On Minimalism: Kerry O'Brien and William Robin in conversation

LP: Thank you both for making time.

William Robin: Absolutely. Yeah. Thanks for having us and for your interest in the book.

LP: Oh my goodness. As I was getting prepped this morning to dial in, how effusive and patronizing is too much to start the conversation with. What I would like to say is, first of all, it's so exciting that this topic was taken on in such a serious manner, but I also loved the scope and the ambition of the book. Yeah, it's such, it's such a great sort of expansive journey just for the benefit of listeners who may have yet to come across the book. The appendix with the playlist material or the recommended listening is just phenomenal as well.

And I did what I'm sure lots of other people did, which was try to put as much of it into a Spotify playlist as possible. I was surprised at how much of what I consider important music from the genre or from this field is actually not available on Spotify. And I wonder, as an opening salvo, do you have any thoughts or impressions as to why that is, especially in a world where pretty much everything's available?

Kerry O'Brien: One problem is that one of the Big Four minimalists, La Monte Young, is very resistant to sharing recordings and has been for decades, so you're not going to find any of his music, which is some of the foundational minimalism recordings. You can find them sometimes on YouTube. There are like bootlegs that float around.

Recently La Monte Young set up a Bandcamp page. So there are some recordings there. I would also add that some artists are really resistant to Spotify, and they don't want their music there.

William Robin: It speaks to a larger kind of dichotomy that emerges in the history of minimalism, which is what you have in the 60s when this art form begins to really emerge and develop. You have everyone focused primarily on the live experience. It's coming out of this idea of music as an environment, which is what Young is so wrapped up in, but also Riley and Glass, and Reich in different ways. And so it's about these ensembles that they're creating and this live kind of immersive experience, the sound of this music in the rooms it's being conceived.

And then you have composers who head in a more like musical works type direction. Reich and Glass are the most representative examples, and for them, it makes total sense to create a piece for an ensemble and have it be recorded and released, and that's what they've been doing now for decades.

And then you have other figures in the world of minimalism that cling more to this experimental ethos where perhaps the recording captures something, perhaps it is a document of something, but it is not necessarily the musical work. And so synonymous with that is a resistance generally towards recording. And then also the fact that you can fully curate playlists that tell the quote-unquote history of minimalism, but that is that more kind of mainstream history that draws on those figures who have placed themselves in this more kind of recorded mainstream, commercial slash classical position.

Only in the last couple of decades have you seen some of these more underground figures from the 60s begin to have both scholarly credit where it's due and also a lot of re-releases on vinyl. There are a bunch of important Labels going back to the 1990s and early 2000s, like Table of the Elements, but also Unseen Worlds. There are a couple of others. Blank Forms is re-releasing this music and bringing it back into circulation. And that's part of this internet culture where things are becoming more and more available, although not necessarily on Spotify, which in many ways is for the betterment of those artists.

LP: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I'm curious to understand from each of you — also, by way of prefacing the conversation — I wonder if you each might tell me a little bit about your engagement with It's hard to say with this music because of the scope of how you contextualize the movement. The intention behind the question is to understand a little bit about how you came to this. Kerry, if you wanted to jump in first, tell me a little bit about how you came to this.

Kerry O'Brien: Yeah, so I'm trained as a percussionist and the music of Steve Reich, who is one of the Big Four composers and one of the composers I specialize in. Reich is a percussionist himself. He wrote a lot of chamber music, music for five, six, and seven percussionists. Percussionists don't have a lot of chamber music because it's a newer instrument type within classical music for chamber music. We don't have Bach. Or Mozart pieces written for percussion, but we have Steve Reich, a lot of great chamber music by Steve Reich. And so I played a lot of it, such as pieces called Six Marimbas and Nagoya Marimbas. I played these in college, and I memorized them all because he encourages it, and the music encourages it. 

Six Marimbas has three marimbas up against three other marimbas. There's no place for music stands. You're just up against each other. And there's something about memorizing the music that really got it in me — in my body, in my mind. And I got obsessed with it. So, I took a turn in my education rather than going to graduate school for percussion. I went for music history, but I was interested in Steve Reich's music and minimalism in general from the beginning, with many people trying to turn me in other directions, but I continued it.

