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AESTHETIC
THE MINIMALIST
IN THE PLASTICARTS
AND IN MUSIC
W. BERNARD
JONATHAN
AS A characterization of music composed by
La Monte Young, Steve Reich, Terry Riley, and Philip Glass, among
others, has been criticized for its inaccurate and misleading connotations.
Wim Mertens, for example, asks whether "the extreme reduction of the
musical means" implied by the term "is important enough to function as a
fundamental characteristic of this music," and concludes that "minimal
musicis only partially satisfactory as a label for this tendency."l Mertens is
typical of those who have written on the subject, however, in devoting no
more than cursory attention to the meaning of minimalism in American
sculpture and painting, where the term originated.2 The circumstantial
evidence linking minimalism in music to minimalism in the plastic arts has,
of course, always been strong. Many of the earliest performancesof Reich's
and Glass'smusic, for instance, took place in art galleries and artists' lofts,
and some of the earliest commercially available recordings of their music
INIMALISM,"
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The Minimalist
Aesthetic
87
were sponsored by galleries. The collaborative histories of individual figures, too, are well known: Glass with Richard Serra, Young with Robert
Morris; the second performanceof Reich'sPendulumMusic, at the Whitney
Museum in New Yorkin 1969, featured three minimalists from the visual
arts among its four performers.3In retrospect, actually,it is interesting that
no one seems to have thought to apply the term minimal to this music, at
least in print, before Michael Nyman did it sometime in the early 1970s.4 It
is even more interesting that this transference does not seem to have
instilled music critics with a desire to find out what minimalism had come
to mean to the art world since it was first coined in the mid-1960s or so
(perhaps originally with derogatory intent). The label, after all, has stuck in
a way that such terms as "phase-shifting,""repetitive,""systems"or "systemic," "process," or "trance" music never did. Why was this so? One
certainly won't find out from the composers, who followed the artists in
vehemently (and perhaps understandably)denying that their work deserved
to be pigeonholed in this way. And for the most part the critics have either
lavished unqualified praise upon the music simply for its newness and
"accessibility"or have derided it for its supposed shallowness.
As it becomes clearer,with the passage of time, that minimalism was no
mere flash in the pan, musicians ought to have correspondingly more stake
in establishing its aesthetic basis. The prospects for meaningful discussion
and analysis of this music are really rather dim if informed by little or no
idea of what might lie behind certain composers' attempts at such a radical
departure from the music they grew up on and the styles they were trained
to emulate. In this respect we have a lot to learn from art criticism, where
minimalism has for some time been the object of detailed and intense
scrutiny. Accordingly, this article has two closely related aims: first, to
show that the term minimal is not at all inappropriate to the music of
certain composers when construed according to its meaning in the plastic
arts; second, to show how the language developed by art critics to treat
minimalism can be adapted to furnish an essentially workable basis for
analysis and criticism of minimalism in music.
Part of what minimal music shares with minimal art is the nature of its
immediate predecessors. The reigning style of the fifties, abstract expressionism, was characterized-especially in painting-by a high degree of
gestural spontaneity which vividly conveyed the presence of the artist in the
work. This quality went by various names, such as: "painterlyabstraction,"
which signified the explicit record of brushwork or other means of paint
applicationas the vehicle of creation; "action painting,"which attempted to
capture the improvisational, work-it-out-as-you-go-along nature of the
technique; and "all-overart," which called attention to the painter'suse of
the entire canvas all at once (Examples 1 and 2). Both of the last two, in
particular, were epitomized in Jackson Pollock's drip technique and his
method of laying the canvas flat on the floor and walking around it,
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EXAMPLE
2:
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(Double-Sided
90
of NewMusic
Perspectives
Ltd.
Photorranhby HansNamuth.? 1980by AgrindePublications.
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The Minimalist
Aesthetic
91
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92
(1952-53)
54"
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Newman's part that nothing be left of himself in the painting once the
painting is done. Reinhardt, for his part, took a more uncompromising
tone: one of his Six Canons or "Noes" insists upon "No Expressionism or
Surrealism" and that "'the laying bare of oneself,' autobiographically or
socially, is obscene."12Further: "No accidentsor automatism"and "Everything, where to begin and where to end, should be worked out in the mind
beforehand."13 Reinhardt's near-monochromatic canvases certainly do
seem to have anticipated the minimalist painters'use of solid fields of color
(Example 5).
