hello again
Are we…back? No, I don’t think so — at least, not really. It’s been almost two years since I’ve sent out one of these, and a lot of life has happened. Like, this kind of life:
That’s Ira at 2.5, and Goldie (full name Marigold) at almost 9 months. Wild stuff, right?
Anyway, they are one of the myriad reasons I’m pretty much off social media these days, and haven’t thought much about reactivating this newsletter. But I did want to sign in, type a bit, and send our a missive to all my old Industry stans (we did this before Substack was totally ubiquitous!).
The main reason is, well, self-promotional. There’s a really awesome book coming out in less than three months, and I co-created it, with the wonderful musicologist Kerry O’Brien: On Minimalism: Documenting a Musical Movement.
You might recall I wrote a bit about this project way back in November 2020, when we were still gathering and compiling hundreds of documents. We settled for a bit more than a hundred in total for the book, and assembled them into a somewhat sprawling narrative that retells the history of minimalism. Here’s how I’ve been describing the book to friends over email:
On Minimalism is a history of minimalist music, from the late '50s to the present, that covers big names like Philip Glass and Steve Reich, but also Julius Eastman, Pauline Oliveros, Yoko Ono, Sunn O))), and many, many others. The story is told through primary sources: we feature more than a hundred rare and out-of-print documents, from trippy manifestos by La Monte Young and spiritual musings by Alice Coltrane, to lacerating indictments by Ian MacDonald and Charlemagne Palestine, to enlightening interviews with Brian Eno and Maryanne Amacher. Introductory and interstitial essays written by Kerry and me unpack the most important avant-garde musical movement of the past half-century, exploring major developments in minimalism including psychedelic drugs, outré tuning systems, backlash from the classical establishment, and pop culture triumph. It's the perfect intro for general readers, but also offers deep immersion for superfans.
Joan La Barbara wrote an amazing foreword, too! And we got some absolutely killer blurbs from the likes of Alex Ross, Julia Holter, Tashi Wada, Annea Lockwood, and Lee Ranaldo! Like this!!
"For anyone interested in the quirks and turns taken by postwar music in the twentieth century, it wasn't so much a big bang/bhang as it was a collective hummmmmm. Was it somehow a reaction to the absolute bleak blankness of the atom bomb? Was it gazing East to find a spiritual purity and stillness? Was the paring away of harmony and motion a reaction to the ever more complex complications of the modern world? Whatever it was, musicians from all sorts of wide-ranging backgrounds, jazz players, contemporary composers, inventors, scientists, tricksters and seekers, men and women (not to mention filmmakers, dancers, painters, writers) were seeking new forms and demanding that new experiences be brought forth from their compositions, seeking a suspension of time, an expanding NOW—like a river, ever changing yet ever the same. They were seeking to quiet the madness of modern life and refocus the thought process, to examine one single flower rather than the field, to strike one single note and understand how it related to the many, to turn off their minds and float downstream. On Minimalism is the story of this music, from its brave beginnings through to underpinning so much of what we listen to today. Turn the pages and witness this revelatory process unfold in a myriad of inventions and directions. Boom went the bomb and hummmmmm came the revolutionary response."
—Lee Ranaldo, founding member of Sonic Youth
University of California Press has been incredible to work with through this process—supportive in all ways of this big project.
I do hope you’ll preorder the book!! It’s only $35 in paperback, and totally designed for a reader like you: you can read it straight-through as a chronological, accessible history, or poke around an array of very weird, fun, and engaging sources. You can skim the opening chapters on Google Books.
We’ll be doing launch events in NYC and DC in April, and I’ll be sure to let you know about those.
If you’re in New Jersey on Feb 16, I’m giving the Hillman lecture at Westminster Choir College— open to the public!
In the meantime, I don’t think I’ll be posting much here, so consider this a one-off for now.
But, you should also know that SOUND EXPERTISE WILL RETURN IN 2023. I’m recording episodes for Season 3 of the podcast now, and though I don’t typically advertise guests in advance, social media is already abuzz.
My hope is we’ll start dropping episodes in April — stay tuned!