It’s time for me to check out of the Betty Ford Center, the wing for recovering Wikipedia editors. I’m cured! I know because the
So that means Beethoven was a minimalist, too! And how about Holst’s Planets? “Mars” and “Neptune” are certainly more repetitive than any Andriessen I’ve listened to lately. So geez, music history must be filled with minimalists! Of course, the new revisions are made by a Stockhausen scholar, to whom anything with a major triad in it must sound minimalist. But over at Wikipedia, he’s the minimalism expert du jour.
The same scholar insists on a printed citation for the following sentence:
Its emphasis on accessibility, periodic rhythm, consonance, and pleasant and often even pretty sonorities drew millions of fans, especially among pop-music lovers, who had turned away from modern music, while simultaneously enraging many classical and academic musicians who saw it as a cheap throwback to a kind of mindless simplicity.
So what’s the next editor supposed to do – run around and find books in which people insult minimalism and quote those insults? Or find a book which states that “many classical and academic musicians saw minimalism as a cheap throwback to a kind of mindless simplicity”? Or delete the sentence as unverifiable? I had written the above sentence to more objectively replace several nasty, nearly illiterate comments trashing the style (none of which had ever been asked for citations). But I don’t care – it’s not my responsibility! And it’s been really good for me, because the time I might have wasted working on Wikipedia has been put into my book Music After Minimalism, which will offer clear, concise, well-documented definitions of minimalism, and its differences from postminimalism, that will stay put on the page, not alterable by anyone who chances along and decides that anything they think sounds minimalist, to them, must be minimalist.
Note to my students: No, you are not allowed to use Wikipedia as a source for class papers.