# Minimalism: A More or Less Neutral Discussion



## LvB (Nov 21, 2008)

Rather than hijacking the 'I Hate Minimalism' thread, I thought it best to start a fresh one for a general discussion of the topic, from a slightly different angle than before. The question I'd like to ask is not what audiences get, or don't get, from minimalist music, but rather what the minimalist composers take themselves to be doing. While it's true that some of them are currently making large sums of money composing as they do, this was by no means the case when they began composing, and is still not the case for many. So it's not simply the cash. Similarly, although Glass and Adams and, to a degree, Arvo Part, Henryk Gorecki, and Steve Reich are popular in a larger sense than most other contemporary composers, the same cannot be said of any other minimalists. So it's not the adulation of crowds. 

Yet composers each compose in a given style for a reason (especially in the modern era, when no style predominates). What, then, drives, a minimalist to compose as he or she does?


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## World Violist (May 31, 2007)

LvB said:


> Yet composers each compose in a given style for a reason (especially in the modern era, when no style predominates). What, then, drives, a minimalist to compose as he or she does?


Thank you, I've been waiting for a thread that offers conversation on minimalism without potential harassment involved...

I'm thinking that minimalism isn't all about the whole "trance effect" that it often evokes. It's more or less about atmosphere and mood, and sustaining both through sustained amounts of time? It's quite a masterful feat to be able to do this without it seeming strained or "old".

As to why? I think it boils down to why people started making minimalist art: they were sick of all the complexities art (music) was going through at the time and sought a reprieve from it.


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## Lang (Sep 30, 2008)

I think minimalist music differs from conventional classical music in the sense that it is not concerned with motivic development, but that the development is often achieved through cycling juxtaposition, so the result is something rather like an aural kaleidoscope. I find there is also a difference in the way i hear minimalist music. With conventional classical music one becomes swept along with the emotion and the unfolding of the form. Minimalist music is static, and therefore your view of it is more detached. You are examining the aural tapestry as it passes you, and are more conscious of the whole piece, and where you are in relation to the whole.

But when it comes down to it, minimalist music can be just as moving, just as involving as any piece. For those who remain sceptical about it, I would recommend Steve Reich's 'Electric Counterpoint' for a piece which is truly minimalist, but which retains certain aspects of conventional classical music.


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## R-F (Feb 12, 2008)

My favourite minimalist composer is Adams. I actually find some of his pieces, like The Chairman Dances, to be quite exciting.


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## PostMinimalist (May 14, 2008)

Minimalism was indeed a reaction to overly complex 'classical' music being composed in the seventies. As with a lot of reactionist movements it succeeded on many levels and failed on others. It certainly got a lot of composers thinking about what music really is and set them off trying to boil it down to certain essential elements like rhythm, sonority etc. It fails on certain levels because unforunately it too is an intellectual form like the overly complex music it was trying to refute. 
It seems to be very organic and intuitive on account of its simplicity but the compositions suh as Mallet Music and Six Pianos are as serial in conception as the works of Schoenberg or Webern (possibly the first minimalist composer?!). Of course this doesn't mean that they are 12 tone structures. Minimalists were not interested in tonality or expanding it into pantonality or atonality. They were interested in rhythmic structures and decided to use simple diatonic patterns in order to make these rhythmic patterns more in focus. No need to concentrate on complex harmonic machinations if you want to emphasize rythmic details. Here again there is a shortcoming in Minimalism. The one dimentional aproach to composition is just as flawed as say a 12 tone serial piece with no dynamics of timbral variety. Experiments like Reichs music for 18 instruments was exploring other natural aspects of sound which these composers thought might give a new direction to music. In 18 instruments one of the experimental aspects was to give the woodwind held chords which related to natural breathing rhythms which of course could be 'measured' better ove a faster moving ostinato. Reich himself had studied African tribal music and had discovered that a lot of the note lengths used there were not fixed but related to how long the singer could hold the note without a breath. He translated this into his 'MF18 Inst.' drawing on his experience with African music. 
One of Reichs ubiquitous features is no so much repetition but constant permutation through tiny almost imperceptable changes in the melodic and rhythmic figures. In 'Six Pianos' it is very easy for the listener not to even notice all these small changes but you can try this experiment: Listen to a recording of this piece on CD all the way through and just at the end replay the begining and see if it is at all waht you remembered it to be. The gradual changes allow the listener to hear a complete set of preset permutations of different rhythmic and melodic combinations sellected by the composer. Terry Reily's 'Clapping Music' is an even more strict example of this purely rhythmic serialism. Two 'clappers' clap a sort phrase together and slowly the second player adds a 8th note and the tow clappers get more and more 'out of phase' until they meet up again as the cycle completes. However interesting this might be as an experiment I'm sure you can see that it doesn't really fill all the prerequisits as a musical compostion. On the other hand, does a Beethoven piano Sonata need to have a pp and a ff and all the inbetween dynamics to qualify as real musc? This is an argument put forward by minimalists and is initially quite compelling but there needs to something more than just a serial approach to any artistic endevour. 
John Adams is the leading light in a new bread of 'post minimalist' composers (which also includes myself) who have come to this conclusion and have started trying to imbue there compositions with many more richer aspects of music than just the rhythmic experiments of the pure minimalists. This is why you hear harmonic developmement and chromatic melodies with a much wider range of timbres and dynamic expressivness than Glass, Reich or Reily. I would at this pint like to draw your attention to a young Dutch composer called Douwe Eisenga. His piano concerto is the best example of post minimalist thinking on offer.

