to an EDM fan. The parallel (in)validity of these two formulations illustrates how neither “minimalism” nor “techno” is collapsable into the other by inclusion; rather, both involve techniques that come from shared musical influences and technological potentialities. One should not mistake techno for minimalism or vice versa on the basis of common musical technique—Steve Reich’s Violin Phase plays very differently than Jeff Mills phasing two techno records, even though both “phasings” stem from the staggered playback of copies of the same recording, a technique historically linked to tape delay in pop music production, as well as to the overlapping call-and-response in North American, especially African-American, popular and vernacular musics (which itself links further back to imitative antiphonies and polyphonies across American, European, and African musics).Footnote 25
In sum, “minimalism as techno” counteracts the well-meaning supposition that including techno in “minimalism” is good or correct, particularly if it falsely inflates the importance and originality of classical minimalism. The same can be said of many related styles and clusters of traditions. In that spirit, we might consider how minimalism is dub. And ambient. And jazz. And African dance music. And on and on and on….
“I never liked minimalism as an art movement—at all. There was nothing interesting in it, it was just an ‘arty’ thing to do—a superficial way of trying to get someone’s attention.” —Daniel BellFootnote 26
“[T]he title ‘art’ is a resource that is at once indispensable and unnecessary to the producers of the [jazz] works in question. It is indispensable because, if you believe art is better, more beautiful, and more expressive than nonart, if you therefore intend to make art and want what you make recognized as art so that you can demand the resources and advantages available to art—then you cannot fulfill your plan if the current aesthetic system and those who explicate and apply it deny you the title. It is unnecessary because even if these people do tell you that what you are doing is not art, you can usually do the same work under a different name and with the support of a different cooperative world.” —Howard BeckerFootnote 27
In a piece both prefiguring and inverting some of this essay’s concerns with historiographic precedence, musicologist Kofi Agawu has recently written of a “core minimalism at the heart of the African compositional mode” that he calls African minimalism.”Footnote 28 Despite West African drumming’s direct influence on classical minimalism,Footnote 29 Agawu characterizes various African dance musics as “minimalist” due to their sparseness and fixed repetition. Yet composing in a minimalist mode, Agawu points out, is not a personal choice for African composers as it is in western minimalism, but rather a “gift”—an “invitation to the listener-dancer to complete the music by occupying the gaps or spaces inscribed in the musical texture, and to do so with all the temporal resources of an apparently continuous present tense.”Footnote 30 This participatory spirit, he goes on, most profoundly differentiates African from western minimalism, “despite the communalistic pose in Western minimalism’s pioneers.”Footnote 31
For me, Agawu’s contrast between African and western “minimalisms” raises a vexing question: given the term’s origins in the gallery arts and concert music, should participatory musics be called “minimalist” in the first place? Consider this assertion by artist Henry Flynt: “A minimalist work is not… underdetermined or open to ambient events. It saturates the field with uniformity or monotony. The audience has to supply the psychological modulations, not because the experience is underdetermined—but because the program is a saturation of uniformity.”Footnote 32 Indeed, the drastic power of classic minimalism often proceeds from an attitude of quiet reverence that promotes total absorption of the observing self into the “field” of the artwork. Conversely, techno productions are underdetermined and participatory in two main ways; first, techno tracks are commonly understood not as standalone pieces, but rather as open to manipulation by DJs as “tools” and by remixers as “originals”; second, the involvement of dancers in live settings affects DJs’ activity and becomes part of the performance. Beyond the tracks themselves, very little remains uniform, monotonous, or minimal within the expanded participatory “field” of techno.
Why, then, frame African dance musics or techno as “minimalist” at all? As Agawu explains his motivations, “appropriating a term from European music historiography should facilitate analysis, encourage cross-cultural exploration, and ultimately engender admiration for the achievements of African musicians working in predominantly oral traditions who have developed extraordinary abilities to make much out of little.”Footnote 33 To echo Bell and Becker above, identifying dance music as “minimalist” might conformably be an effective, if superficial, way of getting scholars’ attention; it might also create the conditions for techno musicians or scholars to access the resources and advantages available to minimalism and its scholarship within the worlds of fine art and academia.
My hope, in arguing for “minimalism as techno,” is that this sort of framing becomes less and less necessary within those art worlds as time goes on. Certainly, it is unnecessary, and maybe even undesirable, outside of them—techno’s political resistance, latent in its communalizing energies, has greater potential for activation in the rave underground, certainly a more egalitarian and cooperative artworld than the fine arts or academia (although such ideals are ever harder to sustain in the long tail of covid and global economic inflation). And while minimalism’s musicological revisionism has led me and other academic scholars to reflect more deeply upon musical similarities across art worlds, it has also shown how unidirectional inclusion can inadvertently reinforce existing representational inequities and institutional powers, despite the liberatory pose of that art and scholarship.
So yeah, maybe going further into the dark is the move.
Acknowledgments
I’d like to thank the other authors in this colloquy for their collaboration and feedback, as well as the anonymous readers for their helpful comments. Thanks also to the organizers of the 2024 Society for American Music Conference in Detroit for hosting the panel from which this colloquy came.
Competing Interest Statement
The author has no competing interests to declare.