I helped run a summer festival for about a decade where we programmed a lot of minimalist types of music. Music that I didn't necessarily perform, but I programmed that I really wanted to hear. That festival actually hosted an academic conference on minimalism one year. And it was at that conference actually that I first, not that conference, but a meeting of that conference a few years prior where I met Will, where we were both just presenting about the music of minimalism.

LP: You mentioned the piece for marimbas and there being no room for music stands. And I wonder, because this comes up, especially in some of the early works that you talk about in the book, how is that expressed to the musicians? It sounds like stage direction, but is that part of the score that basically says six marimbas, three touching each other, and no room for music stands? How do you come to that?

Kerry O'Brien: It's a good question. There's a lot of this music that is like oral tradition. Steve Reich is still alive; most of the members of his ensemble are still alive, and they come to universities and colleges and play. There's so much actually that is not written down, and people will say, "Oh no, Jim Price said to do it this way, or Russell Hartenberg said to do it this way." Those were members of the original ensemble. Within the last two or three years, Russell Hartenberger, a member of the ensemble, published a book about the music of Steve Reich, and it includes a lot of that formerly oral history that is now written down. There are a lot of photos from the original performances. We follow that. 

Musicologists get into this idea of historical performance practice. You try to recreate the way that it was originally done, and there are arguments that you could do it a new way also, and people do it in new ways. But because the original players are still alive, it's a little harder to take liberties with that.

LP: Gosh, that's so fascinating. I could spend an hour talking to you just about that topic. But I'll turn it over to Will. Yeah. How about you, Will? What's your interest and engagement with this?

William Robin: My long-term history is less specifically focused than Kerry's. I studied saxophone, but I didn't interface much as a saxophonist with minimalism for any number of reasons. But even though the saxophone is so important to the sound of minimalism. I started getting into that music in high school when I was in really late high school, but really into college getting into contemporary music. As I developed my interest as a musicologist, I was interested in the generations of composers in the U. S. who came after the original minimalists. So, looking into the Bang on a Can group in the 1980s and 90s, and then this kind of wave of 2000s, 2010 composers who were still very much influenced by these foundational figures, Glass, Monk, Riley, Reich, especially.

I ended up writing a dissertation on this quote-unquote indie classical scene group of then young composers around New York around 2005, 2010 or so, and ended up writing my first book on Bang on a Can, which was very much dealing with kind of what happens to the legacy of minimalism as a sound, but also as a kind of set of institutional circumstances after 1980. And into the turn of the 21st century moment, Kerry and I had been hanging out at conferences a lot, and I am not a scholar of Steve Reich's music. I'm not really a scholar of Philip Glass's music. I was always like, enough people are working on that stuff, and I don't have anything to say that's novel about it.

But when Kerry and I, with a few other scholars, were at a minimalism conference that she organized in Knoxville a while back, which was a really incredible conference because it brought together performers and scholars and included a lot of work around minimalist figures that were not typically seen at this Society for Minimalist Music conference, like Mary Jane Leach presenting on Julius Eastman, there's a performance by Ellen Fullman that was amazing. And I pitched this idea. There were five of us, and it ended up being just Kerry and I who took the project forward after this kind of initial wave of proposals, but there was so much work being done and presented at these conferences that was offering a view of minimalism that seemed fundamentally different from The view of minimalism that you would get if you read like an NPR primer on what minimalism was, or if you looked at a Spotify playlist of what minimalism was.

I wanted to find a way for that story, this kind of scholarly revision of story, to be told in a way that would be both accessible, groundbreaking within scholarship, summarizing all these developments that had happened in the musicological world for the last 10 or 20 years, but also accessible to the folks who are either fans of minimalism or looking for an entry point of minimalism. And so we settled on a primary source reader, which is a very familiar format in musicology of here's a collection of historical sources. Maybe it's like a primary source reader on the Baroque era. And so you reprint letters by Bach or like a review of a performance by Handel or something.

But the idea was, let's bring together historical sources around the story of minimalism from its beginnings in the late 50s to the present day. Let's curate them in a way that You can read front-to-back a fairly digestible history of minimalism, but you can also skip around for interesting stuff.