http://www.last.fm/music/Douwe+Eisenga

Sorry if this a long post but I have become a bit reluctant to enter into discussion on this subject on this Forum due to certain elements mistakenly equating personal opinion with historical fact.
FC


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## Herzeleide (Feb 25, 2008)

post-minimalist said:


> Webern (possibly the first minimalist composer?!).


Ahh, don't compare Webern's diamonds with minimalist lumps of plastic.


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## PostMinimalist (May 14, 2008)

Daimonds, plastic... It's what you make of them, not what they are that counts. Liberaces limo or my teddy bears nose... hmmm, difficult decision. I'll stick with the bear!


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## Herzeleide (Feb 25, 2008)

post-minimalist said:


> Liberaces limo or my teddy bears nose... hmmm, difficult decision. I'll stick with the bear!


You're suggesting minimalism has sentimental value?


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## PostMinimalist (May 14, 2008)

Awwww.. Cuddly wuddly little Philip Glass and Terry Reilly glove puppets for Christmas. Just think of it! Or maybe don't!


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## World Violist (May 31, 2007)

Herzeleide said:


> Ahh, don't compare Webern's diamonds with minimalist lumps of plastic.


Now really, I think he was referring more to the sheer length of Webern's works rather than their musical quality.

EDIT: Nothing meant against minimalism by that statement.


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## PostMinimalist (May 14, 2008)

I guess most minimalist composers must be pretty jelous of Webern being able to get his whole output on to just 4 CDs! (If it's even that much.)


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## World Violist (May 31, 2007)

post-minimalist said:


> I guess most minimalist composers must be pretty jelous of Webern being able to get his whole output on to just 4 CDs! (If it's even that much.)


No, I don't think that's really the case; Philip Glass is apparently content with having a single work in 4 discs (Einstein and the Music in 12 parts)...


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## LvB (Nov 21, 2008)

post-minimalist said:


> One of Reichs ubiquitous features is no so much repetition but constant permutation through tiny almost imperceptable changes in the melodic and rhythmic figures. In 'Six Pianos' it is very easy for the listener not to even notice all these small changes but you can try this experiment: Listen to a recording of this piece on CD all the way through and just at the end replay the begining and see if it is at all waht you remembered it to be. The gradual changes allow the listener to hear a complete set of preset permutations of different rhythmic and melodic combinations sellected by the composer. Terry Reily's 'Clapping Music' is an even more strict example of this purely rhythmic serialism. Two 'clappers' clap a sort phrase together and slowly the second player adds a 8th note and the tow clappers get more and more 'out of phase' until they meet up again as the cycle completes. However interesting this might be as an experiment I'm sure you can see that it doesn't really fill all the prerequisits as a musical compostion.


This element does strike me as being at the heart of minimalism; Terry Riley's _In C_ is an excellent example of this; if you listen to it straight through it's hard to hear most of the changes as being significant, but if you listen to the opening then jump straight to, say the halfway point (harder to do on CD than LP), you'd swear you were in a completely different piece.

