This episode of Sound Propositions features scholars Kerry O’Brien and Will Robin, editors of the recent anthology On Minimalism: Documenting a Musical Movement. Described as a historical source reader, the book compiles over 100 primary sources retelling the story of minimalist music from the 1950s to the present. Sources include liner notes, interviews, journalism, manifestos, and other material organized chronologically and thematically, with introductory essays from the editors. Not a simple revisionist history seeking to expand the canon, let alone an attempt to dethrone the “Big Four” composers, On Minimalism nonetheless radically reconsiders the scope of minimalist music. In some ways the book is a restorative history, following the offshoots of musical practices that had once been described as “minimalist,” beginning with non-western music and modal jazz in the 1950s up to drone rock and techno of the present. We discuss the influence of Ravi Shankar, why the Coltranes were minimalists, the Julius Eastman revival, and much more. (Joseph Sannicandro)
Episode 34: OLD & NEW DREAMS – with Kerry O’Brien and Will Robin
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Interview recorded between Montreal and Seattle / Maryland, June 2023
Produced and mixed in Montreal, February 2024
OLD & NEW DREAMS is the second part of our Minimalism double-feature, following episode 32 with Patrick Nickleson discussing his book, The Names of Minimalism: Authorship, Art, Music, and Historiography in Dispute. Both books radically reconsider the origins and boundaries of musical minimalism, in distinct and complementary ways, something I’ve tried to reinforce with the musical selections for these two episodes. Patrick’s book distinguishes between what he terms “(early) minimalism” and the later canonization of Minimalism as we have known it since the early 1980s. Rather than expanding the canon, he focuses on disputes between key figures, highlighting traits shared amongst the (early) minimalists: the importance of collective authorship; often collaborating in bands or groups; and the priority of recording to tape over written scores. Unlike Patrick’s book, which is an academic monograph which develops an argument throughout, the anthology On Minimalism is able to expand the canon by relating a myriad of overlapping musical practices.
The anthology, published by the University of California Press, restores a wider understanding of minimalism partly by looking to earlier writing on a variety of musics that were at the time referred to as “minimalist.” Prior to the canonization of what was once called the New York Hypnotic school as “Minimalists, ” (early) minimalism had many competing terms, some of which included genres or styles excluded by others. Often inspired by encounters with Indian ragas and modal jazz, various strains of post-war music experimented with repetition and/or drones, alternatively described as Trance, Dream Music, and other terms that didn’t quite catch on. On Minimalism looks to music described under these competing descriptions, but also extends beyond the 1980s to consider how the standard story of Minimalism and the “Big Four” composers emerged, and, importantly, the lesser appreciated offshoots of these conflicting histories, what Kerry describes in the episode as “widening the net.”
On Minimalism is less a revisionist history as much as a recuperation, building upon the work of other musicologists working on minimalism to, sometimes implicitly, make some rather provocative claims. For instance, John Coltrane is widely acknowledged as a key influence on La Monte Young, Terry Riley, and Steve Reich, and while some may admit that some of his music could be described as minimalist, Trane himself is never given that label. And yet, like those minimalist composers, he too was inspired by Ravi Shankar’s ragas (released in the US in 1956). How might our view of Coltrane’s music be altered if we consider him as a minimalist, and not just someone who made minimalist music?
In this, the editors are building off arguments posed by composer and scholar George Lewis in work including “Improvised Music after 1950: Afrological and Eurological Perspectives” (1996) and A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimentalism (2008), and well as Lewis’s student, Ben Piekut, whose Experimentalism Otherwise: The New York Avant-Garde and Its Limits (2011) challenged the white nationalist construction of “experimental music” that excludes jazz and other black musics. The editors’ catholic approach to minimalism is also influenced by the work of Susan McClary. One of the founders of the “New Musicology,” McClary is known for works including Feminine Endings, that reconsider baroque and classical music through the lens of gender and sexuality. She also challenged the field with path breaking essays on popular music, including Madonna and hip-hop. As Kerry emphasizes, even decades ago McClary displayed one of the widest understandings of what constitutes minimalist music, as in “Rap, Minimalism, and Structures of Time in Late Twentieth-Century Culture” (1998).
So much of our histories rely on what Patrick Nickleson calls proleptical historical telling, in which known endings influence how the history of the beginning is told and remembered. By “widening the net” to include music not necessarily considered under the heading minimalist, this restorative history challenges received genealogies, and at the least should expose fans to a lot of great music that may not have been on their radar.
