I see smoke, but where's the fire?

IN HIS ARTICLE, "'Yes I Wrote It, but I Didn't Mean It': Hearing the Unintended in Niimi Tokuhide's Ohju (1988)" (Perspectives of New Music 37, No. 2 (Summer, 1999)), Steven Nuss accuses me of setting various destructive "fires," practicing the very sort of cultural chauvinism that I (and he, presumably) most loathe--feelings which I thought I had made crystal-clear in the article, "Theory, Analysis, and the 'Problem' of Minimal Music," that he quotes from and criticizes. I am at a loss, frankly, to understand why he even finds my comments of relevance to his own work. Nuss is concerned, not (as I was) with composers actively seeking out musical traditions from a part of the world different from their own, and consciously (if superficially) incorporating elements of these traditions into their contemporary pieces, but, rather, with a composer whose recently written music seems to show evidence of "unintended" absorption of certain fundamental principles of the much older traditional music of his own culture. Whatever the explanation might be, every author has had the experience, at one time or another, of being misunderstood--but this is more a misreading, and so egregious that I would like to offer a few brief remarks in response.

To begin, my original point--that Western composers do not magically become non-Western composers by dint of a few months' or even years' study of (to them) exotic musical practices--has been yanked completely out of context. Nuss seems to acknowledge this--"Though Bernard's comments are concerned exclusively with minimal music..." begins a sentence early on (52)--but then proceeds to discuss my article as though it had been written to address the much broader question of worldwide interactions of musical practices. In particular, to have interpreted my "real" meaning as "Nothing meaningful can be/is said by us in the language(s) of them" (52) is a far-fetched distortion.

There are at least two levels on which this distortion operates. The first is the insinuation that degrees of influence do not matter, and that to deny that Steve Reich or Philip Glass were completely converted to non-Western musical practices is tantamount to denying that these composers were affected in any way at all by their exposure to the traditional musics of West Africa, Bali, or India. The question of what happens when a creative musician in one culture encounters the music of another culture is really a very complicated one; I didn't address it in "Theory, Analysis..." and I don't propose to do so now. But of course I would allow that such a musician could be influenced (whatever that rather vague term may mean) by musical practices, wherever they may come from, to which he/she has not previously had exposure; nevertheless, I would continue to hold that simply to have identified such influences is not much of an accomplishment, and cannot be taken as a substitute for serious analysis. (Nuss himself, of course, goes much farther than mere identification, as is appropriate to his topic.) At this juncture in my article, I was simply trying to clear the decks for such analysis, dismissing a few qualities or conditions commonly (but, in my view, mistakenly) attributed to minimal music. In asserting that minimal music is not meaningfully non-Western, I was alluding to writings about minimal music, principally in the popular press, that have claimed the opposite, citing as proof the circumstantial evidence of interest on the part of Reich, Glass, and others in non-Western music. Perhaps I was wasting my time by even bothering to address such arguments, but in light of the importance that scholars sometimes accord this type of "critical reception," the effort seemed worth making.

In any case, let's set the record straight. Reich spent five weeks in Ghana during the summer of 1970, then contracted malaria and had to return home. He never went back. His schooling in Balinese music consisted of ethnomusicology seminars in Seattle and Berkeley during the summers of 1973 and 1974 respectively. Glass worked with Ravi Shankar for two months as a transcriber on a film music project in 1965-6, and later (1967-8) took private lessons for a few months with Alla Rakhar, Shankar's tabla player. Valuable experiences: no doubt. Total immersion: hardly. It is true that La Monte Young and Terry Riley, the other two among the "classic four" minimalists, whose music I did not discuss in my article, exhibit more extensive involvement with non-Western music; yet I would venture to say that to call their music somehow non-Western or even a Western/Eastern hybrid would be just as erroneous a judgment as it is for Reich and Glass. (How "Balinese" does Colin McPhee's music seem to us now?) To study something, to understand it better, even to identify with it on some level is not the same as to become identical with it, a distinction that one would think Nuss, especially in light of his experience teaching in Japan, would appreciate.

However, had I been writing an article about cross-cultural interchange in music in general, I might have been a little more careful to qualify my statement about "long immersion and exposure," which I can now see sounds absolutist. It was actually unnecessary for me to do this in the context of the article I was writing, since none of the minimalists have undergone such experiences. And it remains extremely unlikely, not to say impossible, that Reich, on the basis of those five weeks in Ghana, could somehow have written music that is African in any mean meaningful sense without intending to. Granted, composers do sometimes remark on elements that seem to have crept, ...