| Minimal music | |
|---|---|
| Stylistic origins | Experimental music, twelve-tone music, serialism, process music, Indian classical music |
| Cultural origins | United States |
| Typical instruments | Piano, orchestra, tuned percussion, electronic musical instruments, electronic postproduction equipment |
| Mainstream popularity | Low, except in the Experimental field |
| Derivative forms | Postminimalism, totalism |
| Subgenres | |
| Drone music[1] | |
| Fusion genres | |
| Repetitive music | |
Minimal music is a style of music associated with the work of American composers La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and Philip Glass.[2][3][4] It originated in the New York Downtown scene of the 1960s and was initially viewed as a form of experimental music called the New York Hypnotic School.[5] Prominent features of the style include 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. Minimal compositions that rely heavily on process techniques that follow strict rules are usually described using the term process music.
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 (Young, Riley, Reich, Glass, and later John Adams) emerged to become publicly associated with American minimal music. In Europe, the music of Louis Andriessen, Karel Goeyvaerts, Michael Nyman, Gavin Bryars, Steve Martland, 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, a claim two scholars, Jonathan Bernard and Dan Warburton, have also made in writing. Philip Glass believes Tom Johnson coined the phrase.[6][7][8]
Contents |
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.[9] 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.[10]
Already in 1965 the art historian Barabara 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",[11] but did not specifically use the expression "minimal music".
The most prominent minimalist composers are John Adams, Louis Andriessen, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Terry Riley, and La Monte Young.[12]
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 Michael Snow (as performers, in Reich's case).[7]
The music of Moondog of the 1940s and '50s, which was based on counterpoint developing statically over steady pulses in often unusual time signatures, had a strong influence on many early minimalist composers. Philip 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".[13]
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.
Minimal music has also had some influence on developments in popular music. The Experimental Rock act The Velvet Underground had a connection with the New York down-town scene from which minimal music emerged, rooted in the close working relationship of John Cale and La Monte Young, the latter influencing Cale's work with the band.[14]
During the 1970s progressive rock, experimental rock,[15] art rock, krautrock and avant-prog genres demonstrated the influence of experimental music, including minimalism, for example acts such as Soft Machine, King Crimson, Brian Eno, Robert Fripp and Mike Oldfield. In the 1980s and 1990s, artists working in alternative rock, shoegazing, post rock, and other genres, including the bands Spacemen 3,[16] Experimental Audio Research,[17] and Explosions in the Sky, continued in a similar vein.[18]
Following the minimal electronic music of Brian Eno and the krautrock band Tangerine Dream, 1990s electronic dance music was influenced by changes in technology that lead to the use of production methods based on repetition, especially the genres of trance, minimal techno and ambient. Well-known artists include The Orb, Orbital, Underworld and Aphex Twin.
Sherburne (2006) suggests that the noted similarities between minimal forms of dance music and American minimalism could easily be accidental. Much of the music technology used in EDM has traditionally been designed to suit loop based compositional methods, which may explain why certain stylistic features of minimal techno and other forms of electronic dance music sound similar to minimal art music.[19] One group who clearly did have an awareness of the American minimal tradition is the British Ambient act The Orb. Their 1990 production Little Fluffy Clouds features a sample from Steve Reich's work Electric Counterpoint (1987).[20] Further acknowledgement of Steve Reich's possible influence on EDM came with the release in 1999 of the Reich Remixed[21] tribute album which featured reinterpretations by artists such as DJ Spooky, Mantronik, Ken Ishii, and Coldcut, among others.[20]
Leonard 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.[22]
David Cope (1997) lists the following qualities as possible characteristics of minimal music:
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.
Ian MacDonald claimed 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".[23]
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.[24] 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.[25] 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.[26]
Notable minimalist composers include:
Other more current minimalists include:
A number of composers showing a distinctly religious influence have been labelled the "mystic minimalists", or "holy minimalists":
Other composers whose works have been described as precedents to minimalism include: