Minimalism Has Arrived, Academically Speaking

When I arrived at school today I found a box of copies of the Ashgate Research Companion to Minimalist and Postminimalist Music, straight off the press. (With all due deference to my esteemed colleagues Pwyll ap Sion and Keith Potter, I would like to point out that the first eleven pages of the book’s Introduction, credited to all three of us, were written by myself; they wrote the conclusion detailing the book’s contents. But they did more of the editing than I did, and provided more of the impetus behind the book.) As I write in the Introduction, “any idea that minimalism is not respectable enough to merit scholarly scrutiny has been consigned to historical musicology’s dustbin. In recognition of its widespread popularity, minimalism is arguably the repertoire of late-twentieth-century music that is most often written about today.”