MUS 237 - Minimalism/Postminimalism

The aesthetic known as “minimalism” has been characterized in a number of ways, among them “repetitive,” “hypnotic,” “passionless,” “trance,” “stuck-record,” and “process.” A leading scholar of the style known as “minimalism,” musicologist Robert Fink has listed negative reactions to this music that include being “a kind of social pathology, as an aural sign that American audiences are primitive and uneducated…that kids nowadays just want to get stoned…that traditional Western cultural values have eroded in the liberal wake of the 1960s…that minimalist repetition is dangerously seductive propaganda, akin to Hitler’s speeches and advertising…and even that the commodity-fetishism of modern capitalism has fatally trapped the autonomous self in minimalist narcissism” (Repeating Ourselves: American Minimal Music as Cultural Practice, 2005). Emerging in the late 1960s and early 1970s, this style both borrowed from as well as influenced various popular musics (like disco and punk, among others) with its emphasis on steady pulses and repeating harmonic structures. In this course we will examine the various historical and cultural forces that led to minimalism’s appearance in the work of composers like Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and Philip Glass, but we will also give attention to figures who have previously been left out of minimalism’s historiography like Julius Eastman and Laurie Anderson. We will also get to later generations of minimalist and postminimalist composers like John Adams-whose 2005 opera Doctor Atomic told the story of Oppenheimer and the atomic bomb in a live theatrical setting as opposed to Christopher Nolan’s cinematic imagining of the same things-as well as to ways minimal style has existed in possibly unexpected places such as pinball, video games, and electronic dance music. We will read and listen and discuss and write about this music and its cultural significance. The course has no prerequisite but students registering for MUS 337 will be expected to have some experience with musical notation and theory.