In many ways this is a marvellous book: it presents a documentary history not just of minimalist music but also of many other sorts of musical production that might be thought to relate to minimalism. There are 21 chapters, each opening with a brief introduction – usually no more than a paragraph or two – by the book's editors, Kerry O'Brien and Will Robin, before we are presented with a series of extended passages from existing sources. Chapter Ten, for example, is about ‘The New Downtown’, and the editors’ introductory paragraphs usher us into an exchange of views between Rhys Chatham and Peter Gordon from the November 1978 issue of Ear Magazine; later we can read Lee Ranaldo's memories of his first encounter with Chatham's Guitar Trio, from an article published in The Wire in 2000.
The chapters move, more or less chronologically, from ‘Improvisation and Experimentation’ around 1960 – accounts of minimalism's various origin myths – to a retrospective survey of ‘Futures’, running from 2006 to 2021. There is a further division of the book into three parts: the eight chapters of Part One go from the beginnings to Reich and Glass's consolidation of their versions of minimalism in the first half of the 1970s; the ten chapters of Part Two cover minimalism's ascendancy after 1976 and its offshoots; Part Three consists of three more reflective, speculative chapters.
None of this is out of the ordinary; these days we know how this history unfolds and we have even become used to the idea that it is a history into which we need to add the more marginal figures who were excluded by the dominance of the Reich–Glass hegemony. But it is nevertheless marvellous to have such a wide-ranging collection of documentary sources – polemics, reviews, programme notes, interviews – to demonstrate how music can delight, annoy and confuse people. In this mix of contemporary and retrospective responses it is, as ever, instructive to see how the most perceptive critics tend to be those who report what it is they're hearing without letting their prejudices get in the way. Tom Johnson's writing is represented by two Village Voice articles of which the first, from 1973, about Éliane Radigue, is a study in thoughtful objectivity: in just a few hundred words Johnson explains what Radigue's music is like, how it differs from much of the then new music and why this means that it ‘will probably be overlooked’ (p. 77).
In contrast there's an interview between Wim Mertens and John Cage. Cage had just heard Glenn Branca's music at the 1982 New Music America festival but in a little over four pages we discover nothing about Branca's music except that Cage thought that ‘if it was something political, it would resemble fascism’ (p. 199). I don't much like Branca's music myself but I think it deserves more than this. Somewhere between these two extremes is a curious 1997 interview with David Lang in which he explains why, as an 18-year-old, Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians had made him ‘angry because it was really nice to listen to’; after the ‘really obnoxious… really harsh’ Four Organs, this felt like a denial of the teenage Lang's sense that ‘interesting things in music happened when music was ugly’ (p. 293).
The book is not without its flaws, however, the principal one being that the history on offer is almost exclusively centred on American musicians. Coverage of music from beyond the borders of the US is restricted to a 1976 interview with Louis Andriessen, Reinbert de Leeuw and Misha Mengelberg in a chapter on ‘Politics, Identity, and Expression’, a chapter on the ‘Spiritual Minimalism’ of Górecki and Pärt, and a chapter on ‘Silences’ that is mostly about the Wandelweiser collective. This exclusive focus would have been less problematic if the editors had acknowledged the book's American focus in its title and in their introduction, but they don't, so all those students who make On Minimalism their main resource for minimalist assignments will probably conclude that this music was just an American phenomenon.
Perhaps the most significant absences are composers from the first generation of European minimalists. The two main figures in English minimalism, Michael Nyman and Gavin Bryars, get no more than a handful of brief mentions: it's as if Jesus’ Blood really had failed and The Draughtsman's Contract had never been drawn up. There's also only a brief footnote mention of Henning Christiansen, whose Springen is often credited as being the first acknowledged piece of ‘minimal-music’, the term that Nyman used to describe it in a Spectator review in October 1968.Footnote 1 Nyman's music journalism was as perceptive in its reporting of the London scene as Tom Johnson's was of New York, but On Minimalism includes just one Nyman article, from 1971, and it's a disappointingly unrevealing survey of ‘British composers on discipline and process’.
Nor is there any recognition of Walter Zimmermann's crucial role in the development of an understanding of minimalist music in Germany, not only through his groundbreaking collection of interviews with American composers, Desert Plants, but also through his Beginner Studio concert series in Cologne and, above all, through his own music, especially in works like Beginner's Mind and Lokale Musik. I think this matters because, crucially, the music of composers like Bryars, Nyman and Zimmermann offers a more extended ancestry for minimalism, suggesting family trees that go back to Satie-influenced 1940s Cage (Zimmermann), to Satie himself (Bryars) and, perhaps more playfully, to Purcell, Mozart and Schumann (Nyman).
Any book that attempts to broaden our understanding of a musical tendency is always going to invite the criticism that it could have been broader still: minimalism in film music, eastern European minimalism, minimalist music and contemporary dance? I could go on. I could also argue that very little of the music to which this music refers is really ‘minimalist’ in any useful sense of that term, but it's a bit late for that. Best, then, to finish where I began and welcome a book that is not only meticulous in its scholarship but also a richly stimulating addition to the literature on music after 1960.
