Minimalism
- LAST MODIFIED: 28 September 2016
- DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199757824-0188
- LAST MODIFIED: 28 September 2016
- DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199757824-0188
Introduction
In the history of late 20th-century music, “minimalism” is the general label for a diverse set of repetitive, modular, determinist, and process-oriented tendencies within the world of postwar American experimental music. While some trace the roots of musical minimalism back to the highly compressed serial structures of Anton Webern, and others to the ne plus ultra of John Cage’s experiments with silence, most histories of musical minimalism begin with two collective sonic innovations of the middle 1960s: the extended microtonal drones pioneered by La Monte Young, Tony Conrad, and the Theatre of Eternal Music; and the pulsed modular repetition of Terry Riley’s In C. By the early 1970s, Young and Riley had been somewhat eclipsed by the more virtuosic and accessible music of Steve Reich and Philip Glass, who created and led their own performing ensembles, and who both developed systematic transformational processes for generating melodic and rhythmic diversity over slow-moving harmonies and a steady pulse. By the second half of the decade, the term “minimal” was in general journalistic use for this type of music, but stylistic shifts were already giving rise to what would later be called postminimalism: strict processes loosened, younger composers flirted with teleology and harmonic complexity, melodic material grew more lush, and modular repetition was harnessed to the expressive maximalism of the operatic stage. In England, experimentalists like Michael Nyman, Gavin Bryars, and Christopher Hobbs developed a conceptually rich “systems music,” while on the Continent, the influence of American minimalism was felt more dialectically, as established composers like Louis Andriessen and Karel Goeywaerts struggled with its challenge to modernist orthodoxy; in eastern Europe, a largely underground group of “holy minimalists” (including Henryk Gorecki and Arvo Pärt) followed their own path of transcendent austerity. The early 1980s were the high-water mark of minimalism as a trend, by which time the four “canonical” music minimalists were firmly embedded in classical music institutions. A new generation of composers for whom minimalism and rock music were equally influential developed an aggressive, jagged take on postminimalism they called totalism—but by the end of the 1990s, the dominant figure in postminimalist composition was John Adams, whose trilogy of “CNN” operas—Nixon in China, The Death of Klinghoffer, and Doctor Atomic—entered and transformed the classical operatic repertoire. By the 21st century, minimalism had become a historical style, a set of techniques available to any composer, even those without avant-garde or experimental aspirations. Indie and alternative pop musicians have consistently paid attention to minimalism in art music, from the Downtown crossover with drone minimalism that gave rise to the Velvet Underground, Glenn Branca, and Sonic Youth to the British ambient scene stemming from Brian Eno.
General Surveys
The scholarly literature on “minimal” music began when critics, exploring the landscape of experimental music after Cage, focused on a new musical tendency opposed to the general emphasis on indeterminacy and chance. Discussion of the core group of “canonical” American minimalists has often substituted for a survey of the style; similarly, focused Anglophone work on European minimalists has been rare. For a snapshot of the current state of research on minimalism and postminimalism in music, start with the collection of essays in the Ashgate Research Companion (Potter, et al. 2013, cited under Minimal Music), within which most trends in musicological discussion of minimalist music after 2000 are well represented.
Experimental Music
Nyman’s identification of a “new determinacy” in avant-garde composition, in Nyman 1974, predates the general use of “minimal” (a term first used in 1960s criticism of the visual arts) to describe music. General surveys of experimentalism in music, such as Piekut 2014, still provide interesting perspectives on minimalism and process. Surveys of American music also tend to highlight minimalism and postminimalism: Gann 1997 provides style history and analysis, while the notion of the “maverick” in Broyles 2004 enables a broader cultural perspective.
Broyles, Michael. Mavericks and Other Traditions in American Music. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004.
DOI: 10.12987/yale/9780300100457.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
An Americanist perspective on minimalism appears in the later chapters of this excellent survey. Broyles is a cultural historian of American music who considers minimalism within a tradition of populist “mavericks” like Ives and Cage.
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Gann, Kyle. American Music in the Twentieth Century. New York: G. Schirmer, 1997.
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A textbook history, suitable for undergraduate survey classes. The chapter on minimalism is exemplary, and, uniquely, Gann also devotes significant space to 1970s postminimalism and 1980s “totalism” (a term he himself helped coin). Fully outfitted with musical examples and analytical discussions, many of which are the only ones in print for the works in question.
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Johnson, Timothy A. “Minimalism: Aesthetic, Style, or Technique?” Musical Quarterly 78.4 (1994): 742–773.
DOI: 10.1093/mq/78.4.742Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
An oft-cited methodological statement that considers the dissemination and dilution of the minimalist aesthetic through the larger world of contemporary composition in the 1970s and 1980s. The notion of minimalism in music as a set of techniques available in any compositional context, rather than a strict avant-garde choice at the “end of history,” has proved prophetic.
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Nyman, Michael. Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond. New York: Schirmer, 1974.
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In the earliest sustained critical treatment of repetitive music, Nyman devoted an entire chapter of his 1974 book to “Minimalism, Determinacy, and the New Tonality.” Nyman himself, in a preface to the 1999 reprint (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press), admitted that his survey was preliminary, but the notion of a “new determinacy” remains a persuasive historical take on minimalism as a development within American experimentalism. It also provides a vantage point from which to unify the very different musical characteristics of drone and modular minimalism.
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Piekut, Benjamin, ed. Tomorrow is the Question: New Directions in Experimental Music Studies. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014.
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Contains several chapters relevant to minimal music, including: Ryan Dohoney, “John Cage, Julius Eastman, and the Homosexual Ego” (pp. 39–62); Virginia Anderson, “British Experimental Music after Nyman” (pp. 159–179); Stephanie Jensen-Moulton, “Sounds of the Sweatshop: Pauline Oliveros and Maquilapolis” (pp. 211–228).
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Strickland, Edward. Minimalism: Origins. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993.
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Very detailed, idiosyncratic take on the origins of minimalism in the visual arts and music. The author moves back and forth between painting, sculpture, and music with authority, and the historical and documentary research behind the narrative he constructs is impeccable. The story is one of decline: Strickland pushes the origin of minimalist art back into the late 1940s, and decries developments in minimalist music after the late 1970s.
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Minimal Music
Composer-based surveys of American minimalist music are still quite unusual. The treatments of the canonical four composers (Young, Riley, Reich, Glass) in Mertens 1983 and Schwarz 1996 have been made obsolete by Potter 2000, although Mertens’s polemical final chapter remains unanswered. While there is much less Anglophone discussion of minimalist and repetitive tendencies in European music, Delaere, et al. 2004 and Beirens 2006 represent notable exceptions; see also Beirens’s contribution to Potter, et al. 2013.
Beirens, Maarten. “The Identity of European Minimal Music as Reflected in the Works of Louis Andriessen, Karel Goeyvaerts, Gavin Bryars and Michael Nyman: A Music-Analytical Study.” PhD diss., Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, 2006.
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An in-depth exploration of the relations between the American notion of minimal music and the compositional output of four European composers: Belgian Karel Goeyvaerts, Dutchman Louis Andriessen, and British composers Gavin Bryars and Michael Nyman. Primarily a formalist approach, which provides in-depth analytical discussions of a wide range of works from all four composers, with extended musical examples, reductions, and illustrations.
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Delaere, Mark, Maarten Beirens, and Hilary Staples. “Minimal Music in the Low Countries.” Tijdschift van die Koninklijke Vereniging voor Nederlandse Muziekgeschiedenis 54.1 (2004): 31–78.
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Presents key findings of Beirens 2006 in a more compact form and in a more easily accessible venue, as does Beirens’s chapter in Potter, et al. 2013.
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Mertens, Wim. American Minimal Music: La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass. Translated by J. Hautekiet. London: Kahn Averill, 1983.
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For a long time, Mertens’s monograph was the only book-length treatment of American minimal music. Its structure is idiosyncratic: after four chapters, each devoted to one of the canonical four minimalists, the book finishes with a theoretical-historical exposition of basic experimentalist concepts and a final, Adorno-inspired section on “ideology.” Interestingly, his ideological verdict on repetitive music is quite negative, painting it as regressive and politically reactionary.
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Potter, Keith. Four Musical Minimalists: La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
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Keith Potter, a working critic, musicologist, and editor, has been one of the most influential musicological voices in the discourse around American minimal music. His 2000 monograph is the definitive musicological treatment of the four “canonical” minimalists. Each composer is given a full life-and-works treatment, based on interviews, analysis, and textual study. Key works are analyzed, and copious musical examples and autographs are still, in some cases, the only published ones extant.
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Potter, Keith, Kyle Gann, and Pwyll ap Siôn, eds. The Ashgate Research Companion to Minimalist and Postminimalist Music. Farnham, UK, and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013.
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This collection summarizes the 21st-century state of research on minimalist music, gathering together essays from senior scholars, participant performers, critics, and the rising generation of musicologists. The volume is laid out in six parts, covering: the historical and regional position of minimalist music (Part I); minimalist music considered alongside other media (II, III); analytical and aesthetic perspectives (IV); pop and other musical repertories (V); and issues of performance practice (VI). The volume is particularly strong in discussion of minimalism and the moving image, with essays devoted to film, theater, and television. It also contains the only discussion of minimalism in Serbia published in English. The volume concludes with a full list of the scholarly literature cited by its twenty-two authors, an excellent starting point for any literature survey on minimal music.
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Schwarz, K. Robert. Minimalists. London: Phaidon, 1996.
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Schwarz was one of the first to do musicological style analysis of minimal music, focusing initially on Steve Reich (Schwarz 1980–1981, Schwarz 1990, both cited under Style Analysis). This book, aimed at nonspecialists, covers the canonical four minimalists, some key postminimalists (John Adams, Meredith Monk), and three influential European composers often grouped with them (Michael Nyman, Louis Andriessen, Arvo Pärt).
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Postminimalism and Beyond
“What happened after minimalism?” has turned out to be a key music-historiographic question at the turn of the 21st century. Fink 2004 is a historiographic overview of stylistic and ideological developments, while Gann 1994 and Gann 2006 frame the argument that there was a coherent “postminimalist” generation of experimental composers born in the 1940s, and a next generation of “totalists,” largely born in the late 1950s. Heisinger 1989 and Brown 2010 are early and late takes on the question of audibility and strictness of process in postminimalist music of the 1970s and 1980s.
Brown, Galen H. “Process as Means and Ends in Minimalist and Postminimalist Music.” Perspectives of New Music 48.2 (Summer 2010): 180–192.
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Discusses the transition from minimalism to postminimalism in terms of their differing attitude toward musical processes. Minimalists value discernible processes, whereas postminimalists are less concerned with audibility; processes change from being ends-oriented to means-oriented; and the use of conceptualism gives way to the “traditionally musical.” Identifies Duckworth’s The Time Curve Preludes (1977–1978) and Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians (1976) as key pieces.
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Fink, Robert. “(Post-)Minimalism(s) 1975–2000: The Search for a New Mainstream.” In The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Music. Edited by Nicholas Cook and Anthony Pope, 539–556. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
DOI: 10.1017/CHOL9780521662567.022Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
A historiographical overview of developments in postminimalist music. Considers the constellation of postmodernism and postminimalism, questions of progress versus reaction, the influence of popular music and totalism (Gann 2006), and the coevolution of repetitive music, film, and drama.
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Gann, Kyle. “Downtown Beats for the 1990s: Rhys Chatham, Mikel Rouse, Michael Gordon, Larry Polansky, Ben Neill.” Contemporary Music Review 10.1 (1994): 33–50.
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A more technical introduction to totalism in musical composition, focusing on the complex superimposition of rhythmic patterns that imply multiple simultaneous tempos. The roots of this style are found in the work of Henry Cowell and Conlon Nancarrow.
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Gann, Kyle. “Totally ismic: Totalism.” In Music Downtown: Writings from the Village Voice. By Kyle Gann, 127–129. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.
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Originally published in Village Voice (20 July 1993). The article in which Gann coined the term “totalism.” Composers discussed include Ziporyn, Gordon, First, (Mikel) Rouse.
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Heisinger, Brent. “American Minimalism in the 1980s.” American Music 7.4 (Winter 1989): 430–447.
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One of the earliest examinations of postminimalism in a scholarly publication.
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Key Reviews and Contemporary Accounts
The critical reception of minimalism is well documented. Since the 1970s, a series of important New York-based music critics (Andrew Porter, Tom Johnson, Kyle Gann, Alex Ross) have covered the Downtown musical scene, giving consistent attention to minimalist and postminimalist premieres; much of this reportage has now been collected and reissued in book form, as in Johnson 1989 and Gann 2006. This section of the bibliography provides a survey of representative reporting on musical minimalism. Early press accounts, like vanden Heuvel 1966, have a “can you believe this” air, and Lipman 1985 shows that minimal music had some eloquent detractors in the mainstream media; but New Yorker critic Andrew Porter set the tone with positive coverage of Einstein on the Beach (Porter 1976) and Satyagraha (Porter 1981), while Michael Nyman 1980 argued the critical case against “intellectual complexity in music” to the art world. Thanks to sustained coverage by the Village Voice, collected in Johnson 1989 and Gann 2006, minimalism has, on the whole, been well served in the musical press.
Gann, Kyle. Music Downtown: Writings from the Village Voice. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.
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The successor to Tom Johnson on the Downtown music beat at the Village Voice, Gann is also a talented postminimalist composer. From 1986 to the late 1990s, he was a regular chronicler of the new music scene in New York, and his witty prose style and strong opinions make him one of the most consistently readable journalistic critics of the period. As a composer-critic, Gann worked actively to name, define, and promote progressive stylistic tendencies in repetitive music.
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Johnson, Tom. The Voice of New Music: New York City, 1972–1982. Paris: Editions 75, 1989.
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Tom Johnson, himself a process music composer of real distinction, was hugely influential as the “Downtown” music reporter for The Village Voice in the 1970s. He wrote cleanly, transparently, and placed sympathetic evocation of the experience of new music above rhetorical flash or ideological argument. Johnson was present at many important minimalist premieres, and contributed paradigm-defining essays to the critic canon surrounding the music of what he called the “New York Hypnotic School.”
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Lipman, Samuel. “Einstein’s Long March to Brooklyn.” New Criterion 3.2 (February 1985): 15–24.
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Those least sympathetic to minimalism in music often provide the most compelling account of its political and cultural implications. This essay, prompted by the 1984 revival of the Philip Glass-Robert Wilson collaboration Einstein on the Beach, could not be more dismissive of the aims of the duo; but in his attempts to figure out why everyone else seemed to think Einstein mattered, Lipman, founder of the conservative magazine the New Criterion, created an unforgettable portrait of the opera, its audience, and a cultural moment.
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Nyman, Michael. “Against Intellectual Complexity in Music.” October 13 (1980): 81–89.
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A concise overview of the “New Simplicity” in experimental music, for an art-critical audience. The derivation of a minimalist aesthetic from an idiosyncratic reading of serialism (Feldman, Reich) and as a logical outgrowth of the anti-aesthetics of John Cage (La Monte Young, British systems music) is defended as both rigorous in theory and perceptually complex in practice.
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Page, Tim. “Framing the River: A Minimalist Primer.” High Fidelity/New Music America, November 1981: 64–68, 117.
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A brilliant and wide-ranging introduction to minimalism for those just becoming aware of it in 1981. Page, who also wrote on popular music for a broad audience, provides an engaging tour, introducing more cultural commentary than was usual in writing from the New York Downtown scene.
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Porter, Andrew. “Many-Colored Glass,” review of Einstein on the Beach. New Yorker, 13 December 1976: 164.
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One of the first consequential positive reviews of minimalism in the “mainstream” press. Porter’s take makes the case that the collaboration of Glass and Wilson had been mutually beneficial, creating a new kind of Gesamtkunstwerk with “austere” formal control and beauty. Glass’s music is placed in the context of 20th-century modernism (Satie, Ravel, Stockhausen).
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Porter, Andrew. “Gospel of Peace,” review of Satyagraha. New Yorker, 17 August 1981: 102.
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Porter’s review of Satyagraha qualifies as a “rave.” This canonization by Porter can be seen to mark the beginning of minimalism as a cultural dominant in contemporary music.
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Rockwell, John. “The Death and Life of Minimalism.” New York Times, 21 December 1986.
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One of the first pieces of journalistic criticism to consider minimalism in music as a historical style centered in the 1970s, one whose time might well have passed, and to outline the terms of a growing postmodernist backlash against it. Its final line is a prophetic prediction: “Post-minimalism, anyone?”
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Ross, Alex. “The Harmonist: John Adams Takes the Agony Out of Modern Music.” New Yorker, 8 January 2001: 40–46.
