Minimalist music
Encyclopedia
Minimal music is a style of music associated with the work of American composers La Monte Young
, Terry Riley
, Steve Reich
, and Philip Glass
. 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. 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.
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 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":
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", 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
.
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).
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".
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.
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.
During the 1970s progressive rock
, experimental rock
, 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
, Experimental Audio Research, and Explosions in the Sky
, continued in a similar vein.
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
. 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). Further acknowledgement of Steve Reich's possible influence on EDM came with the release in 1999 of the Reich Remixed tribute album which featured reinterpretations by artists such as DJ Spooky
, Mantronik, Ken Ishii
, and Coldcut
, among others.
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.
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
".
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.
":
La Monte Young
La Monte Thornton Young is an American avant-garde composer, musician, and artist.Young is generally recognized as the first minimalist composer. His works have been included among the most important and radical post-World War II avant-garde, experimental, and contemporary music. Young is...
, Terry Riley
Terry Riley
Terrence Mitchell Riley, is an American composer intrinsically associated with the minimalist school of Western classical music and was a pioneer of the movement...
, Steve Reich
Steve Reich
Stephen Michael "Steve" Reich is an American composer who together with La Monte Young, Terry Riley, and Philip Glass is a pioneering composer of minimal music...
, and Philip Glass
Philip Glass
Philip Glass is an American composer. He is considered to be one of the most influential composers of the late 20th century and is widely acknowledged as a composer who has brought art music to the public .His music is often described as minimalist, along with...
. It originated in the New York Downtown scene
Downtown music
Downtown music is a subdivision of American music, closely related to experimental music. The scene the term describes began in 1960, when Yoko Ono—one of the Fluxus artists, at that time still seven years away from meeting John Lennon—opened her loft at 112 Chambers Street to be used...
of the 1960s and was initially viewed as a form of experimental
Experimental music
Experimental music refers, in the English-language literature, to a compositional tradition which arose in the mid-20th century, applied particularly in North America to music composed in such a way that its outcome is unforeseeable. Its most famous and influential exponent was John Cage...
music called the New York Hypnotic School. Prominent features of the style include consonant harmony
Consonance and dissonance
In music, a consonance is a harmony, chord, or interval considered stable, as opposed to a dissonance , which is considered to be unstable...
, steady pulse (if not immobile drones
Drone (music)
In music, a drone is a harmonic or monophonic effect or accompaniment where a note or chord is continuously sounded throughout most or all of a piece. The word drone is also used to refer to any part of a musical instrument that is just used to produce such an effect.-A musical effect:A drone...
), stasis or gradual transformation, and often reiteration of musical phrases
Phrase (music)
In music and music theory, phrase and phrasing are concepts and practices related to grouping consecutive melodic notes, both in their composition and performance...
or smaller units such as figures
Figure (music)
A musical figure is the shortest idea in music, a short succession of notes, often recurring. It may have melodic pitch, harmonic progression and rhythmic . The 1964 Grove's Dictionary defines the figure as "the exact counterpart of the German 'motiv' and the French 'motif'": it produces a "single...
, motifs
Motif (music)
In music, a motif or motive is a short musical idea, a salient recurring figure, musical fragment or succession of notes that has some special importance in or is characteristic of a composition....
, and cells
Cell (music)
The 1957 Encyclopédie Larousse defines a cell in music as a "small rhythmic and melodic design that can be isolated, or can make up one part of a thematic context." The cell may be distinguished from the figure or motif:...
. 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
Process music
Process music is music that arises from a process. It may make that process audible to the listener, or the process may be concealed. Primarily begun in the 1960s, diverse composers have employed divergent methods and styles of process...
.
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
Louis Andriessen
Louis Andriessen is a Dutch composer and pianist based in Amsterdam. He teaches composition at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague...
, Karel Goeyvaerts
Karel Goeyvaerts
Karel Goeyvaerts was a Belgian composer.-Life:After studies at the Royal Flemish Music Conservatory in Antwerp, Goeyvaerts studied composition in Paris with Darius Milhaud and analysis with Olivier Messiaen...
, Michael Nyman
Michael Nyman
Michael Laurence Nyman, CBE is an English composer of minimalist music, pianist, librettist and musicologist, known for the many film scores he wrote during his lengthy collaboration with the filmmaker Peter Greenaway, and his multi-platinum soundtrack album to Jane Campion's The Piano...
, Gavin Bryars
Gavin Bryars
Richard Gavin Bryars is an English composer and double bassist. He has been active in, or has produced works in, a variety of styles of music, including jazz, free improvisation, minimalism, historicism, experimental music, avant-garde and neoclassicism.-Early life and career:Born in Goole, East...
, Steve Martland
Steve Martland
Steve Martland is an English composer.-Life and Music :Martland was born in Liverpool, England and studied composition at Liverpool University and in the Netherlands with Louis Andriessen...
, Henryk Górecki
Henryk Górecki
Henryk Mikołaj Górecki was a composer of contemporary classical music. He studied at the State Higher School of Music in Katowice between 1955 and 1960. In 1968, he joined the faculty and rose to provost before resigning in 1979. Górecki became a leading figure of the Polish avant-garde during...
, Arvo Pärt
Arvo Pärt
Arvo Pärt is an Estonian classical composer and one of the most prominent living composers of sacred music. Since the late 1970s, Pärt has worked in a minimalist style that employs his self-made compositional technique, tintinnabuli. His music also finds its inspiration and influence from...
, and John Tavener
John Tavener
Sir John Tavener is a British composer, best known for such religious, minimal works as "The Whale", and "Funeral Ikos"...
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
Philip Glass
Philip Glass is an American composer. He is considered to be one of the most influential composers of the late 20th century and is widely acknowledged as a composer who has brought art music to the public .His music is often described as minimalist, along with...
believes Tom Johnson
Tom Johnson (composer)
Tom Johnson , is an American minimalist composer, a former student of Morton Feldman.-Career:His pieces are most often based simply on mathematical and logical processes, such as tiling, which he attempts to make as clear as possible...
coined the phrase.
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 MoormanCharlotte Moorman
Madeline Charlotte Moorman Garside was an American cellist and performance artist.She was born in Little Rock, Arkansas. She studied cello from age ten and won a scholarship to Centenary College where she took her B.A. in music in 1955. She received her M.A...
and Nam June Paik
Nam June Paik
Nam June Paik was a Korean American artist. He worked with a variety of media and is considered to be the first video artist....
at the ICA
Institute of Contemporary Arts
The Institute of Contemporary Arts is an artistic and cultural centre on The Mall in London, just off Trafalgar Square. It is located within Nash House, part of Carlton House Terrace, near the Duke of York Steps and Admiralty Arch...
", which included a performance of Springen by Henning Christiansen
Henning Christiansen
Henning Christiansen was a Danish composer and an active member of the Fluxus-movement. He worked with artists such as Joseph Beuys and Nam June Paik, as well as with his wife Ursula Reuter Christiansen...
and a number of unidentified performance-art pieces. 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
The Village Voice
The Village Voice is a free weekly newspaper and news and features website in New York City that features investigative articles, analysis of current affairs and culture, arts and music coverage, and events listings for New York City...
. 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.
Already in 1965 the art historian Barabara Rose had named La Monte Young's Dream Music, Morton Feldman
Morton Feldman
Morton Feldman was an American composer, born in New York City.A major figure in 20th century music, Feldman was a pioneer of indeterminate music, a development associated with the experimental New York School of composers also including John Cage, Christian Wolff, and Earle Brown...
's characteristically soft dynamics, and various unnamed composers "all, to a greater or lesser degree, indebted to John Cage
John Cage
John Milton Cage Jr. was an American composer, music theorist, writer, philosopher and artist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde...
" as examples of "minimal art", but did not specifically use the expression "minimal music".
The most prominent minimalist composers are John Adams
John Coolidge Adams
John Coolidge Adams is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American composer with strong roots in minimalism. His best-known works include Short Ride in a Fast Machine , On the Transmigration of Souls , a choral piece commemorating the victims of the September 11, 2001 attacks , and Shaker...
, Louis Andriessen
Louis Andriessen
Louis Andriessen is a Dutch composer and pianist based in Amsterdam. He teaches composition at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague...
, Philip Glass
Philip Glass
Philip Glass is an American composer. He is considered to be one of the most influential composers of the late 20th century and is widely acknowledged as a composer who has brought art music to the public .His music is often described as minimalist, along with...
