“It is commonly accepted in Europe, and widely known here, that the originators of minimalism are Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and Phil Glass,” begins a column published in the Village Voice in July 1982, by the composer and music critic Tom Johnson. 1 Johnson was a crucial presence in the New York experimental music scene—and perhaps the central voice in identifying the nascent aesthetic of musical minimalism—but was dissatisfied with how narrowly this movement of drone- and repetition-based musics had come to be defined. Though Johnson expressed sympathy with the tendency to “reduce music history to a rather short list of Great Men,” he also interrogated the notion of list-making, and the problematic framework of “original minimalist,” providing 27 names that might better elucidate the category—knowing also that, as he put it, “more accurate lists get too long and bulky.”

Whose Country Music?: Genre, Identity, and Belonging in Twenty-First-Century Country Music Culture Edited by Paula J. Bishop and Jada E. Watson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023. - Volume 19 Issue 3

William Levi Dawson: American Music Educator. By Mark Hugh Malone. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2023. - William L. Dawson By Gwynne Kuhner Brown. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2024. - Volume 19 Issue 3