Let's make sure we foreground the fact that this term has come to represent the so-called Big Four, these foundational figures: Young, Riley, Reich, and Glass. But let's also make sure that we are telling a story that shows minimalism as a much broader and more diverse phenomenon. So, to say, here's what this canon story is in the center of this thing, but here's all this other stuff around it that is being funneled in and out in various ways, here's how these things intersect. Then we organize the book in terms of theme so that we can make really clear and strong connections between the mainstream and the fringes, between folks who are often just seen as like the 10th person on the list of the 10 most popular minimalists, let's bring them all together into the fold and have them tell conversations across genre and across cultures and stuff.

LP: Yeah, we have to talk about the Big Four so that we can then set aside the Big Four to have subsequent conversations. And that is something that you address very forthrightly in the book as well, very quickly. But something very interesting to me, and it has a very self-referential theme that keeps coming up throughout the book, is that the Big Four were so constantly reinforced. The pantheon was created so early on that almost every subsequent generation and genre of people that you talk to, even some of the Japanese musicians, When you ask them where they came from or what they were listening to or who they were influenced by or even when they mention who they weren't influenced by, they mention one, two, three, four of the Big Four.

Thus, creating like that reinforces the idea that they're the canon here. It's also interesting in that it's not their fault necessarily. I don't think you state anywhere in the book that they contribute to that to the detriment of someone else.

William Robin: I'll say that they do not necessarily deliberately at the detriment, but include all four members of the Big Four — maybe actually I'd pull Riley out of that — but Reich, Glass, and Young are composers who have developed very strong mythologies around themselves. It's not false mythologies, but they have really done a good job of cultivating a very strong career of telling stories about their work and of placing themselves in a history. Now, this is the exact normal thing every composer does going back centuries. Still, it's also the case that they see themselves as these historically important figures, and that has inspired a lot of the discourse around them.

LP: They've believed the story too.

William Robin: Yeah. La Monte Young especially has a cosmic mythology surrounding himself to the extent that it makes it hard to have a conversation with him because he is speaking about being a foundational figure in The entire history of music, which is its kind of unique breed of thing, but yeah.

Kerry O'Brien: I would also plug the new book on minimalism by Patrick Nicholson called The Names of Minimalism. And he has a chapter about exactly this in the way that Steve Reich does this. This chapter, I think, is called The Lessons of Minimalism, and it's on how he places who came before him, how he places who came after them, and how so many scholars have just taken his word for it that that's the sequence of influence that they are the founders.

LP: Incredible. Thank you for adding to my reading list.

Kerry O'Brien: Oh, totally. (laughter)

LP: All right, so let's not spend the next 40 minutes talking about The Big Four exclusively, because it's something I, as a music lover and a person who loves the journey of discovery, very much appreciate about your book. One, you introduced me to names and sounds that I did not necessarily know about before or had heard about but didn't explore.

But you also helped me re-evaluate music I've known and loved for decades, specifically the early '60s work of John Coltrane or even Kind of Blue, like Olatunji; this was something other than music I thought about in this tradition. I knew that the figures were adjacent because geographically, they're near each other, they're in the arts community, and they're bumping into each other. But I hadn't thought about the deeper influences and the ways these kinds of music melded, but could you open that up for me? 

Talk about if minimalism is a movement and not a genre or if it's an ingredient. Can you talk about how it dispersed into other kinds of music? Because where I sit now, it feels like it's everywhere, especially in the last few years. We could talk about whether it had to do with the pandemic or what it was, but ambient music is in the consciousness in a way I never was in my lifetime. I always thought of it as very fringe. In the modern classical world, it was a thing. You talk about the victory of minimalism, like how?

William Robin: Just when you were listing those names earlier, Coltrane and Miles Davis, I was thinking about a passage in the book that I don't think Kerry and I have ever specifically talked about, but it just came to mind, which is There's this essay by La Monte Young in this chapter we have on gurus, where he is writing about his guru, Pandit Pran Nath, who's an important singer of Indian classical music in the Kirana Garana style. And he talks about, in this essay, playing Coltrane and Davis for Pandit Pran Nath. And Pandit Pran Nath is saying, Oh, what wonderful music. This is so much like my music. This moment comes like seven chapters after we set up Coltrane and Davis as these foundational figures. To think about La Monte Young being someone who's obsessed with John Coltrane and Pandit Pran Nath and, or rather, modal jazz and Indian raga and bringing them together and then, but also continuing to find the links between his teachers and his influences and also put them into print and situate them within the discourses. One of the main reasons that we felt compelled to bring these figures into conversation with each other is the documents were showing us that they were all part of the same narrative. And scholars that came before us have also shown that too. 