On the musical side, the activities of the Fluxus group were probably the
most significant in the transition to minimalism. In his excellent treatment
of the subject in ExperimentalMusic: Cage and Beyond, Michael Nyman
points out that the Fluxus composers "reviewed multiplicity, found its
deficiencies, and chose to reduce their focus of attention to singularity."'14
This was very much an issue of control: the performance pieces which
George Brecht called "events"bore only a superficial resemblance to the
mixed-media "happenings"pioneered by Cage as early as 1952. As is well
known, the happening was designed to promote spontaneity and unpredictable outcomes from the random intersections and collisions of simultaneously, independently executed activities.The austerityof Brecht'sevents
stands in stark contrast to such abundance (Example 6).15
The reader will notice that these compositions do not by any means
exclude variabilityfrom their realization or remove all powers of decisionmaking from their performers. However, the sheer range of possible outcomes has been severelyreduced--and it has been done without retreating
from the "wide-open" nature of aleatory, for these pieces continue to
stretch the boundaries of what can be considered music. Further, these
events have a curiously anonymous, or impersonal, aspect, as if anyone
could have planned them-something which is really not true of Cage's
pieces, despite his supposedly having removed himself from the proceedings. Is there anything, really, that categorically distinguishes Brecht's
Fluxus pieces from La Monte Young's of about the same time? This
impersonal quality is noticeable even as one recognizes the vigorously,
almost aggressively distinct and original aesthetic that underlies them as
their common ground.
As the sixties began, the definitive break from abstract expressionism in
the plastic arts came at the hands of such younger artists as sculptor Donald
Judd and painter Frank Stella, who had reached a point of intense dissatisfaction with this tendency of the personality to attract attention to itself.
Stella recalls:
I had been badly affected by what could be called the romance of
Abstract Expressionism ... the idea of the artist as a terrifically sensitive, ever-changing, ever-ambitious person.... I began to feel very
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94
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The MinimalistAesthetic
95
THREETELEPHONEEVENTS
*
Whenthe telephonerings, it is
allowedto continueringing, until it stops.
Spring, 1961
Dripping.
G. Brecht
(1959-62)
Events(1961),
EXAMPLE6: GEORGE BRECHT, ThreeTelephone
AND
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96
of New Music
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31/2
are not
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The Minimalist
Aesthetic
97
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98
Perspectives
orNewMusic
(1963)
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Aesthetic
The Minimalist
99
fact, such as Robert Morris, the impression given by art objects that they
had been manufactured-whether literally true or not-was crucial to
breaking"the tedious ring of'artiness' circumscribingeach new phase of art
since the Renaissance"and helping to remove the accompanying interposition of artist'spersonality between artwork and viewer.28
The simplification of musical materialsthat accompaniesthe suppression
of chance procedures also results in the equivalent of a "shiny"or "nonpainterly" presence. This is manifest in several features. One is the limited
repertoire of sound sources, whether they be taped or live; in the latter
case, the harmonies favored are preponderantly consonances and "mild"
dissonances. (The old tonal criteria are invoked here only for the sake of
convenience; the music itself, by definition, need not have anything to do
with common-practice harmony.) Another notable feature is the extensive
use of repetition, whether or not in the service of graduallyinduced, barely
perceptible change over time. Recourse to such a device, especially when
combined, as is so often the case, with the projection of a constant, uniform
pulse and a busy, bustling, or "buzzing" character, seems calculated to
evoke a sense of flatness, to deny that there is anything but surface to
engage the listener'sattention.29 Of course, if there reallywere nothing but
surfaceto this music, one could only conclude that it was nonhierarchically
based. Such a basis is evidently not an impossible one for visual art-to
judge from the historical evidence-so perhaps it is not for music either.
