The Japanese Society for Aesthetics

Aesthetics No.16 (2012): 66-77

Steve Reich’s “Musical Process”:
A Linkage with Postminimal Art
SHINODA Hiroki
Art Tower Mito, Ibaraki

Steve Reich (1936- ), a representative composer of musical minimalism, wrote an essay in1968 titled “Music as a Gradual Process,”[1] which is known as the quintessence of his artistic
view at that time. In the essay, he claimed that “a compositional process and a sounding music[...] are one and the same thing,”[2] in other words, that a process of music should be audible
through the sound generated. This aesthetic creed of “perceptible processes”[3] has beenrecognized as the basic idea of minimal music. K. Robert Schwarz, for example, introduced“Music as a Gradual Process” as Reich’s “minimalist manifesto”[4] and described some aspectsof “Reich’s early minimalist period,” referring to this essay.[5]“Music as a Gradual Process” first appeared in the catalogue for Anti-Illusion:
Procedures/Materials, an exhibition in which Reich himself participated, held at the Whitney
Museum of American Art in 1969.[6] Although minimal music has been considered acounterpart of minimal art, the Anti-Illusion show is, in fact, a threshold of postminimalism inthe plastic arts: this exhibition presented a metamorphosis of minimal art, and it was asignificant occasion in the dispersal of a new art movement called “process art.”[7] Robert
Pincus-Witten, the art critic who used the term “Post-Minimalism” for the first time,[8]identified process art as “[t]he first phase of Postminimalism.”[9] It is interesting that theminimalist ideas Reich included in “Music as a Gradual Process” were publicized through theexhibition that may have begun postminimal art.
The term “minimal music” has been interpreted in parallel with minimal art; therefore,
preceding studies have considered both as a unit, and explored analogies in view of their
exclusively reductive modules, repetitive features, and so forth.[10] But the fact that the first
appearance of Reich’s “Music as a Gradual Process” was in the catalogue of the Anti-Illusion
show implies that the relationship between minimal music and contemporary plastic arts was
not simply parallel.[11] The term “postminimalism” in music is generally applied to works fromthe mid 1970s onward by the early “minimalists” such as Reich and Philip Glass, and also by
the younger generation of composers influenced by minimal music: this term is used fordevelopment and inheritance of minimalism with respect to pursuit of harmonically richer
sound within repetitive arrangements.[12] On the other hand, “postminimalism” in the plastic
arts indicates comprehensively a series of art movements, especially from the late 1960s to theearly 1970s (process art, earth works, conceptual art, and so on), which advanced minimalism’s
investigation of temporality of the artwork and its defiance of illusionism: this term emphasizes
attempts to surpass minimalism.[13] Presumably because of such differences in the scope ofthe term “postminimalism,” preceding studies of minimal music have focused on thecomparison with minimal art, but they have not considered the relationship to postminimal art.

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In this paper, I would like to clarify the relationship between Reich’s music andpostminimal art through comparison of Reich’s ideas in “Music as a Gradual Process” withpractices and discourses of contemporary art, regarding the Anti-Illusion show as anintersection of music and the plastic arts.

1. Anti-Illusionism in Modern and Postmodern Art
The exhibition Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials took place from May 19 to July 6, 1969.
It was co-organized by Marcia Tucker and James Monte, associate curators of the Whitney
Museum at that time. This exhibition featured not only paintings and sculptures but also works
in various other genres. The participant artists included the plastic artists Robert Morris,
Richard Serra, Bruce Nauman, filmmaker Michael Snow, and composers Steve Reich andPhilip Glass. In addition to exhibits, there were film shows and lectures held as evening events;
concerts by Reich and Glass were presented also as a part of the events.[14] In the concert “An
Evening of Music by Steve Reich” on May 27, Reich performed the pieces Violin Phase (1967),
Pendulum Music (1968), Four Log Drums (1969), and Pulse Music (1969).
Marcia Tucker, one of the organizers, accounts for the theme of the Anti-Illusion show asfollows:
There is, in the exhibition, no illusionism that is relevant to the past tradition of art. We
are presented with a non-symbolic, non-ordered approach, one which does not depend
upon a conceptual framework to be understood. The work is realistic in the fullest sense,
because it does not rely on descriptive, poetic or psychological referents.[15]The “realistic” work, as she described, is the work presented as a thing, as it is actually here
now, by “a non-symbolic, non-ordered approach”; that is, by elimination of meaning andsymbolism, and also by elimination of any order and form typified by linear perspective, theartwork is presented as an object existing here now.
Previously, the formalist critic Clement Greenberg’s modernist theory had clearly insisted
upon a discourse opposed to traditional illusionism. According to him, the development ofmodernist art is a course of purification by which works are limited to what is unique to thenature of each medium: for painting, he identifies “the ineluctable flatness of the support” as
the most fundamental factor; representation of three-dimensional space, he claims, is excluded
from painting because it is “the province of sculpture.”[16] Additionally, he speculates that
“optical illusion” is indispensable for preventing art from becoming “an arbitrary object” as aresult of this purification.
The flatness towards which Modernist painting orients itself can never be an utter flatness.
The heightened sensibility of the picture plane may no longer permit sculptural illusion, or
trompe-l’oeil, but it does and must permit optical illusion. [...] Where the Old Masters
created an illusion of space into which one could imagine oneself walking, the illusion
created by a Modernist is one into which one can only look, can travel through only with

