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“Minimalist Music” is an originally American genre of experimental or Downtown music named in the 1960s based mostly in consonant harmony, steady pulse (if not immobile drones), stasis or gradual transformation, and often reiteration of musical phrases or smaller units such as figures, motifs, and cells. It may include features such as additive process and phase shifting. Starting in the early 1960s as a scruffy underground scene in San Francisco alternative spaces and New York lofts, minimalism spread to become the most popular experimental music style of the late 20th century. The movement originally involved dozens of composers, although only five—Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, John Adams and, less visibly if more seminally, La Monte Young—emerged to become publicly associated with it in America. In Europe, its chief exponents were Louis Andriessen, Karel Goeyvaerts, Michael Nyman, Gavin Bryars, Steve Martland, Henryk Górecki, Arvo Pärt, and John Tavener. The term “minimalist music” was derived around [Read more...]
1970 by Michael Nyman from the concept of minimalism, which was earlier applied to the visual arts. For some of the music, especially that which transforms itself according to strict rules, the term “process music” has also been used.
Brief history
The word “minimalism” was first used in relation to music in 1968 by Michael Nyman in a review of Cornelius Cardew’s piece The Great Learning. Nyman later expanded his definition of minimalism in music in his 1974 book Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond. Tom Johnson, one of the few composers to self-identify as minimalist, also claims to have been first to use the word as new music critic for The Village Voice. He describes “minimalism”:
The idea of minimalism is much larger than most people realize. It includes, by definition, any music that works with limited or minimal materials: pieces that use only a few notes, pieces that use only a few words of text, or pieces written for very limited instruments, such as antique cymbals, bicycle wheels, or whiskey glasses. It includes pieces that sustain one basic electronic rumble for a long time. It includes pieces made exclusively from recordings of rivers and streams. It includes pieces that move in endless circles. It includes pieces that set up an unmoving wall of saxophone sound. It includes pieces that take a very long time to move gradually from one kind of music to another kind. It includes pieces that permit all possible pitches, as long as they fall between C and D. It includes pieces that slow the tempo down to two or three notes per minute.
The most prominent minimalist composers are John Adams, Louis Andriessen, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Terry Riley, and La Monte Young.
The early compositions of Glass and Reich are somewhat austere, with little embellishment on the principal theme. These are works for small instrumental ensembles, of which the composers were often members. In Glass’s case, these ensembles comprise organs, winds—particularly saxophones—and vocalists, while Reich’s works have more emphasis on mallet and percussion instruments. Most of Adams’s works are written for more traditional classical instrumentation, including full orchestra, string quartet, and solo piano.
The music of Reich and Glass drew early sponsorship from art galleries and museums, presented in conjunction with visual-art minimalists like Robert Morris (in Glass’s case), and Richard Serra, Bruce Nauman, and the filmmaker Richard Snow (in Reich’s case).
Early development
Musical minimalism had its origins in both conceptualism and twelve-tone music.
In 1960, Terry Riley wrote a string quartet in pure, uninflected C major. In 1963 Riley made two electronic works using tape delay, Mescalin Mix and The Gift, which injected the idea of repetition into minimalism. In 1964, Riley’s In C made persuasively engaging textures from layered performance of repeated melodic phrases. The work is scored for any group of instruments. In 1965 and 1966 Steve Reich produced three works—It’s Gonna Rain and Come Out for tape, and Piano Phase for live performers—that introduced the idea of phase shifting, or allowing two identical phrases or sound samples played at slightly differing speeds to repeat and slowly go out of phase with each other. Starting in 1968 with 1 + 1, Philip Glass wrote a series of works that incorporated additive process (form based on sequences such as 1, 1 2, 1 2 3, 1 2 3 4) into the repertoire of minimalist techniques; these works included Two Pages, Music in Fifths, Music in Contrary Motion, and others. By this point, development of a minimalist style was in full swing.
Minimalism in pop music
Minimal music is also present in pop music. “Tomorrow Never Knows” by The Beatles is an early example of a piece of music written only in C, making a collage from a drone played on an Indian tambura, a modal tune, bluesy instrumental figures, tape loops, ADT, vocals played through Leslie speakers, distorted close-up miking of instruments, and a psychedelically mystical “outlook.” Psychedelic rock acts of the 1960s and 70s used repetitive structures and droning techniques to express the hallucinations of LSD and other drugs in a musical language. The Velvet Underground had an especially close connection with minimal music, rooted in the close working relationship of John Cale and La Monte Young, who strongly influenced Cale’s work with his rock band. Another well-known minimal music example is Pink Floyd’s album A Saucerful of Secrets, with the minimal pieces “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun”, “Careful with That Axe, Eugene”, and “A Saucerful of Secrets”.