Victor Szabo is Elliott Associate Professor of Music at Hampden-Sydney College. His scholarship broadly addresses popular, electronic, and experimental music in the US and UK, with special focus on psychedelic aesthetics. His monograph Turn On, Tune In, Drift Off: Ambient Music’s Psychedelic Past (Oxford UP, 2023) examines the countercultural history and aesthetics of the ambient music genre from the 1960s to present. He has also published in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Twentieth-Century Music, and Journal of Popular Music Studies. His current research examines the art and aesthetics of the DJ set in the contemporary US rave underground.
Abstract
A curious cleft exists between minimalism, as exemplified by the musical movement originating in California and New York in the late 1950s to early 1960s (and discourse about it), and the aesthetics of twentieth-century Black concert music composers. In contrast to recent scholarship diversifying the cast of characters populating the history of musical minimalism, this exploratory study considers both the historiographical discourse of musical minimalism and its possible stylistic traces in the music of selected Black composers and reflects upon the whiteness at the heart of musical minimalism. The essay examines discourse about Julia Perry’s Homunculus C.F. (1960) and Alvin Singleton’s Shadows (1987) as its primary examples.
In the spring of 2003, I had an opportunity to chat briefly with the brilliant music critic Greg Tate (1957–2021).Footnote 1 He was in New Haven for the 40th birthday party of one of my mentors, ethnomusicologist and composer/multi-instrumentalist Michael Veal, who was friends with Tate and introduced me to him before temporarily heading off. Standing outdoors with Tate and their mutual friend, the video artist and cinematographer Arthur Jafa, I began chatting with them and soon mentioned that I was working on a dissertation on race politics in the music of Steve Reich.Footnote 2 Without missing a beat, Tate said something like, “Steve Reich? You mean African music as a science project?”Footnote 3 Being in the throes of dissertation writing, I explained what I was working on vis-à-vis Reich, but in retrospect I should have asked more questions than I did (of both him and Jafa). When did they first learn about Reich’s music? How did other Black artists and intellectuals they knew respond to it?Footnote 4 At the time, I was thinking about the appropriation question as it concerned Reich’s music; although it wasn’t the focus of my dissertation, one aspect of it would form the basis of my first published article (which came into being also thanks to Veal’s mentorship).Footnote 5 Tate’s clever quip efficiently got at many issues in Reich’s music. It appropriated African music. It did so, moreover, in a quasi-objective, “scientific” way. And, perhaps most importantly, it was based on a rudimentary, elementary school-level understanding of African music and culture, akin to a “science project” in which young students explain scientific phenomena illustrated on poster boards, accompanied by materials from experiments or demonstrations (usually with a lot of help from their parents), and compete for prizes.
Understanding Reich’s work in this way might lead one to suspect that the Black reception of Reich may have been at best ambivalent even prior to the controversy initiated by photographer and music writer Val Wilmer’s reporting of racist statements made by Reich in the early 1970s.Footnote 6 But what of the broader minimalism movement, of which Reich was a part? My cursory, incomplete investigations have thus far revealed that there is something of a logical problem and disjunction when it comes to musical minimalism and Blackness. While there may be a meaningful contingent of Black minimalism fans,Footnote 7 with few exceptions Black composers in the twentieth centuryFootnote 8—particularly those in the Western concert lineage, shaped as it is by its own white supremacy—tended not to take up or claim the aesthetic, certainly not in any sustained way.Footnote 9 In what follows, I both attempt to outline the basis for my assessment (which is in part dependent on a particular understanding of what musical minimalism is and is not) and argue that minimalism is intimately tied to the unmarkedness of whiteness.
For starters, the minimalism movement was overwhelmingly, almost uniformly white,Footnote 10 with a very small number of Black composer-participants in any consistent sense—Julius Eastman to a degree and, in a very different way perhaps, Laraaji. Anthony Braxton and Don Cherry were more tangentially or intermittently connected to it, and moments in the work of luminaries like Alice Coltrane intersect aesthetically with the minimalist project.Footnote 11 Kerry O’Brien and William Robin make the most persuasive case for expanding inclusion of who counts as a minimalist, and yet such efforts could never undo the basic facts of who populated the movement.Footnote 12 Instead of attempting to diversify minimalism, however, what if we were to understand its whiteness as central to what it was—in which case, its quasi-ethnomusicological and quasi-anthropological dimensions would come to the fore as a particular stage in the development of Western concert music and its appropriation of non-Western and vernacular musics?Footnote 13 Patrick Nickleson does a great job of articulating these dynamics in relation to minimalism in his contribution to this colloquy (as does Victor Szabo, particularly in his quote of none other than Greg Tate!), so I need not rehearse them in my own words here. For my purposes, the very whiteness of the movement and its appropriative dynamics did not go unnoticed by Black concert music composers, who have generally sought—or been forced into—alternative ways at engaging with African, Afrodiasporic, vernacular, and non-Western musics.
