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Minimalist music
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 and slow transformation, and often reiteration of musical phrases or smaller units such as figures, motifs, and cells. 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 four—Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, 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 1970 by Michael Nyman from the concept of minimalism, which was earlier applied to the visual arts.[1] For some of the music, especially that which transforms itself according to strict rules, the term "process music" has also been used.
Brief historyThe word "minimalism" was first used in relation to music in 1968 by Michael Nyman in a review of Cornelius Cardew's piece The Great Digest. 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.[2] The most prominent minimalist composers are John Adams, Louis Andriessen, Philip Glass, Michael Nyman, Steve Reich, Terry Riley, and La Monte Young. The early compositions of Glass and Reich tended to be very austere, with little embellishment on the principal theme, and written for small instrumental ensembles (of which the composers were members), made up, in Glass's case, of organs, winds—particularly saxophones—and vocalists, in Reich's case with more emphasis on mallet and percussion instruments. (These works are scored for any combination of such instruments: one piece by Reich, the aptly named Six Pianos, is scored just so.) Adams' works have most often been written for more traditional classical forces: orchestra, string quartet, even 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 Naumann, and the filmmaker Richard Snow, in Reich's.[3] Early developmentMusical 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 into minimalism the idea of repetition. Next, Riley's 1964 masterpiece In C made persuasively engaging textures from repeated phrases in performance. 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, i.e., allowing two nearly identical phrases or sound samples at slightly differing lengths or 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, the minimalist style was in full swing. Minimalist style in musicPeter Schickele, in an episode of Schickele Mix dedicated to minimalism, traced its origins to ostinati in the work of Johann Sebastian Bach and Henry Purcell. Some of 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. 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. In minimalism this function of stability is ignored. Another trait of the minimalist movement established at an early point in time is the use of phase in consonant context to provide variety. A famous example is Terry Riley's In C which gives musicians fragments of music which they are to play at their own pace until they stop. The resulting texture varies with the different choices that performers make. This means that 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. Over time minimalist composers adopted more and more chromatic material for repetition, for example Philip Glass's Symphony No. 2, and the operas of John Adams. There was also an increasing movement to incorporate found sounds, tape, electric or electronic sources of music. Minimalism in classical music often cross-fertilizes with popular experimental music, such as the work of Brian Eno and Mike Oldfield, as well as electronica and house, where DJs layer different recordings on top of each other without regard for their source. The development of minimalist music proceeds as a movement which was consciously aware of its being a post-serialist movement in music, drawing from the use of silence and layering in Cage, but seeking a more melodic basis for its materials. These traits were also the feature of composers who rejected 20th-century chromatic harmony for other reasons, often liturgical or religious. These composers often went back to Medieval and early Renaissance harmony and practice more deliberately, producing works which had more formally worked-out canonic imitation in a modal rather than tonal context. An early exponent here was the American Alan Hovhaness (in his works of the 1940s and 1950s), and more recently Arvo Pärt has done similar things in his work. Minimalism is sometimes associated with an ideology that justifies the moving away from the greater complexity of modernism by arguing from the point of view of postmodernism. Specifically, postmodernism states that progress in music is illusory, and therefore there is no need to have ever more advanced and complex systems of composing, that the purpose of minimalist music is repose, rather than "western" style development, and that minimalism embodies more "eastern" values of meditation, trance and concentration. Philip Glass specifically argues that there has been a disintegration of the concept of "high" and "low" music, and that music of this movement is important because it allows incorporation of, and dialog with, popular styles in a way that previous music did not. These arguments are far from universal among listeners, composers and performers of minimalist music, but are commonly cited in the struggles for performance, attention and acceptance of minimalist music. Minimalist music is frequently used in movie scores and other media to provide a backdrop or mood for a particular scene or opening, or as an episode in a score. It has been adopted for sections of work by composers from other styles, including the late work of Lukas Foss. There is a branch of British minimalism called systems music in which the note-to-note procedure is determined numerically or through a specific physical process like systematically changing the phase of electronically produced sine waves. The term was used informally as a term for all minimalism in the 1980s (due to Michael Nyman's popularity). Critical reception of minimalismIan 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.[4] A pulse-rhythm is an artificial substitute for the energy of conviction and its 'effects' 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.[5] 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.[6] Gann has further argued that the development of music represented by serialism was a one-sided development that focused on analytical elements and structural innovations often easier to identify in the score than to hear. 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.[7] Minimalist composersNotable minimalist composers include:
Other more current minimalists include:
A number of composers showing a distinctly religious influence have been labeled the "mystic minimalists", or "holy minimalists":
Other composers whose works have been described as precedents to minimalism include:
NotesSee alsoSources
External links
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