, Steve Reich
Steve Reich
Stephen Michael "Steve" Reich is an American composer who together with La Monte Young, Terry Riley, and Philip Glass is a pioneering composer of minimal music...
, Terry Riley
Terry Riley
Terrence Mitchell Riley, is an American composer intrinsically associated with the minimalist school of Western classical music and was a pioneer of the movement...
, and La Monte Young
La Monte Young
La Monte Thornton Young is an American avant-garde composer, musician, and artist.Young is generally recognized as the first minimalist composer. His works have been included among the most important and radical post-World War II avant-garde, experimental, and contemporary music. Young is...
.
The early compositions of Glass and Reich are somewhat austere, with little embellishment on the principal theme
Theme (music)
In music, a theme is the material, usually a recognizable melody, upon which part or all of a composition is based.-Characteristics:A theme may be perceivable as a complete musical expression in itself, separate from the work in which it is found . In contrast to an idea or motif, a theme is...
. 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
Orchestra
An orchestra is a sizable instrumental ensemble that contains sections of string, brass, woodwind, and percussion instruments. The term orchestra derives from the Greek ορχήστρα, the name for the area in front of an ancient Greek stage reserved for the Greek chorus...
, string quartet
String quartet
A string quartet is a musical ensemble of four string players – usually two violin players, a violist and a cellist – or a piece written to be performed by such a group...
, 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
Robert Morris (artist)
Robert Morris is an American sculptor, conceptual artist and writer. He is regarded as one of the most prominent theorists of Minimalism along with Donald Judd but he has also made important contributions to the development of performance art, land art, the Process Art movement and installation...
(in Glass's case), and Richard Serra
Richard Serra
Richard Serra is an American minimalist sculptor and video artist known for working with large-scale assemblies of sheet metal. Serra was involved in the Process Art Movement.-Early life and education:...
, Bruce Nauman
Bruce Nauman
Bruce Nauman is a contemporary American artist. His practice spans a broad range of media including sculpture, photography, neon, video, drawing, printmaking, and performance. Nauman lives in Galisteo, New Mexico....
, and the filmmaker Michael Snow (as performers, in Reich's case).
Early development
The music of MoondogMoondog
Moondog, born Louis Thomas Hardin , was a blind American composer, musician, poet and inventor of several musical instruments. Moving to New York as a young man, Moondog made a deliberate decision to make his home on the streets there, where he spent approximately twenty of the thirty years he...
of the 1940s and '50s, which was based on counterpoint
Counterpoint
In music, counterpoint is the relationship between two or more voices that are independent in contour and rhythm and are harmonically interdependent . It has been most commonly identified in classical music, developing strongly during the Renaissance and in much of the common practice period,...
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".
In 1960, Terry Riley
Terry Riley
Terrence Mitchell Riley, is an American composer intrinsically associated with the minimalist school of Western classical music and was a pioneer of the movement...
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
In C
In C is a semi-aleatoric musical piece composed by Terry Riley in 1964 for any number of people, although he suggests "a group of about 35 is desired if possible but smaller or larger groups will work"...
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
Steve Reich
Stephen Michael "Steve" Reich is an American composer who together with La Monte Young, Terry Riley, and Philip Glass is a pioneering composer of minimal music...
produced three works—It's Gonna Rain
It's Gonna Rain
It's Gonna Rain is a minimalist musical composition for magnetic tape written by Steve Reich in 1965. It lasts approximately 17 minutes and 50 seconds. It was Reich's first major work and a landmark in minimalism and process music.-Analysis:...
and Come Out
Come Out (Reich)
Come Out is a 1966 piece by American composer Steve Reich. He was asked to write this piece to be performed at a benefit for the retrial of the Harlem Six, six black youths arrested for committing a murder during the Harlem Riot of 1964 for which only one of the six was responsible...
for tape, and Piano Phase
Piano Phase
Piano Phase is a piece of music written in 1967 by the minimalist composer Steve Reich for two pianos. It is his first attempt at applying his "phasing" technique, which he had previously used in the tape pieces It's Gonna Rain and Come Out , to live performance.Reich's phasing works generally...
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 has also had some influence on developments in popular music. The Psychedelic rockPsychedelic rock
Psychedelic rock is a style of rock music that is inspired or influenced by psychedelic culture and attempts to replicate and enhance the mind-altering experiences of psychedelic drugs. It emerged during the mid 1960s among folk rock and blues rock bands in United States and the United Kingdom...
act The Velvet Underground
The Velvet Underground
The Velvet Underground was an American rock band formed in New York City. First active from 1964 to 1973, their best-known members were Lou Reed and John Cale, who both went on to find success as solo artists. Although experiencing little commercial success while together, the band is often cited...
had a connection with the New York down-town scene from which minimal music emerged, rooted in the close working relationship of John Cale
John Cale
John Davies Cale, OBE is a Welsh musician, composer, singer-songwriter and record producer who was a founding member of the experimental rock band The Velvet Underground....
and La Monte Young
La Monte Young
La Monte Thornton Young is an American avant-garde composer, musician, and artist.Young is generally recognized as the first minimalist composer. His works have been included among the most important and radical post-World War II avant-garde, experimental, and contemporary music. Young is...
, the latter influencing Cale's work with the band.
During the 1970s progressive rock
Progressive rock
Progressive rock is a subgenre of rock music that developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s as part of a "mostly British attempt to elevate rock music to new levels of artistic credibility." John Covach, in Contemporary Music Review, says that many thought it would not just "succeed the pop of...
, experimental rock
Experimental rock
Experimental rock or avant-garde rock is a type of music based on rock which experiments with the basic elements of the genre, or which pushes the boundaries of common composition and performance technique....
, art rock
Art rock
Art rock is a subgenre of rock music that originated in the United Kingdom in the 1960s, with influences from art, avant-garde, and classical music. The first usage of the term, according to Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, was in 1968. Influenced by the work of The Beatles, most notably their Sgt...
, krautrock
Krautrock
Krautrock is a generic name for the experimental music scenes that appeared in Germany in the late 1960s and gained popularity throughout the 1970s, especially in Britain. The term is a result of the English-speaking world's reception of the music at the time and not a reference to any one...
and avant-prog genres demonstrated the influence of experimental music
Experimental music
Experimental music refers, in the English-language literature, to a compositional tradition which arose in the mid-20th century, applied particularly in North America to music composed in such a way that its outcome is unforeseeable. Its most famous and influential exponent was John Cage...
, including minimalism, for example acts such as Soft Machine
Soft Machine
Soft Machine were an English rock band from Canterbury, named after the book The Soft Machine by William S. Burroughs. They were one of the central bands in the Canterbury scene, and helped pioneer the progressive rock genre...
, King Crimson
King Crimson
King Crimson are a rock band founded in London, England in 1969. Often categorised as a foundational progressive rock group, the band have incorporated diverse influences and instrumentation during their history...
, Brian Eno
Brian Eno
Brian Peter George St. John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno , commonly known as Brian Eno or simply as Eno , is an English musician, composer, record producer, singer and visual artist, known as one of the principal innovators of ambient music.Eno studied at Colchester Institute art school in Essex,...
, Robert Fripp
Robert Fripp
Robert Fripp is an English guitarist, composer and record producer. He was ranked 42nd on Rolling Stone magazine's 2003 list of the "100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time" and #47 on Gibson.com’s "Top 50 Guitarists of All Time". Among rock guitarists, Fripp is a master of crosspicking, a technique...
and Mike Oldfield
Mike Oldfield
Michael Gordon Oldfield is an English multi-instrumentalist musician and composer, working a style that blends progressive rock, folk, ethnic or world music, classical music, electronic music, New Age, and more recently, dance. His music is often elaborate and complex in nature...
. In the 1980s and 1990s, artists working in alternative rock
Alternative rock
Alternative rock is a genre of rock music and a term used to describe a diverse musical movement that emerged from the independent music underground of the 1980s and became widely popular by the 1990s...
, shoegazing
Shoegazing
Shoegazing is a subgenre of alternative rock that emerged from the United Kingdom in the late 1980s. It lasted there until the mid 1990s, with a critical zenith reached in 1990 and 1991...
, post rock, and other genres, including the bands Spacemen 3
Spacemen 3
Spacemen 3 were an English alternative rock band, formed in 1982 in Rugby, Warwickshire by Peter Kember and Jason Pierce. Their music was "colorfully mind-altering, but not in the sense of the acid rock of the '60s; instead, the band developed its own minimalistic psychedelia"...
