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
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