The book is divided into three parts, each with thematic sections bringing together a variety of texts. Part one begins with modal jazz and non-western music alongside the usual names, already widening the scope in generative ways. This part includes discussions of improvisation, “Dream Music,” loops, process, altered states, pedagogy, cultural fusion, and minimalism across the arts. The Big Four of Young, Riley, Reich, and Glass are all represented, but so are Erik Satie, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Meredith Monk. Part two concerns recordings and scores, including canonical compositions from Reich, the development of the “New Downtown,” the cultivation of new instruments and environments, ambient, new age, and spiritualism, the formation of canons (and their backlash), and the expression of politics and identity. Also included in this section are two of sources highlighted in our conversation: Tim Page and Mark Abbott’s “Aspects of Minimalism,” an image of a hand-annotated, typewritten playlist broadcast of a remarkable minimalist music festival broadcast on WKCR in 1980; and the transcript of a telephone interview between Alan Licht and Charlemagne Palestine that is easily one of the most fun things in the entire book.
Kerry O’Brien is a musicologist, specializing in experimental music, minimalism, and countercultural spirituality. She currently teaches at the Cornish College of the Arts and is affiliate faculty at the University of Washington in Seattle. In our conversation, Kerry describes her early encounters with minimalist music as a percussionist, particularly that of Steve Reich, much of which she memorized as a performer, leading towards a deep appreciation for his music. She also singles out the work of Pauline Oliveros, in part owing to a shared interest in Yoga and meditation that permeates so much minimalist music. O’Brien has written about various subjects for both academic and popular audiences, including, aside from the aforementioned composers, on the music of Alvin Lucier, Joan LaBarbara, and Annea Lockwood. Will Robin is an associate professor of musicology at the University of Maryland’s School of Music. While he was trained as a saxophonist, his introduction to minimalist music stems instead from his wider interest in contemporary classical music. His works include his dissertation on the “indie classical” phenomenon, “A Scene Without a Name,” and a book on Bang on a Can. He also hosts Sound Expertise, “a podcast that talks to music scholars about music” that I heartily recommend to all our readers.
All three of us, of the same generation, shared an interest in the blogs of Nico Muhly, Judd Greenstein, and Kyle Gann in the 2000s. This perhaps also speaks to my own interest in minimalist music, and in some sense the development of what became A Closer Listen. I discovered the work of Steve Reich late in high school due to a Godspeed song named after him. At SUNY Purchase, where I did my undergraduate studies, a number of my friends studied in the music conservatory, exposing me to composers including Lou Harrison, Harry Partch, and Terry Riley. The year I graduated coincided with a programme of Reich’s works at Lincoln Center in honor of his 70th birthday, the first time I was able to witness Reich’s music performed live, which left a strong impression on me. It was also around this time that Wordless Music started organizing concerts in New York that brought together the kind of artists we were writing about at TSB (Sigur Ros, Mono, Explosions in the Sky, Stars of the Lid) with contemporary classical music, the kind of “indie classical” scene that Will documents in his dissertation. Through Wordless Music, for whom I volunteered, in 2008 I joined 200+ others in a large ensemble for a realization of Rhys Chatham’s A Crimson Grail at Lincoln Center’s Damrosch Park. While the public performance was ultimately rained out that year, the opening acts, who were able to perform, were the sextet Eighth Blackbird, and Ash Ra Tempel founder Manuel Göttsching performing his 1984 masterpiece, E2-E4. That experience solidified for me an impression that minimalism was much more than the Big Four and postminimalists like John Adams, but could include early music, punk, no wave, ambient, Krautrock, jazz and much more. Minimalism is less a genre than an approach to music making.
Before Rich, Jeremy and I left TSB to found ACL (see episode 29), we covered mostly instrumental music, including post-rock, IDM, and ambient. We were increasingly drawn to various strains of “new music” that at the time was emerging as a kind of scene without a name, as Will Robin terms it in his dissertation, what ACL has chosen to label “Modern Composition.” This was an era which classically trained composers and performers were increasingly moving outside the concert hall and engaging with other genres of music, including indie venues and labels outside the usual classical institutions, an extension of the “downtown” ethos of the 1960s and ’70s. This included new recordings of classics like Music for 18 Musicians and In C, as well as new commissions and compositions performed by groups including Bang on a Can, Alarm Will Sound, So Percussion, Kronos Quartet, and many other crossover acts blurring the line between popular and classical.