, Experimental Audio Research, and Explosions in the Sky
Explosions in the Sky
Explosions in the Sky is an American post-rock band from Texas. The band has garnered popularity beyond the post-rock scene for their elaborately developed guitar work, narratively styled instrumentals, what they refer to as "cathartic mini-symphonies," and their enthusiastic and emotional live shows...
, continued in a similar vein.
Following the minimal electronic music of Brian Eno and the krautrock band Tangerine Dream
Tangerine Dream
Tangerine Dream is a German electronic music group founded in 1967 by Edgar Froese. The band has undergone many personnel changes over the years, with Froese being the only continuous member...
, 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
Trance music
Trance is a genre of electronic dance music that developed in the 1990s.:251 It is generally characterized by a tempo of between 125 and 150 bpm,:252 repeating melodic synthesizer phrases, and a musical form that builds up and breaks down throughout a track...
, minimal techno
Minimal techno
Minimal techno is a minimalist sub-genre of techno. It is characterized by a stripped-down aesthetic that exploits the use of repetition, and understated development. This style of dance music production generally adheres to the motto less is more; a principle that has been previously utilized, to...
and ambient
Ambient music
Ambient music is a musical genre that focuses largely on the timbral characteristics of sounds, often organized or performed to evoke an "atmospheric", "visual" or "unobtrusive" quality.- History :...
. Well-known artists include The Orb
The Orb
Throughout 1989, the Orb, along with Martin Glover, developed the musical genre of ambient house through the use of a diverse array of samples and recordings. The culmination of its musical work came toward the end of the year when the group recorded a session for John Peel on BBC Radio 1...
, Orbital
Orbital (band)
Orbital are a British electronic dance music duo from Sevenoaks, England consisting of brothers Phil and Paul Hartnoll. Their career initially ran from 1989 until 2004, but in 2009 they announced that they would be reforming and headlining The Big Chill, in addition to a number of other live shows...
, Underworld
Underworld (band)
Underworld are a British electronic group, and principal name under which duo Karl Hyde and Rick Smith have recorded together since 1980.- Early years: 1979–1986 :...
and Aphex Twin
Aphex Twin
Richard David James , best known under the pseudonym Aphex Twin, is an Irish-born electronic musician and composer described as "the most inventive and influential figure in contemporary electronic music"...
.
Sherburne (2006) suggests that the noted similarities between minimal forms of dance music and American minimalism
Minimalist 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. 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....
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
Electronic dance music
Electronic dance music is electronic music produced primarily for the purposes of use within a nightclub setting, or in an environment that is centered upon dance-based entertainment...
sound similar to minimal art music
Art music
Art music is an umbrella term used to refer to musical traditions implying advanced structural and theoretical considerations and a written musical tradition...
. One group who clearly did have an awareness of the American minimal tradition is the British Ambient
Ambient music
Ambient music is a musical genre that focuses largely on the timbral characteristics of sounds, often organized or performed to evoke an "atmospheric", "visual" or "unobtrusive" quality.- History :...
act The Orb
The Orb
Throughout 1989, the Orb, along with Martin Glover, developed the musical genre of ambient house through the use of a diverse array of samples and recordings. The culmination of its musical work came toward the end of the year when the group recorded a session for John Peel on BBC Radio 1...
. Their 1990 production Little Fluffy Clouds
Little Fluffy Clouds
"Little Fluffy Clouds" is a single released by the English ambient house group The Orb. It was originally released in July 1990 on the record label Big Life and peaked at #87 on the UK Singles Chart. The Orb also included it on their 1991 double album The Orb's Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld...
features a sample from Steve Reich's work Electric Counterpoint
Electric Counterpoint
Electric Counterpoint is a minimalist composition written by American composer Steve Reich. The piece consists of three movements, "Fast", "Slow", and "Fast"...
(1987). Further acknowledgement of Steve Reich's possible influence on EDM came with the release in 1999 of the Reich Remixed tribute album which featured reinterpretations by artists such as DJ Spooky
DJ Spooky
Paul D. Miller , known by his stage name DJ Spooky, That Subliminal Kid, is a Washington DC-born electronic and experimental hip hop musician whose work is often called by critics or his fans as "illbient" or "trip hop". He is a turntablist, a producer, a philosopher, and an author...
, Mantronik, Ken Ishii
Ken Ishii
is a Japanese techno DJ and producer from Sapporo. He graduated from Hitotsubashi University. He has released work under his own name as well as under the pseudonyms: FLR, Flare, UTU, Yoga, and Rising Sun....
, and Coldcut
Coldcut
Coldcut are an English dance music duo, comprising Matt Black and Jonathan More. Their signature style is electronic dance music, featuring cut up samples of hip hop, breaks, jazz, spoken word and various other types of music, as well as video and multimedia.-1980s:In 1986, computer programmer Matt...
, among others.
Minimalist style in music
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.
David Cope
David Cope
David Cope is an American author, composer, scientist, and professor emeritus of music at the University of California, Santa Cruz...
(1997) lists the following qualities as possible characteristics of minimal music:
- SilenceSilenceSilence is the relative or total lack of audible sound. By analogy, the word silence may also refer to any absence of communication, even in media other than speech....
- ConceptConceptual artConceptual art is art in which the concept or idea involved in the work take precedence over traditional aesthetic and material concerns. Many of the works, sometimes called installations, of the artist Sol LeWitt may be constructed by anyone simply by following a set of written instructions...
music - Brevity
- Continuities: requiring slow modulationModulation (music)In music, modulation is most commonly the act or process of changing from one key to another. This may or may not be accompanied by a change in key signature. Modulations articulate or create the structure or form of many pieces, as well as add interest...
of one or more parameterParameterParameter from Ancient Greek παρά also “para” meaning “beside, subsidiary” and μέτρον also “metron” meaning “measure”, can be interpreted in mathematics, logic, linguistics, environmental science and other disciplines....
s [implying length] - Phase and patternPatternA pattern, from the French patron, is a type of theme of recurring events or objects, sometimes referred to as elements of a set of objects.These elements repeat in a predictable manner...
music, including repetition [implying length]
Consonant harmony is a much noted feature: it means the use of intervals which in a tonal
Tonality
Tonality is a system of music in which specific hierarchical pitch relationships are based on a key "center", or tonic. The term tonalité originated with Alexandre-Étienne Choron and was borrowed by François-Joseph Fétis in 1840...
context would be considered to be "stable", that is the form to which other chords are resolved by voice leading
Voice leading
In musical composition, voice leading is the term used to refer to a decision-making consideration when arranging voices , namely, how each voice should move in advancing from each chord to the next.- Details :...
. 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
Einstein on the Beach
Einstein on the Beach is an opera that premiered on July 25, 1976 at the Avignon Festival in France, scored and written by Philip Glass and designed and directed by theatrical producer Robert Wilson. It also contains writings by Christopher Knowles, Samuel M. Johnson and Lucinda Childs...
and Adams' Shaker Loops
Shaker Loops
Written in 1978 by the American composer John Adams, Shaker Loops was originally written for string septet. A version for string orchestra followed in 1983 and first performed in April of that year at Alice Tully Hall New York, by the American Composers Orchestra conducted by Michael Tilson...
.
These traits have precedents in the history of European music—Richard Wagner
Richard Wagner
Wilhelm Richard Wagner was a German composer, conductor, theatre director, philosopher, music theorist, poet, essayist and writer primarily known for his operas...
, for instance, opened his opera Das Rheingold
Das Rheingold
is the first of the four operas that constitute Richard Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen . It was originally written as an introduction to the tripartite Ring, but the cycle is now generally regarded as consisting of four individual operas.Das Rheingold received its premiere at the National Theatre...
with several minutes of static tonality on an E-flat chord, with a linear crescendo of figurations.
Critical reception of minimalism
Ian MacDonaldIan MacDonald
Ian MacCormick was a British music critic and author, best known for Revolution in the Head, his forensic history of The Beatles which borrowed techniques from art historians, and The New Shostakovich, a controversial study of the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich...
claimed that minimalism is the "passionless, sexless and emotionally blank soundtrack of the Machine Age
Machine Age
The Machine Age is a term associated mostly with the early 20th century, sometimes also including the late 19th century. An approximate dating would be about 1880 to 1945. Considered to be at a peak in the time between the first and second world wars, it forms a late part of the Industrial Age...