The possibility is worth pointing out, if only to suggest that it may account
for the difficulties experienced by theorists in particular in accepting this
music as worthwhile art. For now, it will suffice to keep in mind Morris's
dictum that "Simplicityof shape does not necessarilyequate with simplicity
of experience."30
(3) The shift in emphasis from composition to arrangementin minimal
art, or from parts to whole, seems to have come about as an attempt to
communicate more directly and clearly. One way of doing this was to
reduce the number of parts. Among the sculptors, Judd, Morris, and Carl
Andre are particularly significant for the ways in which their work
embodies this idea. Judd has been bluntly eloquent on the subject: "When
you start relating parts, in the first place, you're assuming that you have a
vague whole-the rectangle of the canvas-and definite parts, which is all
screwed up, because you should have a definite wholeand maybe no parts,
or very few."31Andre got around the problem of relations between parts
by using bricks of a fixed size, arranged (unmortared) in various ways:
these came across as "regimented, interchangeableunits" which "did not
lend themselves to relational structures" because "any part could replace
any other part" (Example 8).32 Arrangement is taken here to imply "a
preconceived notion of the whole," as opposed to composition,which "usually means the adjustment of the parts, that is, their size, shape, color, or
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placement, to arriveat the finished work, whose exact nature is not known
beforehand."33 The work illustrated in Example 9 is one of Andre's
arrangements, a series entitled Equivalents I-VIII, in which the same
number of bricks (120) is placed to form each of eight larger blocks, all two
bricks high but varying in their other two dimensions. Still another solution was proposed by Morris:
... Certain forms do exist that, if they do not negate the numerous
relative sensations of color to texture, scale to mass, etc., do not
present clearlyseparated parts for these kinds of relations to be established in terms of shapes. Such are the simpler forms that create strong
gestalt sensations. Their parts are bound together in such a way that
they offer a maximum resistance to perceptual separation.34
These "simpler forms"-the simple regular and irregular polyhedronsMorris also called "unitary forms" for the fact that the viewer need not
move around them to grasp the whole: "One sees and immediately
'believes'that the pattern within one's mind corresponds to the existential
fact of the object" (Examples 10 and 11).35
In their efforts to direct the listener's attention away from the creative
process expressed as something going on in the workof art and towards the
actual sound of the finished product, the minimalist composers also stress
the "wholeness"of their pieces. Cage's Indeterminacyserves as a useful foil
in this case; it is a work that is about nothing if not its own creation. The
fact that in the well-known Folkways recording it is Cage himself whose
voice we hear might at first seem crucial to our sense that the piece is being
created as we hear it; but it is not the literalpresence of the composer's voice
that makes this piece what it is, as will be clear from a comparison of
Indeterminacywith Alvin Lucier'sIAm Sitting in a Room.Lucier'swork, for
which the recorded, re-recorded, re-re-recorded, etc. sound of his own
voice serves as the sole material, is only superficially "about" its creation;
actually,even the listener who has never seen the "score"will soon realizehaving heard the text through a few times-that the compositional decisions were all made before the beginning of the work-that in fact they
preceded the moment at which the composition could be said, even conceptually, to have begun. In Indeterminacy,it is the individual elements that
capture our attention: Cage's anecdotes and aphorisms spoken at various
speeds and David Tudor's sporadic, improvised piano and electronic
"accompaniment."36In I Am Sitting in a Room, by contrast, as the piece
goes on we pay less and less attention to the individual links in the chainthe concatenated readings of the text-and more and more to the whole
progression from the voice in the room to "the room in the voice," as it
were.37
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The Minimalist
Aesthetic
103
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Untitled(1965).