Consider, for example, the observations of composer and music theorist Dwight Andrews (b. 1951), in which he articulates a double standard when it comes to the question of appropriation.Footnote 14
We are living in an age when composers are influenced by a variety of musics and traditions, but because race continues to fracture how we view the artist, if not the art, some people are more equal than others when they want to use other people’s music. In a sense, Steve Reich and Philip Glass are eclectic in their use of traditional musics from around the world, but there is a certain expectation upon African American composers that I find very limiting. If you are a black composer, people want to hear what is “black” about it. I find that frustrating and silly, especially these days when composers like me or any number of other people have a variety of backgrounds and disciplines and are steeped in many traditions, not just one. I don’t find orchestras or critics nearly as comfortable dealing with our eclecticism as they are with that of their white counterparts. To a certain extent I think this is due to the racial reality that white people have been ripping off other people’s stuff forever and it has always been seen as a new interesting thing—George Gershwin, Paul Whiteman, Aaron Copland, and Leonard Bernstein. Interestingly enough, they are labeled as “great American voices.” I just wonder at what point, since half of that music is based on our music, we become American voices, instead of always being seen as a kind of outsider, as the other, or a special something.Footnote 15
In addition, minimalism has an unclear relationship to vernacular musics. One of the difficult-to-ascertain aspects of the minimalist movement entailed classically trained composers trying not only to appropriate non-Western and vernacular musics but, to a certain extent at least, to make a kind of vernacular music themselves (even as they were very art-world oriented and in most instances gravitated increasingly towards the traditional concert hall and/or work concept as their careers progressed). Szabo’s inversion of techno-as-minimalism into minimalism-as-techno offers one way of thinking about minimalism without prioritizing concert music and its movements. As both Nickleson and Szabo suggest, it is not possible to solve minimalism’s white supremacy problems through inclusivity because they are, in part, the white supremacy problems of Western art music. That minimalism proper sits in-between these rough, ill-defined spheres means that it presents a historiographical opportunity: to be read as a curious, white-dominated offshoot of a swath of much larger, more significant, and diverse musical practices, including much Black music.Footnote 16
Let us address these concerns by revisiting them in relation to specific works by Black concert music composers. Two examples may prove instructive. First, consider a discussion of the Black composer Julia Perry (1924–1979), whose remarkable music has received renewed attention in the last few years. Much credit goes to Kendra Preston Leonard, who has been collecting and sharing PDFs of manuscripts, biographical texts, and other materials, all in the service of advocating for a hitherto woefully neglected composer, despite the earlier efforts of scholars like Helen Walker-Hill, J. Michele Edwards, and others.Footnote 17 In a chapter of the 2023 volume Expanding the Canon, edited by Melissa Hoag, Preston Leonard describes one of Perry’s pieces (a harp and percussion work titled Homunculus C. F. from 1960) as “serial minimalism,”Footnote 18 partly in reference to Jeremy Grimshaw’s work on La Monte Young’s Trio for Strings (1958) and states, “While we often associate minimalism with White male composers […], it is worth noting that Perry was 10 years older than, and composing in a minimalist style well before, composers usually associated with the origins of minimalism.”Footnote 19 Preston Leonard’s analytical observations on the piece are immensely helpful, and I have used and credited her essay on Homunculus C. F. in lectures. But her attribution of minimalism to Perry’s work gives me pause, for three reasons—beyond the fact that Perry wasn’t a part of the minimalism movement. One reason is that, to my ears, the piece is certainly remarkable and innovative but also very much in the lineage of US experimentalist percussion works, including those by Varèse, Cowell, Partch, Harrison, and Cage, among numerous others. While there are minimalistic qualities discernible in Perry’s composition, it and other exemplars of this tradition are generally too complex and internally heterogeneous to be minimalist, for me at least; perhaps they’re at best described as proto-minimalist. Another reason that gives me pause is why the attribution was made in the first place: While it seems churlish and nearly pointless to police the use of the term, its appearance here is unmistakably a product of the musicological value attributed to minimalism’s historical significance. This value was itself a product of almost exclusively white scholars who lionized it and found it liberatory in ways that, I would conjecture, failed to resonate to the same degree with nonwhite and especially Black musicians steeped in the traditions that minimalism claimed for its own.Footnote 20 A third reason is that early minimalist aesthetics did not, for the most part, incorporate explicit narrative programs and generally sought to downplay extramusical connections, even obvious ones.Footnote 21 Mildred Green notes that Perry’s work was composed
during the summer of 1960. It was written in her apartment, located on the top floor of her father’s medical office building in Akron, Ohio, which “was equipped with all of the necessary facilities except a piano.” These clinical surroundings evoked memories of the medieval laboratory where Wagner, youthful apprentice to Faust, made a successful alchemy experiment, fashioning and bringing to life a creature he called homunculus, a Latin word for “little man”—a test tube man. Perry selected percussion instruments for her simulation of a test tube creation; then, maneuvering and distilling them by means of the Chord of the Fifteenth (C. F.), brought this musical test tube baby to life. Although it is pure speculation, C. F. may also stand for Cantus Firmus, a fixed or given melody used as the basis for a work. This is a term that Perry certainly understood, and that accurately describes the role of her “Chord of the Fifteenth.”Footnote 22