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the eye.[17]The emergence of minimal art in the 1960s was the high-water mark of Greenberg’s
modernist purification. At the same time, however, by extreme reduction of composition
elements, minimal art also exposed the “objecthood” of works and indicated a denial of optical
illusion.[18] Then, at the beginning of postminimalism, in the Anti-Illusion show, artists
attempted to deny both sculptural illusion and optical illusion through other methods ofminimalism: that was signified by revealing the “procedures” and “materials” in/as the subtitleof the exhibition. By emphasizing the process by which art is realized in the exhibition space,
and the materiality that art consists in, the work is connected with the real time and space thatit makes and presents: thereby any illusion is eliminated from the work.

2. “Music as a Gradual Process”
In music, this “realistic” presence can be regarded as a foregrounding of the physical timeof the work’s actual performance. Tucker introduced the music of Reich and Glass in the
exhibition catalogue as follows:
It has been thought that music creates its own suspended temporality, dependent upon theelements of rhythm and silence. Musical time has thus been considered different from“real” time. For Philip Glass and Steve Reich, actual time is a crucial factor in their music;
it offers no illusion of temporality other than that which exists in the performance of theirpieces. They have [...] only the sense of an isolated present. This constant present exists
because of a deliberate and unrelenting use of repetition which destroys the illusion ofmusical time and focuses attention instead on the material of the sounds and on theirperformance.[19]Tucker adapts the “procedures” and “materials” in the subtitle of the show to “theirperformance” and “the material of the sounds,” respectively. When concentrating on theprocedure of generating sound (performance) and its material (the sound itself), the audience
notices “real” time instead of the musical time of traditional music. This procedure ofgenerating sound corresponds to the “process” which Reich claimed in his essay to be the core
concept of his music.
In the exhibition catalogue of Anti-Illusion, “Music as a Gradual Process” appeared beside
Reich’s biography; this essay was published as his introduction. Since 1965, when he composed
the tape piece It’s Gonna Rain, Reich had made music using “phase-shifting / phasing,” amusical technique to generate a variety of sounds by gradually moving the cycles of two or
more repetitive patterns in and out of phase. “Music as a Gradual Process” identified thistechnique with the concept of “process” and summarized his aesthetic creed. The text leads off,
[By “music as a gradual process”] I do not mean the process of composition but rather
pieces of music that are, literally, processes. / The distinctive thing about musicalSteve Reich’s “Musical Process”

