Already in 1965 the art historian Barabara Rose had named La Monte Youngs Dream Music, Morton Feldmans 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.. 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. Minimal music is an aesthetic, a style, or a technique of music associated with the work of American composers La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and Philip Glass. Minimalism emerged in New York in the early 1960s among artists who were self-consciously renouncing recent art they thought had become stale and academic. 2003. Despite having produced the most publicly popular new works of the last third of the 20th century, minimalism remains controversial, damned in academic and intellectual circles. In Minimalist music, the traditional treatment of form and development was rejected in favour of explorations of timbre and rhythmmusical elements largely unfamiliar to Western listeners. Perlein, Gilbert, and Bruno Cor (eds). [25], According to Richard E. Rodda, "'Minimalist' music is based upon the repetition of slowly changing common chords [chords that are diatonic to more than one key, or else triads, either just major, or major and minorsee: common tone] in steady rhythms, often overlaid with a lyrical melody in long, arching phrases[It] utilizes repetitive melodic patterns, consonant harmonies, motoric rhythms, and a deliberate striving for aural beauty. Michael Nelson. Johnson, Timothy A. It includes pieces that sustain one basic electronic rumble for a long time. ***. I have my own definition of minimalism, which is that which is created with a minimum of means.La Monte Young, Essentially my contribution was to introduce repetition into Western music as the main ingredient without any melody over it, without anything, just repeated patterns, musical patterns.Terry Riley. The Marie Kondo cult is ruining you, says the author of the bestselling The Joy of Leaving Your Sh-t All Over the Place. In visual arts, music, and other media, minimalism is an art movement that began in post-World War II Western art, most strongly with American visual arts in the 1960s and early 1970s. Bernard, Jonathan W. 2003. Prominent artists associated with this movement are John McCracken, Agnes Martin, Anne Truitt, and . La Monte Young, for example, composed a number of electronic continuous frequency environments, in which he generated a few pitches and then electronically sustained them, sometimes for days or weeks. This series of notes is called the Note Row. Minimalism is not going to stop, he said, Because its a direct reflection of the way the world is going. Instead, there are only brief melodic segments, thrusting the organization, combination, and individual characteristics of short, repetitive rhythmic patterns into the foreground.[27]. "[26] Timothy Johnson holds that, as a style, minimal music is primarily continuous in form, without disjunct sections. It may include features such as additive process and phase shifting which leads to what has been termed phase music. 1995. Most of Adams's works are written for more traditional European classical music instrumentation, including full orchestra, string quartet, and solo piano. Far more than the style of Reich or Glass, Adams compositional style has evolved significantly beyond its minimalist roots. [46] One group who clearly did have an awareness of the American minimal tradition is the British ambient act The Orb. 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). The downtown art scene of the late 1950s and 60s was a lively and open-minded one; as Reich once said, painters, dancers, filmmakers and writers were all swimming in the same soup. [13] Nyman later expanded his definition of minimal music in his 1974 book Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond. The St. Lawrence String Quartet performs Steve Reichs Different Trains at the 2019 Daniel Pearl World Music Days Concert in Bing Concert Hall. Less time worrying about other people's opinions. Our editors will review what youve submitted and determine whether to revise the article. Many of todays composers, like Caroline Shaw, Nico Muhly, Michael Gordon, and Julia Wolfe, weave minimalist techniques into their music in strikingly individual ways, and minimalism has even made its way into the sacred-style music of European composers like Arvo Prt and John Tavener. It fomented not in the conservatories of Europe but in the louche lofts and art spaces of New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco, at the hands of four American composers LaMonte Young, Philip Glass, Terry Riley and Steve Reich. Like Riley, Steve Reich began by working with tape loops. In fact, the word "aleatory" comes from the Latin word alea meaning "dice." Musical dice games have been known for centuries, including a famous example attributed to . Omissions? "Andriessen: (4) Louis Andriessen". Their 1990 production "Little Fluffy Clouds" features a sample from Steve Reich's work Electric Counterpoint (1987). It may include features such as phase shifting, resulting in what is termed phase music, or process techniques that follow strict rules, usually described as process music. By 1967, The Velvet Underground were already prising minimalism out of the art-world and into the rock n roll domain. John Adams is often classified as a minimalist composer, and perhaps it's important to define precisely what this term "minimalism" means. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimal_music. Leonard B. 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. [39] Music theorist Daniel Harrison coined the Beach Boys' Smiley Smile (1967) an experimental work of "protominimal rock", elaborating: "[The album] can almost be considered a work of art music in the Western classical tradition, and its innovations in the musical language of rock can be compared to those that introduced atonal and other nontraditional techniques into that classical tradition. The fact that I like the music, am influenced by it as a composer, and teach it keeps me marginalized in academic circles. Keith Potter writes "its fifty-three modules notated on a single page, this work has frequently been viewed as the beginning of musical minimalism. The music does not try to move in any direction; rather, it is wholly satisfied staying exactly where it is, compelling the listener to "be in the moment" for its hour-long duration. More Time Minimalists spend less time cleaning, less time deciding what to wear, less time shopping, less time looking for lost itemsand honestly? This might be using cards, dice, computer generator, mathematical formulas, the I-Ching, or other methods to make musical decisions. Presaging techno, the extended mix of this track was trance-pop minimalism writ large, a seemingly endless aural vista of ecstatic pulsation and iteration. It may include features such as phase shifting, resulting in what is termed phase . And why does it matter? Were stripping down and realizing that we need to focus on whats essential in our lives.. 1988. Works like Tehillim (1981), which used Hebrew psalm texts, and Different Trains (1988), an artistic reflection on the Holocaust, used minimalist techniques but as part of a richer, more expressive musical vocabulary often called postminimalist. [39] The experimental rock act The Velvet Underground had a connection with the New York down-town scene from which minimal music emerged, rooted in the close working relationship of John Cale and La Monte Young, the latter influencing Cale's work with the band. Start Here; Popular; Archives; . So, here is the chromatic scale: The Chromatic Scale Originally, minimalism started as an art movement in the 1960s as a 'protest' to the Action Paintings that became popular in the 50s. ). [23], In 1960, Terry Riley wrote a string quartet in pure, uninflected C major. In music in particular, minimalism was the single most important idea of the last century, the one that made possible virtually all that we now listen to and hold dear, from punk and techno to ambient and grime. The first half of the 20th century had seen. It is based on the musical language and instrumentation of three very diffierent types: African percussion, Indonesian Gamelan and Western tonality. That's lethal to creativity. Today, let's talk about the impact minimalism has had on 21st-century music and how minimalism continues to make a statement in modern ways. The desire for minimalism was only to have less financial stress in starting up a new career. The rave era, and the quantum leaps forward in affordable music-making technology that came with it, would yield yet another generation of DIY minimalists. For many the appeal of minimalism comes from the idea that your life can be simplified and streamlined without sacrificing quality. Robert Fink offers a summary of some notable critical reactions to minimal music: .mw-parser-output .templatequote{overflow:hidden;margin:1em 0;padding:0 40px}.mw-parser-output .templatequote .templatequotecite{line-height:1.5em;text-align:left;padding-left:1.6em;margin-top:0}, perhaps it can be understood as a kind of social pathology, as an aural sign that American audiences are primitive and uneducated (Pierre Boulez); that kids nowadays just want to get stoned (Donal Henahan and Harold Schonberg in the New York Times); that traditional Western cultural values have eroded in the liberal wake of the 1960s (Samuel Lipman); that minimalist repetition is dangerously seductive propaganda, akin to Hitlers speeches and advertising (Elliott Carter); even that the commodity-fetishism of modern capitalism has fatally trapped the autonomous self in minimalist narcissism (Christopher Lasch). Nevertheless, there is valuable information here on what is arguably the most significant musical movement of the late 20th century. Composers such as Glass or Terry . He has written and continues to write for every conceivable