The Names of Minimalism: Authorship, Art, Music and
Historiography in Dispute
by Patrick Nickeleson (Music 780.904 Nic)
Do you remember the old movie Amadeus, whose plot is largely driven by a rivalry between
composers Mozart and Salieri (much of that rivalry is fictional, by the way)?
It was a popular film, and rivalries in general are a huge part of the human
experience as expressed through art. Think of the classic generic forms of
conflict that we study in literature, for example, and “person vs person” is
usually the first on the list. We love these kinds of stories.
One wouldn’t think that there would
be much in the way of person-to-person conflict in the development of musical
minimalism. After all, much of the music produced in this genre tends to be
serene or meditative in nature. But minimalist composers are people, too, and
as shown in the book The Names of Minimalism: Authorship, Art, Music and
Historiography in Dispute by Patrick Nickleson, there have been a
fair share of rivalries and strong disagreements among them. There were
probably similar kinds of interpersonal rivalries among musicians throughout
music history, but most of those tales have been lost to time. In this case,
since most of the parties involved with minimalism still walk among us, and we
have long lived in an era of 24/7 news coverage and lots of interviews with
contemporary composers, there is plenty of documentation to examine statements
made by these composers, and the public interactions between them.
Author Nickleson focuses on a few
varieties of disagreements that arose in the early days of minimalism through
roughly the early 1980s scene in NYC, when minimalism was absorbed into rock,
punk and no wave sounds through the work of composers like Rhys Chatham and
Glenn Branca. While the more unique aspects of this book focus on these
disagreements, there is also an overarching theme of questioning the historical
record around the evolution of minimalism. Similar to the On Minimalism book we also recently added to the Polley
collection, Nickleson questions the “historiography” around the genre,
particularly how the “Big 4” composers Glass, Reich, Young, and Riley, have
been become such pillars of the canon at the expense of many of their many
productive and successful peers.
There are four main “disputes”
examined in the book, starting with an analysis of how Steve Reich’s essay
“Music as a Gradual Process” and his piece “Pendulum Music,” both written in
1968, are often treated as an “explanation” of sorts for minimalism,
particularly as it is discussed and studied in academia. At this point I should
mention one caveat about this book that will immediately become apparent on the
first page of this first chapter: this book is written in a very academic
style. While I love the ideas found throughout this book, I’m not enthusiastic
about its writing style. Ironically, Reich’s “Music as a Gradual Process” essay
is itself a brief document written in plain language, making clear,
easy-to-understand points that remind me why minimalism has been a relatively
popular form of classical music for the last 50 years. Lots of average
non-musician folks who have no particular interest in classical music are
familiar with Glass or Reich. You can read Reich’s essay for yourself at the
library, by the way, in the book “Audio Culture: Readings
in Modern Music.” Nickleson is right, of course, that this simple document
implied potentially upsetting challenges to the standard order of things in the
classical music world, and indeed the wave of composer-performer ensembles
among the early minimalists brought them closer to audiences, allowing for live
presentations similar to rock bands. But it feels funny somehow describing
these notions as “a specific argument against the sites of reproduction of
composerly privilege concretely present in mid-century art music composition.”
But stick with it, dear readers, as
the points being made here and throughout the book are worth thinking about.
Nickleson goes on to discuss various aspects of the academic and music
historian response to “Music as a Gradual Process,” as well as “Pendulum
Music,” which is arguably the only piece Reich wrote that fully conforms to
what he lays out in the essay. The criticisms are many: unlike the
revolutionary ideas of composers like Schoenberg or Cage, Reich’s concept in
practice feels social in nature, freeing audiences rather than music itself. It
asks little of the composer in a traditional musical sense, similar to
criticisms often levied at Cage. The standards of it are virtually impossible
to live up to with the exception of “Pendulum Music.” And there are questions
of influence: Reich was clearly indebted to many African musics, for example,
and there are overlaps with the NYC visual arts scene of the time.
But this “dispute” is more general
to how minimalism was received as a whole — the other three discussed in the
book are more interpersonal in nature. First, Nickleson looks at the arguments
over ownership and authorship in the wake of La Monte Young’s Theater of
Eternal Music group breaking up in 1966. Briefly put, the group had featured a
cast of members since its inception in 1962, and often recorded its rehearsals,
which were a near-daily affair during the earlier period of their existence. As
the first Western group to prominently feature drones in their music, the
ensemble is remembered as an important contributor to the beginnings of
minimalist music, and Young is considered one of the “Big 4” composers of the
genre in some part because of this work. In terms of ownership, disputes arose
when Young proposed that the 60s recordings of their rehearsals could be
released as albums under his own name. Though it seems fair to say that Young
was the primary organizer behind the group, and one of the steadiest members as
others came and went, it’s also true that their rehearsals were essentially
collective improvisations based on a few guiding principles. Additionally,
contributors like violinist Tony Conrad added their own musical expertise to
the vocabulary being explored by the group, which changed those guiding
principles in measurable ways. In particular, Conrad seems to have introduced
Young to the math-based level of detail necessary for working in just
intonation, which went on to become a permanent element of Young’s music. It’s
a fascinating discussion, using quotes from both composers and written evidence
from their period of activity together that reveals ambiguity in terms of who
this music “belongs to.”