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An extended feature article that anoints the postminimalist John Adams as the standard bearer for 21st-century American art music. Strong emphasis on Adams as a native composer, and as the latest example of the “maverick” tradition going back through Cage, rock, and jazz to Charles Ives. Adams’s newest work (at the time), the nativity oratorio El Niño, is discussed in detail.
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vanden Heuvel, Jean. “The Fantastic Sounds of La Monte Young.” Vogue, May 1966: 198.
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An oddity. Jean vanden Heuvel, née Stein, was the highly-educated scion of a famous Hollywood family, a member by marriage of the WASP establishment, and a former editor at the Paris Review. This first-person account both communicates the excitement of “bohemian” New York in the 1960s and provides evidence of the small distance between the intersecting Manhattan art worlds of fashion, glamour, and the avant-garde.
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Composer Interviews
Published collections of interviews with composers since the 1970s have repeatedly included minimalists, especially the canonical quartet of Young, Riley, Reich, and Glass. Duckworth 1995 is a good starting place for lengthy interviews that include discussion of the composers’ biography, aesthetics, and characteristic style. Ashley 2000 (a publication of interviews conducted in the 1970s) and Zimmermann 1976 feature candid early interviews. Gagne and Caras 1982, Strickland 1991, and Gagne 1993 place the minimalists within the larger context of American music, while Kelly 2013 includes Monk, Oliveros, and Vandervelde in a series of interviews with female composers in the United States. English minimalists have received far less attention: Anderson 1983 (while not strictly focused on interviews) contains significant excerpts from the author’s conversations with John White, Gavin Bryars, and Michael Nyman. Bryars is the only minimalist in Griffiths 1985.
Anderson, Virginia. “British Experimental Music: Cornelius Cardew and His Contemporaries.” MA diss., University of Redlands, 1983.
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Although primarily a survey of the life and works of Cardew and associated composers, this thesis is now particularly valuable for extended excerpts from the author’s interviews with John White, Gavin Bryars, and Michael Nyman.
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Ashley, Robert. Music with Roots in the Aether: Interviews with and Essays about Seven American Composers. Cologne: MusikTexte, 2000.
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Published version of the “casual and forthright” interviews Ashley conducted with seven composers for his opera for television Music with Roots in the Aether (1976). Each interview is followed by an essay about the composer’s life and works, offering fascinating portraits of these composers earlier in their careers. Includes Glass, Riley, Lucier, and Oliveros.
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Duckworth, William. Talking Music: Conversations with John Cage, Philip Glass, Laurie Anderson, and Five Generations of American Experimental Composers. New York and London: Schirmer, 1995.
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Insightful interviews conducted by postminimalist composer Duckworth. The “Minimalists” section features all four canonical first-generation composers: Young (interviewed with his wife and artistic partner, Marian Zazeela), Riley, Reich, and Glass. Also includes interviews with Pauline Oliveros (“Avant-Garde”), Meredith Monk, Laurie Anderson (“Performance Artists”), and Glenn Branca (“Post-Moderns”).
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Gagne, Cole. Soundpieces 2: Interviews with American Composers. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow, 1993.
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In the follow-up to Soundpieces (Gagne and Caras 1982), Gagne talks to the other half of the canonical first-generation quartet of minimalist composers: Terry Riley and La Monte Young, who is interviewed with his partner, Marian Zazeela. Also includes interview with Glenn Branca and Pauline Oliveros. Interviews are preceded by short biographical introductions.
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Gagne, Cole, and Tracy Caras. Soundpieces: Interviews with American Composers. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow, 1982.
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Includes interviews with Glass and Reich. Conducted in the 1980s, the two interviews feature discussion of the composers’ training and early careers, as well as their major works from the 1970s. Interviews are preceded by short biographical introductions.
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Griffiths, Paul. New Sounds, New Personalities: British Composers of the 1980s in Conversation with Paul Griffiths. London: Faber, 1985.
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Short interview with Gavin Bryars includes a brief discussion of his relationship to the music of Reich and Glass.
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Kelly, Jennifer. In Her Own Words: Conversations with Composers in the United States. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013.
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Includes interviews with Meredith Monk, Pauline Oliveros, and Janika Vandervelde. Each interview is preceded by a short biographical sketch—which serves as a good introduction to the composer’s life, works, and aesthetics—and followed by a comprehensive works list.
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Strickland, Edward. American Composers: Dialogues on Contemporary Music. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991.
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Extended interviews conducted in the late 1980s by one of the early authorities on minimalism (see Strickland 1993, cited under Experimental Music). Includes brief biographical sketches and dialogues with all four canonical minimalists (Young, Riley, Reich, and Glass), as well as Meredith Monk and John Adams.
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Zimmermann, Walter. Desert Plants: Conversations with 23 American Musicians. Vancouver, BC: Aesthetic Research Centre, 1976.
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A quirky series of interviews conducted by the sympathetic German experimental composer Zimmermann, whose unexpurgated “realistic” transcriptions vividly evoke their interactions. Includes extended interviews with Glass and Oliveros. Reich is represented only by a reproduction of two pages of score from what would become Music for 18 Musicians; and Young by a brief phone conversation discussing terms for an interview.
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The Four Canonical Minimalists
Although Michael Nyman is widely credited as the first critic to write about “minimal music,” his usage bears little resemblance to our current understanding of the term. Instead, the 1968 review he published under that title focused on repertoire that featured minimal (traditional) musical content (See Nyman 2013, cited under Michael Nyman). In 1972, Tom Johnson became the first writer to group together in print four composers from the “New York Hypnotic School” who would anchor the minimalist canon: La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Philip Glass, and Steve Reich (see Johnson 1989, cited under Key Reviews and Contemporary Accounts). A few years later, in Nyman’s Experimental Music (Nyman 1974, cited under Experimental Music), this quartet appeared for the first time explicitly under the label “minimalism.” Subsequent studies, including Mertens 1983 and Potter 2000 (both cited under Minimal Music), would cement the status of Young, Riley, Reich, and Glass as the canonical minimalist quartet. The large body of literature by and on these composers reflects their long-standing preeminence, gradual acceptance into the academy, and, especially for Reich and Glass, significant commercial success. Important primary sources include Young’s MELA Foundation website, Glass’s account of his first three operas (Glass 1995, cited under Philip Glass), and a collection of Reich’s writing from 1965–2000 (Reich 2002, cited under Steve Reich: Basic Sources, Collections). The secondary sources collected in this section include some of the earliest scholarship on minimalism, and reflect the entire scope of critical inquiry into this repertoire. The sections on these four individual composers do not include sources found in the General Surveys section; nor do they include writings that are primarily analytical in methodology, cultural in focus, or concerned with the interaction of musical minimalism with other artistic media.
La Monte Young
Writing on the music of La Monte Young tends to cluster around several issues: his relationship with post-Cage experimentalism, especially the Fluxus movement; his use of just intonation drones and extended timescales; his Mormon upbringing; and the unique metaphysical claims he makes for his sound installations and musical works. The key source for “authorized” information about the composer and his works is the website of the MELA Foundation, curated by the composer and his life partner, visual artist Marian Zazeela, and the collection of writings and interview collated in Duckworth 1996. (Young 1969 contains key writings from his pre-minimalist Fluxus period.) Much of the secondary literature would have to be classified as “unauthorized,” since Young determinedly restricts access to his archive of tapes and documents, out of an innate perfectionism, a desire to control the reception of his music, and a not entirely unjustified paranoia about his image as an authoritarian musical “guru” who has appropriated the musical labor of others. Kyle Gann has done impressive detective work on Young’s tuning systems, much of which is accessible from his La Monte Young web page; Gann 1993 is a theoretical dissection of Young’s magnum opus, The Well-Tuned Piano, supplementing the composer’s account from 1987. Critical work on Young is not extensive: Cardew 1966 is a characteristic reaction to Young’s early drone music, surveyed musicologically in Sun 2006. Grimshaw 2011 is a critical biography published over Young’s objections, and thus stripped of all musical examples and documents; the musical examples in Grimshaw 2005 thus remain indispensable. “Lost” composer Terry Jennings, whose life and works are documented for the first time in Boutwell 2014, is mostly known for his association with Young.
Boutwell, Brett. “Terry Jennings, the Lost Minimalist.” American Music 32.1 (Spring 2014): 82–107.
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The most comprehensive overview of the composer’s life and works to date. Using archival materials as well as interviews he conducted with Jennings’s colleagues, Boutwell details Jennings’s biography and analyzes some of his piano pieces. Article concludes with a list of Jennings’s compositions.
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Cardew, Cornelius. “One Sound: La Monte Young.” Musical Times 107.1485 (November 1966): 959–960.
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One of the first serious journalistic accounts of “minimalism” in music, considered from within the world of the post-Cage avant-garde.
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Duckworth, William, ed. Sound and Light: La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1996.
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The primary source for analytical and musicological discussion of Young’s work, including extended discussions of Young’s compositional ideology, his use of just tuning systems, and the interaction of his musical installations with the accompanying light tracery installations of Zazeela.
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Gann, Kyle. “La Monte Young’s The Well-Tuned Piano.” Perspectives of New Music 31.1 (Winter 1993): 134–162.
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Theoretical exegesis of The Well-Tuned Piano, whose frequency structure Gann had to work out by trial and error on his own before convincing the composer to speak to him about it. This analysis supplements Young’s own narrative liner notes for the 1987 Gramavision release.
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Grimshaw, Jeremy. “Music of a ‘More Exalted Sphere’: Compositional Practice, Biography, and Cosmology in the Music of La Monte Young.” PhD diss., Eastman School of Music, 2005.
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This doctoral dissertation remains the most well-documented musicological study of La Monte Young’s life and work, featuring excerpts from scores and notations found nowhere else, including Grimshaw’s own monograph (Grimshaw 2011). The reason? Young withdrew permission to reproduce key documents and scores after demanding and being refused editorial control over the scholar’s work. (A full and unintentionally revealing account of Young’s side of the dispute can be found on the MELA Foundation website.)
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Grimshaw, Jeremy. Draw a Straight Line and Follow It: The Music and Mysticism of La Monte Young. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
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In his monograph, Grimshaw marshals musicological analysis, biography, ethnography, and cultural criticism to trace Young’s life and work as a “straight line” leading from his early upbringing as a Mormon through 1960s experimentalism to the cosmological maximalism of his Dream House sound installation, now entering its third decade. Also features a discussion of Young’s longtime engagement with the North Indian vocal practice of Pandit Pran Nath.
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La Monte Young. Edited by Kyle Gann.
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Kyle Gann has been the most authoritative theoretical exponent of La Monte Young’s closely held compositional secrets, focusing on the tuning systems Young developed for his extended just-intonation works. Gann’s analytical notes and thoughts on a number of pieces are available on his website.
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Website of Young and Zazeela’s MELA Foundation. Includes collection of writings by the composer, including program notes, interviews, and polemical essays.
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Sun, Cecilia. “The Theatre of Minimalist Music: Analyzing La Monte Young’s Composition 1960 #7.” Context 31 (2006): 37–50.
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Uses Young’s Composition 1960 #7—a single perfect fifth, “to be held for a long time”—as the starting point for an examination of minimalism’s challenges to established analytical methodologies. Places piece within the context of debates over the musical structure and music’s objecthood, as well as contemporary discussions in the visual arts about minimalism’s theatricality.
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Young, La Monte. Selected Writings. Munich: Heiner Friedrich, 1969.
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This collection focuses largely on the earlier, Fluxus-influenced works of Young, including his Composition 1960 series of word-art pieces.
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Young, La Monte. “Notes on The Well-Tuned Piano.” Liner notes to recording of The Well-Tuned Piano 81 X 25, 6:17:50–11:18:59 PM NYC. New York: Gramavision, 1987.
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A very detailed set of liner notes, with timings and description of the work’s expressive and symbolic content, along with other key essays about Young’s ideas and work.
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Terry Riley
Given the centrality of Riley in minimalism’s canon, there is surprisingly little writing about his music. Riley’s official website, the Domain of Terry Riley provides basic factual information on his life and works. The scholarly literature focuses on In C (1964), the piece generally credited as the first piece of pulsed minimalism. The presence of Carl 2009 in Oxford University Press’s Studies in Musical Genesis, Structure, and Interpretation, which places In C in the company of Beethoven’s “Diabelli” Variations, Wagner’s Das Rheingold, and Mahler’s 4th Symphony, attests to its canonical status. Carl 2009 treats all aspects of In C, Bernstein 2008 focuses on its premiere at the San Francisco Tape Music Center, and Reed 2011 provides an analytical perspective.
Bernstein, David, ed. The San Francisco Tape Music Center: 1960s Counterculture and the Avant-Garde. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008.
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Based on meticulous archival research and newly conducted interviews, this collection of essays offers a detailed account of Riley’s early career. Provides a rich cultural, musical, and historical context for the famous 1964 premiere of In C. Includes reproductions of photographs and programs, as well as a DVD.
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Carl, Robert. Terry Riley’s In C. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195325287.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Carl’s comprehensive study includes detailed information on the context of In C within Riley’s career, its premiere in 1964, the seminal 1968 recording, as well as an analysis of the piece. The book includes valuable insights gained from the author’s interviews with Riley and others involved in the performance and recording of In C.
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Riley’s official site. The information on performance dates are current, but the biography, discography, and lists of works and scores only go up to about 2010.
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Reed, S. Alexander. “In C on Its Own Terms: A Statistical and Historical View.” Perspectives of New Music 49.1 (Winter 2011): 47–78.
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Using pitch-class theory and statistical analysis, Reed analyzes the pitch content and overall structure of In C as presented in Riley’s scores and instructions. Also includes a discussion of the work’s revision history.
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Philip Glass
Even though Glass has attracted less scholarly attention than his contemporary and one-time colleague Steve Reich, the existing literature features York 1981 (one of the earliest analytical essays on any minimalist music) and Richardson 1999 (the first book devoted to a single minimalist piece). Haskins 2005 provides another early analytical take on Glass’s music. The acknowledgement in the 1990s of Glass’s importance in postwar composition is reflected in the republication of Glass 1995 (his own account of his operatic trilogy) and Kostelanetz 1997 (an important collection of writings). Glass’s changing relationship to the art-music mainstream is reflected in Garland 1983, a profile of the composer published in the jazz magazine Downbeat, as well as Sennett 1984 and Haskins 2002, which directly address Glass’s commercial success and move from the experimental fringe into the musical mainstream. Clark 1989, Haskins 2002, and Chapman 2013 treat Glass as a performer as well as a composer in their discussions of the Philip Glass Ensemble.
Chapman, David. “Collaboration, Presence, and Community: The Philip Glass Ensemble in Downtown New York, 1966–1976.” PhD diss., Washington University in St. Louis, 2013.
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Using archival research and oral histories, Chapman locates the early years of the Philip Glass Ensemble within the milieu of New York’s Downtown art and music scene. Chapman examines the significance of the locations of some of the group’s performances, and details the contributions of collaborators such as Jon Gibson and Joan la Barbara.
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Clark, J. Bunker, ed. “The Composer and Performer and Other Matters: A Panel Discussion with Virgil Thomson and Philip Glass, Moderated by Gregory Sandow.” American Music 7.2 (Summer 1989): 181–204.
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Transcription of the panel discussion, which took place in 1987. The main subject of the conversation was the relationship between composer and performers. Glass spoke at length about the formation of the Philip Glass Ensemble, his work with singers and directors in operas (focusing on the then-new Satyagraha), and his collaborations with traditional orchestras and conductors.
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Garland, David. “Philip Glass: Theater of Glass.” Downbeat 50.12 (December 1983): 16–18.
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Short profile on the 46-year-old Glass, published as he was working on Akhnaten. Includes extended passages from the composer himself, speaking about his training, influences, and aesthetics.
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Glass, Philip. Music by Philip Glass. 2d ed. Edited by Robert T. Jones. New York: Da Capo, 1995.
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An early, and significant, statement by Glass on his own music. Focuses mostly on the “portrait opera trilogy”: Einstein on the Beach (1976), Satyagraha (1979), and Akhnaten (1984). For each opera, Glass provides details of its genesis, discusses salient musical techniques, and reproduces the full libretto. First edition published in 1987.
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Haskins, Rob. “Philip Glass and Michael Riesman: Two Interviews.” Musical Quarterly 86.3 (Autumn 2002): 508–529.
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Introductory essay surveys minimalism’s move from the avant-garde fringe into the mainstream. The two interviews were conducted in 1991. Glass speaks about the development of his compositional technique, the chronology of his early works, and the Philip Glass Ensemble. Riesman details the history of the keyboards used in the Glass Ensemble.
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Haskins, Rob. “Another Look at Philip Glass: Aspects of Harmony and Formal Design in Early Works and Einstein on the Beach.” Journal of Experimental Music Studies, 12 September 2005.