Roberta Lindsey further speculates that “this composition represents one of Perry’s musical manifestations of the turmoil surrounding the civil rights movement of the late 1950s and early 1960s, and the African-American’s increasing desire to achieve freedom from societal constraints.”Footnote 23 These interpretations, based on the narrative cues in the title of and composer’s notes for Homunculus C.F., offer a compelling contrast to Steve Reich’s Come Out (1966), a work that, despite its explicit link to the Black Freedom Struggle of the long 1960s (via its source sample of the voice of Daniel Hamm, one of the so-called Harlem Six), was described and interpreted for many years by the composer and critics in exclusively technical and general terms.Footnote 24
Second, let us examine a significantly earlier historiographical episode. In 1987, the esteemed Black composer Alvin Singleton (1940–) wrote Shadows, an orchestral work for the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, that became the subject of discussion upon its premiere and particularly after being released on recording in 1989. Shadows is an atmospheric, gradually unfolding and intensifying composition featuring overlapping looped units and, later on, longer passages demarcated by repeat signs and repeated multiple times in full. The work was linked to the aesthetics of minimalism in its reception early on. In a 1990 recording review, critic and minimalism scholar K. Robert Schwarz stated that of the works on the album including Shadows, “Mr. Singleton does seem to have been influenced by Minimalism. Although he rejects its consonance and harmonic simplicity, he shows a fondness for layering repeated patterns that build into dense, polyrhythmic textures.”Footnote 25 Five years later, Samuel Floyd’s foundational study The Power of Black Music states that “Shadows is minimalist, and we see here again an affinity between black music and the avant-garde—the kinship between the hypnotic repetitiveness of African-derived music and the hypnotic repetitiveness of minimalism.” Floyd also contends that its brassy climactic section (in the second half of the piece) “takes on the character of a jazz orchestra.”Footnote 26 Shadows did get picked up by a number of orchestras over the next several years after its 1987 premiere; in a review of the Syracuse Symphony Orchestra’s 1989 performance, a critic dismissed it as “a strained attempt at minimalism.”Footnote 27 Another 1990 record review described the work as “a sophisticated view of minimalism, with dissonant harmonic and melodic materials that evolve slowly, systematically and intensely.”Footnote 28
Other discourses, including some more closely linked to the composer, place the accent slightly differently: minimalism is either not mentioned or, if so, it is more strongly qualified or dismissed as a reference point in Shadows. A prominent early critic tracking the work was Derrick Henry of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, who wrote several pieces discussing Shadows, including the premiere performance and recording. In his lengthiest treatment, Henry wrote in 1987, “Like so many new pieces nowadays, Alvin Singleton’s ‘Shadows’ makes much of little. As with the music of Steve Reich and Philip Glass, ‘Shadows’ relies heavily on the protracted repetition of short motives and on slowly changing, additive textures. Yet Singleton’s music could never be confused with that of Reich or Glass. It employs a richer harmonic vocabulary, a wider coloristic palette, and less insistent rhythms.”Footnote 29 In contrast, Black composer and critic Carman Moore, who reviewed some of the earliest minimalist concerts for The Village Voice in the 1960s, makes no mention of minimalism in his liner notes for Singleton’s 1989 album. In Moore’s reading, the repetitions of the work are “passacaglia-like” and created with distinct layers of “contrasting style and mood, from big-band to postmodern”; nowhere does Moore refer to minimalism or composers like Reich and Glass.Footnote 30 The most substantive treatment of Shadows that I’ve encountered is by Kristin Wendland in 1999. Her 1000-word text does not mention minimalism and instead cites Ravel’s Bolero (via Richard Dyer) and Penderecki’s 1960s music (via Kyle Gann) alongside an informative blow-by-blow description of the composition.Footnote 31
So, is Shadows minimalist or not? According to the composer, it isn’t. In an interview by pianist, composer, and writer Ethan Iverson from around 2016, Iverson notes that “A few pieces [of Singleton’s] traffic in repetition, but they are not minimalist.” Singleton responds, “No, minimalism happened after me. My harmonies don’t have anything to do with Philip Glass or Steve Reich. People try to tell me that Shadows is minimalist, and I counter, ‘Is the rhythm section in a Latin music ensemble minimalist?’”Footnote 32 Indeed, Singleton’s conception of repetition in his music isn’t primarily oriented towards grooves, trance states, and gradual processes, which are all characteristic of minimalist repetition, and instead are oriented towards building up expectation for surprising changes—more in line with his interests in experimental jazz improvisation and the drama of classical composers like Mahler or Beethoven. In a 1995 interview with Bill Morelock, Singleton noted,
I think it’s some kind of a psychological phenomenon, because often I hear something, and then when I hear it again, it gets more and more familiar. Then I want to hear it again. And then I keep wanting to hear it again. And then you’ve reached a point [while composing] when you don’t know how to stop it without creating a situation where the structure becomes incoherent at that point. And then when you hear it again, you wonder, “Well…”, and then you change, and then you go to something that’s completely different. It’s unimaginable.
BM: Oh, yeah, and then the non sequitur is more powerful than it would have been had you not repeated it so many times.
AS: Exactly.Footnote 33
All that said, from the work alone, it isn’t entirely straightforward to determine what might and might not be minimalist about it. When Singleton says, “minimalism happened after me,” he explicitly notes that he was not a part of the minimalism movement (with its heyday emerging just as he left for Italy and then settled in Austria for over a decade, in 1971–1985). Moreover, and in contrast to many of the minimalists, the experience of studying with twelve-tone composers and participating in the European avant-garde was not a profoundly alienating one—even if Singleton appears not to have actually composed any fully twelve-tone pieces.Footnote 34 But the logic and shape of the composition, as well as its stylistic reference points, also seem akin both to more traditional nineteenth- and early twentieth-century concert music and Black vernacular musics. Concerning that logic, Shadows gradually builds in tension before culminating in a loud, cathartic release, which Singleton describes as like “a tag at the end of a spiritual. … It gets locked into a repetition where you keep repeating the ending of that, and it gets larger and larger and larger and larger and you anticipate an ending, [but] it doesn’t happen.”Footnote 35 Concerning these reference points, aside from the idea of a vamp structuring the jazz-orchestra-ish climax of the piece,Footnote 36 the Western classical tradition appears to be indexed, from the loud initial low E (E1/E2) of the piece, akin to the low Cs that open Beethoven’s Coriolan overture (for example), to the little Mahlerian or Coplandesque trumpet fanfare on B4 starting in m. 293—gestures that have since been replicated many times in other works and film scores.Footnote 37 One could say the same of its pitch content, which builds from a C#-E-G diminished triad in the strings and timpani (through m. 107) to an octatonic progression using three triads (C major, Eb major, A major) in the flutes and harp (starting in m. 108). Indeed, eventually the music builds up over the course of its first half to the entire aggregate of the twelve chromatic pitch-classes, in a way that seems rather unlike minimalist pitch processes and closer to those in free atonal music.Footnote 38
a. Alvin Singleton, Shadows (1987), mm. 521–23, oboes, pitched percussion, violas. b. Shadows, mm. 561–62, harp. c. Steve Reich, Piano Phase, m. 17, piano 2. d. Same as c. but transposed up a perfect fourth for easier comparison with a.
Critics, however, were not wrong to hear traces of minimalism in the work. In an eighth-note ostinato appearing in the work’s previously mentioned climax (starting in mm. 521–29), I hear an allusion to the Africanesque 12-note figure that opens Reich’s Piano Phase (1967), which itself is echoed in Reich’s own Music for 18 Musicians (1976), Louis Andriessen’s De Staat (1976), and elsewhere in the minimalist and postminimalist repertoire.Footnote 39 The figure in Shadows (shown in example 1a) is even more reminiscent of the second eight-note figure played by piano 2 in m. 17 of Piano Phase (example 1c, transposed up to the same pitch levels on A4/A5 in example 1d)—even though material by older composers such as Stravinsky and Shostakovich might also come to mind in this passage. When the figure returns in the harp part (first in mm. 561–62, example 1b) as part of the quiet denouement of the work, the resemblance is perhaps even more striking aurally. Moreover, the spacious repetitions that structure most of the composition evoke, in certain respects, the music of Morton Feldman, who Singleton states was a “big influence” on him.Footnote 40 Feldman’s large-scale use of repetition especially beginning in the 1970s brought him closer to the orbit of minimalism, although he never adopted enough of the music’s traits to be seen as a latecomer to the movement.Footnote 41
If there is a conscious or unconscious nod to minimalism in Shadows, it is only one part of a tissue of intertextual sources that Singleton has woven together. A slowly unfolding composition with a rather traditional climax about two-thirds of the way through the piece, Shadows features a sound palette that, while distinctive, fits squarely within that of nineteenth and twentieth century European and American orchestral music. The most important part of the story, for our purposes, is to notice that although Singleton frequently acknowledges that he listens to a very wide range of music and that Shadows in particular was conceived as referencing a variety of musics,Footnote 42 the one type of music he seems to reject, at least within his own aesthetic formation, is minimalism. Why? Surely in part because it appears to have illegitimately claimed Afrodiasporic repetition, such as that found in the rhythm section of a Latin music ensemble, for itself.
Given the ongoing conversation about minimalists’ appropriation of the musics of nonwhite peoples, including that of Africa and the African diaspora, perhaps what started as the journalistic shorthand “minimalism,” with its veneer of cultureless abstraction and art-aesthetic reduction, has come to serve as a territorialization, a conceptual enclosure, an act of theft that Black composers and thinkers have long recognized and refused. In the case of a composer a generation younger than the minimalists, Dwight Andrews pondered over two decades ago whether Black composers would be taken seriously as innovators instead of as part of a marked “culture” that provides source material for white composers like Reich and Glass—and despite recent progress, his reflections remain relevant today. As for Julia Perry, who died in relative obscurity just as minimalists were starting to attain a new level of public acclaim and financial success, minimalism was recently applied retrospectively as a way of situating her music within the familiar tropes of Western (and especially US American) concert music historiography, perhaps in part to add to her growing reputation. Singleton’s case is the most tangled, in that at least one of his works has long been discussed in relation to minimalism (links to which are possible to make, if questionable), but he has seemed resistant to interpreting his music that way and was never really a part of the minimalism movement. Of course, a few Black composers of younger generations have engaged with minimalist aesthetics—often critically, as in the case of Jace Clayton’s The Julius Eastman Memorial Dinner (2011/2013–).Footnote 43 But what seems most intriguing to ponder is that minimalism’s aesthetic abstraction—its logic—and minimalism’s relative economic success—its profit—would appear to merge two core aspects of whiteness itself: its unmarkedness in a world of marked Others, from whom its wealth was made.Footnote 44
Acknowledgments
Many thanks to Beth Hartman and David Valentine for their astute feedback on this draft, to my colloquy co-contributors, and to faculty and students at the Eastman School of Music, who heard a lengthier version of this essay, including Matthew BaileyShea, Maeve Gillen, Nathan Lam, Marina Lee, Landon Morrison, and Holly Watkins.
Competing Interest Statement
None.
Sumanth Gopinath is Associate Professor of Music Theory at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. He has written or co-edited books on the ringtone industry (The Ringtone Dialectic: Economy and Cultural Form, 2013), mobile music studies (The Oxford Handbook of Mobile Music Studies, 2014, with Jason Stanyek), and the music of Steve Reich (Rethinking Reich, 2019, with Pwyll Ap Siôn). He is the leader of the independent Americana band The Gated Community.
