ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to sketch a possible response to a series of linked historical and interpretative questions about the minimalist process music of composers such as Terry Riley, Steve Reich and Philip Glass. Where did this repetitive, modular, ‘hypnotic’ music come from? What is its significance as a cultural practice? And why does this particular practice appear in North American culture at the precise moment it does, around the middle of the 1960s? For most critical commentators, a cultural explanation for musical minimalism might begin with the vicissitudes of avant-garde aesthetic politics; or with a consideration of the counter-cultural upheavals of the 1960s; or, perhaps most seductively of all, with a survey of popular and non-Western musical influences, of (to take a representative sample) jazz, raga, gamelan and West-African drumming, played out in an increasingly globalized and multicultural musical world.1 Recent critical
1 Repetitive, hypnotic and modular are alternative 1960s and 1970s labels for some of the music that would later be called ‘minimalist’. See Michael Nyman, Experimental Music: Cage and beyond (London, 1974), pp. 139-71, and Edward Strickland, Minimalism: origins (Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1993), pp. 1-10. The countercultural link has been enthusiastically endorsed by the composers of repetitive music themselves, most notably Philip Glass (see Glass as interviewed in William Duckworth, Talking Music (New York, 1995), p. 337). The influence of non-Western music on minimalism is a matter of some debate, downplayed by the composers themselves but adduced by legions of critics and scholars, beginning with Tom Johnson in the Village Voice: ‘The other day someone asked me what I thought was the single most important influence on contemporary music. After mulling over a few possible answers for a moment, I found one which seemed broad enough to answer the question. I said I thought it was the infiltration of non-Western ideas’ (‘Music for Planet Earth’, Village Voice, 4 January 1973; reprinted in Johnson, The Voice of New Music: New York City 1972-1982: a collection of articles originally published in the Village Voice (Eindhoven, 1989), p. 35).
