Minimalism, race, and cultural appropriation

The argument about Steve Reich and cultural appropriation usually goes something like this:

According to Reich, his music was not accepted by the academic (serial) music world of the 1960s-70s  because it was a return to a simpler view on life, a view that at least one critic referred to as “infantile.”  (Links to an external site.)

Reich sees minimalism as an expression of the perennial desire to return to the basics of music, the basics of expression:

“There have been periods in music called Mannerist,” Reich explains. “So at the end of Renaissance polyphony, it gets so convoluted, it’s brilliant … but it’s always going to be off in a corner because it’s so recherche and so refined. And this always presages some move towards a drastic simplification, a back to basics. Like: hey let’s just have a voice singing! There’ll be a story, there’ll be people acting it out … Opera!” (Links to an external site.)

“The skill – particularly with Boulez and Stockhausen – and the innovation is enormously admirable, enormously well done, and has its place in music history, no question about it. But, it attracted a minuscule audience.” … “Now, I just can’t … I don’t want to spend my life doing this.” (Links to an external site.)

But how did Reich communicate this basicness in his own music? In two ways: through form and through content.  

On the level of form there is an obvious basicness to his music (e.g., the repetition of simple patterns, form as a single unfolding process, etc.). But perhaps more problematic is his use of specific content: elements from non-western music (specifically, Ghanian music) with which he communicates to western audiences a sort of straightforward authenticity, a sort of directness of expression that is taken to be more in tune with the "natural rhythms of life" or some such thing.

Of course, these musical elements (e.g., interlocking drumming patterns, overlapping rhythmic patterns of various lengths that repeat in various configurations, the pervasive use of the marimba, etc.) are practices that are already embedded in their own web of social values and purposes in their home culture. On the charge of appropriation, Reich essentially removes these practices from their original contexts and meanings and treats them as a “resource” for his own western-style compositions. This is not a value judgment, it's a simple statement of fact. The practices of one culture become a means to the ends of another culture's practices.

The reason that this sort of thing might be concerning is that it has the potential to reinforce damaging stereotypes about specific cultures as well as the relationships between cultures. This concern is often expressed in terms of exoticism: treating a foreign culture as unusual or colorful in a simplistic and monolithic way in order to clarify the values and shortcomings of one’s own culture. 

So, for instance, we might think of modern western culture as being overly rationalized, complicated for its own sake, and "out of touch with its roots”, etc. One way we clarify this to ourselves is to contrast western culture with a stereotypical version of a non-western culture that we take to have, for instance, a more authentic relationship to “the body”, or that has a "simpler way of life", or that has a "stronger sense of community", etc. 

This is then communicated by taking signifiers from those other cultures, and placing them in western cultural products. Maybe this means using non-western folk song forms, or communal forms of music-making, or using non-western instruments or other signifiers in a western "classical" context, but the point is that the signifiers of one culture are used as “raw material” for the purposes of another culture's practices without maintaining the underlying context that gives meaning and value to the original practices in the original culture.

According to this argument, the main problems with this sort of cultural appropriation are that it:

1. uses other cultural practices (and the people responsible for them) as means to one's own ends, not theirs;
2. it upholds and sanitizes the structure of colonialism (i.e., using the rest of the world as raw material for one’s own cultural purposes).