Abstract
This essay considers the politics of inclusion both within my co-edited book On Minimalism: Documenting a Musical Movement and within American music scholarship more broadly.
Inclusion is often characterized as a quantitative act of expansion—adding more and more musical figures to an ever-growing roster. There is an obsession with names and a positivist assumption that more is better. Conventional histories of musical minimalism have focused on four canonic names: La Monte Young, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, and Terry Riley. The fixation on those four composers is in part owed to a series of foundational monographs, beginning with Wim Mertens’ American Minimal Music, La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass (1980) and extending to Keith Potter’s Four Musical Minimalists: La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass (2000), where the composers’ biographies and personalities were central to the narrative. These men were, after all, at times neighbors, classmates, rivals, bandmates, and friends.Footnote 1
Over the past decade or so, sometimes under the banner of inclusion, scholars of minimalism began adding more names, expanding the roster. Whether explicit about their political aims or not, music scholars and concert programmers slowly began to diversify the minimalist canon of straight white men. “Minimalist Composer Julius Eastman … Crashes the Canon,” announced the New York Times in 2016, reporting a surge of interest in the queer Black composer’s music.Footnote 2 In a 2018 article, writer and broadcaster Jennifer Lucy Allen decried overwhelming “menimalism,” and instead gave women prominence, including Pauline Oliveros, Meredith Monk, Éliane Radigue, and Laurie Spiegel.Footnote 3 In this positivist paradigm, if we just keep adding names, we will eventually get a complete list.Footnote 4 Often deploying what musicologist Jeffrey Magee calls the “trope of woeful neglect,” we seemingly discover another “lost” or “forgotten” minimalist each year, rescued from oblivion.Footnote 5
Rather than adding more names, perhaps minimalism is beyond repair. At least in its “Big Four” formulation, minimalism was, as Patrick Nickleson argues in this colloquy, a “white, patriarchal [mode of] authorship grounded in ownership and appropriation.” Beyond minimalism, any Western classical canon is “an outcome of musicology as an arm of colonialist and imperialist European projects,” writes Alejandro L. Madrid.Footnote 6 Why should anyone want to sustain that? Would not more names just “reproduce the values and ideologies that control the shaping and reshaping of that canonic fantasy,” in Madrid’s words?Footnote 7 “Why should we want or need any more minimalists?” asks Nickleson. What is the good in a “newly inclusive roster of musicians”?
These questions present inclusion as a body-counting problem.Footnote 8 Perhaps this focus on numbers and bodies is because, as academics, we take much of our rhetoric about inclusion from academic job searches, in which there is a limited number of spaces for bodies occupying jobs.Footnote 9 Or perhaps we take it from music history curriculum reform, teaching from score anthologies with limited space.Footnote 10 Or maybe this body-counting tendency comes from analyses of concert programming, like Brian Lauritzen’s reporting on the Los Angeles Philharmonic, showing how uniformly white and male concert programs often are.Footnote 11
There are excellent reasons for such number keeping; these numbers can reveal the disparities in whose voices have counted—disparities that endure to the present day. “Numbers can be affective,” notes Sara Ahmed in her book On Being Included, especially for the bodies being counted, particularly when they realize they are not “the only one” (writes the only woman in this colloquy on inclusion).Footnote 12 Counting has its place.
The problem is not that the canon is too small or incomplete and will be remedied through inclusion. The problem is the canon itself. The canon is not a list of people or works; the canon is an epistemology (in the words of Jesús Ramos-Kittrell). “The canon is an ideology more than a specific repertory,” writes Alejandro Madrid.Footnote 13 It is a way of valuing certain aesthetic criteria, technical innovations, and stylistic progress. And yes, to Nickleson’s point, that ideology is white and patriarchal and, as a result, organized around just a few individuals, great white male ones.
Rather than expand minimalism’s roster, we could, as Nickleson suggests, let it “starve or destroy itself.” We could let these few individuals fade into the darkness, as Victor Szabo argues. We are then, however, still left to make sense of a history of repetitive music, drones, loops, cycles—a tremendously popular form of music making, both within Western classical notated settings and far beyond it. The epistemology of the canon (and the epistemology of whiteness) demands a focus on a few individuals. Minimalism, however, was not a list of individuals; minimalism was something some musicians did sometimes, often in groups. What would the history of minimalism look like if not told through a single-composer paradigm?
On Minimalism (not On Minimalists)
In our revisionist history of minimalism, On Minimalism: Documenting a Musical Movement, my co-editor William Robin and I do not orient our history around people or personalities. We do not provide any definitive lists, and we were not looking to police the terms of inclusion or exclusion. Instead, we try to demonstrate how porous and expansive minimalism has been historically, and can be going forward, as a grouping.Footnote 14 In the book, an anthology of more than 100 historical sources, we intentionally avoided creating chapters organized around composers: there is no Philip Glass chapter or Julius Eastman chapter. Rather, we present this history thematically to draw many histories, voices, tendencies, and sensibilities together, which ultimately did allow many different historical figures (the familiar and unfamiliar) to be grouped together in unusual contexts. The book unfolds across three large-scale, chronological sections; in each section, chapters center on themes such as “Loops and Process,” or “Popular Culture” to juxtapose a variety of primary sources (including interviews, newspaper articles, and liner notes) that shed light on different musicians and musical practices.
