On Minimalism: Documenting a Musical Movement ed. by Kerry O’Brien and William Robin (review)

Reviewed by: On Minimalism: Documenting a Musical Movement ed. by Kerry O'Brien and William Robin Kristen Wallentinsen On Minimalism: Documenting a Musical Movement. Compiled by Kerry O'Brien and William Robin. Oakland: University of California Press, 2023. xvi, 449 p. ISBN 9780520382077 (hardcover), 95; ISBN 9780520382084 (paperback), 34. 95; ISBN 9780520382091 (ebook), 34. 95. Illustrations, bibliography, index, listening guide. Historical attempts to "define" mini-malist music often struggle to reconcile the variegated artistic styles of those categorized as minimalists under the umbrella of a single definition, and this struggle has often led to a narrowed view of who gets to "count" in the stories we tell about the minimalist music. Common origin stories perpetuated through music history textbooks and courses, and through the scholarly communities of musicology and music theory, choose to focus on the compositional strategies and resulting works of what editors Kerry O'Brien and William Robin call "the Big Four": La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and Philip Glass (p. 4). In doing so, the stories ignore the plethora of artists, dancers, composers, performers, film-makers, and other creative minds that were (and continue to be) part of the rich environment in which minimalism flourished as a musical movement. On Minimalism: Documenting a Musical Movement aims to broaden this narrative to encompass many of the artists who have been cast to the side. Through a carefully organized collection of 108 primary source documents, O'Brien and Robin introduce their readers to over one hundred composers, performers, artists, critics, and scholars whose work takes the story of minimalism beyond the Big Four narrative. In their self-identified "revisionist history, " O'Brien and Robin ask the questions, "Who can be called a mini-malist? " (p. 5). "Where was repetition-and drone-based music happening, in the 1960s and onward? Who was there? What did it sound like? How was it described? And what is missing from how it is now remembered? " (p. 4). By asking these questions, the editors draw in important historical predecessors both in jazz and classical music; discuss the profound cultural, countercultural, End Page 711 and sociopolitical influences that shaped the movement; and invite into the discussion some composers who one might not initially think of as "minimalist" but whose compositional strategies and sociocultural surroundings place them within the movement's mi-lieu. In expanding minimalism's philosophical reach, this book is in keeping with other recent trends in the scholarship of minimalist music, including books by Christophe Levaux (We Have Always Been Minimalist: The Construction and Triumph of a Musical Style Oakland: University of California Press, 2020) and Patrick Nickelson (The Names of Minimalism: Authorship, Art Music, and Historiography in Dispute Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2023) that problematize the traditional narrative of minimalist music. The work also resonates with current efforts to reexamine the sanitized narrative of the Big Four more critically (such as Sumanth Gopinath and Pwyll ap Siôn's edited volume Rethinking Reich New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). In On Minimalism, O'Brien and Robin push these scholarly trends further by providing a rich and detailed primary-source reader—a crucial resource in which they collect diverse stories into one place and offer future scholars of minimalist music a new and readily accessible source for inspiration. The editors organize the book historically into three parts along chronological divides familiarly outlined by previous scholarship. In part 1, they detail minimalism's origins and early years beginning in the late 1950s. In part 2, they deal with the expansion of minimalism and the rise of postminimalism from the mid-1970s to the 1990s. In part 3, they round out the book by examining minimalism's legacy and current influence from the year 2000 to today (pp. 6–7). O'Brien and Robin contextualize the chapters of part 1 by discussing the wide sphere of influence out of which minimalism grew. They write that "to understand the beginnings of minimalism, it is perhaps best to leave singular or simple 'origin stories' behind. Instead, we can embrace the movement's capaciousness by looking to what made minimalism possible right around the beginnings of the 1960s and the emergence of American post. . .