Minimalism

From NetNewMusic Wiki

Minimalism is a category of music that is largely based on repetition and/or the use of very spare elements (tones held for a long time, etc). The term was first used by Michael Nyman in 1968. While generally associated with music by Steve Reich,Philip Glass, Terry Riley and others, minimalism is often acknowledged to have had its origins in the early 1960's with the static music of La Monte Young. However, there are hints of minimalism in earlier work by John Cage, Anton Webern and others in the 20th Century. Some have even gone as far back as the first piece of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier or Wagner's Overture to Das Rheingold for evidence of minimalist concepts, and Ravel also used repetition in his Bolero, albeit not in a focused, truly minimalist fashion.

Some examples of composers who are often associated with minimalism, or who at least have written music with repetitive structures:

• La Monte Young
• Terry Riley
• Steve Reich
• Philip Glass
• John Adams
• Charlemagne Palestine
• Tom Johnson
• Louis Andriessen
• Terry Jennings
• Meredith Monk
• Phill Niblock
• Jon Gibson
• Laurie Spiegel

Some brief profiles that are important in the development of minimalism:

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La Monte Young (b. 1935), a Mormon born in a log cabin in Berne, Idaho, initially wrote 12-tone music as was the norm at the time in universities. Young studied with Richard Maxfield, and also had a background in jazz performance. Eventually, Young began writing music based on long sustained tones, such as his Trio for Strings (1958), while a student at the University of California at Berkeley. At the time, many of his colleagues thought he had gone "off the deep end." He persisted, however, and eventually was a founding member of the Fluxus Movement in downtown Manhattan, a group that included Tony Conrad, Yoko Ono, Angus Maclise, Henry Flynt and others. It was a movement that valued new, radical ideas. One work by Young from that time, X (any number) for Henry Flynt, consists of a single chord played as many times as desired. Inspired by John Cage, many works from that time consisted of concept pieces in which open-ended instructions would be provided and the performer was free to interpret them as he or she wished.

Inspired by the sound of a transformer wire, La Monte and his wife, the artist Marian Zazeela, developed a series of sound installations based around drones. La Monte Young also explored Indian chanting (as handed down by Pandit Pran Nath), as well as expanding on his interests in just intonation with works such as The Well-Tuned Piano and The Second Dream of the High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer (1962)

Inspired by Young, Terry Riley also developed minimalist works beginning in the 1960's, but instead of an emphasis on long sustained tones, Riley initially wrote works based on repetitive patterns, many of which have an improvisational element to them. The classic example is In C, which can be performed by any combination of instruments along with an instrument that provides a steady pulse of 16th notes.

After participating in the initial concerts of In C, Steve Reich began writing music for tape loops that involved subtle shifts of phase between the two loops. He did not believe this type of pattern music could be easily performed by live musicians, but with the composition of 'Piano Phase, Reich embarked in a series of works that utilized repetitive structures, initially for his own ensemble.

Philip Glass was also a very important minimalist composer. Like Reich, he utilized repetitive patterns, but his patterns were based more on Indian talas in which, through an additive process, the rhythmic structure is built up into fairly lengthy groupings. Glass, in the 1970's, also expanded his focus by combining fundamental harmonic structures with his rhythms.

So what happened? Eventually, minimalism in its truest sense evolved into something that was not as basic as playing a chord over and over, or repeating a rhythmic pattern multiple times. With the possible exception of Young, all of the early minimalist composers expanded their techniques to include dissonance, more traditional counterpoint and became less focused on repetition. Composers such as Morton Feldman or Arvo Part have also been termed "minimalist" because of their use of repetitive elements or sparse writing, even though repetition is not a major focus of their music. The term, "minimalist" has become applied to many composers who may not desire that categorization, including Reich and Glass.