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A revisionist history of minimalism's transformative rise, through the voices of the musicians who created it. When composers like Philip Glass and Steve Reich began creating hypnotically repetitive music in the 1960s, it upended the world of American composition. But minimalism was more than a classical phenomenon--minimalism changed everything. Its static harmonies and groovy pulses swept through the broader avant-garde landscape, informing the work of Yoko Ono and Brian Eno, John and Alice Coltrane, Pauline Oliveros and Julius Eastman, and many others.   On Minimalism moves from the style's beginnings in psychedelic counterculture through its present-day influences on ambient jazz, doom metal, and electronic music. The editors look beyond the major figures to highlight crucial and diverse voices--especially women, people of color, and LGBTQ+ musicians--that have shaped the genre. Featuring more than a hundred rare historical sources, On Minimalism curates this history anew, documenting one of the most important musical movements of our time.

Ambient music --- Minimal music --- History and criticism. --- Pauline Oliveros. --- Philip Glass. --- Postminimalists. --- Yoko Ono. --- avant-garde music. --- composers. --- dream music. --- experimental music. --- history of minimalism. --- improvisation. --- interviews. --- jazz. --- musical studies. --- musicology classes. --- primary sources.

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Minimalism stands as the key representative of 1960s radicalism in art music histories-but always as a failed project. In The Names of Minimalism, Patrick Nickleson holds in tension collaborative composers in the period of their collaboration, as well as the musicological policing of authorship in the wake of their eventual disputes. Through examinations of the droning of the Theatre of Eternal Music, Reich's Pendulum Music, Glass's work for multiple organs, the austere performances of punk and no wave bands, and Rhys Chatham and Glenn Branca's works for massed electric guitars, Nickleson argues for authorship as always impure, buzzing, and indistinct. Expanding the place of Jacques Rancière's philosophy within musicology, Nickleson draws attention to disciplinary practices of guarding compositional authority against artists who set out to undermine it. The book reimagines the canonic artists and works of minimalism as "(early) minimalism," to show that art music histories refuse to take seriously challenges to conventional authorship as a means of defending the very category "art music." Ultimately, Nickleson asks where we end up if we imagine the early minimalist project-artists forming bands to perform their own music, rejecting the score in favor of recording, making extensive use of magnetic type as compositional and archival medium, hosting performances in lofts and art galleries rather than concert halls-not as a utopian moment within a 1960s counterculture doomed to fail, but as the beginning of a process with a long and influential afterlife.

Minimal music --- History and criticism. --- Meditative music --- Minimalism (Music) --- Minimalist music --- Music, Minimal --- Repetitive music --- Systematic music --- Music --- Minimalism, early minimalism, Tony Conrad, Marian Zazeela, La Monte Young, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Terry Riley, Glenn Branca, Rhys Chatham, authorship, music history, historiography, radicalism, leftist historiography, Jacques Rancière, drone, May '68, metonymy, Theatre of Eternal Music, punk, no wave, new wave, New York --- Authorship. --- Historiography. --- 1900-1999