, its utopian selfishness no more than an expression of human passivity in the face of mass-production and The Bomb
The Bomb
The Bomb may refer to:* A nuclear weapon, from "the atomic bomb"* An English language idiom to characterize something as great or good...
".
On the other hand, Kyle Gann
Kyle Gann
Kyle Eugene Gann is an American professor of music, critic and composer born in Dallas, Texas. As a critic for The Village Voice and other publications he has been a supporter of progressive music including such Downtown movements as postminimalism and totalism.- As composer :As a composer his...
, 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
Figured bass
Figured bass, or thoroughbass, is a kind of integer musical notation used to indicate intervals, chords, and non-chord tones, in relation to a bass note...
style following elaborate Renaissance
Renaissance
The Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned roughly the 14th to the 17th century, beginning in Italy in the Late Middle Ages and later spreading to the rest of Europe. The term is also used more loosely to refer to the historical era, but since the changes of the Renaissance were not...
polyphony
Polyphony
In music, polyphony is a texture consisting of two or more independent melodic voices, as opposed to music with just one voice or music with one dominant melodic voice accompanied by chords ....
and the simple early classical symphony
Symphony
A symphony is an extended musical composition in Western classical music, scored almost always for orchestra. A symphony usually contains at least one movement or episode composed according to the sonata principle...
following Bach
Johann Sebastian Bach
Johann Sebastian Bach was a German composer, organist, harpsichordist, violist, and violinist whose sacred and secular works for choir, orchestra, and solo instruments drew together the strands of the Baroque period and brought it to its ultimate maturity...
's monumental advances in Baroque counterpoint
Counterpoint
In music, counterpoint is the relationship between two or more voices that are independent in contour and rhythm and are harmonically interdependent . It has been most commonly identified in classical music, developing strongly during the Renaissance and in much of the common practice period,...
. 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
Steve Reich
Stephen Michael "Steve" Reich is an American composer who together with La Monte Young, Terry Riley, and Philip Glass is a pioneering composer of minimal music...
'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
Postminimalism
Postminimalism is an art term coined by Robert Pincus-Witten in 1971 used in various artistic fields for work which is influenced by, or attempts to develop and go beyond, the aesthetic of minimalism...
and totalism
Totalism (music)
In music, totalism is a term for a style of art music that arose in the 1980s and 1990s as a developing response to minimalism—parallel to postminimalism, but generally among a slightly younger generation, born in the 1950s....
, breaking out of the strongly framed repetition and stasis of early minimalism, and enriching it with a confluence of other rhythmic and structural influences.
Notable composers
Notable minimalist composers include:- John Adams (born in the US)
- Louis AndriessenLouis AndriessenLouis Andriessen is a Dutch composer and pianist based in Amsterdam. He teaches composition at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague...
(born in the Netherlands) - David BehrmanDavid BehrmanDavid Behrman is a US composer and the producer of Columbia Records' Music of Our Time series. He was also a founding member of the Sonic Arts Union. He toured with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company and has worked with Ben Neill. He was a part of Robert Ashley's Music with Roots in the Aether...
(born in Austria) - Barbara BenaryBarbara BenaryBarbara Benary is an American composer and ethnomusicologist specializing in Indonesian and Indian music.In 1976 she co-founded Gamelan Son of Lion with Philip Corner and Daniel Goode; she also constructed most of the group's instruments...
(born in the US) - David BordenDavid BordenDavid Borden is an American composer of minimalist music.In 1969, with the support of Robert Moog, he founded the synthesizer ensemble, Mother Mallard's Portable Masterpiece Company in Ithaca New York. Mother Mallard performed pieces by Robert Ashley, John Cage, Terry Riley, Philip Glass, and...
(born in the US; and his ensemble Mother Mallard's Portable Masterpiece CompanyMother Mallard's Portable Masterpiece CompanyMother Mallard's Portable Masterpiece Company, formed in 1969 by David Borden, was the world's first synthesizer ensemble, predating groups like Tonto's Expanding Head Band and Tangerine Dream. David Borden was in close contact with Dr. Robert Moog and was one of the first musicians to use his...
) - Gavin BryarsGavin BryarsRichard Gavin Bryars is an English composer and double bassist. He has been active in, or has produced works in, a variety of styles of music, including jazz, free improvisation, minimalism, historicism, experimental music, avant-garde and neoclassicism.-Early life and career:Born in Goole, East...
(born in the UK) - Joseph ByrdJoseph ByrdJoseph Byrd was the leader of The United States of America, a notable rock band from the 1960s, as well as the psychedelic group Joe Byrd and the Field Hippies, of cult fame through their release The American Metaphysical Circus...
(born in the US) - Tony ConradTony ConradTony Conrad is an American avant-garde video artist, experimental filmmaker, musician/composer, sound artist, teacher and writer...
(born in the US) - Julius EastmanJulius EastmanJulius Eastman was an African-American composer, pianist, vocalist, and dancer of minimalist tendencies. He was among the first musicians to combine minimalist processes with elements of pop music...
(born and died in the US) - Ludovico EinaudiLudovico EinaudiLudovico Einaudi OMRI is an Italian contemporary music composer and pianist.-Biography:Born in Turin, Italy, Einaudi's mother played to him on the piano as a child. He began his musical training at the Conservatorio Verdi in Milan, gaining a diploma in composition in 1982...
(born in Italy) - Brian EnoBrian EnoBrian Peter George St. John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno , commonly known as Brian Eno or simply as Eno , is an English musician, composer, record producer, singer and visual artist, known as one of the principal innovators of ambient music.Eno studied at Colchester Institute art school in Essex,...
(born in the UK) - Frans GeysenFrans Geysen-Biography:Frans Geysen was born in Oostham, and studied music at the Lemmens Institute in Mechelen, and at the conservatories of Antwerp and Ghent. In 1962 he became professor of harmony and analysis at the Lemmens Institute, and since 1975 has taught at the Royal Conservatory in Brussels...
(born in Belgium) - Jon GibsonJon Gibson (minimalist musician)Jon Gibson is a flautist, saxophonist, and composer.-Education:Gibson studied at Sacramento State University and with Henry Onderdonk and Wayne Peterson at San Francisco State University, where he earned a BA in 1964...
(born in the US) - Philip GlassPhilip GlassPhilip Glass is an American composer. He is considered to be one of the most influential composers of the late 20th century and is widely acknowledged as a composer who has brought art music to the public .His music is often described as minimalist, along with...
(born in the US) - John Godfrey (composer)John Godfrey (composer)John Godfrey is a composer and performer, co-founder and musical director of Icebreaker , founder member of Crash Ensemble , founder of the Quiet Music Ensemble, and lecturer in music at National University of Ireland, Cork....
(born in the UK) - Karel GoeyvaertsKarel GoeyvaertsKarel Goeyvaerts was a Belgian composer.-Life:After studies at the Royal Flemish Music Conservatory in Antwerp, Goeyvaerts studied composition in Paris with Darius Milhaud and analysis with Olivier Messiaen...
(born and died in Belgium) - Henryk GóreckiHenryk GóreckiHenryk Mikołaj Górecki was a composer of contemporary classical music. He studied at the State Higher School of Music in Katowice between 1955 and 1960. In 1968, he joined the faculty and rose to provost before resigning in 1979. Górecki became a leading figure of the Polish avant-garde during...
(born in Poland) - Michael Harrison (born in the US)
- Christopher HobbsChristopher HobbsChristopher Hobbs is an English experimental composer, best known as a pioneer of British Systems music.-Life and career:...
(born in the UK) - Terry JenningsTerry JenningsTerry Jennings was an American minimalist composer and performer.Terry Jennings was born in Eagle Rock, Los Angeles, California, in 1940. Coming from a background in jazz, he played piano, clarinet, and saxophones...
(born and died in the US) - Scott JohnsonScott Johnson (composer)Scott Johnson is an American composer known for his pioneering use of recorded speech as musical melody. He was the recipient of a 2006 Guggenheim fellowship.- John Somebody :...
(born in the US) - Douglas LeedyDouglas LeedyDouglas Leedy is an American composer, performer and music scholar.-Biography:Born in Portland, Oregon, Leedy studied with Karl Kohn at Pomona College and at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was in a composition seminar with membership including La Monte Young and Terry Riley...
(born in the US) - Angus MacLiseAngus MacLiseAngus MacLise was an American percussionist, composer, poet, occultist and calligrapher probably best known as the first drummer for the Velvet Underground.-Biography:...
