Seri­ously, most likely none of you will ever read Repeat­ing Our­selves, Amer­i­can Min­i­mal Music as Cul­tural Prac­tice, from Robert Fink. I’m not imply­ing that none of you are inter­ested in the music of Steve Reich or Philip Glass — I’m sure many of you are, and you should be. I’m also cer­tain that you are inter­ested in crit­i­cal think­ing about cul­tural ideas, espe­cially in terms of music, or else you would not be a reader of this blog. How­ever, there is a par­tic­u­lar sep­a­ra­tion between cul­tural ideas pre­sented for curi­ous, knowl­edge­able and inter­ested lay­men and those pre­sented towards more self-consciously spe­cial­ized audiences.

More on that later, but I think I should digress into a lit­tle dis­clo­sure, so my per­sonal biases are clear up-front. The book is an aca­d­e­mic, though not very tech­ni­cal, musi­co­log­i­cal work, the prod­uct of a gen­eral envi­ron­ment that I both would like to be a part of and am ambiva­lent about. Com­posers sur­vive as com­posers by teach­ing at col­leges and uni­ver­si­ties, and they can teach because they earn PhDs, and I would very much like to sur­vive as a com­poser, espe­cially after more than two years of unem­ploy­ment from any kind of pay­ing job. I also value the aca­d­e­mic envi­ron­ment for the space it makes for think­ing in time, for the mind, and espe­cially for the oppor­tu­nity for never-ending research, which is my crack. How­ever, as a com­poser and a crit­i­cal writer, I do not want to write for aca­d­e­mic audi­ences, I want to make myself under­stood to any­one who is curi­ous about and inter­ested in my sub­jects, no mat­ter their spe­cific edu­ca­tion in them. My mod­els in this include works like Rites of Spring, by Mod­ris Eksteins, which is a superb non-academic study of aes­thetic and cul­tural ideas. It is writ­ten in a way that I value, learned, cogent and clear, eschew­ing the cultish code-words and phrases of con­tem­po­rary academia.

And to fur­ther lay the cards on the table, I applied for PhD pro­grams in the fall of 2007, with no suc­cess. The respon­si­bil­ity is entirely mine — my port­fo­lio needs to be big­ger and bet­ter. My sis­ter J., who just com­pleted her DMA, has had an intrigu­ing sug­ges­tion, which is that I apply for a musi­col­ogy degree, which would allow the same oppor­tu­ni­ties for learn­ing and still let me do my own thing, lit­er­ally, as a com­poser. I’m not sure what to do with that idea. Other than what is avail­able to every­one who reads this blog, I don’t have any other writ­ing that cov­ers musi­col­ogy in any way. Also, I am not sure that my modes of think­ing and means of writ­ing would be accept­able to any depart­ment, and Repeat­ing Our­selves, in that sense, is an argu­ment against the idea. If it is a rep­re­sen­ta­tive work of con­tem­po­rary musi­col­ogy, then I do not belong in that field.

Finally, I’ve started the pre­lim­i­nary process of writ­ing a book, which is planned as a work of West­ern cul­tural his­tory as seen through the lens of West­ern music his­tory, in the line of, and an argu­ment with, Paul Henry Lang, Richard Taruskin and the book and its peers under review here. So this arti­cle itself is a part of that book, per­haps not lit­er­ally but at the very least an argu­ment for it. As I post later entries, I’ll try and make the spe­cific point that they may have some­thing to do with the book, because I would espe­cially elicit and enjoy com­ments on whether or not what I am try­ing to say to you makes sense. It’s part of a worth­while argu­ment I want to have, and if I can’t have it at Prince­ton or Berke­ley, I can do it here, where ink is free, and there’s no tuition … or stipend.

The gen­eral idea of Fink’s book is excit­ing and worth­while — what are the ele­ments of cul­ture which helped pro­duce a par­tic­u­lar, and par­tic­u­larly impor­tant and suc­cess­ful, school of musi­cal thought? I have an intu­itive response when it comes to min­i­mal­ism and cer­tainly the idea of rep­e­ti­tion is a vital part. Fink, how­ever, explores cul­tural rep­e­ti­tion in ways that are only obvi­ous, shal­low and weak, although I’m not sure he is com­pletely respon­si­ble for those choices — again, more on that later.