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Through analysis of Glass’s instrumental works (starting with Two Pages) and Einstein on the Beach, Haskins details a continuity of compositional technique in the composer’s early pieces. Pays particular attention to harmonic structures, formal designs, and Glass’s use of processes.
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Kostelanetz, Richard, ed. Writings on Glass: Essays, Interviews, Criticism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.
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Best introduction to early writings on Glass (1970–1993). It features contributions from many influential critics, including Tim Page, Tom Johnson, and Kyle Gann. Essays are divided into three parts: a brief overview of Glass’s career up to the end of the 1980s, and two larger sections devoted to instrumental music and music for theater and film.
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Philip Glass (official website).
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Includes latest news on Glass’s music, a calendar of events, and full listings of recordings, compositions, and books (by and on Glass).
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Richardson, John. Singing Archaeology: Philip Glass’s “Akhnaten.” Hanover, NH: University of New England Press, 1999.
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The first scholarly monograph devoted to a single work by a minimalist composer, and an early example of a critical musicological approach to this repertoire. Covers all aspects of Akhnaten from its genesis, to culturally grounded discussions of the work, to an account of its reception.
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Sennett, Richard. “Twilight of the Tenured Composer: The New Music and its Public.” Harper’s 269 (December 1984).
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This review essay on a performance of Glass’s The Photographer at the Brooklyn Academy of Music attests to the composer’s commercial success. Sennett places Glass’s popularity within the context of a younger generation of composers who have successfully forged a new relationship with an audience conditioned to appreciate the minimalist aesthetic by television and other forms of mass media.
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York, Wesley. “Form and Process in Two Pages of Philip Glass.” Sonus 1.2 (Spring 1981): 28–50.
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An early, and for a long time the only, analytical essay on Glass’s instrumental music. With a number of illuminating musical examples and charts, York discusses Glass’s small- and large-scale processes, as well as the overall structure in Two Pages. Includes York’s own composer-approved transcription of the piece. (Also published in Kostelanetz 1997.)
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Steve Reich
Steve Reich has been the “acceptable” minimalist composer for much of his career; modernist-inclined composers, critics, scholars, and (especially) theorists who dismiss repetitive music as generally unworthy of comment tend to make an exception for him. Accordingly, the analytical literature on Reich’s music is larger, older, and more varied than for any other minimalist composer (see Analytical Perspectives). The main focus of this literature early on was on Reich’s rhythmic techniques, but more recent discussions have followed the composer himself in assigning an increasing importance to the semifunctional use of tonal harmony. The analytical focus on Reich has receded somewhat in recent years, giving way to more critical reflections on politics and culture. In particular, the complex relationship of Reich’s rhythmic processes to non-European models (West African drumming, Balinese gamelan) has been the subject of ideological critique. Another fruitful line of critical inquiry has been into the composer’s engagement with his Jewish identity, particularly in the context of the Holocaust, Israeli nationalism, and the post 9/11 world order.
Basic Sources, Collections
Steve Reich has been an articulate and influential writer on his own music. Many program notes and interviews can be found at the composer’s well-curated official website, while Reich 2002 collects most of his major aesthetic statements.
Reich, Steve. Writings on Music, 1965–2000. Edited and with an Introduction by Paul Hillier. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
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A revised and expanded version of the composer’s Writings About Music (1974). Includes interviews, program notes, and the key 1968 essay “Music as a Gradual Process.”
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Steve Reich (official website).
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The composer’s website, with links to writings, scores, etc.
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Style Analysis
Reich’s penchant for systematic development of musical ideas has often been analogized to his careful development of a musical style over time. Schwarz 1980–1981 and Schwarz 1990 make this point explicitly, while Taruskin 1997 broadens the focus to include Reich’s influence on the stylistic development of new music at the millennium.
Schwarz, K. Robert. “Steve Reich: Music as a Gradual Process.” Perspectives of New Music 19.1–2 (1980–1981): 373–392.
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Continued in Perspectives of New Music 20.1–2 (1981–1982): 225–286. One of the first analytical discussions by an “outsider” (i.e., not a composer) to appear in print. This extended two-part article provides a narrative of the composer’s stylistic evolution as a “gradual process,” beginning with the tape works of the mid-1960s and ending with a detailed discussion of Tehillim (1981). Includes multiple music examples in full score.
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Schwarz, K. Robert. “Process vs. Intuition in the Recent Works of Steve Reich and John Adams.” American Music 8.3 (Fall 1990): 245–273.
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One of the first consequential treatments of what would become known as “postminimalism” in the 1980s compositions of Reich and John Adams. Includes multiple music examples in full score.
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Taruskin, Richard. “A Sturdy Musical Bridge to the 21st Century.” New York Times, 24 August 1997.
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A forthright argument for Reich’s canonization as a great composer by one of the late 20th century’s most influential musical thinkers. Considers Reich’s relation to the Holocaust, rhythmic issues, and the writing of music history.
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The Art-Historical Context
Two important articles by Ross Cole (Cole 2012 and Cole 2014, provide a radically different historical picture of Reich’s early career than the gradual, inner-directed evolution outlined by Schwarz 1980–1981 (cited under Steve Reich: Style Analysis). The composer’s pivotal 1960s output is dis-unified and reconnected to the varied artistic circles within which he moved during that chaotic decade.
Cole, Ross. “‘Fun, Yes, but Music?’ Steve Reich and the San Francisco Bay Area’s Cultural Nexus, 1962–65.” Journal of the Society for American Music 6.3 (August 2012): 315–348.
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Links Reich’s Bay Area works to the fertile scene around the San Francisco Tape Music Center and the loose, rebel art movement known as “California Funk.”
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Cole, Ross. “‘Sound Effects (O.K. Music)’: Steve Reich and the Visual Arts in New York City 1966–68.” Twentieth-Century Music 11.2 (September 2014): 217–244.
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Traces the roots of Reich’s process-dominated aesthetic of the later 1960s to immersion in the Downtown NYC art scene of the time.
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Rhythmic Theory
The three essays cited here demonstrate a long-standing trope in the music-theoretical reception of Steve Reich: the phenomenological explication of the “unintended consequences” of his gradual processes, in order to show, paradoxically, a composerly intentionality at work. Epstein 1986 was the first to attempt this, but a more formalized theoretical discussion in Cohn 1992 introduced the key metaphor: “beat-class transposition,” a notion by which Reich’s systematic pulse shifting could be modeled using the mathematical operations that already mapped twelve-tone pitch space. Roeder 2003 is a rigorous expansion of Cohn 1992 to include rhythmic “modulation” to and from a tonic; see also Roeder 2011 (cited under Analytical Perspectives), which brings this modulatory approach back to the triadic atonal music of Arvo Pärt.
Cohn, Richard. “Transpositional Combination of Beat-Class Sets in Steve Reich’s Phase-Shifting Music.” Perspectives of New Music 30.2 (1992): 146–177.
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Postulates that the rhythmic structure of Reich’s music can be parsed by analogy to serial procedures in twelve-tone music: phase shifting of musical material is equivalent to transposition of “beat classes”; patterns of attacks in a motif are beat-class sets; and the invariances of beat-class when sets are transposed in time is analogous to invariance under transposition in the pitch-class space.
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Epstein, Paul. “Pattern Structure and Process in Steve Reich’s Piano Phase.” Musical Quarterly 72.4 (1986): 494–502.
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Epstein was the first to work out the intervallic structures that result from the gradual canonic processes of Piano Phase (1967), enabling phenomenological analysis of the work as sounding music.
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Roeder, John. “Beat-Class Modulation in Steve Reich’s Music.” Music Theory Spectrum 25.2 (Fall 2003): 275–304.
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Extends the formal treatment of beat-class modulation in Reich’s music to include accent and pitch. Teleological analyses of Six Pianos, New York Counterpoint, and Four Sections.
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Race and Religion
Reich himself has problematized the contemporary art composer’s relationship with popular and non-Western music (see the essays in Reich 2002, cited under Steve Reich: Basic Sources, Collections, for numerous examples), expressing aversion to “superficial” approaches that copy the sound of other musical traditions, rather than their structure, as he has consistently claimed to do. Critical accounts in Gopinath 2004, Gopinath 2009, Gopinath 2011, and Scherzinger 2005 have begun to parse the political implications of Reich’s structural (and other) borrowings from, in particular, African and Afro-diasporic music, arguing that what appears to be distinctive invention from the perspective of Western musical modernism may be (unacknowledged) borrowing of a common practice from outside of it. Reich’s own Jewishness is also a kind of “otherness,” given the composer’s secular assimilated upbringing; Puca 1997 contextualizes Reich’s study of cantillation and there are a tantalizing few paragraphs in Seter 2014 about Reich’s relation to Israeli nationalism. Hepburn 2016 breaks new ground by basing the author’s hermeneutic reading of key works within the complex and evolving story of Steve Reich’s American-Jewish identity.
Gopinath, Sumanth. “‘A Composer Looks East’: Steve Reich and Discourse on Non-Western Music.” Glendora Review 3.3–4 (2004): 134–145.
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Discusses issues of authority, authenticity, and appropriation in Reich’s relationship to non-Western music. Relates works like Drumming to structure and social relations of the Ewe drumming upon which it is based.
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Gopinath, Sumanth. “The Problem of the Political in Steve Reich’s Come Out (1966).” In Sound Commitments: Avant-Garde Music and the Sixties. Edited by Robert Adlington, 121–144. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.
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Wide-ranging cultural contextualization of Reich’s piece within the aesthetic and political cross-currents of the 1960s. Critical of the use of avant-garde techniques to submerge the identity of the African American youth at its center.
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Gopinath, Sumanth. “Reich in Blackface: Oh Dem Watermelons and Radical Minstrelsy in the 1960s.” Journal of the Society for American Music 5.2 (2011): 139–193.
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A political and historical description of the “radical minstrel” music Reich wrote for the San Francisco Mime Troupe, with particular attention paid to moments that prefigure the repetitive style of the later 1960s.
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Hepburn, Ryan. “Trauma, Music, Testimony: The Holocaust, AIDS and 9/11 in Music by Reich, Corigliano and Adams.” PhD diss., Newcastle University, 2016.
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As part of a larger discussion of Reich’s musical reaction to both historical trauma (the Holocaust) and personal trauma (9/11), Hepburn explores the composer’s return to religious orthodoxy and his identification as a Jew. Discusses the use of Jewish themes and imagery in WTC 9/11.
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Puca, Antonella. “Steve Reich and Hebrew Cantillation.” Musical Quarterly 81.4 (Winter 1997): 537–555.
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Based on the article on Hebrew cantillation that appears in Reich 2002 (cited under Steve Reich: Basic Sources, Collections), Puca discusses the composer’s turn to Jewish liturgical practice and its influence on works like Tehillim.
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Scherzinger, Martin. “Curious Intersections, Uncommon Magic: Steve Reich’s It’s Gonna Rain.” Current Musicology 79–80 (2005): 207–244.
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A strong critique of discourse around Steve Reich’s early music—including the composer’s own accounts—that erases the presence of black voices and African compositional practices.
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Seter, Ronit. “Israelism: Nationalism, Orientalism, and the Israeli Five.” Musical Quarterly 97.2 (Summer 2014): 238–308.
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A survey of the way nationalist musical idioms came to be defined in the postwar Jewish state. Provides background for Reich’s compositional interest in Mizrahi chant.
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Reich and the Holocaust
One aspect of Reich’s Jewish identity that has received sustained critical attention is the semiautobiographical engagement with the Holocaust in one of his most critically acclaimed works, Different Trains, for string quartet and tape (1988). Three quite different approaches are cited here: Cumming 1997 takes a psychoanalytic approach to the work’s sonic surface, reading its constant repetition as refusal of identification with overwhelming trauma; Hepburn 2016, as part of a larger thesis about music and trauma, hypothesizes the opposite, that the work encodes Reich’s desire, as an American Jew whose family escaped the Holocaust, to identify himself with the actual survivors whose testimony he incorporates. Wlodarski 2010, placing Reich within the larger context of Holocaust memorial art and literature, uses archival research to evaluate and critique the work’s use of survivor testimony to promulgate a “documentary aesthetic.”
Cumming, Naomi. “The Horrors of Identification: Reich’s Different Trains.” Perspectives of New Music 35.1 (1997): 129–152.
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Focuses on the way pervasive musical repetition, and the narrow sonic “space” it creates, provides a psychic escape from potentially crushing identification with suffering.
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Hepburn, Ryan. “Trauma, Music, Testimony: The Holocaust, AIDS and 9/11 in Music by Reich, Corigliano and Adams.” PhD diss., Newcastle University, 2016.
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Analyzes Different Trains within the larger discourse of the Holocaust as traumatic event. Supplements the archival research in Wlodarski 2010 with analysis of the composer’s own documents, held at the Paul Sacher Institute in Basel. Reich’s own identity as a Jew is interrogated.
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Wlodarski, Amy Lynn. “The Testimonial Aesthetics of Different Trains.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 63.1 (Spring 2010): 99–141.
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By going back to the archives in which Reich worked, Wlodarski uncovers the subtle ways in which the composer’s selection and editing imposes deeply ingrained tropes of Holocaust narrative on his audio source material.
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Other Minimalist and Postminimalist Composers
The diverse composers listed in this section attest to the wide array of styles now associated with the “minimalist” and “postminimalist” labels. Composers who developed the pulse-pattern minimalism of Riley, Reich, and Glass include John (Coolidge) Adams and Michael Nyman, while Louis Andriessen and the Bang on a Can composers (his students Julia Wolfe, David Lang, and Michael Gordon) also admitted the influence of Afro-diasporic popular music to their compositional style. Explorations of drones and stasis by John Luther Adams, Pauline Oliveros, Tony Conrad, and Phill Niblock demonstrate interest in long tones and just intonation outside of the singular figure of La Monte Young. Meredith Monk perhaps best exemplifies minimalism’s interdisciplinary beginnings in her theater pieces that marry music, dance, and experimental vocal techniques. Although not every piece by Arvo Pärt, Henryk Górecki, and John Tavener shows minimalist influence, the reductive tendencies and austere spirituality of most of their pieces have resulted in their grouping under the label of “holy minimalism.”
John (Coolidge) Adams
Aside from Reich and Glass, Adams has garnered the most scholarly and critical attention of all minimalist and postminimalist composers. Scholarship dates back to the early 1990s, not long after Nixon in China (1987) established him as a major American compositional voice. Excepting Johnson 1993—cited under Stylistic Analysis—an analytical essay on his early instrumental music, the available literature focuses on Adams’s texted music, in particular those with political resonances: the two operas Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer, and his 9/11 memorial piece On the Transmigration of Souls. Published scholarship on the operas shares an interest in issues of representation, especially of real-life characters from the recent past; see Representation and Politics. The question of whether The Death of Klinghoffer is anti-Semitic has generated heated debate among scholars, critics, and journalists in academic publications as well as the popular press (see Klinghoffer Controversy).
Basic Sources, Collections
Adams’s own perspective on his life and career are easily accessible in Adams 2008 (the composer’s own memoir) and May 2006 (a collection of previously published writings and new interviews). The composer’s own website (John Adams) provides more up-to-date information on Adams’s career.
Adams, John. Hallelujah Junction: Composing an American Life. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008.
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Part memoir and part explanation of his compositional process, Hallelujah Junction is Adams’s engagingly written account of his life and career. Includes discussion of his relationship to and movement away from minimalism, and complete chapters devoted to Nixon in China and Death of Klinghoffer.
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John Adams (official website).
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A good starting place to find information about Adams’s works, performances, recordings, and most recent news. Includes a “Works” section with links to individual pieces that provide details of available recordings and scores, instrumentation, length, premieres and other important performances, as well as brief overviews.
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May, Thomas, ed. The John Adams Reader: Essential Writings on an American Composer. Pompton Plains, NJ: Amadeus, 2006.
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This thorough collection of writings on John Adams includes mostly previously published articles from newspapers and magazines, program and liner notes, as well as new interviews conducted by May specifically for the collection. The comprehensive content covers Adams’s biography, individual works (from Shaker Loops to Doctor Atomic), significant collaborations, and critical reception (including the Klinghoffer controversy; for more on this, see Klinghoffer Controversy). Most of the writings are presented without any editorial commentary. Appendices include the text of the deleted “Rumor Scene” from The Death of Klinghoffer.
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Stylistic Analysis
Timothy Johnson adapts existing methods of musical analysis to propose models that can account for Adams’s stylistic characteristics in his early and most obviously minimalist works. Johnson 1993 focuses on instrumental pieces, and Johnson 2011 analyzes the opera Nixon in China.
Johnson, Timothy A. “Harmonic Vocabulary in the Music of John Adams: A Hierarchical Approach.” Journal of Music Theory 37.1 (Spring 1993): 117–156.