(born in the US, died in Kathmandu) - Richard MaxfieldRichard MaxfieldRichard Maxfield was a composer of instrumental, electro-acoustic, and electronic music.Born in Seattle, he most likely taught the first University-level course in electronic music in America at the New School for Social Research...
(born and died in the US) - Robert MoranRobert MoranRobert Moran is an American composer of operas and ballets as well as numerous orchestral, vocal, chamber and dance works.-Life:...
(born in the US) - Phill NiblockPhill NiblockPhill Niblock is a composer, filmmaker, videographer, and director of Experimental Intermedia, a foundation for avant-garde music based in New York with a parallel branch in Ghent, Belgium.-Biography:...
(born in the US) - Michael NymanMichael NymanMichael Laurence Nyman, CBE is an English composer of minimalist music, pianist, librettist and musicologist, known for the many film scores he wrote during his lengthy collaboration with the filmmaker Peter Greenaway, and his multi-platinum soundtrack album to Jane Campion's The Piano...
(born in the UK) - Mike OldfieldMike OldfieldMichael Gordon Oldfield is an English multi-instrumentalist musician and composer, working a style that blends progressive rock, folk, ethnic or world music, classical music, electronic music, New Age, and more recently, dance. His music is often elaborate and complex in nature...
(born in the UK) - Pauline OliverosPauline OliverosPauline Oliveros is an American accordionist and composer who is a central figure in the development of post-war electronic art music....
(born in the US) - Charlemagne PalestineCharlemagne PalestineCharlemagne Palestine is an American minimalist composer, performer, and visual artist...
(born in the US) - Rabinovitch-Barakovsky (born in Russia)
- Steve ReichSteve ReichStephen Michael "Steve" Reich is an American composer who together with La Monte Young, Terry Riley, and Philip Glass is a pioneering composer of minimal music...
(born in the US) - Terry RileyTerry RileyTerrence Mitchell Riley, is an American composer intrinsically associated with the minimalist school of Western classical music and was a pioneer of the movement...
(born in the US) - Arthur Russell (born in the US)
- Howard SkemptonHoward SkemptonHoward Skempton is a British composer and accordionist. Since the late 1960s, when he helped organize the Scratch Orchestra, he has been associated with the English school of experimental music...
(born in the UK) - Dave SmithDave Smith (composer)Dave Smith is an English experimental composer and musical performer. After attending Solihull School, he read music at Magdalene College, Cambridge. In the 1970s, Smith was a member of the Scratch Orchestra and a performer/composer in ensembles with John Lewis, Michael Parsons, Howard Skempton,...
(born in the UK) - Ann SouthamAnn SouthamAnn Southam, CM was a Canadian composer.She was appointed a Member of the Order of Canada in 2010. She died, aged 73, on 25 November 2010...
(born in Canada) - Yoshi WadaYoshi WadaYoshimasa "Yoshi" Wada , is a Japanese sound installation artist and musician living in the United States. He lived in New York for many years but now lives in San Francisco, California....
(born in Japan) - John WhiteJohn White (composer)John White is an English composer and musical performer.-Life:White trained and taught at the London Royal College of Music...
(born in the UK) - La Monte YoungLa Monte YoungLa Monte Thornton Young is an American avant-garde composer, musician, and artist.Young is generally recognized as the first minimalist composer. His works have been included among the most important and radical post-World War II avant-garde, experimental, and contemporary music. Young is...
(born in the US)
Contemporary composers
Other more current minimalists include:- Australia
- Andrew ChubbAndrew ChubbAndrew Chubb is a Newcastle based pianist, composer, teacher and lecturer. Since 1999, he has taught and lectured at the Newcastle Conservatorium of Music, University of Newcastle, Australia....
- Robert DavidsonRobert Davidson (composer)Robert Davidson is an Australian composer. He studied composition with Terry Riley in 1995 following studies with Philip Bračanin at the University of Queensland...
- Nigel WestlakeNigel Westlake-Biography:Nigel Westlake's career in music has spanned more than 3 decades.He studied the clarinet with his father, Donald Westlake and subsequently left school early to pursue a performance career in music.Nigel toured Australia and the world playing with ballet companies, a circus troupe,...
- Andrew Chubb
- Belgium
- Wim MertensWim MertensWim Mertens is a Flemish Belgian composer, countertenor vocalist, pianist, guitarist, and musicologist.-Life and work:Mertens was born in Neerpelt, Belgium...
- Wim Mertens
- Canada
- Peter HannanPeter Hannan (composer)Peter Hannan is a Canadian composer and recorder player. He was born in Montréal.Hannan studied initially at the University of British Columbia, where he received a B. Mus. in 1975. He pursued advanced studies in recorder performance at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, London, who awarded...
- Kyle Bobby DunnKyle Bobby DunnKyle Bobby Dunn is a composer, arranger, and live performer of modern and neo-classical based drone music. He has performed in live and exclusive outdoor settings, including Banff National Park, since 2000 and has released music on various international recording labels.His work has been described...
(based in the United States)
- Peter Hannan
- Estonia
- Arvo PärtArvo PärtArvo Pärt is an Estonian classical composer and one of the most prominent living composers of sacred music. Since the late 1970s, Pärt has worked in a minimalist style that employs his self-made compositional technique, tintinnabuli. His music also finds its inspiration and influence from...
- Arvo Pärt
- Finland
- Petri KuljuntaustaPetri KuljuntaustaPetri Kuljuntausta is a composer, musician, sound artist and author of three books on electronic music and sound art. Since 1990's he has belonged to a new generation of composers in Finland interested in experimental and electronic music....
- Erkki SalmenhaaraErkki SalmenhaaraErkki Olavi Salmenhaara was a Finnish composer and musicologist.-Personal life:Salmenhaara was born in Helsinki, Finland, and married Anja Kosonen in 1961. They had two sons, but divorced in 1978...
- Petri Kuljuntausta
- France
- Yann TiersenYann TiersenYann Tiersen is a musician from France. His musical career is split between studio albums, collaborations and film soundtracks with a distinctive sound that is always involved...
- Yann Tiersen
- Germany
- Peter Michael HamelPeter Michael HamelPeter Michael Hamel is a German composer. His works have been associated with the Minimalist style of composition, and in the late 1970s with the New Simplicity movement....
- Hauke HarderHauke HarderHauke Harder is a German composer and experimental physicist.- Life :Harder received a PhD in Chemistry, and works at the Institute for Physical Chemistry, Department of Chemistry and Physics, University of Kiel, Kiel, Germany.In 1989, he studied with Wolfgang von Schweinitz, a New Simplicity...
- Hans OtteHans OtteHans Otte born Hans Günther Franz Otte in Plauen, Germany was a German composer, pianist, radio promoter, and author of many pieces of musical theatre, sound installations, poems, drawings, and art videos. From 1959 to 1984 he served as music director for Radio Bremen...
- Ernstalbrecht StieblerErnstalbrecht StieblerErnstalbrecht Stiebler is a German composer of mostly chamber, choral, piano, and organ works . His work has "three principal concerns: sonority, rhythm, and duration" leading "to a large and varied body of work" ....
- Walter ZimmermannWalter ZimmermannWalter Zimmermann is a German composer.Zimmermann studied composition in Germany with Werner Heider and Mauricio Kagel, the theory of musical intelligence at the Institute of Sonology in Utrecht , and computer music at Colgate University in New York.Zimmerman's works are infused by a personal...
- Peter Michael Hamel
- Hungary
- Zoltán JeneyZoltán JeneyZoltán Jeney is a Hungarian composer.Jeney first studied piano and attended Pongrácz's composition classes at the Debrecen Secondary Music School, later continuing composition studies with Ferenc Farkas at the Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music in Budapest , and the pursuing postgraduate studies with...
- László MelisLászló MelisLászló Melis is a Hungarian composer and violinist. He writes primarily in the minimal style and his compositions are often characterized by a propulsive, bouncy quality...
- László SáryLászló SáryLászló Sáry is a Hungarian composer and pianist. In the 1970s he began composing in a minimal style.-External links:**...
- László VidovszkyLászló VidovszkyThe native form of this personal name is Vidovszky László. This article uses the Western name order.László Vidovszky is a Hungarian composer and pianist...
