The Persistence of Minimalism

/Minimalism and its outsider - first draft for part 1 essay [incomplete] The working draft of an introduction to Rasheed Araeen monograph Part 1 a, b, c sections are unedited and in progress - this essay is copyrighted- not for publication. purely for academic review. copyright Sharjah Art Foundation and Peter Lewis 2017

ACM SIGDOC Asterisk Journal of Computer Documentation, 1999

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.

[informal] A historical discussion of post-minimalism in music, with particular attention to historiographic issues. Discusses radical vs reactionary postminimalism, minimalism and music theater, the influence of popular music.

Esse arts + opinions, 2007

“Interview with Dan Graham: Minimalism Against Minimalism,” Esse arts + opinions (Montreal, CA), no. 61, Autumn 2007, pp. 46-53.

Page 1. SEMINARI DE RECERQUES LINGÜISTIQUES Universitat de Girona, Girona 19 de juny de 2009 1 Minimalism: A look from Below Ángel J. Gallego (CLT – Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona) <[email protected]> 1. Minimalism: the role of the 3 rd factor (1) Two tensions within GG a. In the GB approach: descriptive vs. explanatory adequacy b. In the MP approach: - SMT [= language is an optimal solution to interface demands] vs.

Text & Talk, 2017

This essay attempts a rapprochement between Kent Bach’s view on semantic minimalism and the most radical version of contextualism about language on offer: Charles Travis’s occasion-sensitivity. Despite common assumptions held by defenders of semantic literalism – which cast Bach’s proposal as a form of contextualism – Bach rejects all conceivable forms of contextualism. In this paper, I argue that in spite of his systematic rejection of contextualism, Bach’s position bears a striking resemblance to Travis’s occasion-sensitivity. Further, when analyzed in light of the conceptual framework developed by Travis, Bach’s strand of minimalism can be shown to contain a deep-rooted conceptual inconsistency to the extent that he aims to ascribe “pure semantic content” to a linguistic entity that is necessarily pragmatic.