performing medium in a uniquely individual style that has made him the most significant American composer of his generation. Already in 1965 the art historian Barbara 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",[15] but did not specifically use the expression "minimal music". Please refer to the appropriate style manual or other sources if you have any questions. The minimalist design is appealing. "[24] In 1965 and 1966 Steve Reich produced three worksIt's Gonna Rain and Come Out for tape, and Piano Phase for live performersthat introduced the idea of phase shifting, or allowing two identical phrases or sound samples played at slightly different speeds to repeat and slowly go out of phase with each other. Minimalism is a branch of modern classical music developed in New York in the early 1960s by composers such as Reich, Philip Glass and Terry Riley.Minimalism is a branch of modern classical music developed in New York in the early 1960s by composers such as Reich, Philip Glass and Terry RileyTerry RileyHe befriended composer La Monte Young, whose earliest minimalist compositions using . What Im interested in is a compositional process and a sounding music that are one and the same thing.Steve Reich. Minimalism strives to constrict and control sound, when we should be liberatng sounds. Dennis Johnsons 1959 composition November, a six-hour work for solo piano, is considered by many to be the first minimalist composition. Most of Adamss works are written for more traditional classical instrumentation, including full orchestra, string quartet, and solo piano. Over time, musical forms become more complex and eventually reach a point where they collapse upon themselves. Minimalism was pioneered by a group of American composers, Michael Nyman and Tom Johnson. 1997. Minimalism wasn't just a movement, it was a paradigm shift: it brought about a sea change in the way that sound is made, heard and thought of. Johnson 1994, 742. Non-teleological for example gimme a break. However, after the second summer of love dance music became newly preoccupied with big vocals, old-fashioned musicality, undue fuss. The everyday household is drowning in things ( over 300,000 items on average! In the UK, ambient house and techno swelled up to meet this demand. They say if your song sounds great with simple accompaniment, you're onto something. Arnold Schoenberg was an Austrian-American composer who created new methods of musical composition involving atonality, namely serialism and the 12-tone row. However, minimalism hasn't helped. While those are the typical applications in modern times, it is helpful to get a background on how minimalism has evolved over time to what it is today. Perhaps the most futuristic work of minimalism to emerge from the disco sphere, though, was Donna Summer and Giorgio Moroders evergreen I Feel Love. La Monte Young credits this piece as the inspiration for his own magnum opus, The Well-Tuned Piano. 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They turned for inspiration to the impassive, quiet works of Barnett Newman and Ad Reinhardt, exponents of the colour-field branch of Abstract Expressionist painting. [22], One of the first minimalist compositions was November by Dennis Johnson, written in 1959. But it was over on the west coast of America that inspiration first struck. In serial music, the series itself is seldom audible. Minimal compositions that rely heavily on process techniques that follow strict rules are usually described using the term process music. Arvo Prt: Fr Alina (1976) Arvo Prt is an Estonian minimalist composer who invented the 'tintinnabulum' style of music - 'tintinnabuli' meaning 'bell-like'. By the end of Johann Sebastian Bach's lifetime, Baroque music had become so complex that it literally broke down and ushered in the Classical era of music with its well structured forms. Muhly will explore the Glass archive in a performance inStanford Live's 202021 season. Eno and David Bowie were seen at various early minimalist concerts, and the former once described a performance of of Glasss work as a viscous bath of pure, thick energy. In Europe, the music of Louis Andriessen, Karel Goeyvaerts, Michael Nyman, Gavin Bryars, Steve Martland, Henryk Grecki, Arvo Prt and John Tavener exhibits minimalist traits. That is why minimalism art is oriented . Comparing his pieces of the late 1970s to those of earlier minimalist composers, Adams says that he used the fabric of continually repeating cells to forge large architectonic shapes, creating a web of activity thatwas more detailed, more varied, and knew both light and dark, serenity and turbulence., One of the major minimalist composers, John Adams work often moved beyond minimalism to a postminimalist style. 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. As the name suggests, it involves stripping. 