- Zoltán Jeney
- Italy
- Fulvio CaldiniFulvio CaldiniFulvio Caldini is an Italian composer, pianist, and musicologist. Since the 1980s he has created a large body of works, which are generally composed according to minimal principles, showing particular influence from the music of Steve Reich...
- Roberto CarnevaleRoberto CarnevaleRoberto Carnevale is an Italian composer, pianist and conductor.- Biography and career :Born in Catania, he started studying piano at the age of seven. He took a degree in Arts at the University of Catania and he attended the Accademia Musicale Chigiana in Siena...
- Giovanni SollimaGiovanni SollimaGiovanni Sollima is an Italian composer and cellist. He was born into a family of musicians and studied cello with Giovanni Perriera and composition with his father, Eliodoro Sollima, at the Conservatorio di Palermo, where he graduated with highest honors...
- Fulvio Caldini
- Japan
- Jo KondoJo KondoJō Kondō is a Japanese composer of contemporary classical music.Kondo studied composition from 1968 to 1972 with Yoshio Hasegawa and Hiroaki Minami at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music. He won the third prize and made his debut in Japan-Germany Contemporary Music Festival in 1969...
- Yoshi WadaYoshi WadaYoshimasa "Yoshi" Wada , is a Japanese sound installation artist and musician living in the United States. He lived in New York for many years but now lives in San Francisco, California....
(based in the United States) - Yasunori MitsudaYasunori Mitsudais a Japanese video game composer, sound programmer, and musician. He has composed music for or worked on over 35 games, and has contributed to over 15 other albums...
(freelance game music composer, most noted for his works in the Chrono series)
- Jo Kondo
- Latvia
- Armands StrazdsArmands StrazdsArmands Strazds is a Latvian politician, education researcher, composer, record producer and software developer....
- Armands Strazds
- Netherlands
- Simeon ten HoltSimeon ten HoltSimeon ten Holt is a Dutch composer. Ten Holt studied with Jakob van Domselaer, eventually developing a highly personal style of minimal composition...
- Simeon ten Holt
- Poland
- Henryk GóreckiHenryk GóreckiHenryk Mikołaj Górecki was a composer of contemporary classical music. He studied at the State Higher School of Music in Katowice between 1955 and 1960. In 1968, he joined the faculty and rose to provost before resigning in 1979. Górecki became a leading figure of the Polish avant-garde during...
- Zygmunt KrauzeZygmunt Krauze- Biography :Polish composer and pianist , who studied composition and piano at the Fryderyk Chopin University of Music in Warsaw and with Nadia Boulanger in Paris. He is known as a composer of unistic music, based on the theory of unistic art adopted from the painting of Wladyslaw Strzeminski...
- Tomasz SikorskiTomasz SikorskiTomasz Sikorski was a Polish composer and pianist.-His life:The son of the composer Kazimierz Sikorski, he was born, and eventually died, in Warsaw. He was a pupil at the Warsaw conservatory where his father taught, and was also a pupil of Zbigniew Drzewiecki there...
- Henryk Górecki
- Russia
- Vladimir MartynovVladimir MartynovVladimir Martynov is a Russian composer, born on February 20, 1946 in Moscow, known for his music in the Concerto, Orchestral Music, Chamber Music and Choral Music genres....
- Anton BatagovAnton BatagovAnton Batagov is a Russian pianist and post-minimalist composer.A graduate of the Gnessin School and the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory and prize-winner at the International Tchaikovsky Competition and the Sydney International Piano Competition , among other competitions, Batagov was the first...
- Vladimir Martynov
- Serbia
- Vladimir TošićVladimir TošicVladimir Tošić is a Serbian composer and visual artist. His works are generally composed according to very stringent minimal principles, which he refers to as "reductionist principles of composing."Tošić teaches at the Faculty of Music in Belgrade, teaching counterpoint, harmony, and musical forms...
- Vladimir Tošić
- United Kingdom
- Joe CutlerJoe CutlerJoe Cutler is a British composer who studied music at the Universities of Huddersfield and Durham, before a scholarship at the Chopin Academy in Warsaw, Poland. He has taught composition at the Birmingham Conservatoire since 2000, and since 2005 he has been the Head of Composition there...
- Graham FitkinGraham FitkinGraham Fitkin is a British composer, pianist and conductor. His compositions fall broadly into the minimalist and postminimalist genres...
- Orlando GoughOrlando GoughOrlando Gough is a British composer, educated at Oxford, and noted for projects written for ballet, contemporary dance and theatre. Collaborators have included Siobhan Davies, Alain Platel, Shobana Jeyasingh and Ashley Page of The Royal Ballet. He is artistic director of The Shout, which he...
- Steve MartlandSteve MartlandSteve Martland is an English composer.-Life and Music :Martland was born in Liverpool, England and studied composition at Liverpool University and in the Netherlands with Louis Andriessen...
- Andrew PoppyAndrew PoppyAndrew Poppy is an English composer, pianist, and record producer.-Biography:From 1974 to 1979 he studied music at Royal Holloway College and Goldsmiths College University of London, studying piano with Susan Bradshaw and earning a B.M...
- Joe Cutler
- United States
- John AdamsJohn Coolidge AdamsJohn Coolidge Adams is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American composer with strong roots in minimalism. His best-known works include Short Ride in a Fast Machine , On the Transmigration of Souls , a choral piece commemorating the victims of the September 11, 2001 attacks , and Shaker...
- John Luther AdamsJohn Luther AdamsJohn Luther Adams is a composer whose music is inspired by nature, especially the landscapes of Alaska where he has lived since 1978.-Biography:...
- Glenn BrancaGlenn BrancaGlenn Branca is an American avant-garde composer and guitarist known for his use of volume, alternative guitar tunings, repetition, droning, and the harmonic series. In 2008 he was awarded an unrestricted grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts.-Beginnings: 1960s and early 1970s:Branca...
- Harold BuddHarold BuddHarold Budd is an American ambient/avant-garde composer and poet. Born in Los Angeles, he was raised in the Mojave Desert, and was inspired at an early age by the humming tone caused by wind blown across telephone wires....
- Lawrence ChandlerLawrence ChandlerLawrence Chandler is an American-born musician, composer and sound artist living in London. He studied with La Monte Young, Pauline Oliveros, at The Juilliard School and Goldsmiths College. He was a founder member of Bowery Electric and has worked for Philip Glass.-References:...
- Richard ChartierRichard ChartierRichard Chartier is a sound/installation artist and graphic designer. Chartier is works in reductionist microsound electronic music, a form of extreme minimalism in which the music is sometimes very quiet, sometimes very sparse, often both.-About:Since 1998, Chartier has created recordings for...
- Rhys ChathamRhys ChathamRhys Chatham is an American composer, guitarist, and trumpet player, primarily active in avant-garde and minimalist music. He is best known for his "guitar orchestra" compositions...
(based in France) - Philip CornerPhilip CornerPhilip Corner is an American composer, action musician, trombone/alphornist, sometime vocalist, pianist-improvisor, theorist-educator, graphic score designer, and visual artist, collage&assembleur, calligrapher.-Biography:After The High School of Music & Art in New York City, Philip Corner...
(based in Italy) - Kurt DolesKurt DolesKurt Doles is an American composer and bass clarinetist. He is best known for his slow, quiet instrumental pieces which are frequently written for unusual groups of instruments...
- Arnold DreyblattArnold DreyblattArnold Dreyblatt is an American composer and visual artist. He studied music with Pauline Oliveros, La Monte Young, Alvin Lucier and media art with Steina and Woody Vasulka. He has been based in Berlin, Germany since 1984...
(based in Germany) - Daniel GoodeDaniel GoodeDaniel Goode is an American composer and clarinetist.Daniel Goode was born in New York City. After graduating in 1957 from Oberlin College, he studied composition at Columbia University with Henry Cowell and Otto Luening, receiving an MA 1962...
- Rafael Anton IrisarriRafael Anton IrisarriRafael Anton Irisarri is an American composer, multi-instrumentalist, producer and media artist based in Seattle, Washington. He is predominantly associated with post-minimalist, drone and electronic music, exploring textural aesthetics for over half a decade...
- Tom JohnsonTom Johnson (composer)Tom Johnson , is an American minimalist composer, a former student of Morton Feldman.-Career:His pieces are most often based simply on mathematical and logical processes, such as tiling, which he attempts to make as clear as possible...