The victory of minimalism is definitely a victory of some kinds of minimalism. There are victors, and there are not necessarily losers, but there are those figures who have become more lauded than others. But it is the case that when we tried to tell the story, it was clear that minimalism today, as you mentioned, is everywhere but in so many different forms. And some of those forms have social, musical, institutional, and person-based links directly back to these figures of the 60s. So it's not hard to connect ambient music to Brian Eno being an obsessive listener to Young and Riley, and Reich's music. Glass's music also informs a lot of his musical ethos, which is certainly cultivated in the idea of ambient music. Still, there are certainly all kinds of ambient musicians who have no specific connection to what we typically think of as minimalism.

At the same time, we wanted to fold ambient into our history, not to say that all ambient music is minimalist music to claim it but to make sure that we don't filter out things like new age or ambient because they're not necessarily part of the canonic story of minimalism, which It gets into kind of almost questions of high and low, like this high art version of minimalism that would exclude forms of more popular music.

And so yeah, a lot of the ambient musicians who are making stuff today have no particular affinity or connection to Reich or Glass, they're more connected to lineages of ambient. But then we print this piece in the 1990s where you have all these British techno musicians saying, what I really like to do is sit down and listen to Glass and Reich when I'm feeling stressed and like, all I want to do is have them listen to my music and like it. And it's a funny article. It was printed in Option Magazine in the late 90s because the author then goes to those musicians, Glass and Reich, and they're like, "I don't know what to do with this music." There are so many different streams and threads of minimalism. So many of them have been successful in different kinds of ways. And we mix them all while also showing them separately.

LP: Like a lot of the topics or even some of the individual chapters in your book, I really appreciate how you contextualize this, your intention of being a primer, because I left the book feeling like there's 20 more books here. Each chapter is a launch pad. I want to come back to that notion in a minute, but I'm very interested in process music. This is something that came up for me in reading your book, and I'd love to know your thoughts on this, maybe Kerry, starting with you, because of your familiarity and immersion in Reich's music. Do most people who start by creating process music ultimately move to more formal composition and notation, or are there figures who that is what they do and it's what they do long term? That's an absolutist question, but it seems like a general truth that people start from a process perspective and then move into one that's more traditional.

Kerry O'Brien: I don't think I see those two things as separate, like process music and more traditional. The thing with a lot of process music is that it often does not require notation because you can explain it quickly. Like Steve Reich's Piano Phase, it's just two pianists playing a 12-beat melody over and over again, and they move out of phase, and the piece is basically over, or it moves to a new section when they come back into unison. That's the piece. If you can explain the process or his piece, Pendulum Music, you drop the microphones, they swing over speakers and create shrieking sounds, and the piece is over when the microphone stops swinging. It takes 15 seconds to explain the process. And so you can create process-type music. Without knowing musical notation, without being a musician, and there are plenty of people within just like the art world that created what some people would call sound sculpture, it's a weird type of sorting where if Steve Reich did it, it was a musical composition. Still, if Richard Serra did it, it was sound art because he's an artist.

In that way, if someone created process art and they weren't trained within the classical tradition, they wouldn't continue down that path. That's because they needed to have the training and or the inclination or the hang-up that made someone like Steve Reich want to create a works list that has scores and get a contract with Boosey & Hawkes. Then, one needs PDFs or actual physical scores. So now there is an actual physical floor for something like pendulum music that has a paragraph of writing. And so yeah, I would say not everyone goes in that direction necessarily.

LP: Is Pendulum Music, to pick on it for a moment, a copyrightable composition at this point?

Kerry O'Brien: It is copyrighted. Yeah. And I've never seen someone else try to do it and call it something else. But I've seen students experiment with it and not necessarily say, okay, the piece is beginning. They just set up hanging microphones, and they experiment with the idea. But yeah, it's a copyrightable thing.

LP: I could perform an evening of that work, or not an evening because it's a relatively short piece, but I can include that in an evening's program of music. And from a performing rights organization point of view, I would pay a public performance royalty on that.

