Hello again! What was once a weekly newsletter has now become a once-every-couple months newsletter, but I’m going to be okay with that. I’m spending less and less time with the book — or, rather, this book, as I’m working on a new one — because we are closer and closer to publication.
Peep that ship date on the right!
Inauguration day. New book, new president. (Is Mitch McConnell…Reviewer 2?)
A month or so ago I got back a new round of proofs with the index included, and proofread that and sent it back; I’m guessing there’s one more round of proofs to spot-check and then, perhaps, nothing until the thing actually comes out. I’ve now seen what I believe will be the final cover design, and it’s super cool. I’ll reveal it to you when I can!
And I also just got the two back-cover blurbs in for the book, which I am extremely excited about/flattered by.
I knew from the beginning that I would want to ask Alex Ross and George E. Lewis for blurbs; Alex has been reading the book from the beginning and been enormously generous in his feedback, and I’ve admired Prof Lewis’s work forever and just really really really wanted him to read my book. And he did and even said nice things about it! I’m super grateful.
Anyway, preorder here!
Sound Expertise wrapped up Season 1 back in early October; I’m really proud of the work we did (we being me + my producer D. Edward Davis + my amazing guests). I’m still hearing from folks who are catching up on the backlog of episodes and are also assigning them to students and sharing them with friends. I’ve been watching papers at virtual AMS this past week and been thinking more and more about how, as excellent as the presentations I’m watching are, I often really just want to hear the speakers talk informally about their research, what gets them excited about it, and how and why they do it. And so I’m happily in the midst of recording Season 2 now — I’ve got two interviews in the bank already, and two more scheduled this week, and will send out more invites soon. I’m hoping we’ll launch in early 2021.
Besides raising a four-month-old who is adorable and amazing, I’m also now focused on the new book project: Minimalist Music: A Reader. It’s a collaboration with my friend Kerry O’Brien: we are compiling a ton of fascinating documents that tell the story of musical minimalism from the late ‘50s to the present day. When Kerry and I submitted the proposal to University of California Press a while back, we got some fantastically helpful feedback from peer reviewers that led us to blow up and expand the project even more: we are constantly interrogating and re-interrogating what minimalism is/was, while compiling a huge amount of primary source documents to potentially include in our book. A lot of the project is logistical work, requesting scans of materials from interlibrary loan (who have been AMAZING), putting stuff into folders in Google Drive; and a lot of the intellectual work is logistical too, moving various files between folders to try to imagine how different groupings of interviews, reviews, profiles, etc. might help create a history of minimalism that emphasizes underrepresented voices, complicates traditional authorial models, and reflects recent scholarship.
The book is divided into three big sections — Part I is 1950s-mid1970s Part II is mid-1970s to 1990s, and Part III is post-2000.
The dividing line between Part I and Part II is 1976: the year of Einstein on the Beach and Music for Eighteen Musicians, but also CC Hennix’s The Electric Harpischord. So some canon, and some stuff way off the beaten path.
Within each big part (which will have an introductory essay that we’ll write) there will be 10–12 shorter chapters that are thematic — we wanted to not focus things around composers but instead around groupings of ideas, aesthetic currents, etc. Early chapters in our current imagining of the book, for example, focus on improvisation (Theatre of Eternal Music, yes, but also John Coltrane and Archie Shepp, tapes and loops (Reich, Riley), ensemble culture (Reich/Glass, but also De Volharding), exoticism, altered states, discipleship (Pandit Pran Nath!). Those will probably change!
As we revised our table of contents post-proposal, we tried to go as broad as we could in finding stuff, scouring the footnotes of recent scholarship and long-forgotten dissertations for underknown materials. We created a massive list of minimalist and postminimalist musicians — as broad as we could imagine, and with as expansive a conception of minimalism as we could imagine — to try to make sure we could get stuff that would represent all of them, knowing that we would pare back a lot. We have a huge folder of folders for all of them. A snapshot:
So far, I’ve been able to answer pretty much everyone who has said to me “Oh, are you talking about XYZ composer?” with a resounding yes. If they were ever called a minimalist, they’ll hopefully be on our radar, if not ultimately in the book; if they made music after 1950 that engaged with stasis, repetition, pulses, drones, and/or a few other broadly conceived musical criteria, they’ll hopefully be on our radar, if not ultimately in the book.
We then looked through all the stuff on each composer and flagged some potential themes it engages with that could help find the best place for it in the thematic chapters. (FYI, permission requests, which we’ve already started on, are going to be a total nightmare.) Now we’ve got a joint Scrivener set up where we are transcribing PDFs to actually create the text of the book. It’s a lot of work, but the nice thing is that the “writing” process is, at this moment, a kind of semi-brainless transcription of other people’s words.
I was going to tweet out one of the articles I was transcribing today because it’s so amazing but figured it would be better to include here. In May 1966, Vogue — Vogue!!! — published two (two!!) articles about La Monte Young, both of which are amazing. One is a profile of Young’s music by Jean Vanden Heuvel. The other, by Kate Lloyd, is a vivid description of a Theatre of Eternal Music. An excerpt:
This was in Vogue! The ‘60s. Crazy.