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processes is that they determine all the note-to-note (sound-to-sound) details and theoverall form simultaneously. [...] / I am interested in perceptible processes. I want to beable to hear the process happening throughout the sounding music. / To facilitate closely
detailed listening a musical process should happen extremely gradually.[20]What Reich calls “pieces of music that are, literally, processes” means the sounding result
generated from execution of a certain musical procedure. Reich attempts to present the soundas a work without imposing his own subjectivity upon the results. He writes,
Musical processes can give one a direct contact with the impersonal and also a kind ofcomplete control [...]. By “a kind” of complete control, I mean that by running thismaterial through this process I completely control all that results, but also that I accept allthat results without changes.[21]Composition based on musical process, however, is not what is original here. The
important point of “Music as a Gradual Process” is that Reich insists on the perceptibility ofmusical process. In music, the process can be divided into two categories: the process ofcomposition (sound arrangement) and the process of performance (sound generation). Reich’s“perceptible process” can be said to be the homology of these two processes, as he claimed that“a compositional process and a sounding music [...] are one and the same thing.”
Reich distinguishes his music from music of chance operation, indeterminacy, andserialism in terms of the perceptibility of its processes,
John Cage has used processes and has certainly accepted their results, but the processes heused were compositional ones that could not be heard when the piece was performed. The
process of using the I Ching or imperfections in a sheet of paper to determine musicalparameters can’t be heard when listening to music composed that way. The compositional
processes and the sounding music have no audible connection. Similarly, in serial music,
the series itself is seldom audible.[22]Cage introduced chance and indeterminacy to his music in order to abandon subjective control
of music. His “process of using the I Ching” is a compositional method of choosing tones bychecking the results of coin tossing using the I Ching’s hexagram; “imperfections in a sheet ofpaper to determine musical parameters” is a method of deciding tones on the basis of thepositions and shapes of stains and scratches on a piece of paper viewed as if it were a musicalscore.[23] On the other hand, Pierre Boulez and a number of other composers use the serial
technique to create strict organization for a piece. Although the two approaches employ
different principles and attempt to compose different types of music, they are coincident withrespect to the intention to arrange tones objectively. It is often pointed out that the sounding
result of Cage’s Music of Changes, composed through a chance operation, resembles Boulez’s
total serial work Structures Ia; nevertheless, they were composed in wholly different ways.[24]The focus of Reich’s criticism is that, as far as listening simply to this music, one cannot

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recognize what type of compositional method produces the sounding result; namely, there is nocorrespondence between the processes of composition and performance. If the composer’s
principle of music is not clarified, the audience may misunderstand that the composer’s
intention has shaped the sounding results, even though subjectivity does not mediate theresults. As a consequence, a kind of illusion may be generated: the attention of listeners focuses
not on the music itself sounding in actuality but on fictitious “hidden messages” of thecomposer. Reich claims in “Music as a Gradual Process” that, by making the process ofgenerating sound audible, he clarifies the mechanisms of music and guides the audience’s
attention to the sounding of music itself here now. This point is regarded as the basic idea ofminimal music.

3. Pendulum Music
Reich explains musical processes as follows:
Performing and listening to a gradual musical process resembles:
pulling back a swing, releasing it, and observing it gradually come to rest;
turning over an hour glass and watching the sand slowly run through to the bottom;
placing your feet in the sand by the ocean’s edge and watching, feeling, and listening to thewaves gradually bury them.[25]It is significant that Reich, in this quotation, compares the acoustic experience of a musicalprocess with the visual experience of observing a swing or an hour glass, and the tangible
experience of feeling waves. This is not merely a metaphor; in fact, he made this sounding
process explicitly visible in Pendulum Music, which was performed in the Anti-Illusion show.
The text score (performance instructions) of the piece is as follows:
2, 3, 4 or more microphones are suspended from the ceiling by their cables so thatthey all hang the same distance from the floor and are all free to swing with a pendular
motion. Each microphone’s cable is plugged into an amplifier which is connected to a
speaker. Each microphone hangs a few inches directly above or next to its speaker.
The performance begins with performers taking each mike, pulling it back like a swing,
and then in unison releasing all of them together. Performers then carefully turn up each
amplifier just to the point where feedback occurs when a mike swings directly over or next
to its speakers. Thus, a series of feedback pulses are heard which will either be all in
unison or not, depending on the gradually changing phase relations of the different mikependulums.
Performers then sit down to watch and listen to the process along with the audience.
The piece is ended some time after all mikes have come to rest and are feeding back acontinuous tone by performers pulling out the power cords of the amplifiers.[26]Pendulum Music was composed in cooperation with sculptor/video artist Bruce Nauman,

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and premiered in the happening Over Evident Falls, planned by painter William T. Wiley at
the University of Colorado at Boulder in August 1968.[27] In the Anti-Illusion show, this piece
was performed by Reich (amplifiers) with the microphones released by Richard Serra, Bruce
Nauman, Michael Snow, and James Tenny.
For Reich’s works, Pendulum Music is exceptional in that it is not written in staff notationand in that it does not use traditional instruments. But this piece demonstrates Reich’s thesis
in “Music as a Gradual Process,” and he has mentioned Pendulum Music as “the ultimate
process piece.”[28] It is obvious that the microphone’s pendulum motion adheres to Reich’s
explanation of the musical process, “pulling back a swing, releasing it, and observing it
gradually come to rest.” In fact, in the first performance, in Over Evident Falls, this piece was
performed by two microphones attached to the sides of a swing.[29] When the performers
release the microphones all together, the pendulums are set into motion and produce thefeedback pulses, illustrating the phrase in “Music as a Gradual Process,” “once the process is
set up and loaded it runs by itself.”[30]Interviewed by Michael Nyman, Reich said,
A pendulum is not a musician. So of all my pieces that was the most impersonal, and was
the most emblematic and the most didactic in terms of the process idea, and also most
sculptural. In many ways you could describe Pendulum Music as audible sculpture, withthe objects being the swinging microphones and the loudspeakers. I always set them up
quite clearly as sculpture. It was very important that the speakers be laid flat on the floor,
which is obviously not usual in concerts.[31]Pendulum Music is, as it were, a sound-generating device consisting of microphones andloudspeakers that visualize the musical process as a pendular motion of microphones: this is
why Reich describes this piece as “audible sculpture.” Forming a musical proceeding aroundthe microphones’ physical movement, Reich reveals the process of generating sound in theactual space and foregrounds the “real” time in which the pendulums move. Comparing Reich’s
ideas in Pendulum Music with the theme of the Anti-Illusion show, the microphones’
pendulum motion and the feedback pulses correspond to “procedure” and “material” in thesubtitle of the exhibition.

4. Recovery of Process in Postminimal Art
Now, how do the ideas propounded in “Music as a Gradual Process” and demonstrated in
Pendulum Music relate to the process art emerging in the Anti-Illusion show?
In this exhibition, the exemplary works presenting the “real” process were Rafael Ferrer’s
installation Ice (1969), which was located on the entrance ramp of the museum, and Richard
Serra’s Casting (1969), which was made on the exhibition floor. Ferrer’s Ice, consisting offifteen blocks of ice, melted away in twenty hours after the show started. The ice piece having
vanished, the receipt for the work was displayed on the exhibition floor, as a sort of drawing,
under the title of Plan for Whitney Ice Piece (1969).[32] In other words, Ferrer exhibited the

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fact – along with the disappearance – of the work itself, in the form of a document of the actionof installing the work. Serra’s Casting was created from molten lead thrown at the intersectionof the wall and the exhibition floor. In this work, by lining up the clots torn from the wall, Serraemphasized the temporality of making art.
As these works demonstrate, the participant artists of the Anti-Illusion show attempted todeny illusion and expose the “realistic” presence of the artwork by foregrounding materiality
and process as well as the temporality of making and installing art. The exhibition cataloguepresents plenty of photographs of the processes of making the presented works, which are
created from various materials not used in traditional art. In addition to the aforementioned
ice and lead, Keith Sonnier’s Flocked Wall (1969) uses latex; Eva Hesse’s Expanded Expansion(1969) uses cheesecloth and fiberglass; and so forth.
As for the result of using these materials, sculptor Robert Morris wrote in his essay “AntiForm”:
Recently, materials other than rigid industrial ones have begun to show up. […] In thesecases considerations of gravity become as important as those of space. The focus on matterand gravity as means results in forms which were not projected in advance. Considerationsof ordering are necessarily casual and imprecise and unemphasized. Random piling, loose
stacking, hanging, give passing form to the material.[33]In contrast with the “rigid industrial” materials, such as steel, Plexiglas, and so on, often usedin minimal art, the soft and ephemeral materials typifying process art directly reflect processesof time. Process artists focused on the duration of real, or “passing,” time. A number of critics
had already made an issue of temporality in the plastic arts before process art emerged. For
example, formalist critic Michael Fried, discussing works of minimalism (“literalism” in his
wording), indicated that “the experience in question persists in time,”[34] writing “thepresentment of endlessness that […] is central to literalist art and theory is essentially apresentment of endless or indefinite duration.”[35] Fried condemned “the presentment ofendlessness” as “theatrical,” that is, neither painterly nor sculptural. His discussion, however,concerns the temporality of the viewer’s experience, which is not equivalent to the process oftime exposed by the transformation of the work itself.[36]Robert Pincus-Witten described the emergence of these works, typified by soft andephemeral materials and the emphasis on process, as “a reaction to the taciturn inexpressivity
and absence of chromatic appeal typical of Minimalism,” and also indicated a linkage withreevaluation of Jackson Pollock, a representative painter of abstract expressionism, by these
artists, in view of the process-oriented nature of his work.[37] The exemplary statement of thisreevaluation was in Morris’s “Anti Form”:
Of the Abstract Expressionists only Pollock was able to recover process and hold on to it aspart of the end form of the work. Pollock’s recovery of process involved a profound rethinking of the role[s] of both material and tools in making.[38]Steve Reich’s “Musical Process”

