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COPYRIGHT 2001 University of Washington
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...
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