Consider, for instance, our chapter on “Instruments and Environments,” which draws together artists and musicians who explored minimalism through sonic immersion—whether by building their own installations or their own homemade instruments. Rather than centering the chapter on individual musicians, we focus on a strain of interest within minimalism, in which musicians devised many different methods to “get inside the sound.”Footnote 15 Under this rubric, this chapter brings together the Earth Horns and Adapted Bagpipes of Yoshi Wada with the buzzing drones of Ellen Fullman’s Long String Instrument. Both artists were instrument builders, studied just intonation, and were influenced by Harry Partch but, somehow, their music is rarely discussed together, certainly not within histories of minimalism. It was not our goal to make them into card-carrying minimalists—to add their names to some official roster. Our goal was to put their activities into dialogue—their mutual interests in sound immersion, in instrument building, in drones—to reveal a broader, shared tendency within the history of minimalist music.
Our chapter titled “Cultural Fusion” focuses on the most widely and rightly criticized aspect of minimalist music—what, in this colloquy, Sumanth Gopinath describes as minimalism’s “acts of theft” and “territorialization” and what Nickleson calls minimalism’s “capacity to appropriate.” Under the heading of “Cultural Fusion,” we include five varied documents, including a 1968 review of Terry Jennings and his All-Star Band and a 1971 interview with Alice Coltrane, who formed her own All-Star Band that year. As Jennings comes out of the white, post-Cagean “downtown” scene, and Coltrane was immersed in the world of spiritual, experimental jazz, this might seem an unlikely pairing; on its face, a clear example of what George E. Lewis might demarcate as Eurological (Jennings) and Afrological (Coltrane).Footnote 16 The two groups, however, share some uncanny resonances: both were engaged in avant-garde improvised musical traditions centered on drones and repetition, both drew from North Indian classical traditions, and both featured a prominent drone held by the tambura (in Jennings’s band by Shyam Bhatnagar and La Monte Young; in Coltrane’s band by Tulsi Sen Gupta). These shared resonances stem from shared genealogies in the vanguardist jazz of the early 1960s: both bands featured soprano saxophone (Jennings in his band and Archie Shepp in Coltrane’s), improvising in a tradition deeply influenced by John Coltrane. Indeed, in the review of Jenning’s concert, the Village Voice critic felt the “ghost of John Coltrane” in the room. And, of course, Alice Coltrane played with her late husband for years, and her All-Star Band was drawn together to perform John Coltrane’s Africa and her own Journey in Satchidananda.Footnote 17
Some scholars may consider Alice Coltrane’s drone-based improvisations like Journey in Satchidananda to be outside the bounds of a history of minimalism—marking what Nickleson calls minimalism’s troubling “inside/outside split,” its inclusions/exclusions. When Lewis asked why John Coltrane has been considered an “outside influence” rather than an “inside member” of minimalism, he articulated the problematic history of those boundaries, those limits.Footnote 18 In On Minimalism we took Lewis’s provocation as an invitation to test those limits and boundaries: to use historical sources to make connections across and through artistic worlds that shared much more in common than scholarly histories often assume.
We were not, however, suggesting that we add Alice Coltrane to a roster of minimalists (nor were we suggesting that we add Ellen Fullman, Yoshi Wada, and Terry Jennings, thereby increasing the body count).Footnote 19 Such quick and easy additions would reap the benefits of diversity without any of the difficult work of questioning the terms of exclusion that made such absences all but inevitable. Expanding a roster was not our goal.Footnote 20 Instead, in On Minimalism, we sought to intervene at a more systemic level. During the making of our book, we were forced to question how primary sources have led scholarly histories toward a history of just a few individuals, and how primary sources and their biases are fundamental to the epistemology of the canon.
The Ease and Dis-ease of Inclusion and Exclusion: Sources and Their Biases
Historical sources—like manifestos or concert reviews—are always imbued with prejudices and biases. One reason that the “Big Four” canon is so persistent—we argue in On Minimalism—is that minimalism scholarship has relied on a fairly limited, fairly accessible group of sources. The Village Voice, for example, is widely available online, digitized, OCR-encoded, and fully searchable; moreover, two of its major music critics, Tom Johnson and Kyle Gann, have published collections of their Voice writings. It is no coincidence that it is cited extensively in histories of minimalism.Footnote 21 In gathering sources to reprint in our chapter “Cultural Fusion,” it was relatively “easy” to find and access the Village Voice review of Terry Jennings’ All-Star Band, while it was more difficult to obtain the interview with Alice Coltrane in the Black women’s magazine, Essence, which required institutional access to request a scan through interlibrary loan, and significant funds to reprint.Footnote 22 The availability, accessibility, and cite-ability of sources is a too-often unacknowledged (or unseen) influence shaping historical absences and exclusions.
One could say that scholarship on minimalism has a “big four” of primary sources. In the handful of monographs on minimalism, most of the primary sources fall into four main categories (with some overlap between them):
(i) Composer interviews and statementsFootnote 23
(ii) Composer archives (personal or foundations)Footnote 24
(iii) Newspaper concert reviews, accessible through online databasesFootnote 25
(iv) Newspaper and magazine profiles of composers
Each of these source types has its biases and its affordances. All four types prioritize the individual composer (the composer’s voice or the composer’s music or the composer’s archive–and what they have chosen to save). Newspaper reviews often prioritize live events at major venues. Composer archives bias composers who have the resources to have their materials stored in temperature-controlled spaces or are prestigious enough for an organization or library to pay for that space.