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Focusing on the dripping technique in Pollock’s painting, Morris identified “Pollock’s recovery
of process” in the role that the fluidity of the flung paint plays in determining the finished work.
“Material and tools” in Morris’s words correspond with “Materials” and “Procedures” in thesubtitle of the Anti-Illusion show. In fact, Tucker and Monte “were going to call the exhibition
Anti-Form” after Morris’s essay at first; however, accepting the other artists’ complaints about
the exhibition title, the curators changed it to Anti-Illusion.[39]In contrast, the formalist criticisms of Greenberg and Fried, which had been potent before
Morris’s interpretation of Pollock, made the point that optical illusion was created byeliminating the materiality of the work. For example, Fried wrote, in his review of Pollock in
1965, “Pollock’s field is optical because it addresses itself to eyesight alone.”[40] In these words,
Fried indicates a purely optical space containing neither materiality of the work nor physicalityof the painter.
Rosalind Krauss discusses this difference of interpretation of Pollock between Morris andformalist critics in her book The Optical Unconscious,[41] referring to Hans Namuth’s
photographs of Pollock painting (1950).[42] Namuth shoots Pollock’s violent gesture and theoverlap of the dripped paint, in which the beholder can read many things: physicality of thepainter, temporality of making, and gravity’s effect on the paint among them. Krauss writes,
Clem [Greenberg]’s mission was to lift him above those [Namuth’s] pictures, just as it was
to lift the paintings Pollock made from off the ground where he’d made them, and onto thewall. Because it was only on the wall that they joined themselves to tradition, to culture, toconvention. It was in that location and at that angle to gravity that they became“painting.”[43]When the horizontal canvas, which bears the trace of the painter’s gesture, is lifted onto
the vertical against gravity (Krauss calls this “sublimation,” referring to Freud),[44] the canvas
gives stable sight to the beholder standing upright, and the whole image can be grasped in an
instant. By concentrating on the vertical position of Pollock’s finished work, formalist critics
concealed the process of making lurking in the picture, and found optical illusion generated
from the picture plane. On the other hand, Morris directs attention to the fact that Pollock
paints on a horizontal canvas. “Gravity was what had combined with liquidity of the paint toread through the finished work as a sign of process,” wrote Krauss, describing Morris’scommentary on Pollock’s works.[45] Process artists pursued effects of gravity in real space byusing the soft and ephemeral materials, as observed in the Anti-Illusion show, attempting toreconcile the processes of making with the results, just as Reich sought to establish an
identification between processes making music and the made music itself.[46]5. Actualization of Process
Given the circumstances under which process art appeared, and under which artists
reevaluated Pollock’s dripping technique as the “recovery of process,” it is understandable that
Reich’s claims in “Music as a Gradual Process” were closely tied to the postminimal movement

