Repeating Ourselves: American Minimal Music as Cultural Practice

Preface

P r e f a c e i x By custom and precedent, the cover of this book should have been a smooth, uniform gray, white, or black broken only by contrasting lettering , preferably lowercase, in an unobtrusive sans serif type. If an image on the cover were needed, it ought to have been a carefully lit art object of reductive purity—perhaps a dark pinstripe painting by Frank Stella, one of Dan Flavin’s cool fluorescent-bulb installations, or an assembly of metallic boxes by Donald Judd.1 The word minimalism tends to elicit a generic “tasteful” response from designers and typographers; its once dangerous asceticism has, as Edward Strickland lamented in his own gray-jacketed monograph, become a graphic cliché.2 Cliché or not, the formalized emptiness that defines most book jacket images of the “minimal” does tell us something: it is quite easy to judge a monograph on minimal art or music by its neat gray cover. The works discussed inside will be considered completely autonomous abstractions; they will be valued for being rigorous and difficult; messy or imprecise connections between the world of art and the larger culture will be cleaned up, or better, suppressed altogether; the general ambience will be the tasteful, understated elegance of the Museum of Modern Art. Judged by its cover, the musicological study you hold in your hand promises, in comparison, to be somewhat vulgar and uncontrolled. (Unless you are looking at a library hard cover, where durable and defensive minimalism is the norm.) Juxtaposing the garish, repetitive imagery of mass consumer society with signs of musical repetition, I have chosen x / P R E FA C E to figure musical minimalism not against the neutral ground of the museum wall, but against the riotous backdrop of the supermarket cereal aisle and the color television set. My central argument is that the most recognizably “minimal” contemporary music is actually maximally repetitive music, and that as a cultural practice, this excess of repetition is inseparable from the colorful repetitive excess of postindustrial, massmediated consumer society. What we now recognize as a “consumer society” first took shape in post–World War II America, and it has been under attack since it was first theorized in the late 1950s. Denouncing wasteful overproduction of consumer goods (John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Affluent Society) and the pervasive yet sinister advertising practices that mobilized demand for them (Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders), academics and journalists began laying the foundation for a countercultural critique of consumption as meaningless repetition. Minimalist art and music have usually been considered part of that counterculture. Even if 1960s minimal artists tended to avoid political statements, their art stood ascetically aloof from the world of consumption and its clotted signs. Minimalists, unlike Pop artists, have tended to align themselves with labor, not capital , and with overt imagery of production, not consumption. Richard Serra’s stint as a junkyard crane operator, Donald Judd’s machined boxes, even Andy Warhol’s Factory—all point to the preference for work over shopping that led Robert Morris in 1961 to exhibit (for sale, of course) a crude plywood box containing a tape recording of the hammering that had gone into its construction.3 The repeated, rhythmic pounding of a hammer on a nail is certainly within the sonic parameters set the previous year by La Monte Young’s foundational text of repetitive musical minimalism, arabic number (any integer) to Henry Flynt. Young had dedicated his Composition 1960 #10 (“Draw a straight line and follow it”) to Morris, and in 1961 he recorded a performance of arabic number in which he rhythmically pounded 1,698 times on a piano with both forearms as loud as he could. As a work that dramatically foregrounds the labor of composition/performance and just as theatrically resists commodification (Young’s recording, though widely bootlegged, has never been authorized for commercial release), arabic number actually harmonizes quite well with the austere high modernist ideology of a previous generation of art-music composers. One can easily imagine Young retorting, when audiences broke into cursing and spontaneous protest-singing during an abrasive 1960 protominimalist happen- P R E FA C E / x i ing (he was dragging a gong along the floor while Terry Riley repeatedly scraped a wastebasket against the wall), “Who cares if you listen?”4 Thus it is not surprising that students of experimental and repetitive music, while disagreeing...