I would disagree with two elements of your discussion, though. The first is largely a semantic quibble; 'serialism' is a charged term, and I think that applying it to pieces commonly heard as minimalist is just asking for unnecessary disagreements. Nor is it accurate; many minimalist pieces (Glass's _Glassworks_, for example) are cyclic in structure in a way not allowed in true serialism.

The second disagreement is more complex, and in a way gets at the heart of what I was setting up in my initial question. Most music is a reaction to what the composer has heard before, either as an attempt to repeat it or to transcend it. Minimalism, which largely started in the 60s (though there are recognizable precursors even earlier) is, I think and as you say, a reaction to the complexity of total serialism, which had come to dominate the American academic scene in the 50s. But it's also an experiment in its own right, whatever its origins-- an attempt to see how many of the traditional elements of Western art music could be stripped away and still leave a recognizable and effective piece of music. This process was abetted by an increasing involvement with non-Western musics; Philip Glass, for example, worked extensively with Ravi Shankar, and came to sum up the difference between Western and Indian music as a matter of their respective approaches to time:


> In Western music we divide time-- as if you were to take a length of time and slice it the way you slice a loaf of bread. In Indian music (and all the non-Western music with which I'm familiar), you takje small units, or "beats," and string them together to make up larger time values.


The result, as Glass eventually recognized, is that "all the notes are equal." Equal not in length, obviously, but in emphasis or significance.

In practice, this is not completely how minimalism works, partly because many traditional Western instruments emphasize pitch more than non-Western ones, but it does, I think, explain why minimalism seems to so many people so often unmoving (both harmonically and emotionally): because it isn't _ meant_ to move, at least in a conventional manner. But modern Western ears, and emotions, want a sense of progession and climax, which is why all the big name minimalists from the 60s on (with, I think, the partial exception of Terry Riley) have expanded their initial minimalist vocabularies to include more traditional elements. Nonetheless, I would argue that the experiments of the early minimalist period were both absolutely vital to the major works which came after (Gorecki, Symphony #3; Adams, _Nixon in China_; Glass, _Akhnaten_; etc.) and viable as music in their own right. Just as _style galant_ and the Rococo were a reaction to the complexities and extremes of ornamentation in the Baroque and produced much fluff but eventually developed into the Classical era, early minimalism was a major element in what became neo-Romanticism. Similarly, just as many people find much of the new music of the 1760s pleasant but unprofound, many people now find much of the new music of the 1960s pleasant but unprofound. It's not that it isn't music but that it lacks the depth of its best predecessors and successors. So I'm both agreeing and disagreeing with you (  ); minimalism is viable as music in any of its incarnations, but in leaving out so much of what Western music has come to rely upon it not only invites its composers and audiences to reach for more, it practically demands that they do. In the process, though, it has changed the nature of that which is being reached for, and that, if nothing else, is an important contribution.


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## PostMinimalist (May 14, 2008)

Yes for a minimalist he's quite prolific!


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## PostMinimalist (May 14, 2008)

I agree with your post (which is very nicely written by the way) in general. I was using the word 'serial' not to indicate that a 12 tone system was being used but rather as a gerenal term to describe compositions wich follow a strict, prescribed set of rules (such as phase shifting as in the Clapping music) this taking preceedent over aesthetic aspects of the work. THe second point of dissagreement seems not even to be dissagreement at all. I see minimalism very much as a viable stylistic form of expression but I tried to define its limitations too. 
It's interesting to mention Gorecky 'Sad Songs' third symphony who's second movement is a torch song of the New Age movement. I think he was not really thinking in the same terms as the American minimalists but more of an expressive sombre ballad taken to extremes. I have played this piece and it can be VERY emotionally charged in the right hands. We had Particia Rozario singing but I can't remember the conductor. It was very moving in the concert. This is not something I generally associate with minimalism.
I also think that Neo Romanticism (Pendercki's 3rd symphony etc) is just a parallel development to minimalism as yet another reaction to the increasingly 'unmusical' compositions of the period rather than having any concrete link although there are some superficial similarities. But these are of the kind; 'my freinds enemies are my enemies.' rather than immediately shared ideas.