Kerry O'Brien: I don't do this a lot, but yeah, whoever he's registered with, BMI or whoever, you would tell them that you did it. Yeah.

LP: That's incredible. I hope I'm not sounding mocking because that's not my intention at all, but it's a new concept. It's for me to hear that. And, I guess I like it. It's very good that you can. I hadn't thought about the repercussions of this music.

William Robin: It's also worth saying that's a musical score. So, in many ways, it's a much more straightforward case of a composition than a lot of the other stuff that's happening in early minimalism, where it is more experimental, where the composer may have to be involved. A lot of La Monte Young's music cannot be performed without La Monte. He does not condone performances of it, whether that's because it's improvisatory or collaborative, and some of those questions of improvisation versus collaboration are intensely political around Young's music.

But this idea you mentioned of do people start with processed music and then always move on to something else speaks to I think part of the history of what it means to be a minimalist composer, which is what you have, as I talked about earlier, someone like Glass or Reich where they develop an early style and then they bring that early style to bear on subsequently developing increasingly, in some ways, complex or ornate or different musical works that are, different in the sense of my seventh symphony is a development on my sixth symphony.

And then you have musicians who are developing a way of creating music. That might be a single approach. I create these incredibly complex drones, and I am going to see that through over the next 30 years in different environments and different contexts. The Glass-Reich model is a very typical capital C composer model. In contrast, these other models of creating music are less about this very straightforward, "I am developing my quote-unquote compositional voice." Although that may be what they were doing, and more about, "I'm more of a music maker, let's say, than a composer," if that makes sense.

LP: Yeah, that is a good delineation. In so far as you know, or that he has said, is La Monte Young's idea that his music dies with him? If he won't let it be recorded and performed.

Kerry O'Brien: It's eternal.

William Robin: It is eternal. (laughter)

Kerry O'Brien: The ensemble that he founded, or he helped to found, was called the Theater of Eternal Music. He's drawing on Indian ideas of time in that this music has always been happening. He's channeling it now, and it will continue happening after he's gone. In a metaphysical way, the music will always continue.

William Robin: Yeah, in a metaphysical way, the music has always existed, will always exist. Practically, there's a big question mark, which is, as far as I know, no one really knows what's going to happen after he passes.

There are several people, including his collaborative partner and wife, Marian Zazeela, who are closely wrapped up in this material, in this archive, and the Dream House itself, which is the sound and light installation. Whatever the plan is totally unclear. And a lot of people are wondering because there's an enormous amount of recordings that have never been released that have had fights around them about being released.

And then there's all kinds of other stuff. I think scholars and a lot of musicians would like to see that material accessible. Still, it's one of the more complex stories in music history in terms of authorship, material, and who it belongs to and where it goes.

LP: That's very non-dualistic in that if you subscribe to his worldview, he's both incredibly important and not important. (laughter) He's important as a channeler. He's unimportant in that there will be other channelers.

Kerry O'Brien: But affiliated with him, his students will carry on this tradition. And he has a number of students who will continue the tradition. Young believes himself to be an important channel that only he can pass down the ability to continue.

LP: So he recognizes the next 'Dalai Lama.' He sees the three-year-old and says, that's the one.

William Robin: Yes. He has disciples. He takes Pandit Pran Nath's approach towards guruship. And so there have been many disciples; Jung Hee Choi and Randy Gibson are two notable ones. Randy Gibson's work is featured in the book.

Kerry O'Brien: But I was going to quickly say Terry Riley is also a disciple of Pandit Pran Nath, and Terry Riley also has disciples. He's in Japan now, and his disciples are there, and he's teaching now in Japan. It's like any guru lineage. There are different branches of the tree. There are definitely schisms.

William Robin: I don't think we can speak so much to the discipleship question in terms of schisms, but there's this long ongoing conflict between Young and several of his collaborators from the Theater of Eternal Music, John Cale and Tony Conrad in specific, around the release of their works, around this question of, was this ensemble in the 60s that was performing together, Essentially a chamber group that La Monte Young wrote compositions for, as Young and Zazeela believe, or as Conrad and Cale believe, was this a kind of collaborative, improvisatory ensemble creating drones together. Depending on which side you take, that would affect how you perceive what this ensemble was and what the recordings are. So, it speaks to one of the fundamental disputes in the history of minimalism that Branden Joseph has a great book on Tony Conrad and Patrick Nicholson have litigated.