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in the plastic arts in the late 1960s.
Reich composed Pendulum Music in cooperation with plastic artists, describing it as“audible sculpture”; Richard Serra, who took part in the performance in the Anti-Illusion show,called the piece “a paradigm for process art.”[47] Reich explained, in an interview in Artforum,that his music and Serra’s sculpture were analogous in that “his [Serra’s] works and mine
[Reich’s] are both more about materials and process than they are about psychology.”[48]“Materials” and “process” are central ideas of “Music as a Gradual Process,” and are essential
ideas of the Anti-Illusion show, as indicated in the subtitle.
According to Tucker,[49] “procedures” and “materials” in the subtitle of the exhibition
were equivalent, in music, to performance and its sound material, that is, the process ofgenerating music in real space and the sound derived from the process. Reconciling theperformance process with the compositional one, Reich claimed “a compositional process anda sounding music [...] are one and the same thing.” This incorporates compositional process,which is usually executed beforehand, into real-time performance, the actualization of process.
By making compositional process perceptible, Reich attempted to reveal the real time within
his music as different from the musical time of traditional music.
For the plastic artists participating in the Anti-Illusion show, “procedures” were a series ofactions of making and displaying art, and “materials” were the substance of the artworks. From
this point of view, Pollock’s paintings were not picture planes generating optical illusion, as
indicated by Greenberg and Fried. By focusing on the “material” and “tools,” paint’s fluidity
and the stick Pollock used for flinging the paint in his work, process artists attempted to reveal
the real presence of artwork under the influence of gravity.
The paint and stick, “material” and “tool,” in Pollock’s painting are parallel to the feedback
pulse and swinging microphones in Reich’s Pendulum Music. Reich also indicates that music is
generated in real space, by making the musical process visible as a pendular motion of
microphones.
In painting, the vertical canvas gives the beholder stable sight, because the beholder’s lineof sight intersects with the wall at a right angle. On this occasion, even Pollock’s intricate dripsof paint are grasped as an image, and generate optical illusion. What Reich found in serialmusic and Cage’s music of chance operation and indeterminacy, and what he criticized in“Music as a Gradual Process,” was illusion generated in a way similar to “sublimation” inpainting.
Under the theme of Anti-Illusion, Reich demonstrated his aesthetic creed through essay
and music. At the same time, the plastic artists built the threshold of postminimalism, by
revealing processes and the materiality of artworks. “Music as a Gradual Process,” known as
the basic idea of minimal music, has been considered independently of the contemporary art
movement, taken out of the context of the Anti-Illusion show, for which the essay was written.
But Reich’s claim was propounded in conjunction with postminimal art as an attempt toeliminate illusion through unification of artworks with real time and space, that is, through“perceptible processes.”Steve Reich’s “Musical Process”

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Notes
[1]

[2]
[3]
[4]
[5]
[6]

[7]

[8]

[9]
[10]

[11]
[12]

[13]
[14]

Steve Reich, “Music as a Gradual Process,” in Writings on Music 1965-2000 (=WoM), ed. Paul
Hillier (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 34-36; originally published in Anti-Illusion:
Procedures/Materials (=AI) [exhibition catalogue] (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art,
1969), pp. 56-57. In addition to these two versions, Reich’s essay “Music as a Gradual Process” hasbeen reprinted in some books, liner notes, and so on. There are some slight differences of wording,orthography and punctuation in the various versions. The text of the essay quoted in this paper istaken from WoM.
Reich, “Music as a Gradual Process,” in WoM, p. 35; AI, p. 57.
Ibid., in WoM, 34; AI, p. 56.
K. Robert Schwarz, Minimalists (London: Phaidon Press, 1996), p. 69.
Schwarz, “Steve Reich: Music as a Gradual Process,” Part 1, Perspectives of New Music, vol. 19(1980-1981), pp. 376-377.
For detailed information on the Anti-Illusion show, see AI. See also The New Sculpture 1965-75:
Between Geometry and Gesture [exhibition catalogue] (New York: Whitney Museum of American
Art, 1990), pp. 16, 135-194, and Marcia Tucker, A Short Life of Trouble: Forty Years in the New
York Art World, ed. Liza Lou (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), pp. 81-85.
See Shinichiro Ozaki, “Tenrankai no Seijigaku: Minimal Art wo meguru Mittsu no Tenrankai (The
Politics of Exhibition: Three Exhibitions of Minimal Art),” Seiyo Bijutu Kenkyu (Studies inWestern Art), no. 10 (2004), pp. 104-106, and Irving Sandler, “Postminimalism,” in Art of the
Postmodern Era: From the Late 1960s to the Early 1990s (New York: Icon Editions, 1996), pp. 2324.
The first appearance of the term “Post-Minimalism” was in a Pincus-Witten treatment of Eva
Hesse, one of the participant artists of the Anti-Illusion show: Pincus-Witten, “Eva Hesse: PostMinimalism into Sublime,” Artforum (November 1971), pp. 32-44.
Robert Pincus-Witten, “Introduction to Postminimalism,” in Postminimalism to Maximalism:
American Art 1966-1986 (Ann Arbor, Michigan: UMI Research Press, 1987), p. 10.
Comparative studies of minimalism in music and the plastic arts include: Jonathan W. Bernard,“The Minimalist Aesthetic in the Plastic Arts and in Music,” Perspectives of New Music, vol. 31,
no. 1 (Winter 1993), pp. 86-132; H. Wiley Hitchcock, “Minimalism in Art and Music: Origins andAesthetics,” in Richard Kostelanetz and Joseph Darby, ed., Classic Essays on Twentieth-Century
Music: A Continuing Symposium (New York: Schirmer Books, 1996), pp. 308-319; and Edward
Strickland, Minimalism: Origins (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993). Bernard and
Hitchcock pay less attention to postminimal art. Strickland’s book, though lacking sufficient
discussion about the relationship between Reich’s music and postminimal art, clarifies the timelag between the peaks of minimalism in music and in the plastic arts with considerable supporting
evidence. The book treats the Anti-Illusion show on pp. 200-202, 215-216, and 242.
See Strickland, op. cit., p. 242.
See Kyle Gann, “Minimal Music, Maximal Impact: Minimalism’s Immediate Legacy: Postminimalism,” New Music Box: The Web Magazine from the American Music Center (November 1,2001), <http://www.newmusicbox.org/articles/minimal-music-maximal-impact/6/> (accessed
April 25, 2012), and Keith Potter, Four Musical Minimalists: La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve
Reich, Philip Glass (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 15-18.
See Sandler, op. cit., pp. 21-85, and Akinobu Tatsumi, “Postminimalism to Ba (Postminimalism
and Sites),” Bigaku (Aesthetics), no. 205 (2001), p. 56.
Glass’s concert in the Anti-Illusion show, “An Evening of Music by Philip Glass,” was held on May
20, where his Two Pages and How Now (both 1968) were performed, and three films by Richard
Serra were projected.