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## Guest (Apr 19, 2009)

I don't know if it's too late (or simply too difficult) to inject a little history into the discussion, and maybe even a little lexicography. But it looks to me like this thread has started off assuming that everyone knows at the very least what "minimalism" means. That doesn't seem to be the case, however. What is the origin of that word, at least as applied to music? When did minimalism in music start?


post-minimalist said:


> Minimalism was indeed a reaction to overly complex 'classical' music being composed in the seventies.


Leaving the question-begging "overly complex" to the side for the moment, how could a type of music (or better, a type of attitude) that has origins in the 1950s and was being practiced already, explicitly, in the early sixties, be a reaction against music that was yet to be written?

Here are some names that people who want to talk about minimalism should probably be familiar with:

LaMonte Young
Tony Conrad
Theater of Eternal Music
Dream Syndicate
Tom Johnson
Fluxus
Louis Andriessen
Eliane Radigue
Pauline Oliveros
Bronius Kutavičius
Rytis Mažulis

(probably also one should know about the work of Cage and Ashley and Lucier, too)

And here are some words that should be added to the discussion:

phase
tiling
drone
noise
deep listening

Sorry to go all professorial on y'all, but the discussion has seemed hamstrung from the start by simply not being aware of all the musics going on in mid-century and all the ideas about music being bandied about at the time. Reinventing the wheel may be all well and good, but at least let's make sure the thing is round and has a nice hole in the center!!


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## PostMinimalist (May 14, 2008)

This is just lifted fromWiki. 


> 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 Digest. Nyman later expanded his definition of minimalism in music in his 1974 book Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond. Tom Johnson, one of the few composers to self-identify as minimalist, also claims to have been first to use the word as new music critic for The Village Voice. He describes "minimalism":


I'm not a big fan of Wiki and people are prone to use it as Holy Scripture one minute and lampoon it's inaccuracies the next. But I think it outlines what we all think of as Minimalism in music. Of course in other diciplines it has been around much longer such as Architecture. Think of Frank Lloyd Wright's design for the Guggenheim Museum. Much of 'Futurism' is based on the pirnciple of minimalism. So the wheel gets passed around quite a bit.

Having said that I for one thank you for any historical light you may shed on the discussion.
FC


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## Guest (Apr 19, 2009)

post-minimalist said:


> I think it outlines what we all think of as Minimalism in music.


What is commonly thought, yes. But is what is commonly thought sufficient? What do Nyman and Johnson say about it, for instance, whenever they wrote? In an interview Tom did a couple of years ago, he defined minimalism like this: "Working with reduced means. African music working with a three-note scale is minimal in principle, wouldn't you say? It's a universal principle, not just an idea from the 70s; it can come back at any moment, and often does, in any culture."

In an article on minimalism for an exhibition in Madrid (2001), he quotes from his Village Voice article, in which he identifies three different types of minimalism in three pieces, none of the types having anything to do with what people usually think of as minimalism: "The minimal experiences I was talking about had nothing to do with the music that most people thought of as minimalist music a few years later."

And talking about Glass and Reich, "The fine ensembles of these particular composers, along with the international success of _Einstein on the Beach,_ drew so much attention to "repetitive music" that listeners tended to forget all the other ways in which one can make music with minimal means." Here he quotes from another Village Voice article, this one from 1982, adding some names that had dropped out of the discussion (and are still missing from the discussion we are in right now*): "Maryanne Amacher, Robert Ashley, David Behrman, Harold Budd, Joel Chadabe, Philip Corner, Alvin Curran, Jon Gibson, Daniel Goode, William Hellermann, Terry Jennings, Garrett List, Annea Lockwood, Alvin Lucier, Jackson MacLow, Meredith Monk, Charlie Morrow, Gordon Mumma, Max Neuhaus, Phill Niblock, Pauline Oliveros, Frederic Rzewski, Steven Scott, Richard Teitelbaum, Ivan Tcherepnin, Yoshi Wada, and last in this alphabetical listing, but certainly not least, La Monte Young. And of course, there are probably a lot of others whose names just didn't happen to come to the mind of this particular list maker."

He goes on to say that in 1982, he "still wasn't ready to include earlier work like Eric Satie's _Vexations_ and John Cage's _4:33,_ and I hadn't even heard of Alfons Allais at this time. And of course, American musicians then were generally ignorant of what their colleagues in Europe were doing, and in many cases they continue to be so today."