We touch on it briefly in our book. But again, it is part of this story of minimalism. Is minimalism a bunch of composers creating musical works, or is minimalism a bunch of musicians coming together to realize sonic environments in some way collaboratively?

LP: I talk about this topic in the context of my conversations with other instrumental musicians, especially those right now who are living at the intersection of electro-acoustic music, where jazz and electronics are meeting, and or improvisational music and electronic music are coming together. And there are some amazing movements around the world, especially in Western Europe, that are playing in this area. 

A topic that comes up repeatedly is the idea of what Reich or maybe La Monte Young would be calling compositions and scores, which some of these other musicians think of as prompts or framing devices. Let's improvise while we think about this, or let's have this phrase in our minds, and then we're all going to start an improvisation. And those are very different conceptual and compositional, but legal and copyright frameworks. I do not envy whoever is going to have to sort that out. And it's not going to be, I mean, touch wood, it's not decades away. We're going to live to see how that resolves or devolves into conflict. There's actually an opportunity for landmark legal precedent in all that. It's fascinating.

William Robin: Yeah, all of these foundational figures are approaching their 90s, and it's a miracle that all four of the Big Four are still alive, and two of them, Riley and Young, are still performing.

I don't think Glass performs anymore. Reich I think stopped performing, but they're still composing. So, there's creative output coming out of all of them. I imagine Reich and Glass are planning for the next phase. They have a very clear institutional apparatus that's professionalized. The archives exist and stuff, and I don't know about the other two as much.

LP: They fit into more of the modern composer tradition. They're not inventing a wheel for how their works live on.

Kerry O'Brien: But it is just worth mentioning that the early works of Steve Reich, La Monte Young, they were calling it improvisation at the time. Steve Reich has pieces that were, he has a piece called Improvisations on a Watermelon, using this particular figure. And there's a book collection called Rethinking Reich, and there's a great chapter in there about Steve Reich's change from calling what he was doing improvisation to calling what he was doing composition. And he's not alone in doing it. Still, it's a way that, like improvised music, categorizes jazz and classical music, or notated music often categorizes classical kind of gets sorted in a way that we actually tried to put back together, especially in the improvisation and experimentation chapter.

It's just semantics half the time like it's just different vocabulary for different genres, but not necessarily different sounds. Yeah, your question about what's really the difference about a group just culling what they're doing, improvising, and another saying, oh, this is the beginning of a musical work, is sometimes just a handful of words and like a shared understanding. And it's a part of the whole Theater of Eternal Music - La Monte Young debate. La Monte Young says that each time they practiced was a musical work that resulted in a recording. The other participants said we were just practicing.

William Robin: The semantic difference can be extremely like a philosophical worldview. We have this chapter on ensembles, and it's clear that in the 70s, late 60s, and early 70s, you have some of the same musicians playing in Glass and Reich's ensemble. In Glass's ensemble, you could improvise. In Reich's ensemble, you could not. However, you could do something that was essentially improvisation, which was like realizing these resultant patterns from phasing.

Similarly, in Glass's ensemble, you could drink a beer in rehearsal, and in Reich's ensemble, you could not. And some people decided to stick in Glass's and leave Reich's in part because of that. Even between those two composers, who are both in a more traditional composerly idiom, there was a different set of expectations and there was a different set of formalities and whether this was seen as something more, more quote-unquote disciplined or not.

LP: That's a fascinating thread to pull on for a moment because I'm going to draw an analogy, and if you kick me in the head and laugh at me, I'll be vulnerable and go out there. But while you were both speaking, I was thinking about how this maps into some popular music. And especially the music of the late '60s and '70s, when bands started to improvise more.

Even before that, to use John Coltrane or jazz in general as an example. All are very well known for using the American Songbook as a basis for improvisation. Famously, a 20-minute version of "My Favorite Things" or whatever. The copyright on the records never lists all the band members who contributed to the improvisation.