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Details a comprehensive analytical system—derived from pitch-class theory and established notions of hierarchy—to account for Adams’s mostly diatonic and static musical language. This article is largely theoretical, but Johnson does include musical examples, mostly from Adams’s early instrumental works.
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Johnson, Timothy A. John Adams’s “Nixon in China”: Musical Analysis, Historical and Political Perspectives. Farnham, UK, and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011.
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A detailed study of Nixon in China in its entirety. The sections on historical and political perspectives serve as a good overview for anyone interested in the work’s background and characters (both real and operatic). Neo-Riemannian music theory provides a consistent analytical model for the entire opera, but may prove difficult for nonspecialists and undergraduate students.
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Representation and Politics
Starting with his so-called “CNN operas,” Adams has often engaged with real-world events in his music. Each source listed below examines one of three such operatic works: Schwarz 1992, Kamuf 1993, and Daines 1995 all parse issues of representation and the relationship between the operatic characters and their real-life counterparts in Nixon in China; Kramer 2007 places Death of Klinghoffer within the wider context of contemporary American opera; and Blim 2013 examines the ways in which Adams’s On the Transmigration of Souls function as a 9/11 memorial piece. The question of whether The Death of Klinghoffer is anti-Semitic is taken up in a separate section on the Klinghoffer Controversy
Blim, Dan. “Meaningful Adjacencies”: Disunity and the Commemoration of 9/11 in John Adams’s On the Transmigration of Souls.” Journal of the Society for American Music 7.4 (November 2013): 382–420.
DOI: 10.1017/S1752196313000369Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
An examination of John Adams’s 9/11 commission that brings together cultural theories of mourning, trauma, and commemoration; musical analysis; and insights gleaned from audience surveys. Includes a discussion of the history of musical minimalism and politics, the work’s minimalist aesthetics, and the role that minimalism played in its construction as a memorial.
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Daines, Matthew. “Nixon’s Women: Gender Politics and Cultural Representation in Act 2 of Nixon in China.” Musical Quarterly 79.1 (Spring 1995): 6–34.
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Daines focuses on three female characters from Nixon in China: Pat Nixon, Madame Mao, and Ching-Hua (the fictional protagonist of the revolutionary ballet The Red Detachment of Women). Through a comparison between the historical figures and their operatic counterparts, Daines concludes that Nixon is one of a few operas that portray women who are equal to their male counterparts.
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Kamuf, Peggy. “The Replay’s the Thing.” In Opera through Other Eyes. Edited by David J. Levin, 79–105. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993.
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Kamuf, a literary critic, juxtaposes the opera Nixon in China (1987) with the real-life events of the presidential visit in 1972 and the Tiananmen Square student uprising of 1989. Paying particular attention to Alice Goodman’s libretto and Peter Sellars’s production, Kamuf examines the relationship between the stage work, real-life events, and the impact of media representation on the way they are constructed and perceived.
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Kramer, Lawrence. “The Great American Opera: Klinghoffer, Streetcar, and the Exception.” Opera Quarterly 23.1 (2007): 66–80.
DOI: 10.1093/oq/kbn015Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
A brief critical meditation on the relation of contemporary American opera to literature and canonicity.
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Schwarz, David. “Postmodernism, the Subject, and the Real in John Adams’s Nixon in China.” Indiana Theory Review 13.2 (Fall 1992): 107–135.
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Uses a postmodern notion of paradox to examine the relationships between Adams’s opera and US geopolitical enterprises. Discusses Nixon’s libretto, music, and relationship to its audience, using Althusser’s theory of “interpellation” and the Lacanian idea of the Real. Features musical analysis.
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The Klinghoffer Controversy
John Adams’s second opera, The Death of Klinghoffer, premiered in 1991 and took as its subject the bungled 1985 hijacking of the cruise liner Achille Lauro, during which a disabled American Jew, Leon Klinghoffer, was killed for no obvious reason. The original intention of Adams, director Peter Sellars, and librettist Alice Goodman was to use the power of opera to examine this small, grim, inconclusive episode from a mythopoetic perspective, avoiding easy outrage or the “taking of sides.” But the opera’s fate has been to become an index of the deepening gyre of conflict over Palestine within and around the American Jewish diaspora. After an extraordinarily harsh first reception in New York, in which the scenario was attacked as deliberately anti-Semitic by powerful critics and the Klinghoffer family itself, the opera disappeared from the American stage for a decade, only to find itself at the center of even more vituperative battles over musical censorship in the aftermath of the terror attacks of September 11, 2001. Our selection of references provides a historical overview of the controversy, including the strongly negative reviews of the premiere by neoconservative Jewish critics, including Rothstein 1991, Wieseltier 1991, and Lipman 1991, and the countervailing perspective of Palestinian activist and literary scholar Edward Said, in Said 1991. Then there is the sustained scholarly battle over Taruskin 2001, including a historicist, identity-focused take in Fink 2005, a political, anti-hegemonic one in Scherzinger 2007, the filmic analysis of Longobardi 2009, and finally the response in Taruskin 2009.
Fink, Robert. “Klinghoffer in Brooklyn Heights.” Cambridge Opera Journal 17.2 (2005): 173–213.
DOI: 10.1017/S0954586705001989Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Starts from a detailed reception history of the original run of New York performances in 1991, focusing on close reading of a “New York Jewish” comic scene later cut from the opera. Fink diagnoses Klinghoffer’s negative reception as symptomatic of fissures within late-20th-century American Jewish identity, and hazards a supportive moral reading of the authorial collective’s intentions.
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Lipman, Samuel. “The Second Death of Klinghoffer.” Commentary 92 (November 1991): 46–49.
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Lipman, founder and editor of the right-wing artistic review The New Criterion, was already on record linking minimalist opera to the shallowly liberal views of the “new class” of professionals and academics. Thus this strongly negative review was no surprise.
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Longobardi, Ruth Sara. “Re-producing Klinghoffer: Opera and Arab Identity before and after 9/11.” Journal of the Society for American Music 3.3 (August 2009): 273–310.
DOI: 10.1017/S1752196309990435Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Longobardi finds Penny Woolcock’s filmed mise-en-scène for the opera, which substitutes camera-enabled “documentary” realism for complex overlapping and doubling of singers, dancers, and video imagery, symptomatic of a general narrowing of the symbolic range available for the depiction of Palestinians during the global war on terror. She argues that the film reduces Adams’s music to an emotive soundtrack for a movie thriller about terror, obscuring the score’s motivic connections, which point to the common humanity of all participants in the hijacking.
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Rothstein, Edward. “Seeking Symmetry between Palestinians and Jews.” New York Times, 7 September 1991.
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The “official” review of Death of Klinghoffer from New York’s most influential newspaper. Rothstein’s negative verdict was decisive in subsequent reception, introducing the trope of “false moral equivalence.” Rothstein disliked the music as well.
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Said, Edward. “Korngold: Die tote Stadt; Beethoven: Fidelio; John Adams: The Death of Klinghoffer.” Nation 253.16 (11 November 1991): 596–600.
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The sole commentary on The Death of Klinghoffer from a Palestinian intellectual. Said’s take is measured, and he does not champion the opera uncritically, but he does note that the controversy around its “taking sides” is founded in the inability to recognize the pervasiveness of ideology in “non-political” artworks that do not challenge the status quo.
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Scherzinger, Martin. “Double Voices of Musical Censorship after 9–11.” In Music in the Post 9/11 World. Edited by Jonathan Ritter and J. Martin Daughtry, 91–122. New York: Routledge, 2007.
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Scherzinger uses the dispute over programming excerpts from the opera in the direct aftermath of 9/11 to examine the workings of censorship in a democracy under stress.
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Taruskin, Richard. “Music’s Dangers and the Case for Control.” New York Times, 9 December 2001.
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Richard Taruskin’s extremely influential contrarian take on the Boston Symphony cancellation, linking it to issues of censorship, anti-Semitism, and aesthetic autonomy that had long preoccupied him. Written from the perspective of a practicing musicologist, it bases its rejection of the opera’s politics on an opening scene cut from the prologue and a close reading of Adams’s orchestral textures. Provided the impetus for Fink 2005 and a key source for Scherzinger 2007.
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Taruskin, Richard. “The Danger of Music and the Case for Control.” In The Danger of Music and Other Anti-Utopian Essays. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009.
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Expanded version of Taruskin 2001, with a new afterword engaging with Fink 2005, Scherzinger 2007, and other commentary on the opera.
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Wieseltier, Leon. “The Death of Klinghoffer (BAM).” New Republic 205.14 (30 September 1991): 46.
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A full-scale, passionate attack on the opera’s representation of Jews from a noted Jewish public intellectual, writing in one of the key neoconservative publications of the day.
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John Luther Adams
Thanks in part to the growing field of ecomusicology and the championing of his music by Kyle Gann and Alex Ross, John Luther Adams has received more scholarly and critical attention than any other composer in this bibliography apart from Reich, Glass, and his near namesake John (Coolidge) Adams. Adams 2004 and Adams 2009 (the composers’ own writings) and Herzogenrath 2012 (an excellent collection of critical essays on Adams’s music) are excellent starting points. Morris 1998, Adams 2009, and Ross 2010 all focus on Adams’s relationship to the landscape and environment of his adopted home state of Alaska.
Adams, John Luther. Winter Music: Composing the North. Foreword by Kyle Gann. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2004.
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A collection of Adams’s writings. Also includes a discography, selected bibliography, catalog of works, and a CD with performances of Roar, Crossing in Phase-Space, and Red Arc/Blue Veil. Gann’s foreword (“John Luther Adams: Music as a Geography of the Spiritual”) is a good introduction to Adams, his compositional aesthetics, and his relationship to Alaska.
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Adams, John Luther. The Place Where You Go to Listen: In Search of an Ecology of Music. Foreword by Alex Ross. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2009.
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Documents the creation of his installation piece The Place Where You Go to Listen, an electronic installation housed at the University of Alaska that uses data from Alaskan meteorological, seismological, and geomagnetic stations to generate sound. Also serves as Adams’s manifesto on the creation of an ecology of music. Ross’s foreword is a shorter version of his New Yorker essay (Ross 2010).
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Herzogenrath, Bernd, ed. The Farthest Place: The Music of John Luther Adams. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2012.
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Collection of essays by musicologists, critics, performers, and composers. Topics include the usual focus on Adams’s relationship to the Alaskan environment, as well as musical analysis, discussions of performers’ experiences playing his music, and Adams’s place within the American experimental tradition. Includes a detailed works list and bibliography.
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John Luther Adams (official website).
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Informative website on Adams. Includes up-to-date information on latest news, full listing of available recordings, and a page of links to writings about the composer.
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Morris, Mitchell. “Ecotopian Sounds, or the Music of John Luther Adams and Strong Environmentalism.” In Crosscurrents and Counterpoints: Offerings in Honor of Bengt Hambraeus at 70. Edited by P. F. Broman, N. A. Engebretsen, and B. Alphonce, 129–141. Gothenburg, Sweden: University of Gothenburg, 1998.
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Positions Adams within the context of American experimentalism, and suggests that he can be best understood as a “‘Green’ composer.” Analyzes Adams’s Dream in White on White (1992) and Earth and the Great Weather: A Sonic Geography of the Arctic (1994) within the discourse of “Deep Ecology” and the composer’s own commitment to environmentalism.
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Ross, Alex. “Song of the Earth: The Arctic Sound of John Luther Adams.” In Listen to This. By Alex Ross, 176–187. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010.
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Originally published in the New Yorker, this essay is a good introduction to the life and musical aesthetics of John Luther Adams. Ross pays particular attention to the composer’s relationship to Alaska, and the way in which the northern landscape has influenced Adams’s compositional practices. Also republished in Herzogenrath 2012.
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Louis Andriessen
Andriessen—a Dutch composer whose music synthesizes influences from American minimalism, Stravinsky, and jazz—is well served in both scholarly literature and publications that make available (in English) the composer’s outspoken views on music (his and others), musical institutions, and the relationship between music and politics. Books devoted to Andriessen include Everett 2006 (which examines his entire ouevre); Andriessen 2002 (English translations of his own essays and speeches) and Adlington 2004 (which focuses on De Staat, an important early work composed under the direct influence of minimalism. Coenen 1988–1989, Andriessen 1994, and Gronemeyer 1992 are good shorter introductions to Andriessen’s music and aesthetics.
Adlington, Robert. Louis Andriessen: De Staat. Aldershot, UK, and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004.
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Monograph on Andriessen’s first major minimalism-inspired work. Adlington contextualizes De Staat within Andriessen’s compositional career, interest in political music, and major influences (including minimalism). He also provides an analysis of the entire work, interpretive insights, and an interview conducted in 2002 with the composer. Book comes with a CD of De Volharding, Il Principe, and De Staat.
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Andriessen, Louis. “After Chopin and Mendelssohn We Landed in a Mudbath.” Interview by Frans van Rossum and Sytze Smit. Keynotes 28.1 (March 1994): 8–15.
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An informative interview with Andriessen in which the composer positions himself as an anti-Romantic. He discusses his compositional influences (including minimalism), the development of his musical language from his early atonal works (including pieces like De Materie in some detail), and his ensembles De Volharding and Hoketus.
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Andriessen, Louis. The Art of Stealing Time. Edited by Mirjam Zegers. Translated by Clare Yates. Todmorden, UD: Arc Music, 2002.
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A collection consisting of previously published essays by Andriessen and transcriptions of his talks on his aesthetics, views on others composers, and the ensembles he founded. The second half of the book is devoted to Andriessen’s talks on his works, from De Staat to Writing to Vermeer. Also includes brief biography (up to 2002).
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Coenen, Alcedo. “Louis Andriessen’s De Materie.” Key Notes 25 (1988–1989): 3–12.
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A good introduction to one of Andriessen’s major works. Article gives an overview of many aspects of the piece, including its genesis and compositional process; a musical analysis of pitch, rhythm, and structure; and a discussion of the fixed forms on which each movement is based.
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Everett, Yayoi Uno. The Music of Louis Andriessen. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
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A chronological examination of Andriessen’s compositions from their precursors in prewar Dutch music, through major works such as De Materie, to his recent collaborations with the singer Cristina Zavalloni. Discussion of Andriessen’s music features detailed musical analysis, as well as consideration of his works’ sociopolitical and ideological contexts.
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Gronemeyer, Gisela. “Spiel nach strengen Regeln: Der hollandische Komponist Louis Andriessen.” Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 153.7–8 (July–August 1992): 52–57.
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Good overview of Andriessen’s music up to De Materie (1989). Gronemeyer pays particular attention to his earlier works, and includes extensive commentary by the composer himself.
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Huber, Nicholaus. “Erlebniswanderung auf schmalem Grat: Das Horbarmachen von Zeit und Geschwindigkeit bei Louis Andriessen.” MusikTexte 9 (1985): 24–31.
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Analysis of De Tijd (1981) and De Snelheid (1983). Huber examines the ways in which Andriessen translates the titles of these two works—“Time” and “Speed”—into musical sounds. Also includes the full score of Ende (1980), and a works list (1956–1983).
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Oehlschlagel, Reinhard. “‘Etwas anderes tun, als die Leute tun’: Ein Portrat des Komponisten Louis Andriessen.” MusikTexte 9 (1985): 16–21.
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Profile of Andriessen that is particularly useful for its focus on his earlier works and for the extensive commentary by the composer himself on his individual pieces. Includes the full score of Hoketus.
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Sabbe, Herman. “Pulsierende gegen geronnene Zeit: Stenogramm einer Analyse von Andriessens Hoketus.” MusikTexte 9 (1985): 22–24.
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Detailed analysis of Andriessen’s Hoketus. Discussion includes a representation of the processes used, an examination of the way Andriessen structured time in each section, and an explanation of the harmonic development used in the entire piece.
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Trochimczyk, Maja, ed. The Music of Louis Andriessen. New York: Routledge, 2002.
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A series of essays and interviews that provide a broad coverage of Andriessen’s influences, compositional techniques, and aesthetics. Includes a short chapter devoted to Andriessen’s most overtly minimalist pieces (De Volharding, Hoketus, and De Staat). Of particular note are Trochimczyk’s extended interviews with the composer himself, as well as with his collaborators Reinbert de Leeuw (conductor), Elmer Schönberger (musicologist and composer), and Fritz van der Waa (musicologist and critic).
