Indeed, it seemed that after Foundations of Music History by Carl Dahlhaus (1983) and Music and the Historical Imagination by Leo Treitler (1989), both of which anticipated many directions of the recent major developments in historical musicology, the question of the reality, multiplicity, or nonexistence of a “profound nature of the musical work” (see Dahlhaus 1983, 150–65, in particular) remained partly unresolved. Just as epistemology was often limited to the study of the lineage or circulation of facts once they were formed (see Latour 1989, 13–17), music history was often confined to the reception, impact, or context of a work, style, or genre. Seldom were these aspects viewed as entities or shifting substances, the fruits of an eminently collective work subject to continual mutation and renegotiation, acting and being acted upon within a diverse network of actors. Rarely would one attempt to tell the story of their making or to rehabilitate the experts and their imprint on such stories.
But in fact the experts—journalists, scholars, composers, and performers, or combinations thereof—are among the main actors in a story inspired by actor-network theory. Indeed, even though facts in the humanities are conventionally considered more malleable, with a wider range of critical possibilities than those in the hard sciences, the requirement of neutrality remains a condition of their scholarly integrity, and thus of their universality (Callerdo and Girard 2011, 243–45). Therefore, the humanities too—more paradoxically than other disciplines—have been subject to what Latour called the “Great Divide” of modernity: that separating facts from values, or the individual from science. This divide is precisely what partisans of actor-network theory have criticized.
From the perspective of actor-network theory, the requirement of neutrality, much like the utopian project of separating facts from values and the individual from science, is the source of the most intense controversies, ones that would impact musicology as well, as seen above. In particular, one controversy became especially heated over the last decades of the twentieth century. It had to do with a music called minimalist and with the work of its four well-known representatives: La Monte Young (1935–), Terry Riley (1935–), Steve Reich (1936–), and Philip Glass (1937–).
At the turn of the third millennium, the second edition of one of the most respected music encyclopedias, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, devoted several pages to this music. According to that entry, minimalism constitutes a twentieth-century “style of composition characterized by an intentionally simplified rhythmic, melodic and harmonic vocabulary” (Potter 2001a, 716). Its accessibility, its tonal or modal nature, its rhythmic regularity and continuity, and its structural and textural simplicity define it. Minimal music, the entry further states, is characterized by two distinct but nonetheless related tendencies or approaches: the elaboration of “sustained sounds,” on the one hand, and repetition, on the other. The first tendency owes mostly to Young; the second was developed by his successors Riley, Reich, and Glass. Although at its inception the movement was closely associated with minimal art (it goes back to 1958, we read), it was subsequently deemed “the major antidote to Modernism, as represented by both the total serialism of Boulez and Stockhausen and the indeterminacy of Cage” (716). Not only did it lead the way toward the destruction of cultural barriers, but it also met with great popular success, writes Potter, becoming one of the most remarkable developments in twentieth-century music. Indeed, this music had a substantial impact on a wide range of concert musics, including rock and the panoply of hybrid and postmodern forms that would become (again, according to New Grove) a major feature of music at the end of the century. Keith Potter’s definition of minimal music leaves little doubt as to the recognition of this style: after all, his entry appeared in one of the major musicology encyclopedias of the world, sanctioned by a substantial bibliography of books issued by the most reputable publishing houses. Behind this definition, however, and behind the books on which it was based, lurk numerous polemics, debates, and all manner of contradictions.
In fact, as we study these texts more closely, the initial obviousness of “minimal music” diminishes. Having read in New Grove that minimalism was born in 1958, we discover elsewhere that it dates to 1953 (Sabbe 1982b). Some even trace the emergence of minimalism to Maurice Ravel’s Boléro or Erik Satie’s Vexations (Schaefer 1987, xii, 65). Whereas Potter considers minimal music a major antidote to the modernism of John Cage or Karlheinz Stockhausen, others see it as the future of experimental music (Nyman 1974) or the final stage of the European musical revolution launched by Arnold Schoenberg (Mertens 1983). Some authors evoke minimal music’s borrowings from popular music or the impact of minimalism on the latter (Strickland 1993), while others completely ignore these connections, and still others refute them (Goodwin 1991).
Designating the main representatives of the “style” defined in New Grove is no less controversial. Michael Nyman first identified Henning Christiansen’s music as minimal in 1968 (article reprinted in ap Siôn et al. 2013, 41–43), and a few years later that of Young, Riley, Reich, and Glass (Nyman 1974). Before classifying the work of these last four as minimal (1982), Tom Johnson saw minimal music as Californian, encompassing the aesthetic of Harold Budd or Michael Byron (1973). Over the years the foursome of Young, Riley, Reich, and Glass came to be universally recognized as minimalist, sometimes with the addition of Dick Higgins (Hitchcock 1974, 269), Morton Feldman (Salzman 1974, 187), or even Cage, acclaimed as a “minimalist enchanted with sound” in his New York Times obituary on August 13, 1992 (Kozinn 1992).
But even the term minimal music with reference to Young, Riley, Reich, and Glass was contested; hypnotic school, trance music, modular music, pulse, and space music were among the many variants associated with the music of all or some of these composers. Indeed, the four composers themselves never accepted the label being attached to their music, as Potter points out in New Grove. Moreover, the very terms of his definition can be questioned as well: how could the style have been at once modern and postmodern? How could the music have been at once minimal and of great richness? One might go so far as to doubt the existence of this minimal music: it is thanks to an “accident of musical history” that the term was ever used, according to John Schaefer (1987, xii).
We could, of course, attempt to follow the traditional approach of science in order to resolve the tangle of controversies that minimalism brought with it, and thus give credence to only the most factual, objective, and methodical works. But that task is complex, to say the least, since musicologists, historians, and critics base their studies on reasoning, facts, and objects. And if the reader cannot always assess their veracity, publishers, editorial committees, and universities, along with notes and bibliographies, will vouch for it. Indeed, many works have been recognized by new generations of authors, who validate them by citing them in their own studies, which are subject to the same