"I can no longer sit back and allow Minimalist infiltration, Minimalist indoctrination, Minimalist subversion, and the international Minimalist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids."

This is priceless:

It happened in 1969 at Berkeley. The campus was roiled by the Vietnam era's antiwar unrest, but that made little difference in my anti-counterculture counterpoint and fugue class. Even if we walked in coughing from the tear gas canisters that the National Guard had exploded outside to disperse demonstrators on Sproul Plaza, the atmosphere in the music building was monkishly directed toward another time and place.

The textbook we used was "Treatise on the Fugue" by André Gedalge, who had taught at the Paris Conservatory in the early 20th century. Absorb it all and you too could write like 19th century French opera composer Gounod. Our professor had been glazing over the eyes of uninterested little Gounods with the confining rules of species counterpoint for far too many years. We knew enough to take classes from him in the afternoon, after he had had a leisurely lunch at the local watering hole.

Then one day I walked into class ostentatiously carrying the new Columbia LP of Terry Riley's "In C." The jacket opened up to reveal the score of 53 short, melodic modules meant to be freely repeated against a continual pulse, defying every law of counterpoint ever concocted. When I showed that to the genially aristocratic professor, he went uncharacteristically ballistic.

Riley had studied in the department a decade earlier, and it was there that he and his classmate La Monte Young first began exploring the conceptual ideas that led to the rebellious, repetitive, nondirectional music that would ultimately be dubbed — because of what it seemed to have in common with the art movement of the '60s — Minimalism. Three years after Riley got his master's in composition from Berkeley in 1961, he put Minimalism on the musical map when he premiered "In C" in San Francisco.

"He betrayed Berkeley," my red-faced professor shouted. "He betrayed music. He betrayed Gedalge. He betrayed everything this department stands for. I will not allow that album to be brought into my classroom. This has nothing to do with Vietnam. It is about preserving civilization."

Via Alex Ross.