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The Bang on a Can Collective (Michael Gordon, David Lang, Julia Wolfe)
Two members of Bang on a Can have now won the Pulitzer Prize (Lang in 2008, Wolfe in 2015), so it is useful to remember that the collective of New York composers and performers was once far outside the mainstream of contemporary art music, forced to become “entrepreneurial” in combining composition, curation of concerts, performance, and recording. Their style has been called “totalism” (in Gann 2006, cited under Postminimalism and Beyond). Students and followers of Louis Andriessen, they have proselytized for his dialectical fusion of American minimalism with European modernism; they also champion groove-based popular music as both a rhythmic model and a source of cultural resistance. There is relatively little formal scholarship on this influential collective. The Bang on a Can website, and interviews in Munk 2000, Krasnow 2001, and Shapiro 2001 provide the composers’ own perspective. Scholarship in Cesare 2006, Atkinson 2012, Bauer 2015, and Wells 2013 have all focused on the composers’ works for the stage.
Atkinson, Sean. “Music, Textual, and Visual Meanings in Bang on a Can’s Lost Objects.” Indiana Theory Review 30.2 (Fall 2012): 1–26.
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Atkinson’s analysis of Lost Objects proposes two related modes of analysis to account for this multifaceted work: first, an analysis based on pitch-class interval cycles that tie both melody and harmony to the central narrative; and second, a multimedia approach that takes into account the relationships between music, text, and visual elements. (See also Atkinson 2011, cited under Analytical Perspectives).
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Website includes information on the history of the group, as well as its individual founding members. Includes latest news, modest audio and video sections, and links to Bang on a Can’s renowned annual “marathon” events (including all programs dating back to the inaugural concert in 1987), its All-Stars performance ensemble, summer festival (“Banglewood”), and associated groups.
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Bauer, Amy. “‘The Mysteries of Selma, Alabama’: Re-telling and Revelation in David Lang’s The Difficulty of Crossing a Field.” In Great American Opera: Trends in American Musical Theatre. Edited by Gregory Herzfeld and Frédéric Döhl, 1–16. Münster, Germany, and New York: Waxman-Verlag, 2015.
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A multifaceted essay on the Long Beach Opera’s 2011 production of Lang’s opera. Seven “re-tellings” present separate but intertwined narratives of the performance’s music, text, staging, plot, and evocations of US history. The longest re-telling analyzes Lang’s score in detail.
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Cesare, T. Nikki. “‘Like a Chained Man’s Bruise’: The Mediated Body in Eight Songs for a Mad King and Anatomy Theater.” Theatre Journal 58.3 (2006): 437–457.
DOI: 10.1353/tj.2006.0147Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Examines the International Contemporary Ensemble’s 2006 performance of David Lang and Mark Dion’s Anatomy Theater as one of two examples of the ways in which the body has been staged in new music theater.
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Krasnow, David. “Julia Wolfe [interview].” BOMB 77 (Fall 2001): 66–71.
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Wolfe discusses her musical influences (including “classic” minimalism), her compositional aims and process, and the Bang on a Can collective.
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Munk, Erica. “The Difficulty of Defending a Form.” Theater 30.2 (2000): 34–43.
DOI: 10.1215/01610775-30-2-34Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Interview with librettist Mac Wellman and composer David Lang about their collaboration The Difficulty of Crossing a Field. In a wide-ranging discussion, they talk about their working relationship, what they tried to achieve in this opera, and the challenges presented by the original short story, Wellman’s adaptation, and Lang’s musical style.
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Shapiro, Andrew. “Chaos and Control: An Interview with Michael Gordon.” 21st-Century Music 8.10 (October 2001): 1–5.
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Gordon discusses his compositional style and career. Includes extended discussion of the influences of minimalism (both musically and in terms of forging a career outside of academia); the relationship between his music, minimalism, and popular music; and minimalism’s perceived movement away from its more rigorous roots.
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Wells, Dominic. “In the Footsteps of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion: The Passion Setting of David Lang and James MacMillan.” Tempo 67.264 (April 2013): 40–51.
DOI: 10.1017/S0040298213000065Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
A musical and theological comparison between two Passion settings composed in 2007—one by MacMillan, a devout Catholic, and the other by Lang, a composer of Jewish descent—and Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, which both composers have claimed as an influence. Wells pays particular attention to the way Lang has replaced Christ in his telling of the Passion story with Hans Christian Andersen’s “Little Match Girl” as heroine.
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Meredith Monk
The dancer, choreographer, and singer Meredith Monk considers herself a composer first, but she is an outlier in the world of minimalist music. Her focus has not been on process and reduction, but on a distinctive evolution of modern dance, combined with a deep immersion in the extended vocal techniques characteristic of “world” music. Jowitt 1997 and Marranca 2014 both provide Monk’s own accounts of her life and works. Sandow 1984, the earliest account of Monk listed here, sets a trend by highlighting her experimental vocal technique. Atlas (1992) has garnered the most scholarly attention, with Lassetter 1993, Marranca 1992, and Mowery 2013 all writing about Monk’s three-act opera, for which she acted as librettist and choreographer, as well as composer. Westfall 1990 places Monk’s work within the context of feminist theater.
Jowitt, Deborah, ed. Meredith Monk. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.
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The first book devoted solely to Monk, the anthology of short essays includes writings from 1966 to 1995 by Monk herself, as well as other composers and critics in music and dance. Book also includes a number of black-and-white pictures from Monk’s productions, a chronology of her works (1962–1996), a select bibliography (1966–1995), and a discography.
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Lassetter, Leslie. “Opera from Elsewhere: Meredith Monk’s Atlas.” Music Research Forum 8 (1993): 20–37.
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An introduction to the composer’s largest and most traditionally composerly work. Lassetter outlines Monk’s compositional process, and provides a detailed analytical discussion of the opera’s opening scene, based on a psychological-relational reading of melodic cells. With music examples.
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Marranca, Bonnie. “Meredith Monk’s Atlas of Sound: New Opera and the American Performance Tradition.” Performing Arts Journal 14.1 (January 1992): 16–29.
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Discusses the ways in which Monk foregrounds the body (in particular in her use of various vocal techniques), the significance of her staging choices, and her influences, both musical and philosophical.
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Marranca, Bonnie. Conversations with Meredith Monk. New York: PAJ Publications, 2014.
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Four conversations Marranca conducted with Monk between 2008 and 2013, covering a wide range of topics, from Monk’s early biography and influences, to her working habits and compositional philosophies, to extended discussions of specific pieces, including Songs of Ascension.
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Mowery, Janice. “Meredith Monk: Between the Cracks.” Perspectives of New Music 51.2 (Summer 2013): 79–100.
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Uses Atlas to examine the ways in which Monk’s music moves between the cracks that typically define artistic mediums, formal structures, performative acts, and musical genres. Pays particular attention to Monk’s distinctive vocal technique and the ways in which she foregrounds the body. Concludes with a musical analysis of Part I.
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Sandow, Gregory. “Invisible Theater: The Music of Meredith Monk.” In The Musical Woman: An International Perspective. Edited by Judith Lang Zaimont, with Catherine Overhauser, and Jane Gottlieb, 147–150. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1984.
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Written by a noted music critic, this short article focuses on Monk’s experimental vocal techniques. Also includes an assessment and ranking of her pieces.
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Westfall, Suzanne. “The Silver Lining in the Mushroom Cloud: Meredith Monk’s Opera/Music Theater.” In Modern American Drama: The Female Canon. Edited by June Schlueter, 264–274. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1990.
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Situates Monk within the context of feminist playwrights and performers who have, since the 1960s, broken with canonized forms. Westfall analyzes feminist aspects of Monk’s The Games (1983), a post-apocalyptic work with long-time collaborator Ping Chong, from its inception and design, to its structure, vocal techniques, and text.
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Michael Nyman
Ap Siôn 2007 (a monograph on the composer) and Nyman 2013 (a collection of his critical work) are excellent places for those interested in researching Nyman’s career and works. Cenciarelli 2006 and O’Shaughnessy 2010 focus on Nyman’s penchant for pastiche works that reference earlier compositions.
ap Siôn, Pwyll. The Music of Michael Nyman: Texts, Contexts and Intertexts. Aldershot, UK, and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007.
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Written with access to Nyman’s manuscripts, sketches, scores, and recordings, this is the first monograph devoted to a single British experimental composer. Ap Siôn analyzes Nyman’s works and places them within their biographical, historical, and cultural contexts. Includes significant discussion of minimalism and its influences on Nyman’s output.
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Cenciarelli, Carlo. “The Case against Nyman Revisited: ‘Affirmative’ and ‘Critical’ Evidence in Michael Nyman’s Appropriation of Mozart.” Radical Musicology 1 (2006).
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Cenciarelli examines Nyman’s use of Mozart’s music in three pieces—In Re Don Giovanni (1977), Trysting Fields (1988), and I Am an Unusual Thing (1991). Cenciarelli demonstrates the ways in which Nyman attempts to turn Mozart’s music, cultural capital, and current reputation to his own experimental purposes by equating the supposed simplicity of Mozart’s tonal language with minimalism, and by appropriating Mozart’s expressive gestures as a way to circumvent the “new objectivity” of experimentalism.
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Nyman, Michael. Collected Writings. Edited by Pwyll ap Siôn. Farnham, UK, and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013.
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A collection of writings by one of the earliest and most important writers on minimalist music. Includes all of Nyman’s reviews, criticisms, essays, interviews, and longer prose pieces from his first publications in 1968 to 1982. Ap Siôn’s contextualizing introductions include a section devoted to minimalist music.
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O’Shaughnessy, Michael. “‘Romantic Minimalist’: Meaning and Emotion in the Film Music of Michael Nyman.” PhD diss., University of Western Australia, 2010.
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Interdisciplinary study of Nyman’s film music. Includes a chapter on “Nyman, Minimalism, and Film Music,” in which the author analyzes a number of film scores (including Man with a Movie Camera and The Draughtsman’s Contract) for minimalist techniques, and discusses the relationship between the sounds of a minimalist film score and the movie images.
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Pauline Oliveros
All of the following sources on Oliveros discuss her interest in the social and corporeal power of sustained tones, most famously expressed in her Sonic Meditations. Oliveros’s three collections of writings frame the issues: in Oliveros 1984, the composer herself places her work in the context of minimalists such as Riley and Young; Oliveros 1998 introduces the notion of “deep listening”; and Oliveros 2010 provides details of the composer’s engagement with technology and improvisation. Von Gunden 1980–1981, Von Gunden 1983, and Mockus 2007 all discuss the philosophical underpinning of Oliveros’s Meditations, with Mockus 2007 explicitly placing it within the context of the composer’s sexuality. Le Guin 1994 approaches one of Oliveros’s extended accordion improvisations from the perspective of a self-reflexive feminist listener, revaluing music often dismissed by masculinist critics as just “easy listening.”
von Gunden, Heidi. “The Theory of Sonic Awareness in The Greeting by Pauline Oliveros.” Perspectives of New Music 19.1–2 (1980–1981): 409–416.
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An examination of Oliveros’s theory of listening—dubbed “Sonic Awareness” by the author—that takes into account sonic details, aesthetics, and its philosophical context. Concludes with an analysis of The Greeting, one of Oliveros’s Sonic Meditations.
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von Gunden, Heidi. The Music of Pauline Oliveros. Foreword by Ben Johnston. Afterword by Pauline Oliveros. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow, 1983.
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The earliest monograph devoted to Oliveros. Von Gunden, a former Oliveros student, examines the composer’s works from her earliest compositions in the late 1950s to pieces from the early 1980s. Writing with the aim of educating listeners, Von Gunden provides insightful analysis that explains and connects Oliveros’s compositional philosophies with the sonic details of her music.
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Le Guin, Elisabeth. “Uneasy Listening.” repercussions 3.1 (1994): 5–21.
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A feminist reader-response appreciation of the extended accordion solo The Roots of the Moment (1988), exploring its connections with Lacanian psychology, New Age philosophy, and pervasive cultural anxieties around “easy listening.” An annotated transcription of this non-notated work is provided.
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Mockus, Martha. Sounding Out: Pauline Oliveros and Lesbian Musicality. New York: Routledge, 2007.
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An important milestone in queer musicology. In the first study that foregrounds Oliveros as a lesbian composer, Mockus analyzes the “lesbian messages” in a number of key compositions written from 1960 to 1985, including the Sonic Meditations. Concluding chapter presents conversations between the author and Oliveros, interwoven with letters from the composer’s friends, lovers, and colleagues.
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Oliveros, Pauline. Software for People: Collected Writings 1963–80. Baltimore: Smith, 1984.
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Oliveros’s early writings. Includes “On Sonic Meditation,” in which she discusses her interest in long tones (shared by Riley and Young), as well as specific Sonic Meditations.
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Oliveros, Pauline. The Roots of the Moment: Collected Writings 1980–1996. New York: Drogue Press, 1998.
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Discussions of meditation practice, “deep listening,” and the composer’s first forays into technological-enabled improvisation.
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Oliveros, Pauline. Sounding the Margins: Collected Writings, 1992–2009. Kingston, NY: Deep Listening, 2010.
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Oliveros in the Internet era; more information about her computer-driven Expanded Instrument System (EIS) and the relationship between technology and improvisation.
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Holy Minimalism (Arvo Pärt, Henryk Gorecki, John Tavener)
Hillier 1997 is a good introduction to Pärt’s life and works by the performer most associated with their success. It includes detailed discussion of lesser-known and early compositions. Shenton 2012 is a more contemporary survey of critical and historical issues focused on the composer’s mature “tintinnabuli” style. Cultural reading of Pärt’s “holy minimalism” forms the focus of both Cizmic 2008 and Cizmic 2012. Cizmic examines two famous works within a variety of contexts that illuminate the spirituality that has become this composer’s calling card. Thomas 1997 is a solid life-and-works of Gorecki by a specialist in Polish music, while Howard 1998 explores the crossover success of his Third Symphony. Dudgeon 2003 is quite unscholarly, but revealing of the contradictions and scandal surrounding this cultish composer. Fisk 1994 presents a general critique of what he called at the time “the New Simplicity,” linking it to religious fundamentalism and consumer culture.
Cizmic, Maria. “Transcending the Icon: Spirituality and Postmodernism in Arvo Pärt’s Tabula Rasa and Spiegel im Spiegel.” Twentieth-Century Music 5 (2008): 45–78.
DOI: 10.1017/S1478572208000601Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Examines two of Pärt’s early tintinnabuli pieces within a context that brings together two previously oppositional views: the works’ spiritual depth and its perceived “flatness.” This interdisciplinary essay draws upon an understanding of Orthodox practices to discuss the subjectivity in Tabula Rasa and Fredric Jameson’s theories of postmodernism to analyze Spiegel im Spiegel’s dialectics of surface and depth.
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Cizmic, Maria. “Witnessing History during Glasnost: Arvo Pärt’s Tabula Rasa as Musical Testimony in Tengiz Abuladze’s Repentance.” In Performing Pain: Music and Trauma in Eastern Europe. By Maria Cizmic, 91–122. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
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Analyzes the ways in which music from the second movement of Tabula Rasa participates in the depiction of suffering in the Georgian film Repentance, and places both works within an explicitly eastern European context of trauma in the late 20th century. Features equally detailed analysis of the film and music.
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Dudgeon, Piers. Lifting the Veil: the Biography of Sir John Tavener. London: Portrait, 2003.
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Unwittingly sensationalist biography of the most controversially “holy” minimalist. Dudgeon uses personal access to cast Tavener’s tumultuous life story as a Freudian drama of the overbearing mother. Full details of the composer’s love affairs and religious obsessions are intertwined with accounts of his artistic collaborations with figures as diverse as Ringo Starr and Mother Thekla of Normanby.
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Fisk, Josiah. “The New Simplicity: The Music of Górecki, Tavener and Pärt.” Hudson Review 47.3 (Autumn 1994): 394–412.
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Grouping Pärt, Tavener, and Górecki together under the label of “New Simplicity,” Fisk argues that these composers represent a break with Western classical music because they eschew musical development and substantive depth. This musical “fundamentalism” turns listeners into mere consumers. Fisk concludes that the New Simplicity’s claim to access a more innocent musical past is fundamentally dishonest.
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Hillier, Paul. The Music of Arvo Pärt. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.
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An excellent overview of the life and works of Pärt by a leading performer of his music. The discussion of pieces includes relevant biographical and historical information, as well as accessible musical analysis. Includes a chapter on performance practice and a discography (to 1996).
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Howard, Luke B. “Motherhood, ‘Billboard,’ and the Holocaust: Perceptions and Receptions of Górecki’s Symphony No. 3.” Musical Quarterly 82.1 (1998): 131–159.
DOI: 10.1093/mq/82.1.131Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
A detailed reception study of Gorecki’s unlikely “pop” hit. Engages with more general issues involved in the marketing of contemporary classical music.
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Shenton, Andrew. The Cambridge Companion to Arvo Pärt. Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
DOI: 10.1017/CCOL9781107009899Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
A collection of essays by advocates for the composer’s music, directed at nonspecialist, musically literate readers. Contains strong chapters on analytical method and on the composer’s relationship to modernism, as well as information on Pärt’s career in Estonia and the West. Extensive bibliography and documentary appendices.
