Books by Patrick Nickleson
Available free via open access at the link above
Minimalism stands as the key representative o... more Available free via open access at the link above
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.
The place of music in Rancière’s thought has long been underestimated or unrecognised. Rancière a... more The place of music in Rancière’s thought has long been underestimated or unrecognised. Rancière and Music responds to this absence with a collection of 15 essays by scholars from a variety of music- and sound-related fields, including an Afterword by Rancière on the role of music in his thought and writing. The essays engage closely with Rancière’s existing commentary on music and its relationship to other arts in the aesthetic regime, revealed through detailed case studies around music, sound and listening.
Journal Articles by Patrick Nickleson
The Affect Theory Reader 2: Worldings, Tensions, Futures, 2023
Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 2022
Between 1963 and 1966, John Cale, Tony Conrad, La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela and a handful of ot... more Between 1963 and 1966, John Cale, Tony Conrad, La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela and a handful of other collaborators rehearsed together on a daily basis. Held since then in the archive at Young and Zazeela's Church Street apartment in New York City, the tapes of the Theatre of Eternal Music have become obscure objects of fascination and mystery for experimental music fans. They have also been at the centre of disputes over the authorial propriety of the drones that they record. This paper offers a material history of those tapes as they circulate online. By tracking and organizing the available bootlegs, I trace the ensemble's changing sonic self-conception as it moved from a composer-led ensemble supporting Young's saxophone improvisations to an egalitarian collective constituted in its dedication to the daily practice of listening from 'inside the sound'. The contract that accompanied a reel-to-reel tape of Sunday Morning Blues likely gave Cornelius Cardew a laugh. It stipulated, his biographer and long-time collaborator John Tilbury writes, that the tape be returned 'immediately on demand'; that Cardew 'agrees not to perform the Tape or the actual music recorded on the Tape, publicly or for profit'; that he 'agrees not to permit any copy of the Tape or the music on the Tape to be made on tapes or recorders or any other form of reproduction', that he 'agrees not to perform the Tape or any of the music recorded on the Tape at private gatherings where it has been previously announced that the Tape shall be performed'; that he 'agrees not to permit any kind of performance, copy, or reproduction of the Tape or the music recorded on the Tape, without the express written consent of the composer'; and so forth. 1 In the contract dated 4 May 1967, La Monte Young was carefully defending from free circulation a recording he had made on 12 January 1964 with his collaborators John Cale, Tony Conrad, Angus MacLise and Marian Zazeela. Tilbury tells us that Cardew
Perspectives of New Music, 2019
Rancière and Music, 2020
In the middle of his first monograph, Althusser's Lesson, Rancière introduces a term that appears... more In the middle of his first monograph, Althusser's Lesson, Rancière introduces a term that appears nowhere else in his published writing: 'the low music'. La musique bas. Several scholars-including many in this volume have noted the relative absence of music in Rancière's writing. In particular, musical works have played almost no role, in comparison to how often he turns to literature, film, poetry and sculpture in making his claims about aesthetics, politics, historiography and pedagogy. Nevertheless, in this essay I would like to consider at length Rancière's use of la musique bas as a means of thinking about what musical and sonic terminology might mean when it appears, often metaphorically, in his published writing.
University of Toronto Quarterly, 2018
Following the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada's ninety-four Calls to Action (2015),... more Following the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada's ninety-four Calls to Action (2015), many art music composers, ensembles, arts organizations, and administrators have taken up the task of decolonization by exploring possible modes of collaboration between settler and Indigenous artists. In this article, the authors report on their experiences as audience members in three recent productions and as witnesses to Indigenous-led discussions to explore trends and problematic assumptions constitutive of these collaborations. Against the ideal of collaboration as a model of social harmony, the authors explore ongoing tensions between settler colonial logics of authorship, collaboration, and appropriation and argue that embracing the discomfort of ally-ship remains key to moving forward in solidarity work in scholarship and creative practice.
Bells and carillon have long symbolized the harmonious community in Euro -American political disc... more Bells and carillon have long symbolized the harmonious community in Euro -American political discourse. In this article, I denaturalize this rhetorical position by taking into account the context of bells and carillon in interwar Canada. I do so by reading William Lyon Mackenzie King’s address at the inauguration of the Parliament Hill carillon within the broader context of Canada’s colonial “Old World” nostalgia for the carillon. I then turn to testimony from survivors of the residential school system to argue that the link between bells, harmony, and community had to be forcefully imposed by settlers to banish any potential discord.
This article considers several prominent pieces of minimalism in their movement from primary soun... more This article considers several prominent pieces of minimalism in their movement from primary sound recording to secondary transcription. In place of the score-based formalism of much musicological scholarship on minimalism, I draw on my own archival work and interviews to consider the frequency of transcriptions of minimalism, as well as the politico-historical aspects of minimalism's development that are elided when the distinction between score and transcription is not taken into account. I argue that defining minimalism in relation to material practices of composing, writing, performing, and listening – rather than to formal features like gradual process, long duration, and diatonicism – helps in defining minimalism as a cohesive field of musical production. Many of the most prominent pieces of minimalist music from the 1960s and 1970s were not originally planned as, or performed from, scores. The composers who would come to be known as minimalists rejected what Tony Conrad later called the 'authoritarian trappings of the score' , instead developing a non-coercive model of authorship that prioritized collaborative rehearsals recorded to magnetic tape in place of writing documents to hand off as delegation to other performers. 1 Performing their own music, and recording it to tape rather than to paper, were both central to the minimalist critique of art music authorship, as traditionally represented by the composer, hunched over a desk, inscribing marks on paper. In several prominent cases examined below, the 'scores' used for contemporary performance and analysis are in fact transcriptions created decades later by performers and scholars eager to engage minimalism as documented art music, often at the request of composers eager to declare sole propriety. Proper attention has not been paid to the authorial and political distinction between scores and transcriptions in historiography on minimalism. In this article, I rely on my own archival work and interviews with transcribers of minimalist works to argue that the absence of scores, and the retroactive creation of transcriptions, draws attention to the authorial politics of writing and listening that led to the music we now call minimalism.
Book Reviews by Patrick Nickleson
Music & Letters, 2021
Christophe Levaux wants there to be an 'established musical fact' called 'minimalist music' (p. 1... more Christophe Levaux wants there to be an 'established musical fact' called 'minimalist music' (p. 10). This provocative and eminently readable book tracks this fact's long, contentious, and ongoing 'musicological discovery' (p. 10).
Dissertation by Patrick Nickleson
Several of the composers we most frequently label “minimalists” have been engaged in disputes abo... more 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.
In 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.
Blog Posts by Patrick Nickleson
AMS "Musicology Now" blog , 2017
Uploads
Books by Patrick Nickleson
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.
Journal Articles by Patrick Nickleson
Book Reviews by Patrick Nickleson
Dissertation by Patrick Nickleson
In 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.
Blog Posts by Patrick Nickleson
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.
In 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.