The whole article may be found here.

*missing from any discussion I've seen, on any forum, just by the way.


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## LvB (Nov 21, 2008)

The question of definition is indeed a difficult one, but I don't see that piling up lists of names solves it. Definitions of styles or eras are, broadly speaking, the province of critics and academics; the former need a convenient hook on which to hang the composers they are dissecting, and the latter gain PhDs, jobs, and tenure by publishing ever more obscure articles offering ever tinier distinctions. In fact, _any_ definition of an era or style in music will to some degree have to be arbitrary, since there will always be overlaps with periods or figures who don't quite fit the proposed definition.

As a result, there are really two definitions at work once some style or chronological period has been hived off and given its own name: that currently accepted by the majority of academics, and that used in a more public sense. The two often overlap; discussions of the Classical period, academic or otherwise, are very often mostly about the three major figures therein (as, for example, in Charles Rosen's landmark study, widely respected by academics and musicians alike, _The Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven_). There is a very good reason for this sort of specificity; over time, certain figures come to be seen (heard) as representative of both what is best and what is most typical of the delineated era. They are the most influential, and therefore they come to stand for the period.

This is not, of course, to say that those who take this central role cannot change-- but the changes are more frequent as the era and/or style are still fluid. Minimalism is still very much with us, and still very much subject to debate (as we have seen right here); even the relevance of the term 'minimalism' is still disputed, as is the origin of its application to music. For various reasons, though, certain figures (Glass, Reich, Adams, Riley, and Young chief among them) are seen as the most significant; they have the widest following and are most easily recognized (this has nothing to do with their relative significance as composers, but only with their frequency of performance and visibility in debates). So it is natural that they will crop up more frequently in brief discussions such as those on the internet. It will be no surprise that the relevance of this or that composer to the term is likewise arguable; The composer Tom Johnson (possibly the first person explicitly apply the term 'minimalist' to music), for example, author of the 1982 _Village Voice_ article referenced by SomeGuy, actually had written an earlier (1972) article in which he designedly omitted or excluded several of the composers he later added. The debate goes on, to be sure.

But part of the process of definition is usage: that is, seeing whose names and compositional practices appear most commonly in such debates as these. Adding someone to the debate, then, implicitly requires two aspects: that the nature of their musical contribution be established, and that the significance of that contribution to the style in question be defended. My next door neighbor might well write music which fits the rubric 'minimalist,' but if she is content to have it performed only at the local music school her importance in defining the term is, for now at least, well, minimal, however good her work may be. Some of the names mentioned in the above post are well known, but their relevance to minimalism is unclear others are neither especially well known or influential, and therefore their relevance to a debate about the nature of minimalism is likewise unclear. I am certainly NOT saying that these composers are either unimportant or irrelevant, but only that, in terms of a general debate on minimalism, that more evidence regarding their place in the discussion is needed.


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## Guest (Apr 20, 2009)

LvB said:


> The question of definition is indeed a difficult one, but I don't see that piling up lists of names solves it.


Well, I wasn't setting out to answer the difficult question of definition; I was actually offering a more inclusive definition as a solution to another problem, that of talking about an issue with insufficient evidence. I would have thought that the utility of piling up names (which neither Johnson nor I have done, by the way!) in this context was self-evident--if you confine your discussion of minimalism to only a few practitioners of one type of minimalism, then you won't have much of a discussion. I was also reacting to some of the comments over on the anti-minimalist thread--several people there report hating minimalism, but there's no sense there that any of them has any but the narrowist sense of what "minimalism" refers to. Hence the possibility that while Herzeleide, for instance, can't stand Phil Glass, he might be quite taken with Phill Niblock, who's a minimalist of quite a different order and type from Glass.



LvB said:


> in terms of a general debate on minimalism, that more evidence regarding their place in the discussion is needed.


Well, aside from the fact that this thread has announced itself as a discussion, not a debate, the more minimalists you can talk about, the more likely you are to be able to make worthwhile generalizations. (The more likely you are to make fewer generalizations!) Yes, minimalism is still very much with us, even more reason to have as many minimalists in one's listening (and debating) arsenal. If anyone who has ever claimed for the genre that its purpose (or at least result) is to lull one into a trance state would take a listen to Tony Conrad, they would then no longer be able to make that particular claim.