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Thomas, Adrian. Górecki. Oxford Studies of Composers. Oxford: Clarendon, 1997.
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A systematic appreciation of the composer’s life and works by a prominent scholar of Polish music. Extensive musical examples.
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Drone Minimalism (Phill Niblock, Tony Conrad)
The following citations cover the wider evolution of what influential accounts like Strickland 1993 (cited under Experimental Music) and Johnson 1989 (cited under Key Reviews and Contemporary Accounts) consider to be the “original” minimalist style in music: extended microtonal drones, often organized according to neo-Pythagorean whole number ratios. The most influential exponents of this style are the “canonical” minimalists La Monte Young and Terry Riley, but other composers, either directly influenced by Young (Conrad) or working independently (Niblock) have also explored the perceptual and metaphysical possibilities of sustained drones in just intonation. The extended public battle between Conrad and Young over authorship of the output of the Theatre of Eternal Music has produced an acrimonious and theoretically dense discourse on the politics of experimental composition.
1/1: The Journal of the Just Intonation Network. 1985–2007.
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The Just Intonation Network is largely the brainchild of composer David Doty. Doty himself is not a minimalist, but the journal he edited is an important source of information about the intersection of minimalism and expanded just intonation theory. In 1989–1990 (Vol. 5, No.4; Vol. 6, No. 1), Doty published a long interview with La Monte Young, which gives a clear picture of Young’s aesthetic theorizing along with a wealth of technical “insider” information about his tuning practice.
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Conrad, Tony. Liner notes to Slapping Pythagoras. Table of the Elements, 1995.
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An important statement in the ongoing feud between Conrad and La Monte Young. Conrad excoriates “Pythagoras”—Young in thin disguise—for his elitism, appropriation, and mystification of numbers. See Young’s MELA Foundation website (cited under La Monte Young) for a response.
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Conrad, Tony. Liner notes to Early Minimalism. Table of the Elements, 1997.
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Extensive liner notes to accompany Conrad’s revisionist take on minimalism’s origins. Includes some of Conrad’s most extended statements in his ongoing feud with La Monte Young over the meaning and legacy of the Theater of Eternal Music. See Young’s MELA Foundation website (cited under La Monte Young) for a response.
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Gann, Kyle. Information on Alternative Tuning.
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An excellent primer on nonequal tuning temperaments. The essay “Just Intonation Explained” includes sound files to illustrate the different tuning systems Gann discusses.
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Gilmore, Bob. “Phill Niblock: The Orchestra Pieces.” Tempo 66.261 (July 2012): 2–11.
DOI: 10.1017/S0040298212000228Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Examines Niblock’s orchestral works: Disseminate (1998), Three Orchids (2003), Tow by Tom (2005), 4 Chorch (2007), 2 Lips (2008), and Baobab (2011). After a useful general introduction to Niblock’s compositional style, Gilmore juxtaposes these live orchestral pieces with the better-known electronic works. He provides analysis of each work, in which he discusses pitch and structural details, aspects of their performance practices, and the expected listening experiences for the audience. Concludes with discography.
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Joseph, Branden. Beyond the Dream Syndicate: Tony Conrad and the Arts after Cage. New York: Zone Books, 2008.
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Positions Conrad as an interdisciplinary artist working within a post-Cageian musical and artistic landscape. Discusses in depth Conrad’s collaborations with La Monte Young, Henry Flynt, and Jack Smith, as well as his landmark structural film The Flicker. An impressive blend of detailed historical writing and sophisticated cultural analysis.
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Niblock, Phill, and Yvan Etienne, eds. Phill Niblock: Working Title. Dijon, France: Les Presses du Reél, 2013.
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An important collection of interviews with and essays about Niblock. Covers music, performance, film and media, and Niblock’s Experimental Intermedia Foundation. Includes a DVD with performances of his video pieces. In French and English.
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Saunders, James. “Phill Niblock.” In The Ashgate Research Companion to Experimental Music. Edited by James Saunders, 313–330. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2009.
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Interview with Niblock conducted by Saunders in 2007. Discussion focused on Niblock’s compositional philosophy and process.
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Straebel, Volker. “Technological Implications of Phill Niblock’s Drone Music, Derived from Analytical Observations of Selected Works for Cello and String Quartet on Tape.” Organized Sound: An International Journal of Music Technology 13.3 (December 2008): 225–235.
DOI: 10.1017/S1355771808000320Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Draws on theorization of arts and technology in Adorno, Heidegger, and Cassirer to consider four pieces: 3 to 7–196 (1974), E for Gibson (1978), Five More String Quartets (1993), and HARM (2003). Discussion includes examination of pitch, the author’s own graphic analyses, and reproductions of score excerpts from Niblock’s archives.
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Brian Eno and Ambient Music
Brian Eno’s ambient recordings from the 1970s and 1980s defined the genre. Eno 1996 contains his most famous statement on the genesis and goals of ambient music. Toop 1995 and Roquet 2009 focus on Eno, while Lanza 1994 and especially Prendergast 2000 paint a much broader picture of ambient music. Much of the available literature on Eno focuses on the earlier, more glam part of his eclectic career. Sheppard 2008 is a good starting place for an engaging and detailed biography, while Tamm 1995 serves as a good introduction to Eno’s musical output. Sun 2007 focuses on Eno’s most famous ambient piece, Music for Airports. Access to journalistic writing on Eno has been made more convenient by Enoweb, a large collection of articles published in the popular press between 1973 and 2002.
Eno, Brian. “Ambient Music.” In A Year with Swollen Appendices: Brian Eno’s Diary. By Brian Eno, 293–297. London: Faber and Faber, 1996.
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A foundational statement of ambient music, this short essay is a 1996 expansion of the liner notes from Eno’s Ambient 1: Music for Airports (1978), in which Eno discusses how he came to create ambient music, the role played by technology, and the mode of listening it encourages. Reprinted in Audio Cultures: Readings in Modern Music, edited by Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner (New York: Continuum, 2000), 94–97.
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This website has no official affiliation with Eno and appears no longer to be updated on a regular basis. It is still valuable, however, for its extensive collection of articles about Eno published between 1973 and 2002 in newspapers and magazines.
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Lanza, Joseph. Elevator Music: A Surreal History of Muzak, Easy-Listening, and Other Moodsong. New York: St. Martin’s, 1994.
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Historical survey of “mood music.” Begins with two chapters that go from the ancient Greeks to the early-20th-century avant-garde, but the bulk of the book is concerned with the history of background music since the invention of Muzak™. The book includes only a brief discussion of Brian Eno and Harold Budd’s ambient recordings, but is valuable for providing a context for the function of their music.
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Prendergast, Mark. The Ambient Century: From Mahler to Trance—The Evolution of Sound in the Electronic Age. New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2000.
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As his title suggests, Prendergast works with a broad definition of “ambient.” The book consists of brief overviews of individual composers and bands, each concluding with a listening list. An entire section is devoted to “Minimalism, Eno and the New Simplicity.” The breadth of coverage precludes any in-depth discussion, but provides a good introduction to ambience as a compositional concern.
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Roquet, Paul. “Ambient Landscapes from Brian Eno to Tetsu Inoue.” Journal of Popular Music Studies 21.4 (December 2009): 364–383.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1533-1598.2009.01208.xSave Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Examines Eno’s landmark ambient albums from the 1970s and 1980s—paying particular attention to On Land—with particular attention to the ways ambient music is located within specific spaces and listening environments. Traces Eno’s significant influence on subsequent generation of ambient composers, with a focus on Tetsu Inoue’s Ambiant Otaku (1994).
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Sheppard, David. On Some Faraway Beach: the Life and Times of Brian Eno. London: Orion, 2008.
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Sheppard’s biography focuses mostly on the early part of Eno’s life and career. It is particularly valuable for its insights into Eno’s formative years and detailed accounts of his critical reception.
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Sun, Cecilia. “Resisting the Airport: Bang on a Can Performs Brian Eno.” Musicology Australia 29 (2007): 135–160.
DOI: 10.1080/08145857.2007.10416592Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Comparison between Bang on a Can’s performance of Music for Airports and Eno’s ambient original. Considers the two recordings from the perspective of instruments used as well as the spaces occupied.
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Tamm, Eric. Brian Eno: His Music and the Vertical Colour of Sound. London: Da Capo, 1995.
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The first monograph devoted to Eno, Tamm’s book covers his work up to the end of the 1980s. Tamm divides his study into two sections: (1) “Eno in the World of Music” provides biographical background and contextualizes Eno’s artistic philosophy and musical achievements; (2) “Eno’s Music” includes discussion of works from Eno’s rock, ambient, and collaborative output. The breadth of Tamm’s book precludes in-depth analysis, but this is a good introduction to the first two decades of Eno’s musical career.
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Toop, David. Ocean of Sound: Aether Talk, Ambient Sound, and Imaginary Worlds. London and New York: Serpent’s Tail, 1995.
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In the earliest book-length study of the topic, Toop traces the history and development of what would become known as ambient music, from Debussy’s encounter with Javanese music in 1899 to the end of the 20th century. An idiosyncratic and personal take on the subject, featuring interviews with musicians, including Brian Eno. Discography.
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Analytical Perspectives
Minimalist music during its rise and heyday was largely ignored by the academic discipline of music theory, which remained committed to complexity and developing variation as fundamental constituents of musical value. Warburton 1988 and Hubbs 1989 are two notable exceptions. (See also Epstein 1986 and Cohn 1992, both cited under Rhythmic Theory.) The most influential commentator within music theory on “the problem” of minimal music has been Jonathan Bernard, whose methodological study Bernard 1995 usefully confronts the ideological problem minimalist “simplicity” presents to music theory and hazards some possible solutions. Quinn 2006 is a later engagement on a similar topic. The other sources use different methodologies in their structural analysis of minimalist music: Bernard 2003 examines minimalist techniques in an attempt to find the line between minimalism and postminimalism; Atkinson 2011 uses the author’s own model to examine works by Reich; Roeder 2011 builds on Lewin’s transformational mathematical models to account for Arvo Pärt’s tintinnabulation; and Tarantino 2009 takes a phenomenological approach in an article on John Luther Adams.
Atkinson, Sean. “Canons, Augmentations, and Their Meaning in Two Works by Steve Reich.” Music Theory Online 17.1 (2011).
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Looks for meaning in minimalist scores by proposing a methodology that connects Reich’s works through the composer’s consistent use of canons and augmentation. After identifying similar such techniques in Tehillim (1981) and Three Tales (2003), Atkinson uses his own “Model for Interpreting Musical Multimedia” (MIMM) to show how one can transfer gleaned insights from the former work to illuminate the meaning of the latter.
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Bernard, Jonathan. “Theory, Analysis, and the ‘Problem’ of Minimal Music.” In Concert Music, Rock, and Jazz Since 1945: Essays and Analytical Studies. Edited by Betsy Marvin and Richard Hermann, 259–284. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 1995.
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Proposes several possible solutions to the “problem” minimal music poses by being too simple, obvious, and surface-oriented for established modes of analysis. The different models offered all use the visual arts as a “way of ‘seeing’ the music.” Analytical examples: Lucier, I am Sitting in a Room; Glass, Music in 12 Parts (part 5), and “The Kuru Field of Justice” from Satyagraha; Reich, Music for 18 Musicians.
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Bernard, Jonathan. “Minimalism, Postminimalism, and the Resurgence of Tonality in Recent American Music.” American Music 12.1 (Spring 2003): 112–133.
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Traces the development of pulse-pattern minimalism through the musical techniques used by Reich, Glass, Adams, and Torke. Concludes minimal music no longer exists, and proposes a definition of postminimalism restricted to former minimalists and younger composers who are writing in direct response to minimalism.
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Hubbs, Nadine. “Minimalism and Macroform.” Contemporary Music Forum 1 (1989): 15–22.
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Argues minimalist music provides one of the few alternatives to music forms predicated upon teleological organicism. Instead, minimalism relies on process, an economy of material, and fluctuating stasis. Illustrates argument with analysis of Reich’s early process pieces and Glass’s Einstein on the Beach.
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Quinn, Ian. “Minimal Challenges: Process Music and the Uses of Formalist Analysis.” Contemporary Music Review 25 (2006): 283–295.
DOI: 10.1080/07494460600726537Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Addresses the challenges minimal music poses to formalist analysis. While process minimalism invites a formalist approach, the resulting analyses can be dull due to the simplicity of the subject. In his critique of different methodologies, Quinn surveys some of the most important analytical writings on minimal music.
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Roeder, John. “Transformational Aspects of Arvo Pärt’s Tintinnabuli Music.” Journal of Music Theory 55.1 (2011): 1–41.
DOI: 10.1215/00222909-1219187Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Building on the work of theorist David Lewin (Generalized Musical Intervals and Transformations, 1987), Roeder theorizes Pärt’s compositional techniques—including his signature use of tintinnabulation—in terms of systematic networks of musical transformations. Article includes detailed mathematical models, and the theory’s application in the analysis of the melodies, harmonies, and form of Fratres, Passio, and The Beatitudes.
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Tarantino, Todd. “Wayfinding in John Luther Adams’s For Lou Harrison.” Perspectives of New Music 47.2 (2009): 196–225.
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A detailed phenomenological analysis in support of the hypothesis that, in Adams’s music, “process tension stands in for harmonic tension.” Musical process in For Lou Harrison is reimagined in natural and architectural terms.
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Warburton, Daniel. “A Working Terminology for Minimal Music.” Intégral 2 (1988): 135–159.
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Written at a time when minimal music had achieved commercial success but little attention from music theorists, this article was one of the first attempts to detail a suitable analytical vocabulary.
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Cultural Perspectives
Arising from the most extreme anti-art gestures of the 1960s, minimalism in the visual arts generated a critical discourse that staked everything on understanding its reductive experiments as part of a general avant-garde “flight from interpretation.” Minimalist composers subscribed to this reductive formalism easily, since it was a natural outgrowth of formalist tendencies in musical criticism going back to Eduard Hanslick. But minimalist and postminimalist composers were, in fact, quite interested in conveying content. By the early 2000s it was clear to most music scholars that repetitive music was embedded in culture, had political implications, and could be the basis for cultural readings.
Minimalism as Cultural Practice
It would seem self-evident that minimal music must reflect the time and place of its birth: postwar America. This is the burden of Fink 2005, which links minimalism to repetitive experiences within the consumer society of the 1960s and beyond. Polin 1989 guessed that the simplicity of minimalism could be a regressive, escapist reaction to a complexifying society felt to be careening out of control, a point made at length in the final, critical chapter of Mertens 1983. Chave 1990 takes the opposite position, identifying minimalism in the visual arts with the opaque and threatening structures of the American military-industrial complex. (Chave 2008 complements this view by noting the dependence of expansive minimalist art gestures on the accumulated power of capital.)
Chave, Anna C. “Minimalism and the Rhetoric of Power.” Arts Magazine (January 1990): 44–63.
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An influential interpretation of the implicitly masculine, aggressive, and epistemologically violent aspects of minimalism in the visual arts. Focuses on the work of Stella, Serra, Morris, and Judd.
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Chave, Anna C. “Revaluing Minimalism: Patronage, Aura, and Place.” Art Bulletin 90.3 (September 2008): 466–486.
DOI: 10.1080/00043079.2008.10786403Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
A reading of minimalist art in terms of its patronage by the oil-rich Dia Foundation. Places La Monte Young’s Dream House in dialogue with other massive installation art of the 1970s and 1980s, such as Walter De Maria’s Lightning Field.
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Fink, Robert. Repeating Ourselves: American Minimal Music as Cultural Practice. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.
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Cutting against the grain of much recent critical work, which takes as a starting point the problematics of minimalism’s encounter with non-Western and Afro-diasporic Others (see Corbett 2000, Whitesell 2001, and Sheppard 2013 (all cited under Minimalism, Race, and Non-Western Music); Scherzinger 2007 (cited under Klinghoffer Controversy); and Gopinath 2004 (cited under Race and Religion), Fink uses media history and close reading of musical texts to interpret minimalist repetition as a structural analogue to pervasive “cultures of repetition”—most notably advertising and television—deeply embedded within American consumer culture.
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Mertens, Wim. American Minimal Music: La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass. Translated by J. Hautekiet. London: Kahn Averill, 1983.
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Rejects the “grooviness” of minimalism along Adornian lines of critique, as a nondialectical escape from the contradictions of contemporary society. Repetition and avoidance of teleological subjectivity links minimal music with overtly regressive musics of escape like disco and psychedelic rock.
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Polin, Claire. “Why Minimalism Now?” In Music and the Politics of Culture. Edited by Christopher Norris, 226–239. New York: St. Martin’s, 1989.