Even when it's a John Coltrane composition that's highly improvisational, there were, if not charts, there was some direction. There was some compositional framework, notated or otherwise. In the rock world, you can imagine The example that came up for me was with the Grateful Dead. Some songs are very much like in the jazz example. It's a song that was written that has a beginning and an end, and the middle is free form. They're never attributed to the full band. But there are also instances where there are pure improvisational pieces that every band member sits on the copyright. Now, I understand you do that when you're in a multi-decade relationship to keep everybody happy, but there's also an honesty in that that's very interesting.

What you're saying and what we're talking about here is that there's no formal delineation. It's a matter of ethics, respect, interpersonal relationships, self-regard, and self-importance. Sometimes, musicians are hired hands who execute your vision. Other times, they're full artistic collaborators. It's very hard from the outside to really remark on that. Or it's easy to remark on it, but it's hard to know.

William Robin: You have musicians in Glass's ensemble, Joan La Barbara and Dickie Landry, the saxophonist. Joan La Barbara's the vocalist, too. They did it because it was a good gig. Glass had this kind of strange arrangement where he basically made it a full-time group so, when they weren't touring, they could collect unemployment. So, it was basically a year-round job. Several of the musicians had their own musical things that they would develop on their own. Joan La Barbara was doing all kinds of different stuff in this period as a composer and as a musician. Landry was recording his own stuff as a saxophonist and composer. When you work with someone who by the 1970s is as famous as Philip Glass, it's steady work, and it's good work, and it's creatively fulfilling as a performer, and then you have the opportunities to do your own stuff.

And that's the case if you look at Glass or Reich's ensembles now, that they're comprised of musicians who have their artistic worlds as composers or musicians on the side as well.

Kerry O'Brien: I'd also add Joan La Barbara played both in Glass's and Reich's group. She also wrote the foreword to our book, which is a beautiful essay. Her experience in Steve Reich's ensemble was that when she was doing this thing that was like improvisation, but not called improvisation, she was creating basically through the repetition of the same pattern played by many people out of sync. These patterns result in the atmosphere, and a singer can pick them out. It's like nobody is actually playing the pattern. It's resulting from the mix. And she would sing these resulting patterns, and she said to herself, "Wait a second, I'm composing here because these things get written down, and then they happen over and over again." And so it's exactly that issue that made her, in part, quit the group and also step out as a composer herself. It's when she started releasing her music under her name that she said, "Wait a second, by performing, I'm actually composing already, but not getting the credit."

LP: There's a lot I wanted to talk about in terms of other genres that you bring up throughout the book or other movements, be it disco or the downtown New York scene. You touched on ambient and new age. To me, that's a proxy for the human diversity that, if not at the heart of the book, is certainly in the soul of the book. Let's short-circuit some of those specific genre conversations and move right to the people.

Listen, it's pretty explicit. The Big Four are four big white. Men of a certain generation and all that is explicit and implicit in that. But that's just like musically, that's not the beginning and end of minimalism, nor is it demographically. I don't know how to frame or to get more specific with the line of questioning beyond introducing the topic, but I would like to know if we could talk a little bit about how minimalism impacted other communities and other people. I would love your help in starting that conversation because I don't have a specific question other than to say I want to explore that line.

William Robin: In the month or so after our book came out, I remember two different people on Twitter asked a question along the lines of "What is your favorite minimalist composition?" And all of the responses, 40 or 50 responses probably in each, were in the Big Four plus. Adams, and then sometimes people would throw out a different composer, often a white man, and then sometimes people would say, oh, some women are minimalist musicians, perhaps Anne Southam, or Meredith Monk, or someone would say, Julius Eastman as a nonwhite man. What was clear about that framing is that there is a way to tell a more diverse story of minimalism as a compositional style in which you include other minimalist composers like Ann Southam. Meredith Monk is a more ambiguous example because she's such an interdisciplinary figure.

Like Julius Eastman, like a handful of other nonwhite men who were composers creating notated music. But if you reframe the conversation around what's your favorite minimalist creation or musical creation, right? One of the ways that we reframe things is if we move beyond this question of quote-unquote capital M minimalist capital C composition. We can, again, understand minimalism as much broader than it was, but also begin to bring in the kind of racial, gender, sexuality, and diversity that we both want to see in a book like this but also should see in a music book like this because we want to blow up this more narrow notion of minimalism.