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[15]
[16]
[17]
[18]

[19]
[20]
[21]
[22]
[23]

[24]

[25]
[26]

[27]

[28]

[29]
[30]
[31]
[32]
[33]
[34]
[35]
[36]

SHINODA Hiroki

Tucker, “Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials,” in AI, p. 33.
See Clement Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” in Richard Kostelanetz, ed., Esthetics Contemporary, revised ed. (Buffalo, New York: Prometheus Books, 1989), pp. 196-197.
Ibid., p. 199.
See Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” Artforum, Special Issue (Summer 1967), pp. 12-15;
reprint, in Art and Objecthood: Essay and Reviews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998),
pp. 151-153.
Tucker, op. cit., pp. 35-36.
Reich, “Music as a Gradual Process,” in WoM, p. 34; AI, p. 56.
Ibid., in WoM, p. 35; AI, p. 56.
Ibid., in WoM, p. 35; AI, pp. 56-57.
See John Cage, “Composition as Process,” in Silence (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan
University Press, 1961), pp. 18-56. He also describes these compositional processes in some otherbooks and articles.
See, for example, Susumu Shono, Choshu no Shigaku: J. Cage kara soshite J. Cage he (A Poeticsof Listening: from J. Cage, and to J. Cage) (Tokyo: Keiso Shobo, 1991), p. 180, and Ryosuke
Shiina, “John Cage no Ongaku: Kigouronteki Bunseki no (Goku Sasayakana) Kokoromi [Music ofJohn Cage: A (Very Brief) Attempt at Semantic Analysis],” Suisei Tsushin (March 2007), p. 67.
Reich, op. cit., in WoM, p. 34; AI, p. 56.
Reich, “Pendulum Music,” in AI, p. 28; WoM, p. 32. The text score of Pendulum Music quoted
here is the 1968 version. When this piece was revised in 1973, Reich added “Directions for
Performance” and partly rewrote the text score: see the current printed score (UE16155, Universal
Edition, 1980). The main changes are as follows: (1) a performer who adjusts the amplifiers is
specified in order to facilitate the performance; (2) the number of microphones is changed fromtwo to at least three; (3) the microphones are suspended not from the ceiling but frommicrophone boom stands or other supports (the length of the microphone’s cables therefore canvary); the phase relations of the microphone pendulums are potentially more diverse due tochanges (2) and (3).
For detailed information on the compositional context and the first performance of Pendulum
Music, see Reich, “Steve Reich Interview: Pendulum Music,” in OHM-: The Early Gurus ofElectronic Music, <http://www.furious.com/perfect/ohm/reich.html> (accessed April 25, 2012);
Potter, op. cit., pp. 174-175.
Reich, “Pendulum Music,” in OHM+: The Early Music Gurus of Electronic Music: 1948-1980 (CD,DVD, Ellipsis Arts, 2005), p. 50. Reich, “Steve Reich Interview: Pendulum Music,” in OHM-: The
Early Gurus of Electronic Music.
See Potter, op. cit.
Reich, “Music as a Gradual Process,” in WoM, p. 34; AI, p. 56.
Reich, “Steve Reich: Interview,” in Studio International (November/December 1976), p. 305;
reprint, as “Second Interview with Michael Nyman,” in WoM, p. 95. Italics in original.
Tatsuo Kondo, “Anti-Illusion: Tetsuzuki to sozai (Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials, Whitney
Museum of American Art, New York),” Bijutsu Techo (October 1969), p. 83.
Robert Morris, “Anti Form,” Artforum (April 1968), p. 35; reprint, in Continuous Project Altered
Daily: The Writings of Robert Morris (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1993), p. 46.
Fried, op. cit., p. 22; reprint, pp. 166. Italics in original.
Ibid., p. 22; reprint, pp. 166-167. Italics in original.
Regarding the temporalities in minimal and postminimal art, I should add that there are some
aspects that we hardly differentiate from one another, such as temporality of the viewer’s
experience and that of the work’s transformation. For example, art critic Scott Burton, in his
review of the Anti-Illusion show, described minimal art, such as Tony Smith’s Black Box (1962), asSteve Reich’s “Musical Process”