FOURPIECES,EACH28" x
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PLEXIGLASSMIR
28" x 28"
The Minimalist
Aesthetic
105
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106
of New Music
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The Minimalist
Aesthetic
107
opposite corners were lopped off or other alterations were made to get
away from the standard rectangular format, producing a shape which
became identical in dimensions to the image (Example 13). Similarly in
sculpture, Judd's and Morris's "elementary,geometrical forms... depend
for their art quality on some sort of presence or concrete thereness.... There is no wish to transcend the physical for either the metaphysical or the metaphoric. The thing, then, is presumably not supposed... to be suggestive of anything other than itself."47 Judd himself
preferred to call work that exhibited such qualities "three-dimensional
art"--neither painting nor sculpture but "related, closely or distantly, to
one or the other"-or, even better, "specific objects."48
The desirabilityof directness of image is certainly evident in the artistic
credos of minimalist composers, notably Reich's essay,"Music as a Gradual
Process,"in which the author begins by explaining his title: "I do not mean
the process of composition, but rather pieces of music that are, literally,
processes.... I am interested in perceptible processes; I want to be able to
hear the process happening throughout the sounding music." Further, says
Reich of his method, "once the process is set up and loaded it runs by
itself"--a feature which acts to remove its inventor from the scene actually
unfolded in the music.49 Reich is also careful to point out the distinction
between Cage's use of process and his own: "The processes he used were
compositional ones that could not be heard when the piece was performed."50 Again with reference to Indeterminacy, it would seem that
although the experience of listening to such a piece is intended to parallel
the process of creating it-in that one follows the accumulation of the
result, moment by moment-one is provided with nothing to go on concerning the basis on which the creative decisions were actually made.
Unable to determine what the largerplan might be-or even whether there
is a largerplan-listeners are far more likely to focus their attention on what
might be called the "eternalpresent"of the individual stories, less likely to
attempt to make sense of the whole. Thus a kind of stasis is establishedapparentlymuch like the stasis that Feldman claims to have brought to his
own work by studying the paintings of such abstractexpressionistsas Mark
Rothko and Philip Guston, for he sees in his compositional aims a denial of
process-in fact, an explicit opposition to it.51
Reich's idea of processis especially interesting in light of the fact that
minimalist artists sought to introduce a kind of temporality into their
work. Morris notes: "Only one aspect of the work is immediate: the
apprehensionof the gestalt. The experience of the work necessarilyexists in
time."52 As Maurice Berger comments:
In [Morris's] Untitled, 1965 [see Example 10], an arrangementof four
identical cubic forms, two sides of each cube were sloped in order to
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108
of NewMusic
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oO
00
rv
0
oo
r-
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Aesthetic
109
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110
of New Music
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EXAMPLE15: JOBAER,Untitled(Wraparound
Triptych-Blue,Green,
Temporalitywas also often expressedin a modularor serialfashion"onething afteranother,"in Judd'soften quotedphrase.The "things"in
questionare sometimesidentical,sometimesof extremelylimitedrange;
certainof Dan Flavin'spieceswhichconsistentirelyof fluorescenttubesin
a few standardlengths(Example16) area good exampleof the latter.55In
eithercase,they arearrangedto producegradualchanges(or, sometimes,
only the slightestof variation)frommoduleto module,whetherwithinan
exhibitionspace(sculpture;see Example17) or acrossa gridor otherfield
(painting).The seeminglyrigid constraintsof grids can be overcome
throughvariousstrategies,suchas thoseadoptedby Martin:"Shesets up a
playofirregularizingrefinements,whichneverbecomedeviationsfromthe
prescribedsystem.... Thus the legibilityof the systemis preserved,the
presenceof the moduleneverin doubt, althoughit supportsnot only a
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EXAMPLE
GreensCrossingGreens(forPietMondrianWhoLa
16: DAN FLAVIN,
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112
Perspectives
of NewMusic
SQUARE SURFACES
141/2" TO 19", N 1/2 -INCH INCREMENTS
(INSTALLATION, DECEMBER 1966)
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The Minimalist
Aesthetic
113
EXAMPLE
18:
AGNES MARTIN,
Untitled (c.1965)
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Perspectives
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if X
91
I
1-1
-c
0
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The Minimalist
Aesthetic
115
without completing the cube). A similar sort of principle operates, not only
in Reich's phase-shifting pieces, but also in works such as his Music for
EighteenMusicians (1974-76), in which each of a series of eleven chords
given in the relativelybrief opening serves in turn as the basis of a section;
this "composing out" accounts for almost the entire duration of the piece,
excepting only the opening and the conclusion which is its exact duplicate.
The wide applicability of this serial principle, in fact, suggests that it is
entirely appropriate to continue to apply the term minimal to the more
recent work of Glass, Riley, and Reich, despite attempts on the part of some
critics (and composers) to brand it "Post-Minimal."