The later progressive rock, experimental rock, art rock, krautrock and avant-prog genres also began exploring minimal music techniques, including groups and artists such as The Soft Machine, King Crimson, Brian Eno, Robert Fripp and Mike Oldfield. Postminimalist composers like Rhys Chatham and Glenn Branca made no wave-inspired musical pieces based on minimal music structures, such as Chatham’s Guitar Trio (1977), while contemporaries such as Arthur Russell and Peter Gordon began to explore the links between minimalist structures and electronic dance music. In the 1980s and 1990s, artists working in the alternative rock, shoegaze, post rock and other genres, including the bands Spacemen 3 Spiritualized, Yo La Tengo, Sonic Youth, Tortoise, Mogwai, Stereolab, Experimental Audio Research, and Explosions in the Sky, all used minimal music to inform their song structures instead of conventional pop verse-chorus-verse patterns.
Following the minimal electronic music of Brian Eno and the krautrock band Tangerine Dream, 90s electronic dance music was largely influenced by minimalism and based on repetitive instrumental structures. Genres like Trance, Minimal techno, ambient. Well-known examples are The Orb, Orbital, Underworld and Aphex Twin.
Minimalist style in music
Leonard Meyer described minimalist music in 1994:
Because there is little sense of goal-directed motion, minimalist music does not seem to move from one place to another. Within any musical segment there may be some sense of direction, but frequently the segments fail to lead to or imply one another. They simply follow one another.
David Cope (1997) lists the following qualities as possible characteristics of minimalist music:
Silence
Concept music
Brevity
Continuities: requiring slow modulation of one or more parameters implying length
Phase and pattern music, including repetition implying length
Consonant harmony is a much noted feature: it means the use of intervals which in a tonal context would be considered to be “stable”, that is the form to which other chords are resolved by voice leading. The “texture” of much minimalist music is based on canonic imitation, exact repetitions of the same material, offset in time. Famous pieces that use this technique are the number section of Glass’ Einstein on the Beach and Adams’ Shaker Loops.
These traits have precedents in the history of European music—Richard Wagner, for instance, opened his opera Das Rheingold with several minutes of static tonality on an E-flat chord, with a linear crescendo of figurations.
Critical reception of minimalism
Ian MacDonald sums up a common, classical-music, traditionalist view that minimalism is the “passionless, sexless and emotionally blank soundtrack of the Machine Age, its utopian selfishness no more than an expression of human passivity in the face of mass-production and The Bomb”. According to this view, a pulse-rhythm is an artificial substitute for the energy of conviction and its “effects” are due not to any effort from artist or audience, but to a negative process of deliberate self-denial. As a music without focus or hierarchy, it is also without goal or struggle, as inert as the pre-planned corporate lifestyle for which it is the perfect accompaniment.
On the other hand, Kyle Gann, himself a minimalist composer, has argued that minimalism represented a predictable return to simplicity after the development of an earlier style had run its course to an extreme and unsurpassable complexity. Parallels include the advent of the simple Baroque continuo style following elaborate Renaissance polyphony and the simple early classical symphony following Bach’s monumental advances in Baroque counterpoint. In addition, critics have often overstated the simplicity of even early minimalism. Michael Nyman has pointed out that much of the charm of Steve Reich’s early music had to do with perceptual phenomena that were not actually played, but resulted from subtleties in the phase-shifting process. In other words the music often does not sound as simple as it looks.
In Gann’s further analysis, during the 1980s minimalism evolved into less strict, more complex styles such as postminimalism and totalism, breaking out of the strongly framed repetition and stasis of early minimalism, and enriching it with a confluence of other rhythmic and structural influences.
