Jump to content

Minimal music: Difference between revisions

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Browse history interactively
← Previous editNext edit →
Content deleted Content added
VisualWikitext
→‎Early development: removal of underscore
Mikething (talk | contribs)
174 edits
m →‎Notable composers: Arthur Russell wunt no Brit
Line 106: Line 106:
*[[Steve Reich]] (born in the US)
*[[Steve Reich]] (born in the US)
*[[Terry Riley]] (born in the US)
*[[Terry Riley]] (born in the US)
*[[Arthur Russell (musician)|Arthur Russell]] (born in the UK)
*[[Arthur Russell (musician)|Arthur Russell]] (born in the US)
*[[Howard Skempton]] (born in the UK)
*[[Howard Skempton]] (born in the UK)
*[[Dave Smith (composer)|Dave Smith]] (born in the UK)
*[[Dave Smith (composer)|Dave Smith]] (born in the UK)

Revision as of 10:50, 5 June 2011

This article is about a musical style. For other uses, see Minimalism (disambiguation).
Minimalist music
Stylistic originsExperimental music, twelve-tone music, serialism, process music
Cultural originsPostmodernism[citation needed]
Typical instrumentsPiano, orchestra, tuned percussion, electronic musical instruments, electronic postproduction equipment
Derivative formsPostminimalism, totalism
Subgenres
Drone music[1]
Fusion genres
Repetitive music

Minimalist music is an originally American genre of experimental or Downtown music named in the 1960s based mostly in consonant harmony, steady pulse (if not immobile drones), stasis 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. 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—Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, John Adams and, less visibly if more seminally, La Monte Young—emerged to become publicly associated with it in America. 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. The term "minimalist music" was derived around 1970 by Michael Nyman from the concept of minimalism, which was earlier applied to the visual arts.[2] For some of the music, especially that which transforms itself according to strict rules, the term "process music" has also been used.

Brief history

The word "minimalism" was first used in relation to music in 1968 by Michael Nyman in a review of Cornelius Cardew's piece The Great Learning. 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.[3]

The most prominent minimalist composers are John Adams, Louis Andriessen, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Terry Riley, and La Monte Young.[4]

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 Richard Snow (in Reich's case).[5]

Early development

Musical minimalism had its origins in both conceptualism and twelve-tone music. For example, many of the avant-garde works, such as those of Xenakis and Ligeti, employed massive soundscapes that had a similarity to certain earlier works by Schoenberg, except that the extremely slow tempo and transitions had reshaped these sound clusters into a pattern of either discrete contrasts or subtle transitions between successive musical moments (see moment form). Thus, where Schoenberg had retained the use of many of the traditional structures and development ideas from the preceding periods of classical-romantic music, a new style of avant-garde works emphasized the basic contrasts between one sound area and the next. It was this basic idea that the minimalist composers would continue to explore. On the one hand, the slow presentation of contrasting "moments" could be employed (free of the requirements of earlier styles that would have demanded an adherance to particular key transitions and tonal relationships), while on the other hand, the ostinato use of repetitive motifs and arpeggios was often the main vehicle for faster tempos to maintain the intended emphasis and contrasts between subsequent "moments" and gradual transitions in these motifs. Where the serialists had been requiring an enormous number of musical ideas and developmental techniques in order to create a large scale work, the minimalists would instead employ and then emphasize a smaller number of carefully chosen ideas and techniques, allowing a greater level of audience accessibility in their music even while they were able to employ some of the most progressive and radical melodic and harmonic ideas.[original research?]

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".[6]

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.

Minimalism in pop music

Minimal music is also present in pop music. Psychedelic rock acts of the 1960s and 1970s used repetitive structures and droning techniques to express the hallucinations of LSD and other drugs in a musical language.[7] The Velvet Underground had an especially close connection with minimal music, rooted in the close working relationship of John Cale and La Monte Young, who strongly influenced Cale's work with his rock band.[8]

The later progressive rock, experimental rock,[9] art rock, krautrock and avant-prog genres also began exploring minimal music techniques, including groups and artists such as The 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,[10] Experimental Audio Research,[11] and Explosions in the Sky, all used minimal music to inform their song structures instead of conventional pop verse-chorus-verse patterns.[12]

Following the minimal electronic music of Brian Eno and the krautrock band Tangerine Dream, 1990s electronic dance music was largely influenced by minimalism and was based on repetitive instrumental structures, especially the genres of trance,[13] minimal techno[14] and ambient. Well-known artists include The Orb, Orbital, Underworld and Aphex Twin.

