Minimal music (also called minimalism)"Minimalism in music has been defined as an aesthetic, a style, and a technique, each of which has been a suitable description of the term at certain points in the development of minimal music. However, two of these definitions of minimalism—aesthetic and style—no longer accurately represent the music that is often given that label." Johnson 1994, 742. is a form of art music or other compositional practice that employs limited or minimal musical materials. Prominent features of minimalist music include repetitive patterns or pulses, steady drones, consonant harmony, and reiteration of musical phrases or smaller units. It may include features such as phase shifting, resulting in what is termed phase music, or process techniques that follow strict rules, usually described as process music. The approach is marked by a non-narrative, non-teleological, non-representational approach, and calls attention to the activity of listening by focusing on the internal processes of the music.Johnson 1994, 744.
The approach originated on the West Coast of the United States in the late 1950s and early 1960s, particularly around the Bay Area, where La Monte Young, Terry Riley and Steve Reich were studying and living at the time. After the three composers moved to the East Coast, their music became associated with the New York Downtown music scene of the mid-1960s, where it was initially viewed as a form of experimental music called the New York Hypnotic School.Kostelanetz and Flemming 1997, 114–16. In the Western art music tradition, the American composers Moondog, La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich and Philip Glass are credited with being among the first to develop compositional techniques that exploit a minimal approach.Mertens 1983, 11.Michael Nyman, writing in the preface of Mertens' book refers to the style as "so-called minimal music" (Mertens 1983, 8)."The term 'minimal music' is generally used to describe a style of music that developed in America in the late 1960s and 1970s; and that was initially connected with the composers La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and Philip Glass" (Sitsky 2002, 361).Young, La Monte, "Notes on The Theatre of Eternal Music and The Tortoise, His Dreams and Journeys" (original PDF file ), 2000, Mela Foundation, www.melafoundation.org—Historical account and musical essay where Young explains why he considers himself the originator of the style vs. Tony Conrad and John Cale. In addition to Young, Riley, Reich, and Glass, other pioneers of American minimalism include John Adams, Dennis Johnson, Terry Jennings, Richard Maxfield, Pauline Oliveros, Phill Niblock, and James Tenney. In Europe, the music of Louis Andriessen, Karel Goeyvaerts, Michael Nyman, Howard Skempton, Éliane Radigue, Gavin Bryars, Steve Martland, Peter Michael Hamel, Henryk Górecki, Arvo Pärt and John Tavener exhibits minimalist traits.
It is unclear where the term minimal music originates. Steve Reich has suggested that it is attributable to Michael Nyman, an assertion that two scholars, Jonathan Bernard and Dan Warburton, have also made in writing. Philip Glass believes Tom Johnson coined the phrase.Kostelanetz and Flemming 1997, 114.Bernard 1993, 87 and 126.Warburton 1988, 141.
Brief history The word "minimal" was perhaps first used in relation to music in 1968 by Michael Nyman, who "deduced a recipe for the successful 'minimal-music' happening from the entertainment presented by Charlotte Moorman and Nam June Paik at the ICA", which included a performance of Springen by Henning Christiansen and a number of unidentified performance-art pieces.Nyman 1968, 519. Nyman later expanded his definition of minimal 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 many 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.Johnson 1989, 5.
Already in 1965 the art historian Barbara Rose had named La Monte Young's Dream Music, Morton Feldman's characteristically soft dynamics, and various unnamed composers "all, to a greater or lesser degree, indebted to John Cage" as examples of "minimal art",Rose 1965, 58, 65, 69. but did not specifically use the expression "minimal music".
The most prominent minimalist composers are La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, John Adams, and Louis Andriessen.Potter 2001; Schönberger 2001. Others who have been associated with this compositional approach include Terry Jennings, Gavin Bryars, Tom Johnson, Michael Nyman, Michael Parsons, Howard Skempton, Dave Smith, James Tenney, and John White. Among African-American composers, the minimalist aesthetic was embraced by figures such as jazz musician John Lewis and multidisciplinary artist Julius Eastman.
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 European classical music 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 Michael Snow (as performers, in Reich's case).
Early development The music of Moondog of the 1940s and '50s, which was based on counterpoint developing statically over steady pulses in often unusual time signatures influenced both Philip Glass and Steve Reich. Glass has written that he and Reich took Moondog's work "very seriously and understood and appreciated it much more than what we were exposed to at Juilliard".Glass 2007, 12.
La Monte Young's 1958 composition Trio for Strings consists almost entirely of long tones and rests. It has been described as an origin point for minimalist music.
One of the first minimalist compositions was November by Dennis Johnson, written in 1959. A work for solo piano that lasted around six hours, it demonstrated many features that would come to be associated with minimalism, such as diatonic tonality, phrase repetition, additive process, and duration. La Monte Young credits this piece as the inspiration for his own magnum opus, The Well-Tuned Piano.Gann 2010, 481.
In 1960, Terry Riley wrote a string quartet in pure, uninflected C major. In the early 1960s, Riley made two electronic works using tape delay, Mescalin Mix (1960-1962) and The Gift (1963), which injected the idea of repetition into minimalism. In 1964, Riley's In C made persuasively engaging textures from the layered performance of repeated melodic phrases. The work is scored for any group of instruments and/or voices. Keith Potter writes "its fifty-three modules notated on a single page, this work has frequently been viewed as the beginning of musical minimalism." Inspired by his work with Terry Riley on the premiere of In C, 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 different 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. Glass was influenced by Ravi Shankar and Indian music from the time he was assigned a film score transcription of music by Ravi Shankar into western notation. He realized that in the West time is divided like a slice of bread; Indians and other cultures take small units and string them together.
Some of Jean Sibelius's musical works have been seen as foreshadowing minimalism. This is perhaps best exemplified by some of his tone poems, such as the repetitive rhythmic patterns and gradual development of musical ideas in Nightride and Sunrise,Blumhofer, J.: Rethinking the Repertoire #8 – Sibelius’s “Night Ride and Sunrise”. The Arts Fuse, 5 March 2016. The Bard and Luonnotar.Bratby, R.: The Music of Jean Sibelius. Gramophpone The British conductor Thomas Kemp has suggested that Sibelius might be, in fact, viewed as a proto-minimalist. Among contemporary minimalists composers his influence can be heard, among others, in Arvo Pärt, John Adams and Philip Glass. Adams in particular has a strong affinity towards Sibelius, citing him as a substantial influence on his compositional style. Notably, Sibelius's Seventh Symphony provided a model for the ultimate form of Adams's Doctor Atomic Symphony.May, T.: John Adams on the Yin and Yang of His Musical Life. Juilliard Journal, Nov 19, 2018. Among Glass's compositions, his opera The Voyage has been described as having a particularly Sibelian quality.Schwartz, K. Robert (1996): Minimalists. 20th-Century Composers Series. London: Phaidon Press
Style According to Richard E. Rodda, minimalist music is based upon the repetition of slowly changing common chords [chords that are diatonic to more than one key, or else triads, either just major, or major and minor—see: common tone] in steady rhythms, often overlaid with a lyrical melody in long, arching phrases...[It] utilizes repetitive melodic patterns, consonant harmonies, motoric rhythms, and a deliberate striving for aural beauty."Rodda, 2 & 4. Timothy Johnson holds that, as a style, minimal music is primarily continuous in form, without disjunct sections. A direct consequence of this is an uninterrupted texture made up of interlocking rhythmic patterns and pulses. It is in addition marked by the use of bright timbres and an energetic manner. Its harmonic sonorities are distinctively simple, usually diatonic, often consist of familiar triads and seventh chords, and are presented in a slow harmonic rhythm. Johnson disagrees with Rodda, however, in finding that minimal music's most distinctive feature is the complete absence of extended melodic lines. Instead, there are only brief melodic segments, thrusting the organization, combination, and individual characteristics of short, repetitive rhythmic patterns into the foreground.Johnson 1994, 748.
Leonard B. Meyer described minimal music in 1994: Because there is little sense of goal-directed motion, [minimal] 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.Meyer 1994, 326. As Kyle Gann puts it, the tonality used in minimal music lacks "goal-oriented European association[s]".Gann 1998.