Archives for May 2007

[Writing new book in head:] One of the problems in discussing minimalism clearly is that the word gets used in a few different senses. Judging from recent debates on the subject, I’d say it has three interrelated meanings:

1. Minimalism was a movement of people who knew each other, worked together, influenced each other, and created variations of a particular common language. In that specific sense, the movement began with La Monte Young’s String Trio of 1958 and lasted until the late ’70s, or certainly no later than around 1983. Pronouncements that minimalism is dead began around 1978 – I was there – and are only meaningful insofar as the word is applied to that definable scene.

2. Minimalism is a style of music based in audible structure and relative stasis and/or slow transformation. In this sense, certain composers, such as Phill Niblock and Tom Johnson, have continued writing minimalist music up to the present day. Some would say the same of Reich and Glass, both of whom, however, have claimed that around 1980 their music quit having anything to do with minimalism strictly speaking. One can argue, then, that a piece made outside the 1958-1983 time frame – say, Carl Stone’s Shing Kee – can be referred to as minimalist, despite the fact that Stone was too young to be involved in the original movement. I’ve described the outlines of this style at greater detail in a New Music Box article that won a Deems Taylor award and got reprinted in the book Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music, so I am led to conclude that my views on the style do not lie outside the mainstream of scholarly understanding.

3. Minimalism is also more vaguely ascribed to any piece that sustains a specific texture, rhythm, tonality, and so on, from beginning to end. In this sense it is often said that Feldman was a minimalist, that certain pieces of John Cage are minimalist, ditto for pieces by Erik Satie and Federico Mompou, Gregorian chant and gamelan music and a ton of pop music all turn out to be minimalist, also the C Major Prelude from the W.T.C. Book I and many of Schubert’s songs, and in fact we find minimalism traversing all centuries and many styles. And let’s never, never neglect to mention the first six minutes of Das Rheingold – which, once it finally modulates (or resolves) from E-flat to A-flat at the entrance of the Rhinemaidens, sounds in retrospect just like an inordinately prolonged dominant preparation, about as relevant to minimalism as the Eroica Symphony is.

The first two meanings are what I think of as the scholarly, precise connotations of minimalism. The third sense looses the word from its historical referents and renders it a universal quality, like romanticism or classicism. We can find romanticism in the medieval epic The Song of Roland, or the music of Messiaen, works that lie well outside the boundaries of what has been defined as the Romantic Period, and we can contrast romanticism with classicism in any historical period. We have a long cultural tradition of what romanticism and classicism mean, so that arguments imputing those two qualities to various works of art are subtle, polemical, not simple, and carry a lot of historical weight.

I don’t believe it is clear yet that minimalism is going to evolve into the same kind of term. We can call Gregorian chant minimalist, but in that sense the word becomes something of a tautology; that is, the general qualities we associate with minimalism in the broad sense predate the actual historical style by centuries, and were once taken for granted. Unchanging texture and tonality became strikingly associated with minimalism only because the contrast with the musical complexity of the previous century and a half was so dramatic. The qualities of romanticism (emphasis on the individual, subjective, spontaneous, and visionary against the idea of rationally imposed order) and classicism (the dependable restoration of harmony, clarity, restraint, and universality) can be spoken of as innate impulses within the human soul. It’s not at all obvious that minimalism’s relatively extreme limitations of texture and tonality are ever going to achieve any similar psychological status. There’s nothing wrong with using minimalism this way, so long as the user understands that the burden of proof is on him to make a case for some universal applicability of the word. Most instances of such use, however, just strike me as intellectual laziness – anachronisms fallen into by people who are so little familiar with music outside the European common practice period that they are naively surprised to find texturally static music in any other milieu.