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## PostMinimalist (May 14, 2008)

some guy said:


> If anyone who has ever claimed for the genre that its purpose (or at least result) is to lull one into a trance state would take a listen to Tony Conrad, they would then no longer be able to make that particular claim.


I actually made the same argument citing John Taverners Total Eclipse on the 'I hate minimalism' thread.

One could indeed name all the early 18thC bohemian composers from Benda to Dittersdorf in an attempt to describe the Classical era more completely but that would not mean that a discussion of that era would centre almost entirely on the big 3. right?


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## Guest (Apr 20, 2009)

As time passes, there is less and less disagreement on who "the big three" are, in any field. Are we quite there yet with minimalism? Why, it's still being done. 

In any case, the point I'm failing to make is that with minimalism there are several Its. The closest I can come to your example is if all our discussions of 18th century music were about orchestral music, no chamber, no operas. (Which is why the superb Christoph Willibald Ritter von Gluck is so often left out of discussions which always include Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven.)

....

Wait a tick!! That IS what we typically do already, with all eras and all isms.


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## PostMinimalist (May 14, 2008)

Right, good point. Fill us in. 
F


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## Herzeleide (Feb 25, 2008)

post-minimalist said:


> I also think that Neo Romanticism (Pendercki's 3rd symphony etc) is just a parallel development to minimalism as yet another reaction to the increasingly 'unmusical' compositions of the period rather than having any concrete link although there are some superficial similarities. But these are of the kind; 'my freinds enemies are my enemies.' rather than immediately shared ideas.


Brian Ferneyhough is awesomely musical.

Anyway, your idea of a 'parallel' development is daft: if say, my friend was attacked, I could a) seek bloody retribution or b) run for my life.

Both of these are indeed reactions. But each reaction _in itself_ is completely different.


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## PostMinimalist (May 14, 2008)

I didn't make myself clear, but we agree. When I used the word 'parallel' I meant two indepenent lines which never meet. They are parallel with regard to there historical timing, i.e. contemporaneous. 

And I wasn't directing my comments at specific composers such as Ferneyhough but at the increasing use of extramusical systems to compose 'music'. There are pieces from that era which are based on the rules of touch football, cookery recipies, shoping lists, mathematical theories and other 'extra-musical' ideas. The problem is as I pointed out in the first post I made in this thread is that the composers give more credance to the extramusical materail that they do to the actual 'sound' of the piece. 
Scenario: Composer X explains his new piece ' Last Years Weather' to Critic X, 'That grating, screaching noise that aurally is out of character with the rest of the piece has to be there becuase there was a terrible storm on Aug. 12th!'. Not really convincing, is it?

I'm still waiting to hear some informations about the lesser lights of 'pre-minimalism'.
The only one I've heard of is Meridith Monk, and that's only because she is connected with Terry Reilly.
FC


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## Margaret (Mar 16, 2009)

I was really enjoying this thread and learning from it before it got derailed and locked. Now that the admins have fixed it (Thank you!), do you think it could get started back up? I'm really looking forward to learning more about this type of music and what the composers hoped to achieve.

For instance, if I were to listen to one piece that best exemplifies minimalism what piece should that be?


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## PostMinimalist (May 14, 2008)

Coming soon: Meredith Monk and Terry Riley. Stay tuned.


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## Guest (Apr 24, 2009)

Margaret said:


> I were to listen to one piece that best exemplifies minimalism what piece should that be?


No such thing. Even if minimalism were truly only the pulse/repetition kind, there would not be one piece that would best exemplify it.

One thing I'm sure is sure, you won't get a good sense of any type of minimalism listening to clips on Amazon. While there are a few short minimalist pieces (Reich's _Clapping Music_ being one of the more delightful), minimalism often takes a long time. Not much happening over a long time is, as I recall, one of the comments Tom Johnson made early on about three very different pieces, which he described in a review using the word "minimal."

Since minimalism often requires some training to hear and appreciate (all decent music does, but for so much of it that training has happened so long ago, we don't remember), perhaps the place to start is with the kind that's closest to what you already know, stuff with at least some rhythmic propulsion to it. Danger with that is, of course, that a) it's not close enough and so just puts you off all of it, or b) it's the only kind of minimalism you really get to know well (hence the persistence of the idea that minimalism=repetition).

