Rethinking Reich, edited by Sumanth Gopinath and Pwyll ap Siôn

Abstract

Book Review| April 01 2021 Rethinking Reich, edited by Sumanth Gopinath and Pwyll ap Siôn Rethinking Reich, edited by Sumanth Gopinath and Pwyll ap Siôn. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. xvii, 394 pp. Victoria Aschheim Victoria Aschheim VICTORIA ASCHHEIM is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Society of Fellows and Lecturer in Music at Dartmouth College. She studies contemporary music and its relations to civic life. She is especially interested in minimalism and postminimalism. Her writing has appeared in the edited volume Staging History: 1780–1840 (Bodleian Library, 2016) and the journals Notes and American Music. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Journal of the American Musicological Society (2021) 74 (1): 170–176. https://doi.org/10.1525/jams.2021.74.1.170 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Victoria Aschheim; Rethinking Reich, edited by Sumanth Gopinath and Pwyll ap Siôn. Journal of the American Musicological Society 1 April 2021; 74 (1): 170–176. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/jams.2021.74.1.170 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentJournal of the American Musicological Society Search Rethinking Reich places Steve Reich’s music in diverse contexts. The editors, Sumanth Gopinath and Pwyll ap Siôn, are critical of Reich’s own descriptions of his art, which tend to “obfuscate more complex realities and contentious ideologies” (p. 8). Rather than retelling the tale of Reich’s artistic origins in the galleries of 1960s New York and his antipathy for European serialism, the contributors take up matters of cultural indebtedness, technical evolution, and ethics. They often make their cases armed with documents gathered from the Reich holdings at the Paul Sacher Stiftung (PSS). Rethinking Reich is structured in four parts: “Political, Aesthetic, and Analytical Concerns,” “Repetition, Speech, and Identity,” “Reich Revisited: Sketch Studies,” and “Beyond the West: Africa and Asia.” While part 4 is thematically precise, the big-tent quality of the headings of the first three parts blurs rather than sharpens the focus on the core issues the book raises. For instance,... You do not currently have access to this content.