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prototypically exposing the process of time by transformation of the work. The surface of BlackBox, located outdoors, is in the process of oxidation. Burton found the difference of temporality
between minimal and postminimal art in the speed of transformation of the object. From his
viewpoint, Minimal art forms may integrate temporality by requiring the perception that the worktransforms; postminimal art tends to have a further requirement, that the transformation isperceptible as the viewer watches. (See Burton, “Time on Their Hands,” ARTnews (Summer 1969),
p. 40).
Pincus-Witten, “Introduction to Postminimalism,” pp. 10-11.
Morris, op. cit., p. 34; reprint, p. 43.
Tucker, A Short Life of Trouble: Forty Years in the New York Art World, pp. 81-82.
Fried, “Jackson Pollock,” Artforum (September 1965), p. 15.
Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1993), pp.
242-329.
Hans Namuth, L’atelier de Jackson Pollock (Paris: Macula, 1978).
Krauss, op. cit., p. 244.
Ibid., p. 247.
Ibid., p. 293. Italics in original.
See Ibid., pp. 293-294; Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss, Formless: A User’s Guide (New York:
Zone Books, 1999), pp. 97-98; Ozaki, “Juryoku: Sengo Bijutsu no Zahyojiku (Gravity: Axis ofContemporary Art),” in Juryoku: Sengo Bijutsu no Zahyojiku (Gravity: Axis of ContemporaryArt) [exhibition catalogue] (Osaka: National Museum of Art, 1997), pp. 186-193; and Ozaki,“Modernism to Futatsu no Suichoku (Modernist Art and Two Verticality),” in Kaigaron wo Koete(Painting Theory and After) (Tokyo: Toshindo, 1999), pp. 219-230.
Richard Serra, [No title], written for MacDowell Medal Award Ceremony for Steve Reich, 2005,<http://www.stevereich.com/articles/Richard_Serra.html> (accessed April 25, 2012).
Emily Wasserman, “An Interview with Composer Steve Reich,” Artforum (May 1972), p. 48;
reprint, as “Excerpts from an Interview in Art Forum,” in WoM, p. 33.
See Tucker, “Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials,” in AI, pp. 35-36.

This paper is the English version, with slight revisions, of my article in Bigaku (Aesthetics), no. 235(2009), pp. 56-69, based on an oral presentation at the 57th National Congress of the Japanese Society
for Aesthetics (Osaka University, October 7, 2006).