Minimalist style in music

Leonard Meyer described minimalist music in 1994:

Because there is little sense of goal-directed motion, [minimalist] 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.[15]

David Cope (1997) lists the following qualities as possible characteristics of minimalist 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.

Critical reception of minimalism

Ian MacDonald says 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".[16]

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.[17] 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.[18] 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.[19]

Minimalist composers

Notable composers

Notable minimalist composers include:

Contemporary composers

Other more current minimalists include:

Mystic minimalists

A number of composers showing a distinctly religious influence have been labelled the "mystic minimalists", or "holy minimalists":

Precedent composers

Other composers whose works have been described as precedents to minimalism include:

  • Jakob van Domselaer, whose early-20th century experiments in translating the theories of Piet Mondrian's De Stijl movement into music represent an early precedent to minimalist music.
  • Alexander Mosolov, whose orchestral composition Iron Foundry (1923) is made up of mechanical and repetitive patterns
  • George Antheil, 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 Satie, seen as a precursor of minimalism as in much of his music, for example his score for Francis Picabia'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 McPhee, 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 Orff, who, particularly in his later theater works Antigone (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 Reich and Philip Glass
  • Yves Klein, 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,[20][21] predating by several years both the drone music works of La Monte Young and the "silent" 4'33" of John Cage.
  • Morton Feldman, whose works prominently feature some sort of repetition as well as a sparseness
  • Alvin Lucier, whose acoustical experiments demand a stripped-down musical surface to bring out details in the phenomena
  • Anton Webern, 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

References

  1. ^ a b Young, La Monte, "Notes on The Theatre of Eternal Music and The Tortoise, His Dreams and Journeys" (original PDF file), 2000, Mela Foundation, www.melafoundation.org — Historical account and musical essay where Young explains why he considers himself the originator of the style vs. Tony Conrad and John Cale.
  2. ^ Bernard 1993, 86–87.
  3. ^ Johnson 1989, 5.
  4. ^ Potter 2001; Schönberger 2001.
  5. ^ Bernard 1993, 87 and 126.
  6. ^ Glass, P. (2008) Preface. In: Scotto, R. (2008). Moondog: The Viking of 6th Avenue. New York: Process
  7. ^ Lucy M. O’Brien. "psychedelic rock (music) - Britannica Online Encyclopedia". Britannica.com. Retrieved 2010-11-08.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  8. ^ Unterberger, Richie (1942-03-09). "John Cale". AllMusic. Retrieved 2010-11-08.
  9. ^ "Explore: Experimental Rock". AllMusic. Retrieved 2010-11-08.
  10. ^ "Dreamweapon An Evening of Contemporary Sitar Music by Spacemen 3 @ ARTISTdirect.com - Shop, Listen, Download". Artistdirect.com. 1988-08-19. Retrieved 2010-11-08.
  11. ^ https://www.allmusic.com/artist/p182845/biography
  12. ^ Post-Rock. "Explore: Post-Rock". AllMusic. Retrieved 2010-11-08.
  13. ^ Trance Electronic » Electronica » Trance. "Explore: Trance". AllMusic. Retrieved 2010-11-08.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  14. ^ "Explore: Minimal Techno". AllMusic. Retrieved 2010-11-08.
  15. ^ Meyer 1994, 326.
  16. ^ MacDonald 2003, [page needed].
  17. ^ Gann 1997, 184–85
  18. ^ Nyman 1974, 133–4
  19. ^ Gann 2001.
  20. ^ Perlein and Corà 2000, 226: "This symphony, 40 minutes in length (in fact 20 minutes followed by 20 minutes of silence) is constituted of a single 'sound' stretched out, deprived of its attack and end which creates a sensation of vertigo, whirling the sensibility outside time."
  21. ^ See also at YvesKleinArchives.org a 1998 sound excerpt of The Monotone Symphony (Flash plugin required), its short description, and Klein's "Chelsea Hotel Manifesto" (including a summary of the 2-part Symphony).

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 Apollohuis. ISBN 90-71638-09-X.
  • 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, 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.
  • 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. 2000. Minimalism: Origins. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Corrected and somewhat revised version of the original 1993 hardback edition. ISBN 0-253-21388-6.
  • Sweeney-Turner, Steve. 1995. "Weariness and Slackening in the Miserably Proliferating Field of Posts." Musical Times 136, no. 1833 (November): 599–601.

Template:Link FA

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Minimal_music&oldid=432660477"