acclaimed as a “minimalist enchanted with sound” in his New York Times obituary on August 13, 1992 (Kozinn 1992).
But even the term minimal music with reference to Young, Riley, Reich, and Glass was contested; hypnotic school, trance music, modular music, pulse, and space music were among the many variants associated with the music of all or some of these composers. Indeed, the four composers themselves never accepted the label being attached to their music, as Potter points out in New Grove. Moreover, the very terms of his definition can be questioned as well: how could the style have been at once modern and postmodern? How could the music have been at once minimal and of great richness? One might go so far as to doubt the existence of this minimal music: it is thanks to an “accident of musical history” that the term was ever used, according to John Schaefer (1987, xii).
We could, of course, attempt to follow the traditional approach of science in order to resolve the tangle of controversies that minimalism brought with it, and thus give credence to only the most factual, objective, and methodical works. But that task is complex, to say the least, since musicologists, historians, and critics base their studies on reasoning, facts, and objects. And if the reader cannot always assess their veracity, publishers, editorial committees, and universities, along with notes and bibliographies, will vouch for it. Indeed, many works have been recognized by new generations of authors, who validate them by citing them in their own studies, which are subject to the same academic vetting.
Perhaps, then, one might put the controversies to rest by considering only the most recent works on the topic, assuming they represent a higher level of information. But to do so would be to subscribe to the idea that facts are ephemeral; all truth would thus be provisional. By definition, however, what is “certain” cannot be temporary. Would it be better, then, to assemble the range of conceptions and discourses in an attempt to synthesize them, making minimal music a genre inspired as much by Webernian serialism as by the jazz of John Coltrane or Indian raga, belonging at once to modernity and postmodernity, and in turn influencing both serious and popular composers? In many ways, that is what the definition in New Grove did in 2001. That approach, however, disregards the fact that the oppositions, sometimes radical, are what shaped the various stances on both sides: for some, minimal music is serious precisely because it is in no way popular; for others, it has no Western roots because it owes everything to the East; and so on.
Thus, it is anything but easy to break free of these controversies. New Grove presents a calm musical landscape, where the concept of minimal music was established on the strength of the music alone. We initially imagine that we need only listen to one or another representative of the genre to confirm the validity of the concept. But once we dig a bit deeper, we find ourselves on a veritable postwar battlefield, with signs of struggle, weapons strewn on the ground, and the remnants of camps, destroyed or standing.
The present book has its precise origin in this chaos that, as a young researcher in 2012, I encountered while studying the links between minimalist music and popular music: thousands of works (articles in the press, scholarly articles, interviews, monographs, and edited volumes) intended to give an accurate and reliable description of minimalism failed to converge in a single direction. At that time the model developed by Latour for the natural sciences enabled me to slowly find my way through this set of antagonisms. Little by little, a twofold project of understanding the controversies around minimalism and testing the Latourian model on the history of music took shape. Its aim would be to bring to light the construction of a “musicological discovery”—that of minimal music.
I thus set out to trace, in the literature on minimalism, those modalities that transform established facts into new facts and ultimately into proven facts. I examined how those writing on music history, like Latour’s scholars, sought to lead their readers down a single path; how they tried to patch up holes that their opponents might exploit; how they translated the interests of others in order to reinforce their arguments; and how the musical fact could be conceived as a layering or stratification, as a collective phenomenon, and ultimately as a reified object. Finally, I asked whether the profound epistemological upheaval provoked by actor-network theory might resonate in musicology. To find the answers, I had to reach into the black box and reopen the controversies of an established musical fact: the arrival of so-called minimalist music—that of Young, Riley, Reich, and Glass—on the twentieth-century musical landscape. I followed the network of ideas that developed around this event, exploring the texts generated at each node beginning with the first ones written about the four composers’ work from the late 1950s to early 1960s, when “minimal music” did not yet exist.
To capture minimal music in the making, we must set the stage and revive the moments that immediately preceded the first published mentions of the music of its originators—Young, Riley, Reich, and Glass—to return to the cultural state as attested in the literature of the early 1960s, without questioning or analyzing it. Thus, in the first chapter of this book, we do not try to find out, for example, why serialism was recognized as the main trend in twentieth-century music or how Cage was at that time becoming one of the most prominent musical figures in the United States. Instead we take these statements for what they were at the time: facts. Indeed, the construction of future facts forms the heart of this study. Consequently, this book is structured by a succession of brief surveys on the history of these concepts, with occasional interruptions to consider what musicology on American minimal music tells us about specific points. These “freeze-frames”—chapters 4, 10, 18, and 21—are intended to systematically present the state of minimal music’s development in the wake of seminal publications that recount its history or that of its main protagonists: in 1967, shortly after the publication of “One Sound: La Monte Young” by Cornelius Cardew (1966); in 1975, following Experimental Music by Michael Nyman (1974); in 1984, a year after the English-language translation of Wim Mertens’s American Minimal Music; in 1994, following Minimalism: Origins by Edward Strickland (1993); and finally in 2001, with the definition in New Grove (Potter 2001a). We conclude with a wide-ranging chapter that looks at the evolution of conceptions of minimal music over the course of the twenty-first century.
As I have already indicated, this history of minimal music, from the birth of the concept to the moment when it became “music itself,” draws on works in science and technology studies and in particular on actor-network theory—a theory notably elaborated over the course of the 1980s and 1990s at the École nationale supérieure des mines de Paris, an engineering school founded in 1783. In a more general way, the present work is an attempt to apply this approach to the historiography of music. The technical concepts of modalization, translation of interests, stratification, and reification, though abundantly employed in this field of research, will operate only on an indirect level, so as to preserve the fluidity of the text, letting its methodological outlines appear progressively.
1. 1960
BEFORE MINIMALISM
What did contemporary American music mean at the dawn of the 1960s? What views on the subject were deemed accurate? The major encyclopedias and music dictionaries of the day held few answers to these questions. Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, a German encyclopedia of music begun in 1949, had not yet published its entry on the United States (“Vereinigte Staaten”); that would appear only in 1966 (Broder 1966). Nor did the fifth edition of Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians in 1954 contain an entry for “United States.” What we do learn of the music panorama at mid-century is that most countries had adopted the twelve-tone technique; that the French were focused on musique concrète; and that the Germans, much like Edgard Varèse in New York, were trying their hand at electronic music (Searle 1954, 1961a, 1961b). The French Encyclopédie de la musique (Michel 1958–61) better documents the subject of American music. There we read that the United States had recently seen “the incorporation of the main European tendencies” and the progressive emergence of several different currents. One was the “mathematical” style of Milton Babbitt; another, a mode anchored in the complex music