(based in France) - Ingram MarshallIngram MarshallIngram Marshall is an American composer and a former student of Vladimir Ussachevsky and Morton Subotnick. Son of Bernice Douglas and Harry Reinhard Marshall, Sr. He was a talented soprano in the Boy's Choir at the Mt. Vernon Community Church, and was influenced early by noted music instructor,...
- Meredith MonkMeredith MonkMeredith Jane Monk is an American composer, performer, director, vocalist, filmmaker, and choreographer. Since the 1960s, Monk has created multi-disciplinary works which combine music, theatre, and dance, recording extensively for ECM Records.-Life and work:Meredith Monk is primarily known for her...
- Tim RisherTim RisherTim Risher is an American composer, trombonist, and pianist. Risher received his B.A. in Music at the University of Central Florida and his M.M. in music composition from Florida State University...
- Frederic RzewskiFrederic RzewskiFrederic Anthony Rzewski is an American composer and virtuoso pianist.- Biography :Rzewski began playing piano at age 5. He attended Phillips Academy, Harvard and Princeton, where his teachers included Randall Thompson, Roger Sessions, Walter Piston and Milton Babbitt...
- Wayne SiegelWayne SiegelWayne Siegel is an American composer living in Malling, Denmark.From 1971 to 1974 Siegel studied composition and philosophy at the University of California, Santa Barbara. After three years there he decided to complete his Bachelor of Arts degree in Århus, Denmark, where he studied with the noted...
(based in Denmark) - Stars of the LidStars of the LidStars of the Lid is a duo specializing in drone-based ambient music. They list among their influences minimalist and electronic composers such as Arvo Pärt, Zbigniew Preisner, Gavin Bryars, and Henryk Górecki, as well as Talk Talk , post-rock artists Labradford, and ambient innovator Brian...
(Adam WiltzieAdam WiltzieAdam Wiltzie is a composer and sound engineer. Although he may be best known for founding the seminal ambient classical projects Stars of the Lid, The Dead Texan, and Aix Em Klemm, he also has recorded, played, and worked as a live sound engineer for famed groups such as The Flaming Lips, Mercury...
& Brian McBrideBrian McBride (artist)Brian Edward McBride is a musician best known as one half of the duo Stars of the Lid. He has also released two solo albums, When The Detail Lost Its Freedom and The Effective Disconnect on Kranky Records using his own name. McBride moved to Austin, Texas in 1990 where he met Adam Wiltzie, forming...
)
- John Adams
Mystic minimalists
A number of composers showing a distinctly religious influence have been labelled the "mystic minimalists", or "holy minimalistsHoly minimalism
Holy minimalism, mystic minimalism, spiritual minimalism, or sacred minimalism are terms used to refer to a number of late-twentieth-century composers of Western classical music, whose works are distinguished by a minimalist compositional aesthetic and a distinctly religious or mystical subject...
":
- Henryk GóreckiHenryk GóreckiHenryk Mikołaj Górecki was a composer of contemporary classical music. He studied at the State Higher School of Music in Katowice between 1955 and 1960. In 1968, he joined the faculty and rose to provost before resigning in 1979. Górecki became a leading figure of the Polish avant-garde during...
- Alan HovhanessAlan HovhanessAlan Hovhaness was an Armenian-American composer.His music is accessible to the lay listener and often evokes a mood of mystery or contemplation...
(the earliest mystic minimalist) - Giya KancheliGiya KancheliGiya Kancheli , born 10 August 1935, in Tbilisi, is a Georgian composer resident in Belgium.Since 1991, Kancheli has lived in Western Europe: first in Berlin, and since 1995 in Antwerp, where he is composer-in-residence for the Royal Flemish Philharmonic....
- Hans OtteHans OtteHans Otte born Hans Günther Franz Otte in Plauen, Germany was a German composer, pianist, radio promoter, and author of many pieces of musical theatre, sound installations, poems, drawings, and art videos. From 1959 to 1984 he served as music director for Radio Bremen...
- Arvo PärtArvo PärtArvo Pärt is an Estonian classical composer and one of the most prominent living composers of sacred music. Since the late 1970s, Pärt has worked in a minimalist style that employs his self-made compositional technique, tintinnabuli. His music also finds its inspiration and influence from...
- John TavenerJohn TavenerSir John Tavener is a British composer, best known for such religious, minimal works as "The Whale", and "Funeral Ikos"...
- Pēteris VasksPeteris VasksPēteris Vasks is a Latvian composer.Vasks was born in Aizpute, Latvia, into the family of a Baptist pastor. He trained as a violinist at the Jazeps Vitols Latvian Academy of Music, as a double-bass player with Vitautas Sereikaan at the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre, and played in several...
Precedent composers
Other composers whose works have been described as precedents to minimalism include:- Jakob van DomselaerJakob van DomselaerJakob van Domselaer was a Dutch composer.Domselaer was born at Nijkerk, Netherlands...
, whose early-20th century experiments in translating the theories of Piet MondrianPiet MondrianPieter Cornelis "Piet" Mondriaan, after 1906 Mondrian , was a Dutch painter.He was an important contributor to the De Stijl art movement and group, which was founded by Theo van Doesburg. He evolved a non-representational form which he termed Neo-Plasticism...
's De StijlDe StijlDe Stijl , propagating the group's theories. Next to van Doesburg, the group's principal members were the painters Piet Mondrian , Vilmos Huszár , and Bart van der Leck , and the architects Gerrit Rietveld , Robert van 't Hoff , and J.J.P. Oud...
movement into music represent an early precedent to minimalist music. - Alexander MosolovAlexander MosolovAlexander Vasilyevich MosolovMosolov's name is transliterated variously and inconsistently between sources. Alternative spellings of Alexander include Alexandr, Aleksandr, Aleksander, and Alexandre; variations on Mosolov include Mossolov and Mossolow...
, whose orchestral composition Iron Foundry (1923) is made up of mechanical and repetitive patterns - George AntheilGeorge AntheilGeorge Antheil was an American avant-garde composer, pianist, author and inventor. A self-described "Bad Boy of Music", his modernist compositions amazed and appalled listeners in Europe and the US during the 1920s with their cacophonous celebration of mechanical devices.Returning permanently to...
, 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 SatieErik SatieÉric Alfred Leslie Satie was a French composer and pianist. Satie was a colourful figure in the early 20th century Parisian avant-garde...
, seen as a precursor of minimalism as in much of his music, for example his score for Francis PicabiaFrancis PicabiaFrancis Picabia was a French painter, poet, and typographist, associated with both the Dada and Surrealist art movements.- Early life :...
'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 McPheeColin McPheeColin McPhee was a Canadian composer and musicologist. He is primarily known for being the first Western composer to make an ethnomusicological study of Bali, and for the quality of that work...
, 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 OrffCarl OrffCarl Orff was a 20th-century German composer, best known for his cantata Carmina Burana . In addition to his career as a composer, Orff developed an influential method of music education for children.-Early life:...
, who, particularly in his later theater works AntigoneAntigone (opera)Antigonae , written by Carl Orff, was first presented on 9 August 1949 under the direction of Ferenc Fricsay in the Felsenreitschule, Salzburg, Austria. Antigonae is in Orff's words a "musical setting" for the Greek tragedy by Sophocles of the same name...
(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 ReichSteve ReichStephen Michael "Steve" Reich is an American composer who together with La Monte Young, Terry Riley, and Philip Glass is a pioneering composer of minimal music...
and Philip GlassPhilip GlassPhilip Glass is an American composer. He is considered to be one of the most influential composers of the late 20th century and is widely acknowledged as a composer who has brought art music to the public .His music is often described as minimalist, along with... - Yves KleinYves KleinYves Klein was a French artist considered an important figure in post-war European art. He is the leading member of the French artistic movement of Nouveau réalisme founded in 1960 by the art critic Pierre Restany...
, 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 musicDrone musicDrone music is a minimalist musical style that emphasizes the use of sustained or repeated sounds, notes, or tone-clusters – called drones. It is typically characterized by lengthy audio programs with relatively slight harmonic variations throughout each piece compared to other musics...
works of La Monte YoungLa Monte YoungLa Monte Thornton Young is an American avant-garde composer, musician, and artist.Young is generally recognized as the first minimalist composer. His works have been included among the most important and radical post-World War II avant-garde, experimental, and contemporary music. Young is...
and the "silent" 4'33" of John CageJohn CageJohn Milton Cage Jr. was an American composer, music theorist, writer, philosopher and artist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde...