And so a lot of that intellectual labor of moving minimalism beyond this history of composition was done by other scholars. The incorporation of John Coltrane really comes from the fact that Georgie Lewis has made the argument that so many of these figures viewed Coltrane as an influence. Still, he's always seen as an influence but not a minimalist himself.

And so that helped us make that kind of rhetorical shift. To move into the worlds of no-wave rock and post-rock and performance art was something that other scholars have developed, and we took off from there. As we were doing this project, we had this giant Google Drive folder where we had basically names of everyone we could think of who was either called a minimalist or was doing work that really touched in some way the world of minimalism. Someone like Alice Coltrane, who wasn't necessarily grouped as a minimalist in her life but was grouped as part of a trance music movement or a kind of global drone movement or something like that. And then we gathered all the documents we could for all of these different hundred or so names and wanted to make sure as we were Putting these documents together that we were not just featuring white guys, but Kerry, you can speak more to this.

Kerry O'Brien: Yeah. We could have created a source reader like a book of documents filled with profiles from the New York Times, the New Yorker, and the Village Voice. And many historians have told the history of minimalism that way, primarily consulting New York-based mainstream media.

William Robin: Or well-known alt media like the Village Voice right?

Kerry O'Brien: True. Yeah. But it's always New York-based. Part of what we did was, as a source reader, we were trying to access different kinds of documents and documents from different places that featured different communities as a way to tell different stories.

Our interview with Meredith Monk comes from the feminist magazine, Ms. The interview with Alice Coltrane comes from Essence magazine, the black women's magazine. There's a piece on Laraaji, the ambient musician, in the Journal of the Black American. And part of our argument is that you're going to keep telling the same stories if you keep accessing the same historical documents.

And so if we create a book full of documents from different communities and different places like The Chicago Reader or the Ithaca News, we can start to hear other voices.

LP: Something that was really cool about the examples you cited with Essence and Ms. was how actually great both of those pieces were. I appreciate there might be something patronizing in that comment, but it's more of my ignorance. I didn't understand the level of discourse that was going on. 

By the way, the fact that Alice Coltrane was in essence, there was a point in time in America where Alice Coltrane could be in a magazine so popular. {laughter}

William Robin: The Vogue description of La Monte Young is one of my favorite ever articles about La Monte Young, and it's Vogue Magazine, and it's great. Similarly, we have Glamour Magazine with this little review of the first record of In C, and just the way that they describe it is great. It's a really great description, and it adds something that we don't necessarily think of when we think of In C, both that it was reviewed in Glamour Magazine and that it was reviewed under a review of a Beatles album. And just the language that the writer Janet Rotter is using to describe it is so rich and textured and different from the very frequently reprinted review of the premiere of In C that the San Francisco Chronicle, for example, printed.

LP: By way of bringing the conversation home, there's something that I would like to say personally, which is a lot of the music that you bring into the tent through this book is music that I grew up with, and that I've loved over the years. And you captured the strand of jazz that the jazz I listen to. In fact, McCoy Tyner is at the top of the pantheon for me. To have an opportunity after all these years to go back and re-hear McCoy's music in this context was a gift.

The downtown no-wave music was something that was a massive influence and had a lot of impact on me. As a fan of that, I knew the concentric circles went into what I would call the serious music world. That combination of high and low, that music always has represented to me where the punks would go to a classical show at night or something like that.

For a fan of mid-late 20th-century music in almost any genre, to have Donna Summer show up in this book, again, I understood the lineage she was coming from, but for someone who didn't, it's fun. It's a fun read. I'm very grateful for it. So thank you. And I appreciate your time.

Kerry O'Brien: Thank you so much for those words.

William Robin: Yeah, that's, like, exactly why we made the book. So that's amazing. That feels very good in my soul to hear.

LP: It's funny every once in a while, a piece of work comes along that I feel was target-marketed for my mind. It's like I had the first time I remember having that experience was a long time ago, sitting in the movie theater by myself, going to see The Big Lebowski. And I was like, "How did this movie get made?" (laughter) Was I in the pitch that they say there's this one person this movie's for? And that's how I felt about this book. I felt like this was the book that I didn't know I needed but that I'm so happy to have. So thank you.

William Robin: Thank you for this conversation.