In my own dissertation, The Refusal of the Work of Art (2023), I have a chapter that details how reception of Minimalism in Italy was inherently tied up with so-called East-West dialogues, particularly with Indian classical music. Influential American minimalists including Young and Zazeela, Riley, Reich, Glass, and Charlemagne Palestine performed in Rome’s L’Attico gallery, often marking their Europe debuts. Many of these performances occurred as part of multi-day Dance and Music festivals with Yvonne Rainer, Simone Forti, Trisha Brown, and others postmodern dancers. In this, the Roman scene seems to have simply imported the sort of multi-media work associated with New York’s downtown scene and the Judson Memorial Church. But many of the early performances also took part in the context of programs explicitly dedicated to East-West dialogue, emphasizing tantra, Yoga, and ragas,with NY “minimalists” performing alongside Pandit Pran Nath, Asad Khan, and other figures associated with Indian classical music.
And so I read with great interest the texts in On Minimalism, weaving together a compelling account of the development of minimalist music in dialogue with non-western musics, modal jazz, and indeed through a plurality of interdisciplinary collaborations, particularly in the section “Across the Arts,” which situates the development of minimalism alongside minimalism in other media. Many early minimalist performances or sound installations occurred in lofts and art spaces alongside interdisciplinary work that may or may have included soundings, but nonetheless influenced the development of minimalist musical practices.
Of course there are many composers, compositions, and scenes that one might identify as missing from the already very broad purview of On Minimalism. This shouldn’t be viewed as a deficit, however, but again as an invitation to listen more widely. Whether you find the implicit arguments of this anthology convincing or not, the book leaves no doubt that “minimalist” music is much broader than previous histories of Minimalism would have us believe. As Kerry says at the end of this episode, there’s simply so much more out there. But it’s not enough to merely widen the canon. Minimalism is not just about composers, or even about compositions. As Jace Clayton writes in his contribution, also included as one of the book’s epigraphs, “Spotlights create shadows–how to turn off these bright lights?” (Joseph Sannicandro)
[Note: This episode features the usual blend of my tastes with those of the subjects. As I sometimes do, the end is a kind of sound collage medley, representing a wide spectrum of styles. This includes a field recording I made of artist Pierre Huyghe’s “After Dream,” an installation of wind chimes whose pitches are drawn from John Cage’s Dream. Partly for this reason, as well as the wider association of minimalism with “Dream Music,” (Young and Zazeela’s Dream House, the Dream Syndicate, etc), I (somewhat arbitrarily) gravitated towards musical selections that include the world dream in their titles. Hence also the title of this episode, which alludes both to the jazz quartet Old and New Dreams (Dewey Redman, Charlie Haden, Ed Blackwell, and Don Cherry, all members of Orentte Coleman’s group) as well as to the sense of On Minimalism as forward thinking restorative history.]
Pierre Huyghe – “Wind Chimes (After Dream)” [1997/2009] The Walker Art Center’s Sculpture Garden, Minneapolis, MN
Kerry O’Brien (site)
Kerry O’Brien (Twitter)
William Robin (site)
Will Robin (Twitter)
Sound Expertise (podcast)
TRACKLIST
ARTIST – “TITLE” (ALBUM, LABEL, YEAR)
Kenny Burrell & John Coltrane – “Why Was I Born?” [1958](Kenny Burrell & John Coltrane, New Jazz, 1963)
John Coltrane – “Blues Minor” (Africa/Brass, Impulse!, 1961)
SP INTRO
Ornette Coleman – “Dreams” (Skies of America, Columbia, 1972)
Sound Expertise INTRO
Jon Hassell – “Dream Theory” (Dream Theory In Malaya (Fourth World Volume Two), Editions EG, 1981)
