Minimalist music: Encyclopedia II - Minimalist music - Minimalist style in music

Minimalist music - Minimalist style in music

The most identifiable traits of minimalism in music are the use of repeated motivic fragments, presented unaltered in themselves or in slow transformations, to establish a harmonic texture. While this is not unprecedented in itself--Richard Wagner would use an arpeggiated E-flat as the basis for the opening of his opera Das Rheingold--the pervasiveness of the technique, and the use of layering and phase of these fragments which is identifiable as "minimalist". This is related to, but not the same as, repetition of whole sections of music, again not unprecedented, but not made as pervasive a stylistic trait in previous styles. Layering often produces the major development of a section, as one voice is added on top of another to produce the final full effect.

Consonant harmony is a feature much noted - 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. In mininalism this function of stability is ignored.

Another trait of the minimalist movement established at an early point in time is the use of phase in consonant context to provide variety. A famous example is Terry Riley's In C which gives musicians fragments of music which they are to play at their own pace until they stop. The resulting texture varies with the different choices that performers make.

This means that 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.

Over time mimimalist composers adopted more and more chromatic material for repetition, for example Philip Glass' Symphony No. 2, and the operas of John Adams. There was also an increasing movement to incorporate found sounds, tape, electric or electronic sources of music. Minimalsim in classical music often cross fertilizes with popular experimental music, such as the work of Brian Eno and Mike Oldfield, as well as electronica and house(music), where DJs layer different recordings on top of each other without regard for their source.

The development of minimalist music proceeds as a movement which was consciously aware of its being a post-serialist movement in music, drawing from the use of silence and layering in Cage, but seeking a more melodic basis for its materials. Many of the individual traits of minimalist music occur in serial works of the same period, for example the use of layering in Berio's Sinfonia, or the long suspended tones of Morton Feldman.

These traits were also the feature of composers who rejected 20th century chromatic harmony for other reasons, often liturgical or religious. These composers often went back to Medieval and early Renaissance harmony and practice more deliberately, producing works which had more formally worked out canonic imitation in a modal rather than tonal context. Among these Arvo Pärt is one who has gained a wide following and had numerous recordings and performances of his work.

Minimalism is sometimes associated with an ideology that justifies the moving away from the greater complexity of modernism by arguing from the point of view of postmodernism. Specifically, postmodernism states that progress in music is illusory, and therefore there is no need to have ever more advanced and complex systems of composing, that the purpose of minimalist music is repose, rather than "western" style development, and that minimalism embodies more "eastern" values of meditation, trance and concentration. Philip Glass specifically argues that there has been a disintegration of the concept of "high" and "low" music, and that music of this movement is important because it allows incorporation of, and dialog with, popular styles in a way that previous music did not. These arguments are far from universal among listeners, composers and performers of minimalist music, but are commonly cited in the struggles for performance, attention and acceptance of minimalist music.

Minimalist music is frequently used in movie scores and other media to provide a backdrop or mood for a particular scene or opening, or as an episode in a score. It has been adopted for sections of work by composers from other styles, including the late work of Lukas Foss.

There are those who argue, most notably Kyle Gann, that minimalism, as such, ended in music sometime in the 1980s, and that music since that point in time should be regarded as post-minimalist. According to Gann the breaking out of the strongly framed repetition and stasis of minimalist music represents a stark departure from previous practice.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Minimalist style in music", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki