"The Crux of Minimalist Criticism"

Since its emergence as an aesthetic category in the mid-twentieth century, minimalism has been contentious amongst scholars of all forms of art. It has been alternately celebrated, questioned, and condemned by not only its critics, but also the artists whose works have been given the historical title “minimalist.” This article explores the emergence of minimalist music, examining its relation to the earlier “avant-garde” works of John Cage and other eclectic influences, such as jazz and Eastern music. In doing so, this article attempts to establish a broad understanding of the elements integral to minimalist music, with a special focus on the composers La Monte Young, Terry Riley, and Steve Reich. The works of Riley and Reich are compared to the works of visual artists Barnett Newman and Sol LeWitt in order to highlight the pivotal elements of the minimalist aesthetic, including repetition, simplicity, and, to borrow Cage’s term, “Unfixity.” This article concludes that the minimalist compositions of the aforementioned composers ultimately demonstrate the integral characteristics of minimalism better than their visual counterparts, due to the temporal nature of music. However, the article seeks to demonstrate the importance of contemplating visual and musical interpretations of minimalism together, as they are complimentary windows into this modern movement.

Proceedings of the European Society of Aesthetics, 2018

Australian Journal of Art, 1999

E.P. Dutton eBooks, 1968

who is already widely known for his stimulating anthology called THE NEW ART (Dutton Paperbacks, 1966), has collected in this volume twenty-eight enlightening essays by both critics and artists analyzing all aspects of the fascinating and very complex "Minimal Art" style now in full swing in the most advanced American painting and sculpture. In addition, over 170 photographs showing important Minimal works are included. In both text and picture, therefore, this unique anthology will be indispensable to all who wish to know more about the newest art in America.

/Minimalism and its outsider - first draft for part 1 essay [incomplete] The working draft of an introduction to Rasheed Araeen monograph Part 1 a, b, c sections are unedited and in progress - this essay is copyrighted- not for publication. purely for academic review. copyright Sharjah Art Foundation and Peter Lewis 2017

2011

33 Edward Strickland offers an excellent overview of the development of minimalism as a critical and journalistic term, and the chronologies which discover their limits in relation to the several canonical understandings of minimalism which prevail in the majority of criticism (Strickland, Minimalism, 17-20).

Esteemed musicological texts refer to La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich and Philip Glass as ‘the minimalists’. This study brings into question the validity of this grouping by exploring the ways that minimalism evolved from Cageian experimentalism. Primary source documents are utilised to characterise the musical philosophies and seminal works of Young, Riley, Reich and Glass according to the divergent methods of the handling of musical process within the experimental and minimal ideologies. Through this, it arises that Young continues the experimental traditions that were championed by John Cage. It was found that Riley utilises both Youngian experimental and more determinate minimal idioms, whereas Reich and Glass exemplify the determinism which defines minimalism. Thus, the paper serves as a challenge to the grouping of Young, Riley, Reich and Glass that pervades the musicological literature.

Several of the composers we most frequently label “minimalists” have been engaged in disputes about musical authorship with fellow composers and former colleagues. This dissertation uses those disputes as starting points towards understanding minimalism as a practice of authorial critique. Drawing on the philosopher Jacques Rancière, I also examine the historiographical practices that have frequently denied that critique any efficacy. In the introduction I outline Rancière’s method of dispute, and how histories of minimalism have used composers’ later renunciations to deny the minimalist critique of authorship any efficacy. To exemplify this method, I consider the “confiscations” in effect when musicologists read Reich’s “Music as a Gradual Process” and Pendulum Music. Chapter 1 introduces Rancièrian concepts of importance throughout my study—politics and police, the pedagogic relation, noise and “low music”—through considering Rancière’s disputes with his professor Louis Althusser, his classmate Jacques-Alain Miller, and his “friend-enemy” Alain Badiou. Chapter 2 examines the conflict between La Monte Young and Tony Conrad over the authorial propriety of the music they created together in the Theatre of Eternal Music. I draw on primary documents to argue that the ensemble functioned as the first appearance of compositional collectivism in western art music. Chapter 3 considers a pair of disputes: between Terry Riley and Steve Reich, and, between Reich and Philip Glass. Through a close reading of interviews from the late 1980s and early 1990s, I show how these composers retroactively articulated a singular minimalism by effacing collaboration in favour of pedagogic transmission. Chapter 4 leaps ahead into the era of the “death of minimalism” to consider the relationship between Glenn Branca and Rhys Chatham. I focus in particular on the diverse applications of the terms “minimal” in in late 1970s downtown New York to show the many “indistinct minimalisms” (including punk and no wave) ongoing at the time. In the conclusion, I articulate a Rancièrian theory of names and naming to tie together several themes from the different case studies. My concern is to ask how the authorial name whether proper, collective, or improper—attached to a piece of music impacts our historiographical treatment.