. - Morton FeldmanMorton FeldmanMorton Feldman was an American composer, born in New York City.A major figure in 20th century music, Feldman was a pioneer of indeterminate music, a development associated with the experimental New York School of composers also including John Cage, Christian Wolff, and Earle Brown...
, whose works prominently feature some sort of repetition as well as a sparseness - Alvin LucierAlvin LucierAlvin Lucier is an American composer of experimental music and sound installations that explore acoustic phenomena and auditory perception. A long-time music professor at Wesleyan University, Lucier was a member of the influential Sonic Arts Union, which included Robert Ashley, David Behrman, and...
, whose acoustical experiments demand a stripped-down musical surface to bring out details in the phenomena - Anton WebernAnton WebernAnton Webern was an Austrian composer and conductor. He was a member of the Second Viennese School. As a student and significant follower of Arnold Schoenberg, he became one of the best-known exponents of the twelve-tone technique; in addition, his innovations regarding schematic organization of...
, whose economy of materials and sparse textures led many of the minimalists who were educated in serialism to turn to a reduction of means.
See also
- Post-minimalism
- Process musicProcess musicProcess music is music that arises from a process. It may make that process audible to the listener, or the process may be concealed. Primarily begun in the 1960s, diverse composers have employed divergent methods and styles of process...
- Repetitive musicRepetitive musicRepetitive music is music that features a relatively high degree of repetition in its creation or reception. Examples includes minimalist music, krautrock, disco , some techno, some of Igor Stravinsky's compositions, barococo, and the Suzuki method...
- Drone musicDrone musicDrone music is a minimalist musical style that emphasizes the use of sustained or repeated sounds, notes, or tone-clusters – called drones. It is typically characterized by lengthy audio programs with relatively slight harmonic variations throughout each piece compared to other musics...
– the drone-based, "sustained tone branch of minimalism"
Sources
- Bernard, Jonathan W. 1993. "The Minimalist Aesthetic in the Plastic Arts and in Music". Perspectives of New Music 31, no. 1 (Winter): 86–132.
- Bernard, Jonathan W. 2003. "Minimalism, Postminimalism, and the Resurgence of Tonality in Recent American Music". American Music 21, no. 1 (Spring): 112–33.
- Cope, David. 1997. Techniques of the Contemporary Composer. New York, New York: Schirmer Books. ISBN 0-02-864737-8.
- Fink, Robert. 2005. Repeating Ourselves: American Minimal Music as Cultural Practice. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-24036-7 (cloth). ISBN 0-520-24550-4 (pbk).
- Gann, Kyle. 1997. American Music in the Twentieth Century. Schirmer. ISBN 0-02-864655-X.
- Gann, Kyle. 1987. "Let X = X: Minimalism vs. Serialism." Village Voice (24 February): 76.
- Gann, Kyle. 2001. "Minimal Music, Maximal Impact: Minimalism's Immediate Legacy: Postminimalism". New Music Box: The Web Magazine from the American Music Center (November 1).
- Gann, Kyle. 2006. Music Downtown: Writings from the Village Voice. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-22982-7.
- Garland, Peter, and La Monte Young. 2001. "Jennings, Terry". The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, edited by Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell. London: Macmillan.
- Gotte, Ulli. 2000. Minimal Music: Geschichte, Asthetik, Umfeld. Taschenbucher zur Musikwissenschaft, 138. Wilhelmshaven: Noetzel. ISBN 3-7959-0777-2.
- Johnson, Timothy A. 1994. "Minimalism: Aesthetic, Style, or Technique? " Musical Quarterly 78, no. 4 (Winter): 742–73.
- Johnson, Tom. 1989. The Voice of New Music: New York City 1972-1982 – A Collection of Articles Originally Published by the Village Voice. Eindhoven, Netherlands: Het ApollohuisHet ApollohuisHet Apollohuis was a space for experimental music and visual arts, "focused in particular on...sound art, new music, performance art and the new media," founded in Eindhoven, Netherlands, by Remko Scha and Paul Panhuysen in a former 19th century cigar factory in 1980...
. ISBN 90-71638-09-X. - Kostelanetz, Richard, and R. Flemming. 1997. Writings on Glass: Essays, Interviews, Criticism. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press; New York: Schirmer Books.
- Linke, Ulrich. 1997. Minimal Music: Dimensionen eines Begriffs. Folkwang-Texte Bd. 13. Essen: Die blaue Eule. ISBN 3-89206-811-9.
- Lovisa, Fabian R. 1996. Minimal-music: Entwicklung, Komponisten, Werke. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft.
- MacDonald, Ian. 2003. "The People's Music". London: Pimlico Publishing. ISBN 1-84413-093-2.
- Mertens, Wim. 1983. American Minimal Music: La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass. Translated by J. Hautekiet; preface by Michael Nyman. London: Kahn & Averill; New York: Alexander Broude. ISBN 0-900707-76-3
- Meyer, Leonard B. 1994. Music, the Arts, and Ideas: Patterns and Predictions in Twentieth-Century Culture, second edition. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-52143-5
- Nyman, MichaelMichael NymanMichael Laurence Nyman, CBE is an English composer of minimalist music, pianist, librettist and musicologist, known for the many film scores he wrote during his lengthy collaboration with the filmmaker Peter Greenaway, and his multi-platinum soundtrack album to Jane Campion's The Piano...
. 1968. "Minimal Music". The Spectator 221, no. 7320 (11 October): 518–19. - Nyman, Michael. 1974. Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond. London: Studio Vista ISBN 0-289-70182-1; reprinted 1999,Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-65383-5.
- Perlein, Gilbert, and Bruno Corà (eds). 2000. Yves Klein: Long Live the Immaterial! Catalog of an exhibition held at the Musée d'art moderne et d'art contemporain, Nice, April 28 – September 4, 2000, and the Museo Pecci, Prato, September 23, 2000 – January 10, 2001. New York: Delano Greenidge Editions, 2000, ISBN 978-0-929445-08-3.
- Potter, Keith. 2000. Four Musical Minimalists: La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass. Music in the Twentieth Century series. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-48250-X.
- Potter, Keith. 2001. "Minimalism". The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, second edition, edited by Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell. London: Macmillan Publishers; New York: Grove's Dictionaries of Music.
- Rose, Barbara. 1965. "ABC Art". Art in America 53, no. 5 (October–November): 57–69.
- Schönberger, Elmer. 2001. "Andriessen: (4) Louis Andriessen". The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, second edition, edited by Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell. London: Macmillan Publishers; New York: Grove's Dictionaries of Music.
- Schwarz, K. Robert. 1996. Minimalists. 20th Century Composers Series. London: Phaidon. ISBN 0-7148-3381-9.
- Strickland, Edward. 1993. Minimalism: Origins. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ISBN 0-253-35499-4 (cloth); ISBN 0-253-21388-6 (pbk, corrected and somewhat revised printing, 2000). Chapter T, pp. 241–56, reprinted as Strickland 1997.
- Strickland, Edward. 1997. "Minimalism: T (1992)". In Writings on Glass: Essays, Interviews, Criticism, edited by Richard Kostelanetz and Robert Flemming, 113–130. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press; New York: Schirmer Books. ISBN 0520214919. Reprint of a chapter from Strickland 1993.
- Sweeney-Turner, Steve. 1995. "Weariness and Slackening in the Miserably Proliferating Field of Posts." Musical Times 136, no. 1833 (November): 599–601.
- Warburton, Dan. 1988. "A Working Terminology for Minimal Music." Intégral 2: 135–59.
External links
- Art of the States: minimalist minimalist works by American composers, including audio samples.
- Art and Music Since 1945: Introduction to Minimal Music, from Ohio State UniversityOhio State UniversityThe Ohio State University, commonly referred to as Ohio State, is a public research university located in Columbus, Ohio. It was originally founded in 1870 as a land-grant university and is currently the third largest university campus in the United States...
's Department of Art EducationArt educationArt education is the area of learning that is based upon the visual, tangible arts—drawing, painting, sculpture, and design in jewelry, pottery, weaving, fabrics, etc. and design applied to more practical fields such as commercial graphics and home furnishings...
. - Minimal Music, Maximal Impact, by Kyle GannKyle GannKyle Eugene Gann is an American professor of music, critic and composer born in Dallas, Texas. As a critic for The Village Voice and other publications he has been a supporter of progressive music including such Downtown movements as postminimalism and totalism.- As composer :As a composer his...
, with a more comprehensive list of early minimalists.