Four Musical Minimalists: La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass (review)

Four Musical Minimalists: La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass. By Keith Potter. (Music in the Twentieth Century.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. [xv, 390 p. ISBN 0-521-48250-X. $69.95 (cloth); ISBN 0-521-01501-4. $26 pbk.).]

Is it time yet to write the history of musical minimalism? Judging from books that have appeared within the past decade, some scholars and critics certainly think so. As the years have passed, minimalism as a movement unto itself—separate and distinct from other sorts of "experimental" composition that sprang up post-1950 and ended, at least in its "pure" form, around 1975—seems better defined than ever as principally the work of the four American composers treated in Keith Potter's new study. Earlier, Edward Strickland's Minimalism: Origins (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993) provided an aesthetically oriented history, integrated with an account of the visual art from which musical minimalism got its name and, arguably, its main motivation. K. Robert Schwarz, in his Minimalists (London: Phaidon, 1996), concentrated almost exclusively on the music but ambitiously extended his coverage beyond Strickland's, both chronologically (into the 1990s) and geographically (to Europeans who have done, in some sense, related work). In deciding to deal strictly with the four composers who have come to be regarded as the "classic" minimalists, and furthermore not to venture beyond the mid-1970s, Potter has also aimed for a more specialized readership than either Strickland or Schwarz; this narrower focus, however, permits a more comprehensive and detailed treatment, including analyses of varying closeness of the pieces that the four have produced, than in any previously published writing on the subject.

Four Musical Minimalists is organized into a concise introduction and four long chapters. In part, perhaps, because the limits of his coverage are self-evident, Potter expends little effort in his introduction to define minimalism as such, mainly taking note of when the term became associated with music (as early as 1968, although not yet denoting specifically the work of Young, Riley, and others) and summarizing the various meanings that others have attached to it. This neutral approach is useful to a point, but one ends up wishing that Potter had not so scrupulously avoided taking a stand as to what he thinks minimalism is. For instance, is it fundamentally modernist, as he seems content to characterize it on page 10, or instead post-modernist, as he suggests on page 19? Are John Cage and Morton Feldman minimalists as well, or precursors, or something else altogether? A clearer definition from the author himself might have provided some intrinsic reason for treating his four chosen composers together in the same book.

Each of the four chapters that follow is designed according to the same general plan: Young, Riley, Reich, and Glass are taken up in turn, their early biographies unfolded, their musical training and the formative influences upon them examined, their earliest pieces—some now disavowed and known only by their titles—discussed where possible. With the arrival of each composer's first maturity, biographical matters begin to receive less emphasis as the music itself takes center stage. The accounts of the composers' early years are a particularly valuable feature of this book. Potter interviewed each of the four extensively and has ferreted out a good deal of information about their lives and works that, to this reviewer's knowledge, is not available elsewhere; the access he was given to obscure early scores has helped him fill in some gaps in our understanding of how these composers reached their first audiences and took their initial steps toward fame.

Of course, many of the minimalists' later scores have remained unpublished too, even as recordings of these works have enjoyed wide circulation. This circumstance, owing in part to the fact that from the beginning of their careers these composers took part in performance of their own music and exerted...