Further, each of these types of sources have biases in terms of access. Newspapers like the New York Times and the Village Voice are cited regularly in part because they are so easy to access; both are quickly available through online databases and online reprints. Other important, niche publications that covered minimalist music in the 1970s, such as the SoHo Weekly News or EAR Magazine, are rarely cited because they are nowhere online.Footnote 26 Our book features all of these publications, and many more; we took the opportunity to seek out many hard-to-find publications—aided by the incredible library teams at our universities, who scanned materials during the pandemic—not only to counteract these biases, but also to enrich our history of this musical movement.Footnote 27
Our book is not immune to these biases. We reprint Village Voice reviews and composer statements printed in the New York Times. The Voice and Times—like every major media outlet during minimalism’s heyday—skewed white, straight, and male (and not just the subjects of the articles, but also their authors and editors). For this reason, we actively sought out sources that featured non-white and non-male voices, including publications like the Black American, the feminist magazine Ms., and Essence. Unlike the widely anthologized writings of Steve Reich or Philip Glass, many of the items we reprint have not otherwise been reprinted. Nickleson rightly notes that musicology is a field “obsessed with preservation,” but one must ask: obsessed with the preservation of whose materials? Whose music, recordings, scores, or writings are being preserved?
Diffusing Minimalism
One of the epigraphs that opens our book comes from the musician Jayce Clayton’s brilliant essay on Julius Eastman, in which he writes: “The carefully ordered canon is better thought of as a site to traverse rather than a resting place…Spotlights create shadows—how to turn off these bright lights?” In his colloquy essay, Victor Szabo also uses the metaphor of light to suggest moving our histories away from individuals and toward the collective, away from inclusion and toward participation and universality, away from spotlights and “into the dark.”Footnote 28
In On Minimalism, we sought to cast a more diffuse light, radiating its beams on an expansive, collective history of minimalism. In her so-called “convoluted genealogy” of minimalism, written in 1998, Susan McClary imagined such a genealogy—stretching from disco to techno, from the drones of New Age devotees to the cyclic processes of feminist musicians. Much of that music will never be studied, and most participants will never be named or counted, but that does not necessitate a retreat into complete universality and anonymity.Footnote 29 Such universality is perhaps most acceptable to those whose identity has already been well represented and affirmed.Footnote 30
There was a utopian, collectivist promise at the core of early minimalism. The pronouns were not singular but collective. Early minimalism was the music of ensembles, groups, and bands, as Nickleson reminds us in The Names of Minimalism. “We all listen to the process together,” wrote Steve Reich in 1968.Footnote 31 So how did minimalism—a music of collectives—become represented by singular individuals? In the roundtable session that prompted this colloquy, Szabo urged us to abandon “minimalism” and all its baggage and instead to return to one of its earliest monikers “hypnotic music,” a nod to minimalism’s ability to induce altered states of consciousness. This name “hypnotic music” describes not the way minimalism sounds but the way minimalism feels in the minds and bodies of listeners, whether they were hypnotized, ecstatic, or entranced.
In On Minimalism, our chapter “Altered States” prints excerpts from interviews I conducted with members of an all-women droning group that was active in the 1970s. One woman explained that the group of singers would converge on a single pitch, aiming to eliminate overtones as much as possible, to approximate a sine tone, and then use that drone “as a powerful, focused energy, and one which impacts the body, flows through the body.” Another woman reported that the group investigated whether these drones—as highly focused energy—could move small objects, like a matchbox. They called their gatherings “healing work.”Footnote 32
These women have not figured into most histories of minimalism, despite their clear and deep participation in it. But is the answer to add their names to a list? This has certainly been done and, indeed, we do include many voices of women and transwomen in On Minimalism. But this kind of inclusion alone is insufficient, for it further perpetuates the canonic fantasy of the complete list, the complete roster. The all-woman droning group featured in On Minimalism is not an exemplar; it is an example of a much broader history of repetition, drones, and healing within 1970s feminism.
We can name these women—Ruth Anderson, Emily Derr, Annea Lockwood, and Julie Winter—and we certainly do so in our book. There is no retreat into universality here. We are arguing that their experiences count, as voices able to articulate a history of drones and healing. Against the epistemology of the canon, there were no technical innovations to note here, no stylistic progress; this was a single note, after all. Against the ease of inclusion, this group was difficult to study. They saved no programs, there were no concert reviews, no sound recordings, just their experience, captured through newly conducted interviews.Footnote 33 In On Minimalism, their collective experience—the experience of the many, rather than the few—that is what counts.
Competing Interest Statement
N/A.
Kerry O’Brien is a musicologist who specializes in experimental music, minimalism, and countercultural spirituality. She has taught at Yale University, the University of Washington, Indiana University, and Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle. Her writing has appeared in the Mitteilungen der Paul Sacher Stiftung, Tempo, NewMusicBox, the Chicago Reader, VAN Magazine, The New York Times, The New Yorker online, and the edited collection Rethinking Reich. With William Robin, O’Brien is co-editor of On Minimalism: Documenting a Musical Movement (University of California Press, 2023).
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