Fink breaks out four cul­tural cat­e­gories that he feels helped cre­ate and explain the exis­tence and appeal of Min­i­mal­ism (and I want to point out that though he name-checks a list of com­posers which includes LaM­onte Young, Terry Riley, Philip Glass, John Adams and Steve Reich, he con­fines most of his actual musi­cal analy­sis to Reich — 11 out of 18 total exam­ples. His tech­ni­cal analy­sis of the music is, to his credit, quite good. Fink explains how the music works clearly and, I think, accu­rately, in that the expla­na­tions jibe with what the ear hears. He also specif­i­cally calls Min­i­mal­ism “pulse-pattern” music, which I find an excel­lent descrip­tion, as the actual qual­ity of Reich and Glass is max­i­mal­ist. They use repet­i­tive pat­terns to build active, poly­phonic struc­tures, pro­duc­ing large scale works out of evolv­ing vari­a­tions of small scale ideas. It is the idea of mak­ing, shap­ing, grow­ing a var­ied large-scale struc­ture out of much smaller repet­i­tive music that is key to the suc­cess of their works, and this truth of the music is actu­ally a prob­lem for Repeat­ing Our­selves); disco, tele­vi­sion adver­tis­ing, the rel­a­tively pop­u­lar appeal of baroque music dur­ing the boom of the LP era, and the Suzuki method of music instruc­tion. At first thought and hear­ing, these ideas seem intu­itively cor­rect. The test is to put them to greater analy­sis, and it is there that they are found wanting.

The first sec­tion lays it all out there; a musi­cal and soci­o­log­i­cal com­par­i­son of the long remix of Donna Sum­mer singing “Love To Love You Baby” with Reich’s Music For 18 Musi­cians, two long works that are land­marks of their respec­tive gen­res. There is a musi­cal com­par­i­son to be made, in that they are both exam­ples of pulse-pattern music, made with the tech­nique of accu­mu­lat­ing brief, repet­i­tive units. It’s inter­est­ing, but only goes so far. The idea of disco is to be com­pletely, explic­itly repet­i­tive, to lay out a dependable/predictable tempo/rhythm for danc­ing. The idea of Music For 18 Musi­cians is to use a process of sub­sti­tut­ing notes for rests to build a large scale, aes­thet­i­cally and emo­tion­ally trans­for­ma­tive expe­ri­ence. Musi­cally there is a great bifur­ca­tion between the two means and ends, and extra-musically there is a fun­da­men­tal bifur­ca­tion between the pro­fane and the exalted. Fink’s takes a dif­fer­ent path, how­ever, which is a com­par­i­son of the two pieces as dif­fer­ent aspects of tele­ol­ogy in music … and there it is, the fun­da­men­tal and spec­tac­u­lar flaw in this book. Rather than an exam­i­na­tion of Amer­i­can Min­i­mal music as music, it’s a study of the social the­ory of this music.

Per­haps it’s bet­ter to write that as Social The­ory, as opposed to music in soci­eties and the mutu­ally com­plex rela­tion­ships between cul­tures and their arts. The use of Social The­ory, as an aca­d­e­mic field of study, in the dis­cus­sion of music was pio­neered by Susan McClary, and Fink’s book is her intel­lec­tual prog­eny. Now, I am not expert on Social The­ory, and I’m in no posi­tion to offer a broad cri­tique of it. How­ever, how it is used in this musi­co­log­i­cal study is fair game, and it’s use is mis­guided and wrong-headed in dif­fer­ent ways. It’s not the music of Donna Sum­mer and Steve Reich that mat­ters so much, it’s the desire for tele­ol­ogy or jouis­sance and how well they sat­isfy those desires which mat­ters. Um, excuse me? Per­haps these are imper­a­tives of Social The­ory, but they have very lit­tle do to with music. Or rather, they have to do with only a small and arti­fi­cially defined qual­ity of music.