Another complicating factor is that many amateurs are only familiar with the tip of the minimalist iceberg – i.e., the works of Reich and Glass plus Riley’s In C – so that repetition becomes minimalism’s defining feature. Were one familiar with other minimalism of the 1960s – the droning improvisations of the Theater of Eternal Music, Niblock’s slowly moving drones, Young’s sine-tone installations, Jon Gibson’s and Barbara Benary’s change-ringing note permutations, and so on – it would become clear that repetition is only one strategy in minimalism’s arsenal, and not the sufficient core of a general definition.

An additional problem with taking staticness as the primary criterion is that minimalism grew out of a conceptualist movement started by Cage, whose works tended to be calculatedly static over a period of time. Minimalist music shares its static quality with many works by Cage, Lucier, Ashley, Berhman, Feldman, Wolff, Mumma, and others that predated or were contemporaneous with the minimalist movement; but minimalism self-consciously differentiated itself from that music by embracing various techniques of audible process, in fact deliberately rebelling (as Reich’s early writings document) against the hidden quality of Cagean processes. Without taking that differentiation into account, one arrives at a version of minimalism that inaccurately represents what was going on at the time.

Add to this that we now have an entire generation that has come to minimalism through its reuse in DJ music, remixes, ambient music, and so forth, so that there is now a widespread popular image of minimalism that is only a rough caricature of the way the movement looked to those of us who followed it as it was still going on. This will all pass. Until it does, though, I think it’s impossible to imagine that any meaningful definition or description of minimalism could be achieved through the consensus of people unfamiliar with the issues, repertoire, and writings of the range of composers involved in the movement itself.

I’ve seen the light on Wikipedia, and I feel like a fool. I’ve used it, praised it, and, determined populist that I am, extolled it here as a model. I’m probably one of the few professors who has talked it up to his students and allowed them to cite it as a reference – carefully, with outside confirmation if possible, and judging the quality of an entry carefully. I started contributing to Wikipedia as a kind of spare-moment hobby, and I guess I was lulled into complacency by the fact that most of the entries I worked on were obscure ones, not likely to attract attention. But I had the temerity to do a little badly-needed clean-up on the dismally confused “Minimalism” entry, and learned more than I wanted to know about how the site operates. The articles that a lot of people think they know something about, it turns out, are a nightmare. I take back everything: Wikipedia is a playground for belligerent adolescents.

What pushed me over the edge was that a kindly editor finally directed me to a policy page called Expert retention. (One thing you’ve got to hand the Wikipedia community: they take self-analysis and self-examination to levels Socrates would have envied, and the site’s every foible is analyzed to within an inch of its life.) It turns out that Wikipedia has a difficult time holding on to experts to edit their articles. The site, with its ever-present Wikimania for lists, lists many scholars who have given up on the site, many more who are discontented, and only two who are happy with the status quo. The vandalism problem has received a lot of publicity, but that one’s actually fairly minor, or at least relatively fixable. More aggravating is “edit creep,” the gradual deterioration of a polished article by well-meaning but careless edits, and, even worse, “cranks,” which are classified with typical Wiki-precision as “parasites, scofflaws or insane.” And a crank can single-handedly destroy an article’s usefulness.

The problem is that Wikipedia forces its contributors to come to a consensus, and building consensus with a crank is a fool’s errand. Many of the departing scholars note the incident that finally brought them to leave; mine was a truculent teenager who refused to acknowledge that minimalist music was considered classical, because, as he put it, “it sounds more like Britney Spears than like Merzbow.” Let that sink in a minute. A person who insists that Einstein on the Beach, or Phill Niblock’s Four Full Flutes, or Tom Johnson’s Chord Catalogue cannot be considered classical because it sounds like Britney Spears is not a person one can seek consensus with. Because of that and his flippant rudeness I refused to argue directly with him, and appealed to the Wiki editors. Yet because of the Wikipedia policy about consensus, I couldn’t get around him, either. And when I checked the “Expert retention” page, I realized that this was not an isolated bit of bad luck, but that this recurring problem bars the dissemination of knowledge throughout Wikipedia.

