Conference Agenda

"Do women have the potential for a unique aesthetic?” So pondered the Canadian composer Ann Southam (1937-2010) in a scribbled, undated note. After building a successful career as a composer of electronic and experimental dance music, in 1975 Southam discovered feminism and minimalism almost simultaneously. Together, they brought her back to the piano, where she conceptualized a “life-sustaining” music that she connected to the history of repetitive “women’s work,” such as weaving, stitching, and washing. Soon she began integrating favorite twelve-tone rows into her minimalist pianism, “spinning” a “thread of notes” “one additional note at a time.”

This paper analyzes a selection of Southam’s piano works as acts of “craftivism.” Although her feminist music has received some attention from a small group of musicologists and a leading Canadian music critic, Tamara Bernstein, none have considered her method in relation to the history of feminist crafting. Craftivism as a term is just 15 years old—a description of knitting, weaving, sewing, and other hobby crafts that subversively reclaim craft’s associations with femininity and domesticity as acts of protest. Yet this conception of craft is not new: scholars have recently begun using the term to interrogate the long history of activist crafting by women, including the 1970s craft revival which may have inspired Southam’s aesthetic. The term “craftivism” has not previously been applied to music, yet Southam’s piano works, composed “by hand” at her much-loved instrument, bear much in common philosophically and musically with these humble domestic creations, similarly articulating what Fiona Hackney has called a “quiet activism of everyday making.” Southam’s music can also be understood as an artistic parallel to her remarkable philanthropic support for women’s organizations in Canada.

Like craftivism, Southam’s piano music articulates a “gentle protest” (Corbett, 2017)—a modest and beautiful celebration of women’s ordinary achievements, ambivalent to the ambition of the masculine masterwork.

In a 1998 interview, Canadian composer Ann Southam voiced her admiration for Terry Riley’s In C by stating that “[p]art of the way the piece works is a result of the way it’s written,” referencing Riley’s one-page score. Southam pursued a similarly economical approach to notation in her Glass Houses cycle for solo piano (1981, revised 2009) whose score appears to share several musical characteristics with both In C and minimalism at large, including “[a]uthorial noninterference,” “nonrepresentation,” and “depersonalized processes” (Scherzinger 2019). In each of Glass Houses’s fifteen movements, an ostinato repeats hundreds of times underneath a precisely ordered pattern of melodic tunes, all within a codified formal structure. Like Riley’s composition, on paper the music appears ceaseless, stable, and devoid of sustenance – that is, until we listen to it.

I argue that Southam resists contemporary tropes of minimalism – isolated immobility, parochial procedures, and inorganic impersonality – by infusing her cycles and processes with political meaning through notation. First, I briefly demonstrate how Southam’s score of Glass Houses changed from open-ended “tune sheets” and “form charts” in 1981 to a “pseudo-piano score” in 2009. In both versions, the pianist’s pitches are always determined but are rarely fully notated. Drawing on ethnographies with multiple performers (including pianists and marimbists), I trace how Southam’s “inconsistencies” between the formal alignments of ostinatos and tunes require performers to depart melodically, metrically, or formally from what is clearly notated.

Southam intentionally embedded feminist messages into her repetitive cycles by referencing “women’s work,” or patient, sustaining, non-climatic tasks such as weaving, folding laundry, or washing dishes (Bernstein 2021). Glass Houses thus challenges minimalism’s assumed apolitical nature (Reich 1968, Mertens 1983) by creating repetitive processes that are both subjective (contrary to Reich) and representational (contrary to Riley). Building on these references, I further argue that “women’s work” is physically manifested by performers’ hands as they craft their idiosyncratic interpretation of Southam’s technically unperformable score. This phenomenological reading also resonates with the Toronto Dance Theatre’s choreographed performances of the fifth movement (1984 and 2004) and Southam’s original notations which were, after all, written out by hand.

In December 1979, composer Philip Glass, choreographer Lucinda Childs, and visual artist Sol LeWitt premiered Dance, a 100-minute multimedia collaboration. Childs and Glass contributed process-driven music and choreography, and LeWitt added a film of the dance to be projected simultaneously with the performance. Taken on its own, each component was simple and relatively flat in affect. Together, however, the overlapping media created a spectacle, each one reinforcing and amplifying the others. The whole thing was also phenomenally expensive, with a budget over $200,000. Dance showed Glass and Childs moving away from their avant-garde roots and towards more expensive and elaborate productions intended for proscenium stages.

Musicologists Ryan Ebright, Sasha Metcalf, and John Kapusta have recently chronicled a similar trajectory in minimalist opera, away from the aesthetics of the avant-garde and towards big budget multimedia spectacle intended for major institutions. In this paper, I draw on documents from Childs’s archive and interviews with many of the original performers to explore how important dance is to understanding the trajectory of minimalist music during the late 1970s.

In a seeming stroke of irony, the 1970s, when Glass and other minimalists were moving towards maximalist aesthetics, was also the time in which the term ‘minimalism’ became common for this music; previously, critics had called it trance, repetitive, process, or hypnotic (Levaux). I argue that working with ‘minimal’ artists like Childs and LeWitt made Glass’s music legible as ‘minimalist’ in its own right, even as the resulting multimedia became more grandiose, complicated, and emotional. I conclude by demonstrating how the move towards ‘minimalism’ enabled an implicit whitening of hypnotic or repetitive music; minimalist choreographers such as Childs and Yvonne Rainer employed almost exclusively white dancers and often set themselves up against the emotion and virtuosity of both ballet and African American theatrical dance (Chaleff). Thus the paper ends by tying into recent scholarship by Sumanth Gopinath, Martin Scherzinger, and George Lewis exploring the racial dynamics of minimalist music.