Leaving Young aside, the next
chapter looks at the curious forms of revisionist history that the remaining 3
composers of the “big 4” engaged in as their careers settled into the age where
historians come knocking. Though all four composers’ lives and work intersected
in the early days of minimalism, their later interviews in the 1990s belie a
bit of one-upmanship as each jockeyed for the highest position in the
minimalist canon. At the same time, they displayed a mutual support that pushed
all others out of consideration for the top tiers of minimalism. And of course
this sort of thing was useful for journalists, too—this kind of narrative
results in a clean, easily packaged way to talk about the genre. Or as
Nickleson puts it, “With the support of their interviewers, the four composers
produced a minimalist commons founded on failed collaborations articulated
through theories of pedagogic priority.” He breaks down several of the
composers’ most well-known interviews, finding lots of subtle jabs at one
another, whether through downplaying one another’s contributions or through
omission in the course of their storytelling. I found this chapter to be
amusing, in its way. I suppose most of us would find ways to put our own
stories on a pedestal if given the chance. These gentlemen were essentially
given that chance, and they largely took it!
The final dispute addressed in “The
Names of Minimalism” focuses on late 70s/early 80s NYC, where Rhys Chatham and
Glenn Branca combined the approaches of minimalism with the textures of guitars
being used in the punk and no wave music scenes around them. This is a rivalry
I’ve heard about before: briefly put, Chatham’s experiences with minimalism
dated back to its earlier days. He first saw Terry Riley perform in 1968,
became the first music director of The Kitchen in NYC in 1971, where he started
booking minimalist acts, and starting writing minimalist pieces using electric
guitars after seeing the Ramones in 1976. Branca ended up playing on the same
scene in the late 1970s, and Chatham briefly played in one of his bands. Branca
ended up writing similar kinds of music for multiple electric guitars, and
because he released a lot of albums and Chatham didn’t, he got most of the
credit for this kind of approach to minimalism, and eventually it’s said that
the pair had such a falling out that they stopped speaking. But perhaps the
most important angle that Nickleson examines in the intertwined tales of Branca
and Chatham relates to the way that critics and historians have sought to
differentiate them by their backgrounds: they must be substantially different
because Chatham has a serious music background, and Branca came up in the world
of punk music. Nickleson makes one of his best points of the book regarding
this kind of lazy categorization: “Rather than considering this a chiastic,
dual process of accreditation, of world-crossing and hybridity, we should
perhaps consider something both simpler and more theoretically interesting:
under the label minimalism, a composer could form a punk band, and a theater
artist could become a prominent symphonist.”
On the whole, I enjoyed this book.
However, it has a few weaknesses. As mentioned before, the writing style is
going to make the book a lot less fun than many of the books we discuss here.
Nickleson also deploys a fair amount of energy attempting to relate all of
these tales of rivalries and lazy journalism to Rancierian philosophy, a
post-democracy, post-Foucault take on aesthetics. There are some interesting
associations to be made, but I think this is far more interesting for folks who
care about continental philosophy than the typical audience for books about
music history. And there are some just plain weird asides that bothered me
while reading — one that comes to mind is that
Nickleson points out several times when Reich’s “Pendulum Music” is being
discussed that he doesn’t consider the piece to be music, an opinion with which
I disagree in the specific, and more generally leads to a whole “what is music”
discussion that I find unproductive in the best of circumstances. Those issues
aside, The Names of Minimalism offers a unique
perspective into the way the genre’s dominant narrative formed, and many of its
points are worthy of consideration before more biographies and histories of
this music are written.
(If you enjoy this, you may also
wish to try On Minimalism: Documenting a Musical Movement by Kerry
O’Brien or Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music edited by Christoph
Cox.)
( publisher’s official The
Names of Minimalism web page ) | ( official Patrick
Nickleson page at the University of Alberta )
Recommended
by Scott S.
Polley Music Library
Have you read or listened to
this one? What did you think? Did you find this review helpful?
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