Avantgarde-Musik der USA aus bundesdeutscher Sicht um 1970. Personalism versus Subjektphilosophie

When in 1972 Steve Reich's Drumming (1970/71) was performed in West Germany, critics-among them Clytus Gottwald, who published an article on the work in 1975-compared the performance modes of this work to dehumanized assembly-line labor. Reich responded indignantly, recalling years later the wish to "kick with his boots his critics' minds out of their skulls." Yet in wrangling over artistic phenomena's social implications, both Gottwald and Reich failed to grasp that the root of their disagreement derived less from aesthetic or labor-related issues than from differing conceptualizations about the individual, as mirrored in opposing positions toward the category within the context of the New Left movements on both sides of the Atlantic: Drawing on Kant, Hegel, and the Frankfurt School (represented in particular by Adorno), the traditional German position regarding the idea of the human subject-namely, a unique, active, spontaneous and emotive individual-continued to inform musicians' and musicologists' views of avant-garde music; the New Left in the United States aligned itself with the value system of personalism, a philosophical classification in which the concept of the individual is set apart from the ideal of a unique, and thus egocentric, isolated being. An analysis of Drumming, a paradigm of minimal music, demonstrates to what degree Reich's music articulates the personalist concept of the individual.