It is for this very quality of temporality,however-instilled at least partly
for the sake of rendering the work clearerand more accessible and making
of it "something that everyone can understand," in the words of sculptor
Tony Smith58-that minimal art is perhaps most open to criticism. A
difficulty arises from the fact that the basis for the governing decisions
noted above is rarely(if ever) justified in any larger terms. In an influential
and provocative essay entitled "Art and Objecthood," Michael Fried noted
the consequences of this lack: "The actual number of modular units in a
given piece is felt to be arbitrary, and the piece itself... is seen as a
fragment of, or cut into, something infinitely larger." Curiously, this
impression lends a sense of "endless, or indefinite, duration"to the work
itself.59 Environmental artist Robert Smithson has drawn attention to
these very qualities in the works he calls "nonsites,"which he developed as
a way of containing an "oceanic" site and its "disruption." In his words,
"The container is in a sense a fragment itself, something that could be
called a three-dimensional map.... It actually exists as a fragment of a
greater fragmentation. It is a three-dimensionalperspectivethat has broken
away from the whole, while containing the lack of its own containment.
There are no mysteries in these vestiges, no traces of an end or a beginning."60As Example 20 shows, Smithson often incorporated photographs
or maps into such works, showing the place from which the materialfor the
nonsite was taken.
Numerous critics in the sixties quickly came to realize that this new art,
through its fixation upon literal appearance- Stella's"what you see is what
you see"-guaranteed that the work would include the beholder.Not in the
sense simply of drawing viewers in, of involving them or fascinating them,
but rather in the sense that the act of looking at the work of art would
become part of that work's meaning: "An earmarkof minimalist art is the
tendency to locate content outside the art object, in its physical setting or in
viewers' responses, rather than 'inside' it, in the literary or psychological
import of an image, for example."70This quality amounts in part to a
critique of earlierart and its implicit assumption that what is located strictly
within the work could wholly define the artistic experience--that a work of
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EXAMPLE20 (CONT.):
ROBERTSMITHSON,A Nonsite,Franklin,N.J.(1968)
PART 2: AERIAL PHOTOGRAPH
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art could in fact mean anything without someone around to look at it. But
this dependence upon the beholder turned out to be a coin with an
opposite side: being included also meant being controlled, coerced. Barbara
Rose has noted this quality in Judd'swork (Example 21); what he is trying
to do, she says,
is to circumvent this process of "reading"or "ordering"required by
pictorial conventions in order to force a visual confrontation more
direct than that offered by conventional forms. Toward this end he
chooses a simple, redundant, nonhierarchicalorder so that the sharpness and immediacy of the impact of the stamped-out single shape is
maximized. There are no choices in looking at a Judd; there is only one
way to see it, and hanging it on a wall insures that it will be seen only
one way, that is, frontally.71
The sheer, vast size of many works of minimal sculpture, besides precluding
one from taking them in all at once,72 may also serve to menace the viewer.
Richard Serra'sCircuit, for example (Example 22), has been described as a
work that makes one feel unguarded at every side to stand at its center-in
the end, it is "an assault upon our vanity of feeling that we govern the
figure we cut in the eyes of the world."73 In her forceful indictment of this
and other aspects of minimal art, Anna Chave notes that the evident desire
to dominate the viewer goes hand in hand with the tendency to favor large,
even overwhelming scale (especially in sculpture) as a way of seizing
control of an area or a space. In some sculptors' work, this aim has been
carried to such extremes as to have literallyendangered life and property.74
Paintersas well have adopted techniques that seem, among other things,
calculated to annoy or frustrate the viewer. In particular,Kenneth Noland
has produced canvases that are extremely narrow (vertically) but so long
(horizontally) that one cannot stand far enough away from them in any
normal exhibition space to get them entirely within one's field of vision all
at once. The experience of looking at his diamond-shaped canvases has
been characterizedas "basicallyunsatisfying and unstable," because "one's
eye, in trying to focus on the colors and gauge their relativehues, is always
slipping off the edge of the canvas, propelled there by the tilt of the
bands."75Writing about some of Noland's work from around 1967, this