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. [5] In the Western art music tradition, the American composers La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and Philip Glass are credited with being among the first to develop compositional techniques that exploit a minimal approach. Like the painters, Minimalist sculptors attempted to make their works totally objective, unexpressive, and non-referential. 1994. In Glasss case, these ensembles comprise organs, windsparticularly saxophonesand vocalists, while Reichs works have more emphasis on mallet and percussion instruments. 3. Minimal music was created in order to further challenge the norms of music and the precedent that music is only good if it's sweeping, dramatic, and complex. This article originally appeared in The Daily Note, the official newspaper of the Red Bull Music Academy. [22] It has been described as an origin point for minimalist music. I dont think you can be a great composer unless you have a feeling for harmony.John Adams, Though John Adams is often called a minimalist or postminimalist composer, he tends to call himself a poststyle composer. Minimalism has had a profound effect on nearly every aspect of contemporary society. It is unclear where the term minimal music originates. Two Pages works with a repeated five-note musical cell to which notes are added at the end and taken away from the beginning creating an austere, pure, minimalist process piece. He is currently the Creative Chair of the LA Phil, and curates its Minimalist Jukebox festival. Many famous composers today use minimalism in their own compositions. One important aspect of minimal music is that it usually focuses on sound rather than melody or harmony. The first movement, the work's most well-known, makes its musical mark through repetitive phrases, consonant harmonies, and sustained tones. All that junk mail I get every single day repeats; when I look at television I see the same advertisement, and I try to follow the movie thats being shown, but Im being told about cat food every five minutes. The lifestyle has helped people to be inspired to pursue their passions and craft their life in a way that brings them the most joy. It includes pieces that sustain one basic electronic rumble for a long time. One notable entry on the list: minimalism. As composer John Adams remarked, Reich didnt reinvent the wheel so much as he showed us a new way to ride.. However, no one had quite made it yet and Serra helped out many of his friends by employing them at Low-Rate Movers, his furniture removal business. However, two of these definitions of minimalismaesthetic and styleno longer accurately represent the music that is often given that label." #Chance #Music or #Aleatoric Music is music where some element of the music is left to chance. In it he outlines the idea of self-determining musical process, music that facilitates closely detailed listening. The approach is marked by a non-narrative, non-teleological, and non-representational approach, and calls attention to the activity of listening by focusing on the internal processes of the music.[4]. Minimalism brought repetition, drones, gradual change, and a reduction in complexity into music, along with a permission to be appealing and comprehensible. What is being minimalist? As you'll discover as you read, the minimalist aesthetic has diverse meanings for different composers. Prominent artists associated with minimalism include Donald Judd, Agnes Martin, Dan Flavin, Carl Andre, Robert Morris, Anne Truitt, and Frank Stella. The most simplistic definition of minimalism is that it is objective, literal, and pushed to extreme simplicity. However, it was through one Brian Eno that the principles and practices behind minimalism would properly, and most lastingly, permeate the pop mainstream. The original acid house records were stripped to the bone, and the very basis of house and techno music repetitive bass and drums was definitively minimalist. Minimal has now fallen out of fashion as a genre, but as an idea and practice it heartily persists. Prominent features of minimalist music include repetitive patterns or pulses, steady drones, consonant harmony, and reiteration of musical phrases or smaller units. ", This page was last edited on 14 October 2022, at 08:15. The musical style known as minimalism emphasizes repetition, shifting rhythmic patterns, and composition concepts that extend beyond traditional classical music. Dub had proven that the dancefloor, rather than the concert hall, was the environment where minimalism could create the most impact. The piece can last up to three hours, and in classic minimalist fashion, it develops extremely slowly based on repetitive structures with small changes making a striking impact. In addition, critics have often overstated the simplicity of even early minimalism. [28], As Kyle Gann puts it, the tonality used in minimal music lacks "goal-oriented European association[s]". Though "minimal", it wasn't as easy to get right as it might sound. As you'll see when you start reading, the aesthetic of minimalism means different things to different composers. Humans have naturally run barefoot for almost all of their time on earth. 