Both “Love To Love You Baby” and Music For 18 Musi­cians can be con­sid­ered in two gen­eral ways, how they are made, which is musi­col­ogy, and how they are expe­ri­enced, which is aes­thet­ics. The for­mer, being tech­ni­cal, is a more spe­cific and also more lim­ited study than the lat­ter, which is incred­i­bly fruit­ful. To set out a premise that the music can only be expe­ri­enced in one of two ways is ridicu­lously ten­den­tious and per­haps sim­ply stu­pid. What if the tele­ol­ogy of each music is itself jouis­sance? Musi­cians can cer­tainly pro­duce music that is sim­ply made to be a plea­sure to hear. That is a good thing. Music can also be made that has a par­tic­u­lar social or polit­i­cal pur­pose, but that music can still also be a plea­sure to hear. Also, a good work of art gen­er­ally reveals a pur­pose to the audi­ence that the cre­ator may nei­ther have intended nor been aware of. I’m not argu­ing any­thing here but the obvi­ous, and it takes a stren­u­ous bit of effort to ignore the sim­ple power, depth and effi­cacy of first choices in lis­ten­ing and to sup­pose only one of two binary, and false, choices. This effort shows itself in the lack of crit­i­cal ethics that the book con­veys, from this first sec­tion on. Fink argues (not very clearly) that both pieces of music have a tele­ol­ogy as well as jouis­sance, and vice versa, to which the answer is, well yes, and he also hints at both a snob­bery and a reverse-snobbery, a weird atti­tude that tele­o­log­i­cal music is gen­er­ally supe­rior than music that only seeks jouis­sance, yet that he as an aca­d­e­mic imbued with Social The­ory assumes his own smug supe­ri­or­ity over the tele­o­log­i­cal thrust, as it were, of com­posers who them­selves never had the intel­lec­tual tools to see that they were cap­tive of unen­light­ened and uneth­i­cal social and eco­nomic sys­tems. Social The­ory Musi­col­ogy sees Beethoven as a supe­rior artist to Donna Sum­mer, but mocks Beethoven because he could not rec­og­nize that he was forced by the struc­ture of soci­ety into the tele­o­log­i­cal trap of the Fifth Sym­phony. That the Fifth fol­lows a dra­matic jour­ney from dark­ness and ten­sion to deeply sat­is­fy­ing joy is some­how irrel­e­vant — the music itself, how it sounds, doesn’t seem to mat­ter at all, while some sup­posed social struc­ture (which we can­not hear), is really the thing that matters.

This is both brit­tle and shal­low, too weak as an argu­ment to han­dle the “facts” that Fink mar­shals. This sec­tion on repet­i­tive adver­tis­ing as the force for pro­duc­ing pulse-pattern music is ram­bling and bizarre. The argu­ment is that the repeated show­ing of par­tic­u­lar ads on tele­vi­sion in the 50’s though the early 60’s cre­ated an envi­ron­ment in which the only pos­si­ble out­come is Steve Reich. This has to do, some­how, with the “con­struc­tion of desire.” That in itself is a con­cept I would dis­pute, but even if this were so, even if we are empty husks wait­ing to be directed by the some­how wholly human and inde­pen­dent thinkers of adver­tis­ing, how could this lead to pulse-pattern music? The expe­ri­ence of Music For 18 Musi­cians is one in which the piece begins and is played through to the end. The expe­ri­ence of see­ing the same ad repeat­edly on tele­vi­sion is actu­ally one of see­ing the same ad repeated non-sequentially, inter­rupted by dif­fer­ent broad­casts, dif­fer­ent days of the week. Pulse-pattern music is a sequen­tial medium, broad­cast adver­tis­ing is an inter­rupted medium, no mat­ter how fre­quent. Hear­ing music that uses rep­e­ti­tion, whether Reich or Haydn, is not repeated hear­ing of a jin­gle. It’s all in the ears, but again the idea of Social The­ory seems to be that the music doesn’t matter.