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A very early and thus much-cited attempt at a cultural reading of minimalism. Polin’s general conclusion—that “beyond rebellion, minimalism today represents a critical reaction to the condition of humanity in a complex and uncontrolled society”—is plausible, but lacks historical specificity.
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Minimalism, Race, and Non-Western Music
Minimalism’s programmatic openness to non-Western musical sounds, forms, and aesthetic positions, especially within the larger multicultural agenda of American experimentalism, has been a consistent topic for ethical critique. The earliest source here, Nicholls 1996, is relatively sanguine about cross-cultural borrowing, but Corbett 2000 is much more skeptical about West Coast experimentalism’s romance with the East. Gopinath 2004 focuses on Steve Reich’s attempts to avoid Orientalism by inscribing his borrowings under the sign of “structure” (this critique of modernist reduction as “whiteness” had already been made compellingly in Whitesell 2001). Sheppard 2013 rejects as colonialist the postmodern multiculturalism evident in the operatic works of John Adams, Alice Goodman, and Peter Sellars.
Corbett, John. “Experimental Oriental: New Music and Other Others.” In Western Music and Its Others: Difference, Representation, and Appropriation in Music. Edited by Georgina Born and David Hesmondhagh, 163–186. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.
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A critical discussion of “Orientalism” (Said) in American experimental music. Largely focused on West Coast multiculturalism (Cage, Partch, Cowell, Harrison), but deals incisively with La Monte Young and Steve Reich as well.
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Gopinath, Sumanth. “‘A Composer Looks East’: Steve Reich and Discourse on Non-Western Music.” Glendora Review 3.3–4 (2004): 134–145.
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Issues of authority, authenticity, and appropriation in Reich’s relationship to non-Western music. Interrogates Reich’s modernist use of “structure” as a value-free cultural universal.
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Nicholls, David. “Transethnicism and the American Experimental Tradition.” Musical Quarterly 80.4 (Winter 1996): 569–594.
DOI: 10.1093/mq/80.4.569Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Nicholls surveys what he calls “transethnicism” in the work of eight American experimentalists, including the four canonical minimalists. Eschewing the postcolonial framework in which ethnic appropriation can be a sign of European symbolic violence, he takes a pragmatic approach, highlighting the extent to which some experimentalists did indeed submerge an individual, Eurocentric musical personality in the more impersonal embrace of world music culture.
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Sheppard, Anthony W. “The Persistence of Orientalism in the Postmodern Operas of Adams and Sellars.” In Representation in Western Music. Edited by Joshua S. Walden, 267–286. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9781139109413.019Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Close musical readings are used to support the argument that the operas of John Adams, Peter Sellars, and Alice Goodman continue to traffic in the Orientalist tropes of the 19th-century operatic stage. The author takes a literalist stance on theatrical representation, rejecting the notion that modernist notions of parody or postmodernist appeals to the “free play” of politically charged signifiers can sever the linkage to Eurocentric colonial attitudes.
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Whitesell, Lloyd. “White Noise: Race and Erasure in the Cultural Avant-Garde.” American Music 19.2 (Summer 2001): 168–189.
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Moves beyond the critique of surface exoticism in minimalist music to diagnose racialized “whiteness” in the reductive impulse itself. The desire to wipe the slate clean and annex the resulting “virgin territory” with systematic process is linked persuasively to key features of white self-representation, including self-discipline, industry, and universalism.
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Gender and Sexuality
It is almost impossible to find cultural readings of minimalist music that predate the anti-formalist turn in musicology of the late 1980s, based initially in challenging readings of gender and sexuality in classical music. McClary 1989–1990 and McClary 1991 set the terms: minimalism’s avoidance of traditional teleology was read as a rejection of phallic masculine desire, creating space where other sexualities, feminine or queer, could be musically represented. Schwarz 1993 mapped this new musical topology along Lacanian lines; the notion of minimalism as a new kind of desiring production is central to Fink 2005, which also provides a more general analytical outline of “recombinant teleology.” Perhaps the most extended treatment of queer minimalism is Hanson-Dvoracek 2011, focusing on composer-vocalist Julius Eastman, one of the style’s most theatrical and confrontational exponents.
Fink, Robert. Repeating Ourselves: American Minimal Music as Cultural Practice. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.
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Argues for minimalist repetition as desiring production that transcends individual subjectivity, analogous to the way desire of objects is “manufactured” by mass-media advertising. The homology is not used exclusively for critique; minimalism’s recombinant teleology is imagined as a necessary cultural response to consumer society.
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Hanson-Dvoracek, Andrew. “Julius Eastman’s 1980 Residency at Northwestern University.” PhD diss., University of Iowa, 2011.
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A detailed narrative and critical analysis of the highly provocative concerts and lectures in which Eastman, a gay black man with a long, impressive, yet troubled history in the postwar avant-garde, presented his autobiographical extended repetitive works for piano, works that bore incendiary titles like Gay Guerrilla, Evil Nigger, and Crazy Nigger. The concerts and their reception provide a powerful instance of the negotiations around race, sexuality, and power in the American avant-garde.
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McClary, Susan. “This is Not a Story My People Tell’: Musical Time and Space According to Laurie Anderson.” Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture 12.1 (Fall–Winter 1989–1990): 104–128.
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A landmark feminist critique of Anderson’s “O Superman” and “Langue d’amour,” from United States (1983). McClary’s essay positions the songs’ minimalist repetition, simple harmonic language, and different way of structuring time as alternate compositional strategies to the male-dominated compositional mainstream. Includes detailed but accessible music analysis, as well as a discussion of the significance of Anderson’s performance art. Also published in Feminine Endings (McClary 1991).
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McClary, Susan. “Getting Down off the Beanstalk: The Presence of a Woman’s Voice in Janika Vandervelde’s Genesis II.” In Feminine Endings. By Susan McClary, 112–131. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991.
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A pioneering take from Susan McClary, whose discussion of nonteleological process in the work of postminimalist composer Janika Vandervelde counts as one of the first attempts to “read” repetition in music as a cultural practice.
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Schwarz, David. “Listening Subjects: Semiotics, Psychoanalysis, and the Music of John Adams and Steve Reich.” Perspectives of New Music 31.2 (Summer 1993): 24–57.
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A Lacanian approach to the interpretation of minimalist repetition. The effect of musical process is to move beyond music’s traditional identification with the Imaginary and Symbolic orders, projecting in sound the mechanical, unfeeling aspects of the Lacanian Real.
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Philosophical Perspectives (Time, Repetition, Process)
Minimalism in music raises epistemological questions about identity and sameness, as well as ontological questions about time, process, and the musical work. Although its subject matter is far more general than music, Gilles Deleuze’s work on difference, repetition, and temporality in philosophical inquiry has been foundational for many seeking to understand the power of highly repetitive music. Deleuze 1994 was also his thesis in philosophy, and has little to do with musical form directly, or with aesthetics in general, while Deleuze 1990, translated first, actualizes the anti-philosophical stance of its predecessor. Deleuze’s notion of repetition is counterintuitive, the main goal being epistemological, the championing of “pure” difference over any representation of it, displacing traditional means (identity, opposition, analogy, and resemblance) of using sameness to construct philosophical generalities. For a number of the authors listed below, the musical loop, cycle, or process is a new cultural form that defines fresh ways of moving through time. Strelitz 1987 links the frustration and boredom engendered by “excessive” repetition to anti-art gestures familiar from punk and the historical avant-garde. Hainge 2004 and Girard 2010 directly borrow Deleuzian concepts, while McClary 2004 takes a more traditionally dialectical approach to minimalist structures of time. Most practical is the typology of tropes in Leydon 2002, while Lee 2010 persuasively argues that performing minimal music requires mediation between two different temporalities, the linear and the vertical.
Deleuze, Gilles. The Logic of Sense. Translated by Mark Lester. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990.
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First published 1969. Formally complex and disunified, fractured into thirty-four nonsequential “series,” filled with mocking references to Alice in Wonderland. Useful for the scholar of minimalism is Deleuze’s take in the Tenth Series on the nonsequential nature of time itself, which he divides into aion (the simultaneous linear extent of the past-and-future) and chronos (the set of interlocking and infinitely divisible presents). Highly suggestive for students of musical teleology and its others.
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Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.
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First published 1968. Although Deleuze’s distinctions between “naked” and “clothed” repetition, and between “repetition of the same” and “repetition of difference,” have been found suggestive by more than one author on repetitive minimalism, there are no easy hermeneutic answers here for music scholars. Use with caution.
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Girard, Johan. Répétitions: L’esthétique musicale de Terry Riley, Steve Reich et Philip Glass. Paris: Presses Sorbonnes Nouvelles, 2010.
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Girard’s well-researched study, though based on the works of the three “canonical” composers listed, is more usefully classified as a philosophical investigation of the minimalist aesthetic in music. Chapter 4 (“Naked Repetition”) takes its title from Deleuze, and stands as one of the most useful attempts to apply the insights and polemics of Difference and Repetition to the explication of contemporary music.
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Hainge, Greg. “The Sound of Time is Not Tick Tock: The Loop as a Direct Image of Time in Noto’s Endless Loop Edition (2) and the Drone Music of Phill Niblock.” Invisible Culture 8 (2004).
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Hainge explains listeners’ experiences of timelessness or altered time in Niblock’s music in terms of Deleuze’s conception of aeonic time (see Deleuze 1990). Niblock achieves this by presenting a “pure” loop (he removes all attacks and decays), making the drone the entire subject of his music, and insisting on high volume that traps the listeners inside of the sound.
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Lee, R. Andrew. “The Interaction of Linear and Vertical Time in Minimalist and Postminimalist Piano Music.” DMA diss., University of Missouri, Kansas City, 2010.
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Lee, a concert pianist with experience in the repertoire, devises a hybrid theory of semi-teleological form in postminimalist music. Includes extended analytical discussion of works by William Duckworth (Time-Curve Preludes) and Tom Johnson (An Hour for Piano).
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Leydon, Rebecca. “Towards a Typology of Minimalist Tropes.” Music Theory Online 8.4 (December 2002).
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Examines the different types of subjectivities possible in repetitive music, and argues that repetition can serve radically different expressive ends. Defines six different minimalist tropes—maternal, mantric, kinetic, totalitarian, motoric, and aphasic—each illustrated with score and audio examples.
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McClary, Susan. “Rap, Minimalism, and Structures of Time in Late Twentieth-Century Culture.” In Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music. Edited by Christopher Cox and Daniel Warner, 289–298. London: Continuum, 2004.
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Attempts a broad cultural reading of repetitive forms in late-20th-century Euro-American music, touching on technology, the influence of non-Western and Afro-diasporic aesthetics, the rise of and reaction to postmodernism, and a pervasive, viral consumer society. Ultimately concludes that the “triumph” of static, cyclic experiences in the contemporary world of music is overdetermined.
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Strelitz, Irene. “Repetition as Cultural Rebellion: Boredom, the Avant-Garde, and Rock and Roll.” OneTwoThreeFour 4 (Winter 1987): 42–57.
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An early attempt to link the centrality of “boredom” in post-Cageian experimentalism, repetitive music, and drone minimalism with similar tendencies in proto-punk and punk rock aesthetics.
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Minimalism in Popular Culture
Repetitive musical minimalism and popular culture have interpenetrated and mutually influenced each other. Minimal music achieved its widest dissemination on soundtracks, fundamentally changing the sound of underscoring in independent film. Pulsed repetition is now a recognized expressive trope in film music, and has thereby taken on new and quite specific cultural associations (obsessiveness, despair, machines, horror). Minimalism has also been called “pop music for intellectuals,” and it is undeniable that the influence of popular music and jazz is fundamental to its genesis. Thus it is possible to use analytical and hermeneutic tools developed for the analysis of minimalism to illuminate repetition patterns in popular music, especially those styles (EDM, blues) which foreground cyclic repetition.
Film and Television
The music of Philip Glass, whether literally present (Koyaaniqatsi, Candyman) or simply a stylistic model, has become a new default setting for serious, atmospheric, or meditative films. Glass’s nonteleological aesthetic was, early on, compared to that of experimental filmmaker Michael Snow in Foreman 1997 (first published 1978), while Schneider and Korot 1976 includes a Steve Reich essay that treats the two media as mirrors of each other. In fact, minimalist musical repetition has always been closely connected with the rhythms of the mass media, as noted in Antin 1975 and Sennett 1984 (cited under Philip Glass), and as Fink 2013 argues in detail. The way minimalist repetition functions in film scores has been extensively discussed in recent literature: McClary 2007 uncovers the hidden romanticism of minimalist underscoring of the depiction of women, while Eaton 2014 is characteristic in the way it links repetitive process in film soundtracks to the ups and downs of masculine “genius.” Renihan 2014 finds that, in an explicitly political context, minimalism’s nonteleological approach to time can work with filmic montage to destabilize controlling historical narratives.
Antin, David. “Video: The Distinctive Features of the Medium.” In Video Art. Edited by Suzanne Delahunty, 57–74. Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, 1975.
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Discusses the then-new genre of video art in comparison with the medium of television. Argues that key differences between the two stem mostly from their relationship to time: video art’s greater duration, perceived boredom, and reliance on content to determine length oppose the constraints placed on television by commerce and programming concerns. Includes brief discussion of works by Morris and Serra.
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Eaton, Rebecca. “Marking Minimalism: Minimal Music as a Sign of Machines and Mathematics in Multimedia.” Music and the Moving Image 7.1 (Spring 2014): 3–23.
DOI: 10.5406/musimoviimag.7.1.0003Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Eaton has become the primary theoretician of minimalism as film music. She takes a semiotic approach, exploring the way evocations of minimalist process music work within the signifying structure of musical multimedia, most notably as a sign for the order and disordering of rational thought.
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Fink, Robert. “Going with the Flow: Minimalism as Cultural Practice in the USA since 1945.” In The Ashgate Research Companion to Minimalist and Postminimalist Music. Edited by Keith Potter, Kyle Gann, and Pwyll ap Siôn 201–218. Farnham, UK, and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013.
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A continuation of the author’s work on musical minimalism and mass media. The evolution of minimalism through postminimalism into totalism is correlated with technologically mediated shifts in the televisual environment. In the era of VCR, MTV, and the remote control (studied in detail in the article), the smooth flow of 1960s TV gave way to jerky, cut-up rhythms and event-driven teleology; minimalist music often followed suit, complexifying its rhythms and adding bombast.
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Foreman, Richard. “Glass and Snow (1970).” In Writings on Glass. Edited by Richard Kostelanetz, 80–86. New York: Schirmer, 1997.
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One of the first serious academic discussions of the music of Philip Glass. His music is paired with the abstract films of Michael Snow, both of which are seen to be working against the expressionism and teleology characteristic time-based art forms, using repetitive process to highlight the aural/visual perception of pure “presence.”
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McClary, Susan. “Minima Romantica.” In Beyond the Soundtrack: Representing Music in Cinema. Edited by Daniel Goldmark, Lawrence Kramer, and Richard Leppert, 48–65. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.
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A detailed musicological analysis of three minimalist film scores: Angels and Insects (Balanescu), The Piano (Nyman), and The Hours (Glass). McClary’s close readings demonstrate how minimalist looping of traditional tonal structures enhance postmodern filmic depictions of subjectivity in crisis; minimalism indexes a new/old form of “unheard melody,” in which the repetition of motives and gestures can provide audiences with the subliminal experience of paranoia, sexual obsession, and despair.
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Renihan, Colleen. “Gesture, Temporality, and the Politics of Engagement in Opera on Film: Penny Woolcock’s The Death of Klinghoffer.” Music, Sound, and the Moving Image 8.1 (Spring 2014): 57–85.
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Argues that the combination of Adams’s complex musical web with the temporal distortions and nonlinearities inherent in Woolcock’s cinematic montage works against the teleological mode of history underlying Jewish-Israeli claims to epistemological power.
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Schneider, Ira, and Beryl Korot, eds. Video Art. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976.
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An early collection of essays on video art, coedited by the artist who would later create the video for Steve Reich’s operas The Cave and Three Tales. Emphasizes the process-driven aspects of the medium.
