Minimalism and the Politics of Inclusion

“It is commonly accepted in Europe, and widely known here, that the originators of minimalism are Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and Phil Glass,” begins a column published in the Village Voice in July 1982, by the composer and music critic Tom Johnson. 1 Johnson was a crucial presence in the New York experimental music scene—and perhaps the central voice in identifying the nascent aesthetic of musical minimalism—but was dissatisfied with how narrowly this movement of drone- and repetition-based musics had come to be defined. Though Johnson expressed sympathy with the tendency to “reduce music history to a rather short list of Great Men,” he also interrogated the notion of list-making, and the problematic framework of “original minimalist,” providing 27 names that might better elucidate the category—knowing also that, as he put it, “more accurate lists get too long and bulky.”