Review of Rethinking Reich, Edited by Sumanth Gopinath and Pwyll ap Siôn (Oxford University Press, 2019) (original) (raw)
Related papers
Steve Reich's "Musical Process": A Linkage with Postminimal Art
Aesthetics, 2012
Steve Reich (1936- ), in his essay “Music as a Gradual Process” (1968), wrote that “a compositional process and a sounding music [...] are one and the same thing.” His aesthetic creed of “perceptible processes,” indicated in these words, is known as the basic idea of minimal music. Although minimal music has been considered a counterpart of minimal art, this essay first appeared in the exhibition catalogue of Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials (Whitney Museum of American Art, 1969), an exhibition recognized as a threshold of postminimalism in the plastic arts. In this paper, I would like to clarify a linkage between Reich’s music and postminimal art in view of his involvement in the Anti-Illusion show. The theme of the Anti-Illusion show was to refocus on the process of making art. By emphasizing the processes and materials of the works, the participating artists tried to deny illusion and expose the reality of art. Among these works, Reich performed his Pendulum Music, in which he made the sounding process visible as microphones’ swinging. This piece clearly demonstrates that Reich’s claim in “Music as a Gradual Process” was propounded in connection with postminimal art as an attempt to disclose musical processes and thereby reveal the real.
This article examines attitudes towards the issue of race and ethnicity and musical performance during Weimar Germany. In the charged atmosphere of interwar Europe, music criticism became ensnared in wider debates about both the place of music in the lives of ordinary Germans and its larger role as a means to reestablish Germany among the community of nations following the travails of World War I. As radio appeared to threaten the viability of live performance in the 1920’s, music critics focused more than ever before on the role of concertizing artists and their relationship to the music of their native countries. Some commentators continued to adhere to a cosmopolitan view of performance that viewed the performer’s nationality as irrelevant, while others dismissed the notion altogether as scientifically unsound. Yet others singled out specific ‘races’ as possessing unique musical gifts—above all Jews and Slavs—and celebrated racial mixing as the preferred means for cultivating musical talent. Still, just as critics extolled Jews as performers, commentators were often quick to point out their ‘uncreative’ and ‘imitative’ tendencies when it came to composition. I argue that these debates surrounding race and musical performance are emblematic of Weimar anti-Semitism and illustrate important ruptures in ‘race thinking’ between Weimar and the Third Reich.