Wikipedia is amateur-friendly, and that’s what I liked about it. Too many print reference works are hobbled by the exclusion of scholars and thinkers who are ahead of the curve, whose ideas (and even entire categories of knowledge) are not countenanced in the stodgier university departments whence many reference works depend. But Wikipedia is not only amateur-friendly, but expert-unfriendly. They pretend not to be, and give lip service to the importance of expert editors. But when you put the rules together, you realize that people who are actually authorities on a subject are forced to argue with one hand tied behind their backs.

For instance, there’s an “original research” rule: original research, i.e. facts you’ve dug up or deduced yourself but that are not verifiable in the scholarly literature, are not allowed. Well, I can see that. You don’t want every unpublished crank using Wikipedia to propagate his crackpot views. Most of what I do is original research, since I rarely write about things other scholars have already covered, but that’s all right, since I’ve published most of my research, and all I have to do is footnote my own books. Ah! but there’s another rule called “Conflict of Interest,” which disallows quoting yourself for the purpose of bringing public attention to your writings. Which means that any other person on the planet can write something in Wikipedia and quote me as an authority, but if I do it myself, that’s suspect. I have done it myself, and the citations stand if no one objects, but if a crank wants to contradict me, all he has to do is yell “Conflict of interest!,” and delete whatever he wants. After all, who knows what scruffy, fly-by-night vanity presses my books might be issued by (Cambridge University Press, Schirmer Books, University of California Press)? Editors are sympathetic – everyone agreed with what I was saying except this post-pubescent parasite – but rules are rules, and nothing could be done. There’s even an official “Ignore all credentials” policy, which explicitly disallows a writer’s credentials from being taken into account. I thought I was egalitarian enough not to mind. Turns out I’m not.

So the “Minimalism” article is wretched, and so it will remain. When I came to it, one of the definitions given was “From hippie to yuppie[,] minimalism is a drip-feed pseudo-art for cultural bottle-babies.” That no one objected to. I removed Petr Kotik from the list of minimalist composers, for the minor reason that there is nothing minimalist about his music, and there was a vehement protest. I removed a statement that minimalist pieces are known for their brevity, and there was a protest. Then I ran into the moronic crank, who wouldn’t agree that minimalism was the most controversial movement in recent classical music on the grounds that it wasn’t classical. He stonewalled. How can one verify that minimalism is part of classical music? No reference work will state as much, because everyone with an above-80 I.Q. simply knows it. I could have overlooked that and gone on, but the “Expert retention” page informed me that such problems are endemic throughout Wikipedia’s warp and woof. There is an apparently famous case in which one amateur crank defeated a group of professional scientists trying to describe facts about uranium trioxide. It’s kind of an intellectual’s worst nightmare: you find out your new editor is the dumb bully who used to beat up on you in seventh grade – and he hasn’t changed in any respect! He’s still in seventh grade, and imagines you are too.

And so I’m off Wikipedia. What’s more, now that I know how the background process chases away experts, I can no longer allow students to cite it. I’m holding out some hope for Digital Universe, which has been designed to elicit expert writing in order to circumvent such difficulties. Meanwhile, I have actual books to write, with adult editors willing to take my word for something. Between my Simpsons videos and The Comics Curmudgeon, I don’t need to spend my spare moments building sand castles of knowledge on a heavily-trafficked beach.

UPDATE: Forgive me for turning off the comments here, but some Wikipedians (Wikipediots?) are beginning to come here to continue arguments started over there, and, not having any earthly idea who’s right and who’s wrong, I don’t want to get stuck refereeing. The site clearly stirs violent emotions, sufficient reason for me to keep well away from it.

(AP) — The National Rifle Association is urging the Bush administration to withdraw its support of a bill that would prohibit suspected terrorists from buying firearms.

Let me say that again:

(AP) — The National Rifle Association is urging the Bush administration to withdraw its support of a bill that would prohibit suspected terrorists from buying firearms.

The next time Democrats are portrayed by Republicans as aiding and abetting the terrorists, turn to someone near you and remind them about this.