Proceedings of the European Society of Aesthetics, 2018

On Nature and Language

I. The roots of the Minimalist Program. AB & LR: To start from a personal note, let us take the Pisa Lectures as a point of departure [1]. You have often characterized the approach that emerged from your Pisa seminars, 20 years ago, as a major change of direction in the history of our field. How would you characterize that shift today? NC: Well, I don' t think it was clear at once, but in retrospect there was a period, of maybe 20 years preceding that, in which there had been an attempt to come to terms with a kind of a paradox that emerged as soon as the first efforts were made to study the structure of language very seriously, with more or less rigorous rules, an effort to give a precise account for the infinite range of structures of language. The paradox was that in order to give an accurate descriptive account it seemed necessary to have a huge proliferation of rule systems of a great variety, different rules for different grammatical constructions. For instance, relative clauses look different from interrogative clauses and the VP in Hungarian is different from the NP and they are all different from English; so the system exploded in complexity. On the other hand, at the same time, for the first time really, an effort was made to deal with what has come to be called later the logical problem of language acquisition. Plainly, children acquiring this knowledge do not have that much data. In fact you can estimate the amount of data they have quite closely, and it's very limited; still, somehow children are reaching these states of knowledge which have apparently great complexity, and differentiation and diversity ….and that can't be. Each child is capable of acquiring any such state; children are not specially designed for one or the other, so it must be that the basic structure of language is essentially uniform and is coming from inside, not from outside. But in that case it appears to be inconsistent with the observed diversity and proliferation, so there is kind of a contradiction, or at least a tension, a strong tension between the effort to give a descriptively adequate account and to account for the acquisition of the system, what has been called explanatory adequacy. Already in the nineteen fifties it was clear that there was a problem and there were many efforts to deal with it; the obvious way was to try to show that the diversity of rules is superficial, that you can find very general principles that all rules adhere to, and if you abstract those principles from the rules and attribute them to the genetic endowment of the child then the systems that remain look much simpler. That's the research strategy. That was begun around the nineteen sixties when various conditions on rules were discovered; the idea is that if you can factor the rules into the universal conditions and the residue, then the residue is simpler and the child only has to acquire the residue. That went on for a long time with efforts to reduce the variety and complexity of phrase structure grammars, of transformational grammars and so on in this manner [2]. So for example Xbar theory was an attempt to show that phrase structure systems don't have the variety and complexity they appear to have because there is some general framework that they all fit into and that you only have to change some features of that general system to get the particular ones. What happened at Pisa is that somehow all this work came together for the first time in the seminars, and a method arose for sort of cutting the Gordian knot completely: namely eliminate rules and eliminate constructions altogether. So you don't have complex rules for complex constructions because there aren't any rules and there aren't any constructions. There is no such thing as the VP in Japanese or the relative clause in Hungarian. Rather there are just extremely general principles like "move anything anywhere" under fixed conditions that were proposed, and then there are options that have to be fixed, parametric choices: so the head of the construction first or last , null subject or not a null subject, and so on. Within this framework of fixed principles and options to be selected, the rules and the constructions disappear, they become artifacts. There had been indications that there was something wrong with the whole notion of rule systems and constructions. For example there was a long debate in the early years about constructions like, say, "John is expected to be intelligent": is it a passive construction like "John was seen", or is it a raising construction like "John seems to be intelligent"? And it had to be one or the other because everything was a construction, but in fact they seemed to be the same thing. It was the kind of controversy where you know you are talking about the wrong thing because it doesn't seem to matter what you decide. Well, the right answer is that there aren't any constructions anyway, no passive, no raising: there is just the option of dislocating something somewhere else under certain conditions, and in certain cases it gives you what is traditionally called the passive and in other cases it gives you a question and so on, but the grammatical constructions are left as artifacts. In a sense they are real; it is not that there are no relative clauses, but they are a kind of taxonomic artifact. They are like "terrestrial mammal" or something like that. "Terrestrial mammal" is a category, but is not a biological category. It's the interaction of several things and that seems to be what the traditional constructions are like, VP's, relative clauses, and so on. The whole history of the subject, for thousands of years, had been a history of rules and constructions, and transformational grammar in the early days, generative grammar, just took that over. So the early generative grammar had a very traditional flair. There is a section on the Passive in German, and another section on the VP in Japanese, and so on: it essentially took over the traditional framework, tried to make it precise, asked new questions and so on. What happened in the Pisa discussions was that the whole framework was turned upside down. So, from that point of view, there is nothing left of the whole traditional approach to the structure of language, other than taxonomic artifacts, and that's a radical change, and it was a very liberating one. The principles that were suggested were of course wrong, parametric choices were unclear, and so on, but the way of looking at things was totally different from anything that had come before, and it opened the way to an enormous explosion of research in all sorts of areas, typologically very varied. It initiated a period of great excitement in the field. In fact I think it is fair to say that more has been learned about language in the last 20 years than in the preceding 2000 years. AB & LR: At some point, some intuitions emerged from much work within the Principles and Parameters approach that economy considerations could have a larger role than previously assumed, and this ultimately gave rise to the Minimalist Program [3]. What stimulated the emergence of minimalist intuitions? Was this related to the systematic success, within the Principles and Parameters approach and also before, of the research strategy consisting in eliminating redundancies, making the principles progressively more abstract and general, searching for symmetries (for instance in the theoretically driven typology of null elements), etc.? NC: Actually all of these factors were relevant in the emergence of a principles and parameters approach. Note that it is not really a theory, it's an approach, a framework that accelerated the search for redundancies that should be eliminated and provided a sort of a new platform from which to proceed, with much greater success, in fact. There had already been efforts, of course, to reduce the complexity, eliminate redundancies and so on. This goes back very far, it's a methodological commitment which anyone tries to do and it accelerated with the principles and parameters (P&P) framework. However, there was also something different, shortly after this system began to crystallize by the early 80s. Even before the real explosion of descriptive and explanatory work it began to become clear that it might be possible to ask new questions that hadn't been asked before. But not just the straightforward methodological question: can we make our theories better, can we eliminate redundancies, can we show that the principles are more general than we thought, develop more explanatory theories? But also: is it possible that the system of language itself has a kind of an optimal design, so, is language perfect? Back in the early 80s that was the way I started every