Rethinking Reich
Edited by Sumanth Gopinath and Pwyll ap Siôn
Author Information
Pwyll ap Siôn is Professor of Music at Bangor University, Wales. He studied music at Oxford University. Ap Siôn has published books and articles in the areas of minimalist and postminimalist music, quotation and intertextuality in music and minimalist music in film and media. He has contributed record reviews and articles for Gramophone music magazine since 2007.
Sumanth Gopinath is Associate Professor of Music Theory at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. He is the author of The Ringtone Dialectic: Economy and Cultural Form (2013), co-edited The Oxford Handbook of Mobile Music Studies, vols. 1 and 2 (2014) with Jason Stanyek, and has published work on Steve Reich, minimalism, new media, Marxism, country music, and other topics. He is the leader of the independent Americana band, The Gated Community.
Contributors:
Pwyll ap Siôn is Professor of Music at Bangor University, Wales. His publications include The Music of Michael Nyman (2007) and Michael Nyman: Collected Writings. He co-edited The Ashgate Research Companion to Minimalist and Postminimalist Music (2013) with Keith Potter and Kyle Gann, and has contributed articles and reviews to Contemporary Music Review, Twentieth-Century Music and Performance Practice Review. In 2016, he received a Leverhulme Research Fellowship to focus on the music of Steve Reich. He also contributes regularly to Gramophone music magazine.
Twila Bakker completed her doctorate in musicology at Bangor University, Wales, in 2016, focusing on Steve Reich's Counterpoint pieces. Her current research addresses digital sketch studies utilizing Reich's compositional output as a case study, and the work of new music philanthropist Betty Freeman. Bakker is a committee member of the Society for Minimalist Music and holds previous degrees in music and history from the University of Victoria and the University of Alberta, Canada. She currently holds a teaching post at MacEwan University.
Maarten Beirens studied musicology at the Catholic University of Leuven (KU Leuven), Belgium, where he was awarded a Ph.D. in 2005 for his thesis on European minimal music. He then held a postdoctoral fellowship awarded by FWO Flanders at KU Leuven, conducting research on the music of Steve Reich, before being appointed lecturer in musicology at the University of Amsterdam. He contributed a chapter to The Ashgate Research Companion to Minimalist and Postminimalist Music (2013). Other publications have appeared in the Revue Belge de Musicologie, Tempo, and Contemporary Music Review.
David Chapman Jr. is assistant professor of music at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology in Terre Haute, Indiana, where he teaches music history and theory to engineers, mathematicians, and scientists. His research focuses primarily on the role of performance, improvisation, and ensembles in the downtown New York avant-garde music scene of the 1960s and 1970s. He holds degrees in piano performance and in musicology from Kennesaw State University, Georgia and the University of Georgia, respectively. He received his Ph.D. from Washington University in St. Louis in 2013 for a thesis on Philip Glass and the downtown New York scene between 1966-1976.
Ryan Ebright serves as an instructor of musicology at Bowling Green State University. He earned his Ph.D. in musicology at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2014, and holds a masters' degree in musicology and vocal performance from the Peabody Conservatory. His research includes music for the voice, stage, and screen, with an emphasis on contemporary opera, minimalism, and nineteenth-century Lieder, and has been published in American Music, Notes, and the online publication on contemporary music NewMusicBox.
Robert Fink is Professor of Musicology at the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music and author of Repeating Ourselves: American Minimal Music as Cultural Practice (2005). His publications on minimalism and repetition, popular music, the fate of the classical canon, and problems of musical analysis have appeared in Rethinking Music (1999), Beyond Structural Listening? (2004) and The Ashgate Research Companion to Minimalist and Postminimalist Music (2013), and in journals including Cambridge Opera Journal, Journal of the American Musicological Society, and American Music. Along with Cecilia Sun, he is the collator of Oxford Bibliographies online's substantial entry on "Minimalism."
