The Names of Minimalism: Authorship and the Historiography of Dispute in New York Minimalism, 1960â 1982

Several of the composers we most frequently label “minimalists” have been engaged in disputes about musical authorship with fellow composers and former colleagues. This dissertation uses those disputes as starting points towards understanding minimalism as a practice of authorial critique. Drawing on the philosopher Jacques Rancière, I also examine the historiographical practices that have frequently denied that critique any efficacy.\n\tIn the introduction I outline Rancière’s method of dispute, and how histories of minimalism have used composers’ later renunciations to deny the minimalist critique of authorship any efficacy. To exemplify this method, I consider the “confiscations” in effect when musicologists read Reich’s “Music as a Gradual Process” and Pendulum Music. Chapter 1 introduces Rancièrian concepts of importance throughout my study—politics and police, the pedagogic relation, noise and “low music”—through considering Rancière’s disputes with his professor Louis Althusser, his classmate Jacques-Alain Miller, and his “friend-enemy” Alain Badiou. Chapter 2 examines the conflict between La Monte Young and Tony Conrad over the authorial propriety of the music they created together in the Theatre of Eternal Music. I draw on primary documents to argue that the ensemble functioned as the first appearance of compositional collectivism in western art music. Chapter 3 considers a pair of disputes: between Terry Riley and Steve Reich, and, between Reich and Philip Glass. Through a close reading of interviews from the late 1980s and early 1990s, I show how these composers retroactively articulated a singular minimalism by effacing collaboration in favour of pedagogic transmission. Chapter 4 leaps ahead into the era of the “death of minimalism” to consider the relationship between Glenn Branca and Rhys Chatham. I focus in particular on the diverse applications of the terms “minimal” in in late 1970s downtown New York to show the many “indistinct minimalisms” (including punk and no wave) ongoing at the time. In the conclusion, I articulate a Rancièrian theory of names and naming to tie together several themes from the different case studies. My concern is to ask how the authorial name—whether proper, collective, or improper—attached to a piece of music impacts our historiographical treatment.

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