Minimalist composers
Notable composers
Notable minimalist composers include:
John Adams (born in the US)
Louis Andriessen (born in the Netherlands)
David Behrman (born in Austria)
Barbara Benary (born in the US)
David Borden (born in the US; and his ensemble Mother Mallard’s Portable Masterpiece Company)
Gavin Bryars (born in the UK)
Joseph Byrd (born in the US)
Tony Conrad (born in the US)
Julius Eastman (born and died in the US)
Ludovico Einaudi (born in Italy)
Brian Eno (born in the UK)
Frans Geysen (born in Belgium)
Jon Gibson (born in the US)
Philip Glass (born in the US)
John Godfrey (composer) (born in the UK)
Karel Goeyvaerts (born and died in Belgium)
Henryk Górecki (born in Poland)
Michael Harrison (born in the US)
Christopher Hobbs (born in the UK)
Terry Jennings (born and died in the US)
Douglas Leedy (born in the US)
Angus MacLise (born in the US, died in Kathmandu)
Richard Maxfield (born and died in the US)
Robert Moran (born in the US)
Phill Niblock (born in the US)
Michael Nyman (born in the UK)
Mike Oldfield (born in the UK)
Pauline Oliveros (born in the US)
Charlemagne Palestine (born in the US)
Rabinovitch-Barakovsky (born in Russia)
Steve Reich (born in the US)
Terry Riley (born in the US)
Arthur Russell (born in the UK)
Howard Skempton (born in the UK)
Dave Smith (born in the UK)
Ann Southam (born in Canada)
Yoshi Wada (born in Japan)
John White (born in the UK)
La Monte Young (born in the US)
Contemporary composers
Other more current minimalists include:
Australia
Andrew Chubb
Robert Davidson
Nigel Westlake
Belgium
Wim Mertens
Canada
Peter Hannan
Estonia
Arvo Pärt
Finland
Erkki Salmenhaara
France
Yann Tiersen
Germany
Peter Michael Hamel
Hauke Harder
Hans Otte
Ernstalbrecht Stiebler
Walter Zimmermann
Hungary
Zoltán Jeney
László Melis
László Sáry
László Vidovszky
Italy
Fulvio Caldini
Roberto Carnevale
Giovanni Sollima
Japan
Jo Kondo
Yoshi Wada (based in the United States)
Latvia
Armands Strazds
Netherlands
Simeon ten Holt
Poland
Henryk Górecki
Zygmunt Krauze
Tomasz Sikorski
Portugal
Ernesto Rodrigues
Serbia
Vladimir Toši?
United Kingdom
Joe Cutler
Graham Fitkin
Orlando Gough
Steve Martland
Andrew Poppy
Daniel Patrick Quinn
United States
John Adams
John Luther Adams
Glenn Branca
Harold Budd
Richard Chartier
Rhys Chatham (based in France)
Philip Corner (based in Italy)
Kurt Doles
Arnold Dreyblatt (based in Germany)
Daniel Goode
Rafael Anton Irisarri
Tom Johnson (based in France)
Ingram Marshall
Meredith Monk
Tim Risher
Frederic Rzewski
Wayne Siegel (based in Denmark)
Stars of the Lid (Adam Wiltzie & Brian McBride)
Mystic minimalists
A number of composers showing a distinctly religious influence have been labelled the “mystic minimalists”, or “holy minimalists”:
Henryk Górecki
Alan Hovhaness (the earliest mystic minimalist)
Giya Kancheli
Hans Otte
Arvo Pärt
John Tavener
P?teris Vasks
Precedent composers
Other composers whose works have been described as precedents to minimalism include:
Jakob van Domselaer, whose early-20th century experiments in translating the theories of Piet Mondrian’s De Stijl movement into music represent an early precedent to minimalist music.
Alexander Mosolov, whose orchestral composition Iron Foundry (1923) is made up of mechanical and repetitive patterns
George Antheil, whose 1924 Ballet Mecanique is characterized by much use of motoric and repetitive patterns, as well as an instrumentation made up of multiple player pianos and mallet percussion
Erik Satie, seen as a precursor of minimalism as in much of his music, for example his score for Francis Picabia’s 1924 film Entr’acte which consists of phrases, many borrowed from bawdy popular songs, ordered seemingly arbitrarily and repetitiously, providing a rhythmic counterpoint to the film.
Colin McPhee, whose Tabuh-Tabuhan for two pianos and orchestra (1936) features the use of motoric, repetitive, pentatonic patterns drawn from the music of Bali (and featuring a large section of tuned percussion)
Carl Orff, who, particularly in his later theater works Antigone (1940–49) and Oedipus der Tyrann (1957–58), utilized instrumentations (six pianos and multiple xylophones, in imitation of gamelan music) and musical patterns (motoric, repetitive, triadic) reminiscent of the later music of Steve Reich and Philip Glass
Yves Klein, whose 1949 Monotone Symphony (formally The Monotone-Silence Symphony, conceived 1947–1948) is an orchestral 40-minute piece whose first movement is an unvarying 20-minute drone and the second and last movement a 20-minute silence, predating by several years both the drone music works of La Monte Young and the “silent” 4’33″ of John Cage.
Morton Feldman, whose works prominently feature some sort of repetition as well as a sparseness
Alvin Lucier, whose acoustical experiments demand a stripped-down musical surface to bring out details in the phenomena
Anton Webern, whose economy of materials and sparse textures led many of the minimalists who were educated in serialism to turn to a reduction of means.
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