Repeating Ourselves: American Minimal Music as Cultural Practice

2. “A Colorful Installment in the Twentieth-Century Drama of Consumer Subjectivity”: Minimalism and the Phenomenology of Consumer Desire

T W O “A COLORFUL INSTALLMENT IN THE TWENTIETH-CENTURY DRAMA OF CONSUMER SUBJECTIVITY” Minimalism and the Phenomenology of Consumer Desire Our frenetic earnestness to attack advertising, our fear of advertising, and our inability to fit advertising into old-time familiar cubbyholes of our significance—all these prevent us from seeing its all-encompassing significance as a touchstone of our changing concept of knowledge and of reality. Daniel Boorstin, 1961 What is your thought about minimalist music? I have a feeling about it that is very strong and it’s probably not [politically] correct. And that is that we are surrounded by a world of minimalism. All that junk mail I get every single day repeats; when I look at television I see the same advertisement , and I try to follow the movie that’s being shown, but I’m being told about cat food every five minutes. That is minimalism . I don’t want it and I don’t like it. And it’s a way of making an impression that doesn’t impress me. In fact, I do everything to avoid it. I turn off the television until it’s over. I refuse to be advertised to. Elliott Carter, 2001 6 2 “ T H E D R A M A O F C O N S U M E R S U B J E C T I V I T Y ” / 6 3 THE BIRTH OF MINIMALISM FROM THE SPIRIT OF ADVERTISING “I Refuse to Be Advertised To”: Interpreting Repetitive Music in a Consumer Society Why compare minimal music to, of all things, advertising? As I observed in the Preface, it is hard to imagine any cultural interpretation breaching the radical formalism of minimalism’s true believers; but to bypass all the attractive, exotic hermeneutic excursions that seem so close at hand— ecology, meditative spirituality, the influence of non-Western cultures, utopian race and gender politics—only to hone in on one of the least attractive features of our corporate consumer society might seem downright hostile. Delivered as a talk, an early version of this chapter had a noted oral historian of twentieth-century American music out of her seat before the applause died down, vibrating with anger. “You must really hate this music,” was her accusation. As will become abundantly clear in the following pages, I am irresistibly attracted to minimal music and see this book as an affirmation of its cultural indispensability, but her instantly defensive reaction to the reading that is about to unfold does deserve an answer. Won’t I play right into the hands of Elliott Carter, who only brings up advertising as a stick to beat with? Carter’s dark pronouncements on minimalism have been remarkably consistent over the years, returning again and again to what is clearly a preferred metaphorical register. In 1982, when, for a moment, repetitive music looked fair to sweep all before it, his bitterness knew no bounds, not even those of political correctness: “About one minute of minimalism is a lot, because it is all the same. Minimalists are not aware of the larger dimensions of life. One also hears constant repetition in the speeches of Hitler and in advertising. It has its dangerous aspects.” Behind these blind attacks is an implacable hatred of repetition per se, an extreme musical snobbery that led Carter in 1973 to dismiss not only nascent minimalism, but the home-grown American modernism of Edgard Varèse and Charles Ives: “I cannot understand the popularity of that kind of music, which is based on repetition. In a civilized society things don’t need to be said more than three times.”1 Carter attacks repetitive music, which he loathes, by analogizing it to consumer advertising, another pervasive and repetitive phenomenon he assumes everyone loathes. The strategy is not new: advertising has been a useful scapegoat within Western culture ever since its rise to international prominence in the 1920s, constantly subject to withering dissection by humanists secretly (or not-so secretly) afraid that its repetitive rhythms will drown out the cultivated discourse of Carter’s “civilized society.” In an oft-anthologized article on the “unintended consequences of advertising,” the Journal of Marketing boiled down decades of academic critique into a ringing indictment of such manifold complexity that only a multipage chart could do it justice. (The following is a loose narrative paraphrase of what author Richard Pollay thought were the most...