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Popular Music
The following references have been chosen to highlight the specific relation of minimalism in 20th-century art music to contemporary trends in popular music. Not surprisingly, the majority of these articles deal with electronic dance music (EDM), whose extraordinarily high levels of cyclic repetition, expanded timescale, and synthesized textures were being compared with musical minimalism—and vice versa, as when Glass’s music was called “art disco”—as early as the 1970s (chapter 1 of Fink 2005, cited under Minimalism as Cultural Practice provides a reception history and comparative analysis). Butler 2006 applies music-theoretical frameworks for the unfolding of rhythmic structure in Western art music to the highly repetitive, more Afro-diasporic world of four-on-the-floor dance genres like house and (minimal) techno, while McCandless 2013 transposes the beat-class framework of Cohn 1992 (cited under Rhythmic Theory), developed for minimalism, to the analysis of progressive heavy metal. Nye 2013 is a cultural study of the way “minimalism” in techno music has functioned as a generic label, a cultural aesthetic, and a sociological thesis in Berlin club culture. Sherburne 2004 covers much of the same territory, but from a broader, more purely aesthetic standpoint. Garcia 2005 moves decisively into an affirmative cultural hermeneutics of repetition, directly countering the Adornian critique in Mertens 1983 (cited under Minimal Music); Latartara 2010 deals with more rebarbative, noise-laden music in similar terms. Grimshaw 2002 explains the crossover success of the recorded music of Philip Glass by analyzing its use of pop music production techniques, while Lawrence 2009 provides an exhaustive biographical treatment of the ultimate crossover figure in the minimalist story, Arthur Russell, who moved restlessly from the art gallery and the concert hall to the disco floor without ever finding a stable audience.
Butler, Mark J. Unlocking the Groove: Rhythm, Meter, and Musical Design in Electronic Dance Music. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006.
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Butler’s identification of “diatonic” rhythmic patterns—patterns that, like the diatonic scale, are irregular, maximally even, and function as referential—allows him to discern and explicate complex patterns of tension and release in music that many theorists dismiss. His observations on larger-scale formal gestures in EDM performance (e.g., “turning the beat around” and the “bass drop”) are ethnographically elegant and acute.
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Garcia, Luis-Manuel. “On and On: Repetition as Process and Pleasure in Electronic Dance Music.” Music Theory Online 11.4 (October 2005).
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Provides a good overview of 20th-century musicological literature on musical repetition, focusing on a Freudian critique of regression characteristic of Adorno. Counterposes to this a cultural reading of repetition as process, and process as pleasure. Analyzes music by Richie Hawtin (Plastikman), Tony Rohr, and Akufen.
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Grimshaw, Jeremy. “High, ‘Low,’ and Plastic Arts: Philip Glass and the Symphony in the Age of Postproduction.” Musical Quarterly 86.3 (Fall 2002): 472–507.
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Discusses the success of Glass’s symphonies as crossover works. Argues that crossover characteristics are less evident in compositional style and marketing strategies, and more significant in Glass’s use of studio technology not typically associated with art music. Examines the use of techniques such as instrumental isolation, click tracks, overdubs, and Pro-Tools in postproduction.
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Latartara, John. “Laptop Composition at the Turn of the Millennium: Repetition and Noise in the Music of Oval, Merzbow, and Kid606.” twentieth-century music 7 (2010): 91–115.
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Using spectrograms as a score equivalent, analyzes the way three contemporary electronic musicians use repetition and noise to structure sound forms. The dialectical and interpenetrating nature of these two states of sonic being are related to the influential philosophical treatment of repetition and difference in Deleuze 1994, cited under Philosophical Perspectives (Time, Repetition, Process).
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Lawrence, Tim. Hold On to Your Dreams: Arthur Russell and the Downtown Music Scene, 1973–1992. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009.
DOI: 10.1215/9780822390855Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Definitive biography of a key figure in the Downtown music scene of the 1970s and 1980s. Russell, a protean figure who played (cello) in many of the ensemble works of Glass and Reich, was a composer of postminimalist art music, as well as a pioneer of avant-garde electronic dance music.
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McCandless, Gregory R. “Metal as a Gradual Process: Additive Rhythmic Structures in the Music of Dream Theater.” Music Theory Online 19.2 (June 2013).
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Application of theoretical approaches developed for the analysis of process music to repetition structures in complex progressive metal.
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Nye, Sean. “Minimal Understandings: The Berlin Decade, the Minimal Continuum, and Debates on the Legacy of German Techno.” Journal of Popular Music Studies 25.2 (June 2013): 154–184.
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Traces the more general development of German dance music since the 1970s in terms of a “minimal continuum,” by analogy and contrast to the “hardcore continuum” that Simon Reynolds has posited as the main structural path for British EDM from rave to dubstep.
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Sherburne, Philip. “Digital Discipline: Minimalism in House and Techno.” In Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music. Edited by Christopher Cox and Daniel Warner, 319–326. London: Continuum, 2004.
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Provides a detailed taxonomy of the minimalist impulse in EDM, noting the preference within techno and house for “skeletalism,” versus a countervailing preference within the drum’n’bass scene for “massification.” Both tendencies are traced back to strategies in the avant-garde minimal music of Young, Reich, and Glass.
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Minimalism and Process in the Other Arts
The histories of minimalism in music, the visual arts, and dance have been intertwined from their earliest days, sharing the same experimental milieu in New York City. Composers, visual artists, dancers, and choreographers shared personal and professional relationships, as well as performance spaces and creative endeavors. Indeed, before gaining access to traditional musical patronage, composers found more support from their avant-garde contemporaries in the other arts. For those studying musical minimalism, writings by and about minimalists in the visual arts and dance offer important insights, especially into minimalism’s early aesthetics. These sources also provide a richer context in which to understand the development of minimalist music.
Visual Arts
Minimalism in the visual arts received serious attention from scholars and critics earlier than its counterpart in music. The sources gathered here mostly concern the visual arts, but they should also be useful to those interested in minimalism in music for their discussions of the minimalist aesthetic and philosophy. Battcock 1995 reprints early writing by art critics (including Richard Wollheim, generally credited as the first to use “minimal” to describe art—see also Wollheim 1965, the first appearance of this essay). Baker 1988, Colpitt 1990, and Meyer 2001 provide good entry points into the history, aesthetics, and controversies of minimalist art, while Cuno’s essay in Anderson 1990 attempts to define the differences between minimalist and postminimalist art. Kuspit 1977 provides a critical examination of authoritarianism in the works of major minimalist artists. (See also Chave 1990, cited under Minimalism as Cultural Practice.) Hitchcock 1996 and Bernard 1992–1993 are two early influential essays by music scholars who make the direct connection between minimalist art and minimalist music.
Anderson, Lisa. Minimalism and Post-Minimalism: Drawing Distinctions. Hanover, NH: Hood Museum of Art, 1990.
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Catalogue documenting a 1990 exhibit held at Dartmouth College that exhibited two groups of drawings: “minimalist” and “post-minimalist.” Of particular interest is the short introductory essay by James Cuno, in which he traces the history of the use of the term “minimalism” in the visual arts. Concludes by stating that the line between “minimalist” and “post-minimalist” was “too fine to draw.”
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Baker, Kenneth. Minimalism: Art of Circumstance. New York: Abbeville, 1988.
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An excellent introduction to minimalism in the visual arts. Baker provides historical perspective, and discusses the aesthetics of key figures in minimalist art and sculpture. Includes many illustrations.
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Battcock, Gregory. Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.
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Key collection of texts on minimal art by critics grappling with this new art form, as well as influential manifestos by some of the artists themselves. Each text is prefaced by a brief contextualizing introduction by Battcock. Includes important writings by Michael Fried, Robert Morris, Barbara Rose, and Richard Wollheim (see Wollheim 1965). First published by E. P. Dutton, 1968.
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Beidler, Paul G. “The Postmodern Sublime: Kant and Tony Smith’s Anecdote of the Cube.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 53.2 (Spring 1995): 177–186.
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Focusing on the postmodern aspects of minimalism, Beidler argues that works such as Tony Smith’s six-foot steel cube Die represent a move toward what Lyotard has theorized as the postmodern sublime. Articles features discussion of the minimalist aesthetics in sculpture by referencing key writings by Michael Fried and Robert Morris.
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Bernard, Jonathan. “The Minimalist Aesthetic in the Plastic Arts and in Music.” Perspectives of New Music 31 (1992–1993): 86–132.
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One of the first musicological essays to make explicit the relationships between minimalist art and minimalist music. Bernard connects techniques and aesthetics found in specific pieces of the minimalist repertoire to their counterparts in the visual arts. Focused almost exclusively on the music of Young, Riley, Reich, and Glass.
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Colpitt, Frances. Minimal Art: The Critical Perspective. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1990.
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A good primer on minimal art. Includes a definition and brief history, as well as these key issues: minimal art as process, its composition, its relationship to the spectator, and theoretical issues (art and objecthood, abstraction, the aesthetic of boredom, and the line between art and non-art). Includes fifty-nine black-and-white plates of minimal art works.
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Hitchcock, H. Wiley. “Minimalism in Art and Music: Origins and Aesthetics.” In Classic Essays on Twentieth-Century Music: A Continuing Symposium. Edited by Richard Kostelanetz and Joseph Darby, 308–319. New York: Schirmer Books, 1996.
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First delivered as a lecture in the late 1980s, this essay is one of the earliest efforts to make sense of minimalist music by comparing it to the visual arts, and it still serves as a good introduction to this topic. Also includes discussion of the roots of minimalist music and surveys pieces by the canonical quartet of minimalist composers. Volume copublished by Prentice Hall International, London.
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Kuspit, Donald B. “Authoritarian Abstraction.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 36.1 (Autumn 1977): 25–38.
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Frankfurt School critique of “objectivist minimalist forms.” Kuspit argues that authoritarianism is a “symptom” (in Adorno’s sense) of the decadence of the abstraction and reductionism that characterizes minimalist art. Discusses the work of Serra, Andre, Morris, and others. Concludes with a discussion of how these three artists, in works from the 1970s, attempted a departure from their authoritarian past.
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Meyer, James. Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001.
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Engages with the debate over what constitutes minimalism in the visual arts by discussing both artistic works and the critical debate surrounding the movement. Organized chronologically, with coverage from 1959 to 1968. An excellent introduction to both minimalist art and the various philosophies and aesthetics that prompted their creation.
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Wollheim, Richard. “Minimal Art.” Arts Magazine, January 1965: 26–32.
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The essay generally credited as the first to use the adjective “minimal” to describe an artistic style. Wollheim, however, makes no references to any visual artist we now associate with minimalism. Instead, he focuses on Reinhardt, Rauschenberg, and Duchamp. He examines the ways in which these works’ “minimal art-content” challenges conventional thinking about the ontology of art, the relationship between an original and copies, and the value placed on endeavor in the creation of an artistic piece. Reprinted in Battcock 1995.
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Dance
Writing on the minimalist aesthetic in dance traces two main lines of influences: Croce 1980, Koblitz 1985, and Reich 1983 detail the importance of minimalist composers, especially Glass and Reich, in both providing the music for, and inspiring the aesthetics of, minimalist choreography; while Rainer 1974 and Spivey 2003 examine intersections between dance and minimalism in the visual arts.
Croce, Arlene. “Slowly Then the History of Them Comes Out.” New Yorker, 30 June 1980: 92, 95.
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Positions Glass and Wilson as the most important influences on the post-Cunningham generation of choreographers and dance composers, whose creations share a prominent beat and a general “misterioso” atmosphere. Surveys a number of recent performances by such choreographers as Lucinda Childs, Laura Dean, Andrew de Groat, Kathryn Posin, and David Gordon.
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Koblitz, David. “Minimalist Music for Maximum Choreography: Breaking Away from the Rhythmic Straight Jacket.” Dance Magazine 59.2 (February 1985): 52–55.
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Positions Glass and Reich as a key influence on both composers and choreographers in the 1970s and 1980s. Concludes that minimalist music is particularly well suited to a new choreographic aesthetics because of its undifferentiated rhythmic pulse, which can structure the dance without being overly restrictive to the choreographer; and its diatonic harmonies, which offer both abstraction and familiarity.
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Rainer, Yvonne. “A Quasi-Survey of Some ‘Minimalist’ Tendencies in the Quantitatively Minimal Dance Activity midst the Plethora, or an Analysis of Trio A.” In Work, 1961–1973. By Yvonne Rainer. Edited by Kasper Koenig, 263–273. Halifax, NS: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1974.
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Rainier presents in chart form the similarities she discerns between minimalism in the plastics arts and dance. Using her own Trio A as a case study, she discusses the ways in which the minimalist aesthetics in sculpture started informing her choreography and movements in the mid-1960s. Volume copublished by New York University Press. Essay reprinted in What is Dance?: Readings in Theory and Criticism, edited by Roger Copeland and Marshall Cohen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 325–332.
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Reich, Steve. “Notes on Music and Dance.” In What is Dance?: Readings in Theory and Criticism. Edited by Roger Copeland and Marshall Cohen, 336–338. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983.
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Reich argued in 1973 for the dance equivalent of minimal music. This new choreography, exemplified by Laura Dean, would share rhythmic structure with the music, without either art explicitly influencing the other.
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Spivey, Virginia. “Sites of Subjectivity: Robert Morris, Minimalism, and Dance.” Dance Research Journal 35.2 (Winter 2003): 112–130.
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Continued in Dance Research Journal 36.1 (Summer 2004). Spivey contextualizes Robert Morris’s pioneering minimalist sculptures within the aesthetics of contemporary avant-garde dance. Comparing Morris’s large, geometric objects from the early 1960s with Yvonne Rainer’s dance Trio A (1965), Spivey argues they share both a focus on the relationship between the audience and the artwork/dance, and a desire to reduce art forms to their basics.
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Article
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- Japan
- Jazz
- Jewish Music
- Joachim, Joseph
- Joplin, Scott
- Karłowicz, Mieczysław
- Keyboard Instruments
- Keyboard Music
- Korea
- Liedekens, 15th- and 16th-Century Dutch Polyphonic Songs
- Ligeti, György
- Liszt, Franz
- Locatelli, Pietro Antonio
- Lully, Jean-Baptiste
- Lusophone Africa, Music and
- Lute, Vihuela, and Early Guitar
- Luther, Martin
- Machaut, Guillaume de
- Madrigal
- Mahler, Gustav
- Makeba, Miriam
- Mass
- Massenet, Jules
- Medieval Music
- Medievalism and Music
- Mendelssohn, Felix
- Messiaen, Olivier
- Mexico
- Milhaud, Darius
- Minimalism
- Monteverdi, Claudio
- Motet
- Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus
- Music and Asian America
- Music and Cognition
- Music and Mysticism
- Music in Colonial Hispanic America
- Music in the Balkans
- Musica Ficta
- Musical
- Musical Instruments, Classification of
- Musorgsky, Modest Petrovich
- Nationalism in Western Art Music
- N’Dour, Youssou
- Nketia, J.H. Kwabena
- North Africa
- Oboe
- Operetta
- Orchestral Music
- Organum
- Palestrina, Giovanni Pierluigi da
- Parton, Dolly
- Peking Opera (Beijing Opera, jingju)
- Penderecki, Krzysztof
- Performance Practice in Western Art Music
- Philosophy of Music
- Ponce, Manuel
- Popular Song in the Age of Louis XIV
- Post-Colonialism
- Poulenc, Francis
- Printing and Publishing of Music
- Program Music
- Prokofiev, Sergey
- Puccini, Giacomo
- Puerto Rico, Music of
- Purcell, Henry
- Queer Musicology
- Rameau, Jean-Philippe
- Rap/Hip-Hop
- Ravel, Maurice
- Recitative
- Recorder
- Reich, Steve
- Renaissance
- Resources for Musical Research
- Revueltas, Silvestre
- Rodrigo, Joaquin
- Romanticism
- Rousseau, Jean-Jacques
- Roussel, Albert
- Rumba
- Saint-Saëns, Camille
- Salsa
- Satie, Erik
- Scarlatti, Alessandro
- Scarlatti, Domenico
- Schenkerian Analysis
- Schnittke, Alfred
- Schoenberg, Arnold
- Schütz, Heinrich
- Schumann, Clara
- Schumann, Robert
- Serialism
- Shostakovich, Dmitry
- Sibelius, Jean
- Soler, Antonio
- Solo Secular Vocal Music
- Sonata
- Sonata Form
- Sound Art
- Sound Studies
- Strauss, Richard
- Stravinsky, Igor
- Street Music
- String Quartet
- Suite
- Sustainability, Music
- Symphony
- Tailleferre, Germaine
- Tallis, Thomas
- Talma, Louise
- Tango
- Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Ilyich
- Technology, Music
- Telemann, Georg Philipp
- Thailand
- Thomas “Mukanya” Mapfumo and Songs of Protest in Colonial ...
- Tonality
- Troubadours and Trouvères
- Umm Kulthūm
- Variation Form
- Vaughan Williams, Ralph
- Verdi, Giuseppe
- Victoria, Tomás Luis de
- Video Game Music
- Villa-Lobos, Heitor
- Viol
- Viotti, Giovanni Battista
- Virtuosity/Virtuoso
- Vivaldi, Antonio
- von Weber, Carl Maria
- Wagner, Richard
- Webern, Anton
- West Asia
- Western European Music Criticism, c. 1700-1970
- Wind Bands
- Women in Music
- Woodwind Instruments
- Yuasa, Jōji
- Zarzuela
