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The Names of Minimalism: Authorship, Art Music, and Historiography in Dispute
Minimalism stands as the key representative of 1960s radicalism in art music histories—but always as a failed project. In The Names of Minimalism , Patrick Nickleson holds in tension collaborative composers in the period of their collaboration, as well as the musicological policing of authorship in the wake of their eventual disputes. Through examinations of the droning of the Theatre of Eternal Music, Reich’s Pendulum Music , Glass’s work for multiple organs, the austere performances of punk and no wave bands, and Rhys Chatham and Glenn Branca’s works for massed electric guitars, Nickleson argues for authorship as always impure, buzzing, and indistinct.
Expanding the place of Jacques Rancière’s philosophy within musicology, Nickleson draws attention to disciplinary practices of guarding compositional authority against artists who set out to undermine it. The book reimagines the canonic artists and works of minimalism as “(early) minimalism,” to show that art music histories refuse to take seriously challenges to conventional authorship as a means of defending the very category “art music.” Ultimately, Nickleson asks where we end up if we imagine the early minimalist project—artists forming bands to perform their own music, rejecting the score in favor of recording, making extensive use of magnetic type as compositional and archival medium, hosting performances in lofts and art galleries rather than concert halls—not as a utopian moment within a 1960s counterculture doomed to fail, but as the beginning of a process with a long and influential afterlife.
Expanding the place of Jacques Rancière’s philosophy within musicology, Nickleson draws attention to disciplinary practices of guarding compositional authority against artists who set out to undermine it. The book reimagines the canonic artists and works of minimalism as “(early) minimalism,” to show that art music histories refuse to take seriously challenges to conventional authorship as a means of defending the very category “art music.” Ultimately, Nickleson asks where we end up if we imagine the early minimalist project—artists forming bands to perform their own music, rejecting the score in favor of recording, making extensive use of magnetic type as compositional and archival medium, hosting performances in lofts and art galleries rather than concert halls—not as a utopian moment within a 1960s counterculture doomed to fail, but as the beginning of a process with a long and influential afterlife.
- GenresMusic
266 pages, Paperback
Published January 19, 2023
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
June 13, 2023
Three short passages from The Names of Minimalism:
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Against policed histories, I insist that authors do not preexist their work; they are subjectivized in it. Minimalism emerges from relational subjectivities in authorship – they became minimalists, and minimalism became minimalism, while they were hanging out together, and they were hanging out together because they considered the normative model of solitary composition to paper an unsatisfactory way to create work and a life.
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We need critical conceptions of revolt that begin from recognizing the fact that critique often emerges simultaneously from inside and outside of the problem at hand.
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My conception throughout this book has been that capturing events of egalitarian potential is not about valorizing exceptional moments, but about recognizing our consistent refusal of any prehistory claimed by radical movements in art and politics. In the name of “critique,” we consistently refuse the opportunity to weave the sensory tissue that might provide a precedent to eventual events of egalitarianism.
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Against policed histories, I insist that authors do not preexist their work; they are subjectivized in it. Minimalism emerges from relational subjectivities in authorship – they became minimalists, and minimalism became minimalism, while they were hanging out together, and they were hanging out together because they considered the normative model of solitary composition to paper an unsatisfactory way to create work and a life.
*
We need critical conceptions of revolt that begin from recognizing the fact that critique often emerges simultaneously from inside and outside of the problem at hand.
*
My conception throughout this book has been that capturing events of egalitarian potential is not about valorizing exceptional moments, but about recognizing our consistent refusal of any prehistory claimed by radical movements in art and politics. In the name of “critique,” we consistently refuse the opportunity to weave the sensory tissue that might provide a precedent to eventual events of egalitarianism.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review