same critic found that either the viewer must give into
a precipitous and engulfing encounter with sheer, brilliant color, or
else one can, by certain eye adjustments, consciously limit the experience of these paintings, that is look at the paintings but in much the
same way as one looks at the banal textiles that they resemble. This
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Photograph? 1993RichardSerra/ARS,Ne-wYork
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122
Perspectives
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people who will wander right out of the hall in the middle of a performance.90 Perhaps this constitutes a liberation of sorts, but clearly not everyone thinks so. Mertens, for example, points out that "Since each moment
may be the beginning or the end, the listener can choose how long he
wants to listen for, but he will never miss anything by not listening."91
To say that minimalism has proved to be more than a passing fad is
certainly not to say that it is necessarilydestined to endure, in the long run,
as art. Undoubtedly it is far too early to answer in definitive terms the
question of whether minimal music is built to last. In part this is because
the history of minimalism is not yet complete-either in art or in music. It
is true that certain earlier works of minimal painting and sculpture have
alreadytaken on a kind of "historical"stature--that they are now regarded
as integral to the recent history of art even by those who originally
questioned the validity of minimalism. No parallel canonization of even a
provisional sort seems to have taken place in music, for even the earliest
minimal pieces are still regarded as controversialin many quarters. Perhaps
this state of affairs is only a reflection of musicians' more conservative
reflexes, compared to their counterparts in any of the other arts; perhaps,
that is, eventual general acceptance of this music is only a matter of time.
There remains the possibility, however, that some of the problems with
minimalism in music discussed earlier will eventually prove insuperablethat, in other words, the adoption of critical language from the plastic arts
shows, not that minimal music is "just like"minimal art, but ratherthat the
two media are fundamentally incompatible in certain ways and that the
deficiencies of minimal music-if deficiencies they turn out to be-have
arisen from pursuing too far the analogy between visual and auralart. Such
matters, fortunately,are beyond the scope of this article to resolve.
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43. Such is evidently the view of Elaine Broad, for example, who in her
article, "A New X? An Examination of the Aesthetic Foundations of
Early Minimalism" (MusicResearchForum 5 [1990]: 51-62), refersto
minimal music as "non-time-directed"(59). In this regard, she echoes
Mertens, who speaks of the "mereduration and stasis"of Young'swork
(AmericanMinimal Music, 89). Nyman, too, comes perilously close to
equating the formal stasis attributed by Cage in 1948 to new music
(including his own) with the qualities of Young's music ("Against
Intellectual Complexity in Music," 88-89).
44. Hitchcock, "Minimal Art and Music"; John Rahn, "What Is Valuable
in Art, and Can Music Still Achieve It?,"Perspectives
of New Music 27,
no. 2 (Summer 1989): 6-17.
45. Glaser, "Questions to Stella and Judd," 158.
46. Quoted in Rubin, "FrankStella," 108.
47. BarbaraRose, "A B C Art,"Art in America, October-November 1965;
reprintedin Battcock, Minimal Art, 291.
48. Judd, "Specific Objects," Arts Yearbook8 (1965); reprinted in Judd,
CompleteWritings 1959-1975 (Halifax: Nova Scotia College of Art
and Design; New York:New YorkUniversity Press, 1975), 181-89.
49. Steve Reich, "Music as a Gradual Process" (1968), in Writings about
Music (Halifax: Nova Scotia College of Art and Design; New York:
New YorkUniversity Press, 1974), 9.
50. Ibid., 10. He refers,in all likelihood, to the methods used for Changes,
ImaginaryLandscapeNo. 4, and Musicfor Piano 21-52, all documented
in John Cage, Silence(Middletown, Conn.: WesleyanUniversity Press,
1973), 57-61.
51. Feldman, "Crippled Symmetry," 137; "Some Elementary Questions,"
67-70. Discussing his TriadicMemories,Feldman notes that each of the
chords in slow tempo is repeated a number of times depending on
"how long I felt it should go on," and reports finding that "Quite soon
into a new chord I would forget the reiterated chord before it."
Working with this phenomenon, he aimed for a "disorientation of
memory," under which the repetition without discernible pattern
would suggest"that what we hear is functional and directional, but we
soon realize that this is an illusion" ("CrippledSymmetry," 127). The
idea of an eternal present could not be more clearlyprojected than it is
here.
52. Morris, "Notes on Sculpture," 234.
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