Celia Fitz-Walter is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Queensland, Australia, where she has been conducting research on the creative process in Steve Reich's speech works. Prior to this, her first-class honors thesis investigated aspects of Erik Satie's contribution to conceptual art. Her doctoral research has benefitted from interviewing Reich and from the support of a Paul Sacher Foundation research grant and travel awards from the University of Queensland, allowing several visits to the Paul Sacher Foundation, Basel, to undertake sketch studies. She has performed widely as a cellist and vocalist, touring nationally and internationally with The Australian Voices.
Sumanth Gopinath is Associate Professor of Music Theory at the University of Minnesota. He is the author of The Ringtone Dialectic: Economy and Cultural Form (2013), and co-edited The Oxford Handbook of Mobile Music Studies (2014) with Jason Stanyek. His research ranges widely from Steve Reich and musical minimalism to Marxism and music scholarship, sound and digital media, Bob Dylan, Benjamin Britten, the aesthetics of smoothness, and the music of contemporary Scottish composer James Dillon.
Matthias Kassel studied musicology and German language and literature in Freiburg im Breisgau. He has been a curator at the Paul Sacher Foundation, Basel, since 1995. His publications and articles mainly focus on composers' collections in the archive. Recent interests include the work of Mauricio Kagel, and the Steve Reich collection, as well as the performance practice and archival aspects of new music.
Kerry O'Brien received her Ph.D. from Indiana University in 2018, which focused on focusses on the history of Experiments in Art and Technology in America between 1966-71. Her work on postwar experimentalism, minimalism, media studies, and countercultural spirituality has been supported by a Presser Music Award, a Paul Sacher Foundation research grant, a Getty research library grant, and an American Fellowship from the American Association of University Women. Her research has been published in the Mitteilungen der Paul Sacher Stiftung and NewMusicBox, in addition to articles in The New York Times and The New Yorker online.
Keith Potter is Reader in Music at Goldsmiths, University of London. Active as both musicologist and music journalist, he was for many years chief editor of Contact: a Journal of Contemporary Music, the 34 issues of which were republished online in 2017. For a decade, he was a regular music critic for The Independent daily newspaper. A founding committee member of the Society for Minimalist Music, he was its Chair from 2011-13. His publications include Four Musical Minimalists: La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass (2000) and The Ashgate Research Companion to Minimalist and Postminimalist Music (2013) co-edited with Kyle Gann and Pwyll ap Siôn. Recent research on Reich, arising from research carried out at the Steve Reich archive at the Paul Sacher Foundation, Basel, has appeared in Tonality Since 1950 (2017) and Contemporary Music Review (2018); and the outcome of collaborative projects on musical perception and cognition, involving music by Glass as well as Reich, has recently appeared in Music and/as Process (2016) and the journal Time and Time Perception.
John Pymm is Dean of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Wolverhampton. He is a founder member of the Society for Minimalist Music, and was twice elected as the Society's President between 2013 and 2017. He has given numerous international conference papers on the music of Steve Reich, based on archival research carried out at the Paul Sacher Foundation, Basel, contributing a chapter to The Ashgate Research Companion to Minimalist and Postminimalist Music (2013). He received his Ph.D. on "Narrative Trails in the Speech-Based Music of Steve Reich" from the University of Southampton in 2013.
Martin Scherzinger is Associate Professor of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University. His research focusses on the relationship between sound, music, media and politics, and has appeared in publications including Postmodern Music/ Postmodern Thought (2002), Beyond Structural Listening? (2004), and The World of South African Music: A Reader (2005), and in the journals Current Musicology, Perspectives of New Music, and Cultural Critique.
Michael Tenzer is a performer, composer, scholar, and teacher. He has been active in the international proliferation of gamelan music since 1977, undertaking years of fieldwork in Indonesia and co-founding Gamelan Sekar Jaya in Berkeley in 1979. He was the first non-Balinese composer to create new works for Balinese ensembles in Bali. His book Gamelan Gong Kebyar: The Art of Twentieth Century Balinese Music (2000) received the Alan P. Merriam Prize of the Society for Ethnomusicology and the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award. He has a Ph.D. in Music Composition from UC Berkeley, and has been Professor of Music at the University of British Columbia since 1996.