Here's a few ideas, anyway, for getting started. These are not necessarily the best pieces, just one's I would guess (how well am I at guessing??) would be easy to start with.

Glass, _The Photographer_--repetitious with rhythmic propulsion (and Paul Zukovsky, violin)

Reich, _Music for 18 Musicians_--unflaggingly interesting, I'd say

Riley, _In C_--a collection of short phrases played in or out of phase with each other (mostly out), for ensemble of practically any size, and lasting practically any time.

There's three very different pieces by three very different composers who are usually mentioned together but who really have very little in common.

Eliane Radigue, _Trilogie de la Mort_--electronic drone; very small changes over long time spans.

Francisco Lopez, _Live in Montreal_--also long, slow electronic drone--but more different from Radigue than those words would lead you to believe.

Bronius Kutavicius, Lokys (The Bear)--a unique brand (Lithuanian) of minimalism, more closely allied to Lithuanian folk music than anything else. Obsessively beautiful. (I literally could not listen to anything else for two weeks after I first heard this. Two friends of mine have had the same experience with it--without me telling them anything, by the way!)

For later, there's LaMonte Young's _The Second Dream of the High Tension Line Step-down Transformer from the Four Dreams of China,_ an extremely nothing happening over a long time type of minimalism, Tony Conrad's _Four Violins,_ extremely loud, harsh, aggressive and ultimately beautiful electronic violin feedback crunchy goodness. (I heard Tony do four half hour sets in L.A. a few years ago. After each one, there was a collective sigh of "Oh, no, it's not over already, is it?")

And possibly, once Conrad's music has broken you in, you'll be ready for the extremely maximal minimalism of Japanese (and US and UK, et cetera) noise bands.

That's plenty for starters, though. Others may jump in with recommendations for Adams (I'd go for John Luther, myself, the others for the other John Adams), Part, Tavener, and so forth.

Enjoy!!


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## LvB (Nov 21, 2008)

Margaret said:


> For instance, if I were to listen to one piece that best exemplifies minimalism what piece should that be?


while I agree that there is no one piece which can be said to sum up 'minimalism' (just imagine trying to find one piece which sums up the Classical era), I think you can start with a short list and work out from there.

Terry Riley's _In C_ is definitely a major work in the mainstream of minimalism; this is one of the most spectacular examples of process music out there. It's based on fourteen specific motifs, played sequentially but otherwise at the will of the performers, with the result that no two performances will be even close to identical yet each will be recognizably related to any other. A surprising number of the players at the premiere performances of this went on to become composers themselves.

Philip Glass's _Glassworks_ is possibly the most instantly recognizable piece in contemporary music (particularly the movement entitled 'Rubric'). It's not Glass's best work (by far), and it's not typical of what he composes now, yet its several movements cover a surprising range, and there is a definite sense of emotional purpose to the overall design. It's virtually impossible to forget this piece once you've heard it.

Steve Reich's _Music For Eighteen Musicians_ is a good suggestion; I would also mention _The Desert Music_, for chorus and orchestra, which shows a minimalist composer grappling with a non-minimalist text and remaining true to his own style.

When trying to arrive at your sense of minimalism, keep in mind the comments made by Glass and Reich in a joint interview in 1980, in which they were asked about the term. Glass:


> If there had been a good name, we would have leapt on it long ago. I talk about music that's based on process. I talk about repetitive structures. I think this comes closer to it than anything else. Anyone who wants to talk about this music seriously is going to have to talk about repetitive structures-- both harmonic and rhythmic. The minimalism idea is only a rather short-lived stylistic period of this music.


Reich:


> I don't think these questions are answered, historically, by composers. [....] I think the various media-- whether they be scholarly journals, newspapers, or somewhere in between-- really make the decision. Philip tries to convey information and I try to convey information about the music when we talk about it. But I don't think that this what makes for catch-all titles in music. That's left to other people.


Part of the process of definition comes in the listening; you hear various pieces and look for the underlying similarities (chronological, rhythmic, structural, tonal, or whatever), and then decide whether the similarities outweigh the differences. There will be disputes in and about every style and era, especially one which is still very much with us (no composer commonly considered a major figure in minimalism has yet died), but gradually a generally accepted view, complete with standard examples, emerges. The details remain to be explored, and that can be a great deal of fun, but the central figures serve as such because they do, within a smallish range, allow one to get a sense of what the details are likely to be connected with, and whether one is interested enough to explore those details.