Except when it does. The third and last sec­tions are about the cul­tural aspects of being able to put sev­eral LPs of sec­ond rate baroque string con­cer­tos on the repeat­ing arm of the turntable, and about the ped­a­gogy of rep­e­ti­tion pio­neerd by Shinichi Suzuki. As this sec­tion is title “Cul­ture of Thanatos,” we seem to be in the world of tele­ol­ogy here — although it’s unclear. Fink tries to con­vince us that a cul­ture of repeated lis­ten­ing pro­duced by these two per­haps prob­lem­atic inno­va­tions, like ads on TV, made pulse-pattern music pos­si­ble. I think these argu­ments are slightly stronger than the first half of the book (“Cul­ture of Eros”), but still weak. The issue here is demo­graph­ics. The post-war pro­fes­sion­als who bought stereo sys­tems and stocked up on aural wall­pa­per were not the Boomers who became Reich’s early audi­ence (I think it’s impor­tant to point out here that Reich and espe­cially Glass devel­oped a rel­a­tively large audi­ence among Boomer lis­ten­ers who came from a rock back­ground). It’s eas­ier to make the point that stu­dents who under­went the Suzuki method were essen­tially drilled into the idea of repet­i­tive lis­ten­ing, but here I won­der why this mat­ters at all. There was a brief Suzuki craze in Amer­ica, but it was just that. Where is the Suzuki method now? How many Amer­i­cans were autom­a­tized by Suzuki, and how long did that effect last? And again, this ignores the actual qual­ity of the music. Reich’s music, with its empha­sis on process, starts some­place and goes some­place else. It may not be the path that Clas­si­cal struc­tures take, but it is still a task. Suzuki’s demand that masses of stu­dents play the same exer­cise over and over again is sim­ply rote, sta­tic rit­ual. Pulse-pattern music uses repet­i­tive tech­niques to pro­duce a larger result. Fink is con­fus­ing tech­ni­cal means for the actual prod­uct; a car is not an assem­bly line. We cer­tainly do live in a repet­i­tive cul­ture and have ever since Ford’s man­u­fac­tur­ing inno­va­tion. There are repet­i­tive expe­ri­ences we have every day; the same com­mute, pass­ing tele­phone poles on the high­way, punch­ing in our PIN num­ber, lift­ing weights. There is an aspect of human­ity that finds pleas­ing focus in repet­i­tive tasks, as well as boredom.

This is per­haps the strangest aspect of the Social The­ory view of music; it ignores what is right in front of one’s nose for ideas that depend on fussy, com­pli­cated and arti­fi­cial rules of thought. Just because some­thing is obvi­ous doesn’t mean it doesn’t reward study, and just because some­thing is com­pli­cated doesn’t mean it’s true. There’s also an eth­i­cal and moral prob­lem with this way of think­ing. The argu­ment of the book is impos­si­ble to make with­out assum­ing a par­tic­u­lar view of human­ity, which is that peo­ple lack minds and souls, the abil­ity to sense, think, make deci­sions and be active agents — they are sim­ply automata, their every move pre-determined by social struc­tures, things like the “con­struc­tion of desire.” On this, I call deep, ten­den­tious bull­shit. Remove active agency from peo­ple, and you’ve removed respon­si­bil­ity and thereby eth­i­cal and moral con­sid­er­a­tions. There are no val­ues, no judg­ments, which is wrong on many lev­els, from facts to morals. Peo­ple think, feel and take action. Soci­eties are built around de jure and de facto ideas of what is right and wrong. How is it that these value-free soci­eties filled with automata were con­structed any­way? Is our world like that of “They Live,” where every­thing is run by aliens? If so, the adver­tis­ers who con­trol our very actions must be aliens, and I would say that since peo­ple like Robert Fink some­how find the free will and thought to cre­ate such com­pli­cated and cer­tain expla­na­tions for how things are, they are clearly free of the shack­les of the “con­struc­tion of desire,” and must be space aliens themselves.

Except, of course, they are not. And they are wrong. Per­haps human exis­tence is ruled by desire, but if so that is an idea of desire far more com­plex and won­der­ful than the sim­ple desire to con­sume prod­ucts and ser­vices. This view is incred­i­bly mate­ri­al­is­tic, incred­i­bly shal­low and com­plete stuck in a West­ern and aca­d­e­mic cen­tric view­point, there is so much of the world, his­tory and human expe­ri­ence that it misses. This is dogma that admits no doubts, no mat­ter the bizarre twists and turns it must make for argument’s sake. In this it is very much like every other belief sys­tem and has none of the fea­tures of the sci­en­tific method that it claims as its own. There is so much more to the world, to life and to art than this. A book about music should give the impres­sion it hears the music, and knows that lis­ten­ing is the sin­gle most impor­tant part of think­ing about music. It would see the Beethoven “Pas­toral” sym­phony as the inevitable result of the car­riage indus­try and its adver­tis­ers abil­ity to cre­ate a pre­vi­ously unknown and com­pletely mate­ri­al­is­tic desire for peo­ple to pic­nic in the coun­try, and through the forces of which Beethoven him­self becomes sim­ply another cog in the media-industrial machine, and the tele­ol­ogy of the work is directed towards the pur­chase of horse-drawn car­riages. Per­haps, but it’s also an aural expres­sion of per­sonal sen­sa­tions and joys, a rep­re­sen­ta­tion of human expe­ri­ences, a strict nar­ra­tive con­veyed through entirely abstract means (some­how!) and also com­pletely grip­ping and beau­ti­ful. I think I’ll go listen …