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. "Tintinnabulation is an area I sometimes wander into when I . Richard D. James, AKA Aphex Twin, had already shown an affinity with the phasing and pulsation of classic minimalism in his sensational Selected Ambient Works 85-92 album, but its sequel, Selected Ambient Works Volume II (1994), took things to a whole new level of poise and tonal sophistication. A quasi-improvisatory piece based on a list of motifs, it works in classic early minimalist fashion with repetition, complete tonal harmony, and an incredibly slow pace of change. The truth is, we wanted to do those things. His music for films has been exceptional, and like Reich, he formed his own performing ensemble, creating a new model for how contemporary composers might bring their music to the public. One has the experience of time coming to a standstill when listening to much of Webern's music. Its harmonic sonorities are distinctively simple, usually diatonic, often consist of familiar triads and seventh chords, and are presented in a slow harmonic rhythm. Ahead of the pack, though, careering serenely down the Autobahn, were Kraftwerk, whose electronic sound was at once indebted to minimalism and totally sui generis. Like minimalism in art, minimalism in music came of age in the 1960s as a reaction against the extraordinary complexity, density, and difficulty of the modernist music of composers like Pierre Boulez, Milton Babbitt, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Elliott Carter. "[32] When asked in 2001 how he felt about minimal music he replied that "we are surrounded by a world of minimalism. Minimalism, chiefly American movement in the visual arts and music originating in New York City in the late 1960s and characterized by extreme simplicity of form and a literal, objective approach. Hard-edge painting is characterized by large, simplified, usually geometric forms on an overall flat surface; precise, razor-sharp contours; and broad areas of bright, unmodulated colour that have been stained into unprimed canvas. [42][43][44][45], Philip Sherburne has suggested that noted similarities between minimal forms of electronic dance music and American minimal music could easily be accidental. 3.) It was his 1976 opera Einstein on the Beach that brought him firmly into the public eye. Photo 1 by Ana Cuba. Although radical, and rejecting many of the concerns of the immediately preceding abstract expressionist movement, earlier abstract movements were an important influence on the ideas and techniques of minimalism. Reich stated that, Stockhausen, Berio, and Boulez were portraying in very honest terms what it was like to pick up the pieces after World War II. 7 consistsof two notes marked to be held a long time, and The Tortoise: His Dreams and Journeys (1964) has instrumentalists and singers come in and out on different harmonics over a synthesizer drone. Then we discussed four minimalist-music pioneers and their contributions to the style . In even simpler terms it means the music can seem to wander around without a clear sense of direction. Other characteristics include repetition, balance, simplicity, and silence. [36] 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. Minimalism as a musical style emerged in the middle of the 20th century, and its influence has since permeated contemporary music. Updates? Germany had a huge role to play in the evolution and dissemination of minimalism, with Can and especially Neu! 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. Grime was minimalist, by default as much as by design; dubstep is minimalist, foregrounding bass and percussion in a way that would please Reich as much as Tubby. In fact, you could say minimalism is the classical music of the 21st century! It has its dangerous aspects. 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. Critics were quick to compare James to Reich and Glass, and, though he claimed he had never heard of them, by 1995 he had collaborated with Glass on Icct Hedral and remixed the New Yorkers Heroes symphony, itself based on the album by David Bowie and Brian Eno. Its impact can be seen in interior design, tiny houses, decluttering, the sleek design of modern Scandinavian furniture, and the elegant minimalist surfaces of Steve Jobs Apple devices. We are all living in a postminimalist world. It focuses on the occupation of space around the art and how it interacts with the viewer and vice versa, leaving out any unnecessary elements. Influenced by Indian music, his 1968 pieces 1+1 and Two Pages employ additive processes. The note row is a series of intervals that uses all 12 notes of the chromatic scale (hence the name 12 tone music) in an order chosen by the composer.
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