Yoko Ono – “I’m Moving On [excerpt]” (Double Fantasy, Geffen, 1980)
Alice Coltrane – “Isis & Osiris” (Journey in Satchidananda, Impulse!, 1971)
Ultramagnetic MCs – “Ego Trippin’” (Critical Beatdown, FFRR, 1988)
Teebs – “Red Curbs Loop (Stuff I Dream About)” (Collections 01, Brainfeeder, 2011)
Terry Riley & Don Cherry – “Descending Moonshine Dervishes” (Live Köln 1975, 2013)
The Dream Syndicate with La Monte Young – “Day Of The Holy Mountain (excerpt 1)” (Day Of The Holy Mountain, 1964)
Sunn 0))) & Boris – “Etna” (Altar, Southern Lord, 2006)
Gregg Kowalsky – “Maliblue Dream Sequence” (L’Orange, L’Orange, Mexican Summer, 2017)
Annea Lockwood – “Turning Gong” (Early Works: 1967-1982, EM Records, 2007)
Pauline Oliveros, Stuart Dempster, Panaiotis. “Suiren” (Deep Listening, New Albion, 1989)
Maryanne Amacher – “A Step Into It, Imagining 1001 Years (Excerpt)” (Sound Characters (Making The Third Ear), Tzadik, 1999)
Steve Reich – “Phase Patterns” (Four Organs / Phase Patterns, Shandar, 1970)
Meredith Monk – Dolmen Music (Dolmen Music, ECM, 1981)
Gastr Del Sol – “Each Dream Is An Example” (Camoufleur, Drag City, 1998)
Franco Battiato – “Orient Effects” (M.elle Le “Gladiator”, Bla Bla, 1975)
Donna Summer – “State of Independence” [extended] (Donna Summer, Warner, 1982)
Jon Hassell & Brian Eno – “Delta Rain Dream” (Fourth World Vol.1: Possible Musics, Editions EG, 1980)
Ravi Shankar – “Raga Jog” (Three Ragas, Angel, 1956)
Ustad Ali Akbar Khan – “Raga: Durgeshwari” (Raga: Ahir Bhairav / Raga: Durgeshwari, HMV, 1973)
Erik Satie / Stephane Ginsburgh – “Vexations” (42 Vexations (1893), Sub Rosa, 2009)
Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza – “Sunrise (Improvvisazione Per Otto)” (The Private Sea Of Dreams, RCA Italiana, 1966)
Sound Expertise – BACH SCANDALS, JUG BANDS, AND VEXATIONS WITH JOSHUA RIFKIN (Season 3, Episode 10, 2023)
Catherine Christer Hennix – “The Well-Tuned Marimba: For Yamaha Synthesizer, Sine Wave Drone, Live Electronics” (Selected Early Keyboard Works (1976), Blank Forms, 2018)
Steve Reich – “Six Marimbas (1973-86)” (Sextet · Six Marimbas, Nonesuch, 1986)
Dickie Landry – “15 Saxophones” (Fifteen Saxophones, Wergo, 1977)
Charlemagne Palestine – “Three Fifths…” [1973] (Four Manifestations On Six Elements, Alga Marghen, 2010)
Frederic Rzewski – “Les moutons de Panurge” (Attica / Coming Together / Les Moutons De Panurge, Opus One, 1974)
Terry Riley & Don Cherry – “Sunrise of the Planetary Dream Collector” (Live Köln 1975, 2013)
Julius Eastman – “If You’re So Smart, Why Aren’t You Rich?” (Unjust Malaise, New World Records, 2005)
Julius Eastman – “Femenine” (Femenine, Frozen Reeds, 2016)
Jace Clayton / Julius Eastman – “Gay Guerrilla Part III” (The Julius Eastman Memory Depot, New Amsterdam, 2013)
Armand Hammer – “Sweet Micky” (Paraffin, Backwoodz, 2018)
Old And New Dreams (Don Cherry, Dewey Redman, Charlie Haden, Ed Blackwell) – “Old And New Dreams” (Old & New Dreams, Black Saint, 1977)
Theo Parrish – “Dreamers Blues” (Parallel Dimensions, Sound Signatures, 2000)
Luciano Cilio – “Primo Quadro da Della Conoscenza” (Dialoghi Del Presente, EMI, 1977)
Francesco Messina & Raul Lovisoni – “Prati Bagnati Del Monte Analogo” (Prati Bagnati Del Monte Analogo, Cramps, 1979)
Franco Battiato – “L’Egitto Prima Delle Sabbie” (L’Egitto Prima Delle Sabbie, Ricordi, 1978)
Joan La Barbara – “Cyclone” (1976-77) (The Early Immersive Music of Joan La Barbara, mode298, 2020)
Jason Lescalleet – “The dream’s the same every night” (THIS IS WHAT I DO vol. 4, Glistening Examples, 2014)
Robert Ashley – “She Was A Visitor” (Automatic Writing, Lovely Music, Ltd., 1979)
Miles Davis – “It’s About That Time” (In a Silent Way, CBS, 1969)
Pierre Huyghe – “Wind Chimes (After Dream)” 1997/2009 ( field recording, 2014)
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Sound Propositions is written, recorded, mixed, and produced by Joseph Sannicandro.
a closer listen 