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## PostMinimalist (May 14, 2008)

Steve Reich describes his music's performance as an ongoing compostitional process. Infact his manifesto like essay bears the title 'Music as a Gradual Process'. By this he means that he wants the listener to hear how the piece is constructed (rather like Bauhaus architecture where all the plumbing and wiring is in clear view and not tucked neatly out of view). He says he doesn't want the listener to be confronted with a finished mysterious masterpiece, the creation of some matermind, and left gaping at its intelectuality. He wants the listener to get down in the dirt, so to speak, of the inner workings of a piece and get carried away on the process of continual consrtuction and development. One technique he employs which is easy to understand in this way is blending short figures in different ways and then stressing the resulting figures in other instruments which then take over the dominant role until they too have blended and developed their figures at which point the process is repeated by a new group of instruments. In his 'Six Pianos' this is fairly easy to hear as each piano is added to the repeated figure then another piano 'picks out' a hidden figure from this structure and then becomes the predominant voice. 

Reich was also a bit secretive about his scores and usually rehearsed with his own group in private and made a 'definitive' recording. This is how 'Music for18 Instruments' came to be so well known. The original ECM recording was, at the time, something of a cult record. (I had it and played it to death when I was about 18!) More recently he has allowed other groups, some of which also bear his name to perform his music. The performance of Reich's music is actually very difficult and demands an incredible amount of concentration so these groups are generally made up of specialists in this kind of music if not just specialists in Reich's music (in the same way some groups are dedicated to the performance of Bach's music).
Other names that Some Guy mentioned Arvo Part and John Adams are in some respects not as 'hard line' minimalists as Reich but their music is grouped and labelled in this category so we could have a look at how they are different and why they are seen to be related.

Arvo Part is an Estonian composer who's music is based in a large part on the expansion of a single note or chord by a process of what he calls titinabulation. Tintinabulation is also the medical term for ringing in the ears but here it means finding the edges of the sound and expanding them and exploring them in order to create whole pieces of music. How is this done? Well taking the example of the most famous string piece in his canon of compositions, the 'Pasacaglia In Memoriam for Benjamin Britten' we can see how this works. The inital sound in this work is the striking of a bell which is left to ring. The very high violins which enter now as instructed to come in 'inside' the ringing sound of the bell. The work then gradually unwinds adding more and more instruments getting louder and louder untill the whole orchestra is playing ff and not a soul knows how they got started. THen as slowly and imperceptibly as they arrived the orchestra gradually quietens down and one by one they stop playing andwith any luck, the bell should be ringing from the resonance when the string fall silent. the piece ends when the bell has finally come to rest. Thie piece is about 7 minutes long, but due to the intensity and dramatic curve of the process it seems to last for about half an hour!

John Adams is one of these fine all round musicians that play (clarinet in his case) conduct not only his own music but others too, compose for almost all mediums and he's a nice guy into the bargain.
His music is labeled as minimalist and sometimes as post minimalist. His early works were writen before his move to the west coast and bear little resmblance to the music with which he is now so readily associated. In the early 80s he moved away from NY and Boston where he had studied with the grast Roger Sessions (probably the finest American composer of the previous generation). In doing so he also left the intelectual and strict academic music scene behind him quite literally. His works often are so busy that one really cannot see why the could be called minimalistic. The process of repeats and continuous development in his music however betray his influence of Reich who's Music for 18 Instruments he definitely knew. His major work for String Orchestra is 'Shaker Loops'. The loops refer to the use of repeated figures which like tape loops of different lengths go in and out of phase (the influence of Reich here is clear). The Shakers in the title are not just the trills and tremolandos which characterise the piece but a reference to the religious sect of austere Christians which existed in New England in the 17th Century. He writes that he was trying to recreate a Shaker religous rite where pious rapture would manifest itself in a form of ecstatic mania. The process of compostion in Adams' music however hides the 'nuts and bolts' more elegantly than Reich's music so the result is not so much participation in the performance for the listener, but a more traditional classical system of performers on stage and the detatched listener in the hall. 
I've just had a look at how long this post is so I'll stop now!
But that's enough to be getting on with....
FC


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