Rethinking Minimalism: at the Intersection of Music Theory and Art Criticism

Rethinking Minimalism: At the Intersection of Music Theory and Art Criticism Peter Shelley A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Washington 2013 Reading Committee Jonathan Bernard, Chair Áine Heneghan Judy Tsou Program Authorized to Offer Degree: Music Theory ©Copyright 2013 Peter Shelley University of Washington Abstract Rethinking Minimalism: At the Intersection of Music Theory and Art Criticism Peter James Shelley Chair of the Supervisory Committee: Dr. Jonathan Bernard Music Theory By now most scholars are fairly sure of what minimalism is. Even if they may be reluctant to offer a precise theory, and even if they may distrust canon formation, members of the informed public have a clear idea of who the central canonical minimalist composers were or are. Sitting front and center are always four white male Americans: La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and Philip Glass. This dissertation negotiates with this received wisdom, challenging the stylistic coherence among these composers implied by the term minimalism and scrutinizing the presumed neutrality of their music. This dissertation is based in the acceptance of the aesthetic similarities between minimalist sculpture and music. Michael Fried’s essay “Art and Objecthood,” which occupies a central role in the history of minimalist sculptural criticism, serves as the point of departure for three excursions into minimalist music. The first excursion deals with the question of time in minimalism, arguing that, contrary to received wisdom, minimalist music is not always well understood as static or, in Jonathan Kramer’s terminology, vertical. The second excursion addresses anthropomorphism in minimalist music, borrowing from Fried’s concept of (bodily) presence. Relying heavily on Adriana Cavarero’s philosophy of vocality, differences in bodily expression are explored within and between the music of Young and Reich. The final excursion deals with objecthood itself, disrupting the commonplace that minimalism makes no political or cultural statements. Following art critic Anna Chave, I argue that tropes of masculinity have been disguised in minimalist music by the presumption of neutrality. Masculinity, however, must be redefined with the onset of the 1960s. Following Peter Stearns and Michael Kimmel, I argue for an austere, isolationist masculinity, whose presumed omnipotence produces an immanent fragility. Reich’s minimalism in particular can be distinguished from that of Riley and Young on account of its recontextualization of American masculinity. Overall this dissertation is a dissertation of difference. By attending to time, corporeality, and masculinity – subjects too often subordinated within the field of music theory – I would undermine the stabilizing and homogenizing claims implicit in the stylistic heading of “minimalism.” Contents Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 1: Defining Minimalism in Music ................................................................................... 16 Chapter 2: Minimalism and Postmodernism................................................................................. 72 Chapter 3: The Time of Minimalism .......................................................................................... 158 Chapter 4: Space, Interest, and Uniqueness ................................................................................ 219 Chapter 5: Minimalism Matters .................................................................................................. 290 Bibliography ............................................................................................................................... 336 INTRODUCTION This dissertation, which ranges across a variety of approaches to minimalist music, is united by a commitment to difference. Difference, over recent decades, has grown to be an important academic concept; many scholars concerned with social justice and theories of identity have grown rightly critical of disciplinary approaches that favor the universal, acknowledging that too often this happens at the expense of those who occupy the margins. Difference has often been adopted—explicitly or implicitly—as a point of focus in order to escape the gravitational pull of universals. While it will remain important throughout this dissertation, there are two areas in which difference serves as the essential point of departure: stylistic definition and gender. A great deal of ink has been spilled pursuing the definition of minimalism in music, attempting to identify the essential feature or features that allow us to identify a minimalist composition as such. This dissertation will not take up a position in this debate, but instead will argue for difference in the place of sameness, for an undefined minimalism. Gender will appear throughout this dissertation both because the analyses below will often incorporate cultural criticism, and because the question of difference and definition is a question of abstraction, and, as Gayatri Spivak asserts, “the thought of gender is the first abstraction.”1 The work of this dissertation will be more rigorously to pursue the differences within the minimalist canon and to account for them in terms of the play of gender and difference within society more broadly. One of the hallmarks of academic work done on minimalist music has been the attempt to establish a meaningful definition, one which justifies the author’s choice of objects of analysis 1 Gayatri Spivak, “What is Gender? What is Europe? Walking with Balibar,” The Fifth Ursula Hirschmann Annual Lecture on Gender and Europe (April 21, 2005), 3. Accessed 7/29/2013, http://www.eui.eu/RSCAS/WP-Texts/200605-UHL_Spivak.pdf 1 INTRODUCTION and extends a larger field to which the reader might employ similar methods. Part of the reason for this impulse was surely the comparative lack of familiarity with minimalism through the 1980s. Scholars today enjoy the pleasant circumstance of no longer needing to justify or defend an academic interest in minimalist music, yet the problem of definition would seem to linger. What began as a scarcely acknowledged radical compositional practice is now viewed as one of the dominant musical developments of the second half of the twentieth century. While early scholars were obliged to devote a considerable amount of time to describing minimalist music to an audience unfamiliar with it, today it is common for undergraduate music students to be able to identify and discuss at least the most prominent pieces from the minimalist repertoire. A number of minimalist compositions are now included in the canon of twentieth-century music, and many present-day composers, both inside and independent of the academy, produce work indebted to minimalism. In spite of—or perhaps owing to—this increased prestige, there remains considerable disagreement about which composers and pieces of music should be considered minimalist. While most early scholars were faced with the problem of defining minimalism for an uninitiated readership, the twenty-first-century scholar is instead confronted with minimalism as an established, though disputed, fact. Nevertheless, it is clear from the diverse character of minimalist scholarship, from the often contradictory meanings attributed to minimalism by different scholars, that minimalism as a fait accompli entails not a convergence of meanings but a practical multiplicity. For some scholars, minimalism is a practice that died out almost as soon as it began, exhausted by its necessary simplicity; for others, minimalism is still amongst the most vital of contemporary practices, with at least three generations of distinguished composers. Some critics use the word “minimalism” to indicate specific aesthetic and compositional 2 INTRODUCTION concerns, effectively limited in scope to American—and especially New York—composers in the late 1960s and early 1970s; others consider minimalism’s simplicity, relative especially to the New Complexity, as a sufficient criterion for definition, allowing a much more diverse set of composers to share the designation. There is no universally agreed-upon definition or delimitation of minimalism in music, and any study of minimalism in music must take account of this circumstance. There are a number of factors contributing to the diversity of definitions of minimalism in music, but it is surely significant that the term itself easily functions in both a technical and a colloquial sense. Edward Strickland has enumerated many of the diverse deployments of “minimalism” as a term in late twentieth-century English-language discourse, including its use in advertisement and fashion, and surely every reader in an English-speaking community regularly encounters both “minimal” and “minimalist” used as generally descriptive terms, independent of any specific art- or music-historical context.2 The more technical definitions of minimalism, both in the plastic arts and in music, develop from the art-critical discourse of the mid 1960s, when “minimal” emerged as the favorite of several epithets used to describe the work of a diverse collection of artists producing cool, reserved, and/or simple work. Those writing decades later on the art of the 1960s generally agree on a canon of minimalist artists: Robert Morris, Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, and Carl Andre. Several other artists appear just

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