Minimalism: A Survey of Four Major Composers and Their Styles to 1974

During work on Music for The Gift, Riley came to use repetition; he "started understanding what repetition could do for musical form."16 The final culmination of his use of repetition is his Minimal masterwork In C. John Schaefer gives an apt description of the work:

Each member of a group of musicians is presented with fifty-three short, numbered fragments to be played in numerical order; but each figure may be repeated for a different period of time, at the discretion of the individual musicians. Once all the players have played all the fragments at least once, the piece ends. Any combination of instruments can be used, and performances may vary widely in duration; but the work always includes the same patterns. And it's always quite repetitive.17

Two tape loops are lined up in unison and then gradually move out of phase with each other, and then back into unison. The experience of the musical process is, above all else, impersonal: it just goes its way. Another aspect is its precision; there is nothing left to chance whatsoever. Once the process has been set up it inexorably works itself out.22

Also from the same period are works in which Reich employs simple instrumentation: Music for Pieces of Wood (1973) and Clapping Music (1972). The performance forces used in both pieces proved to be the exception, as Reich continued to use larger chamber-ensemble combinations in works such as Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices and Organ (1973) and Music for 18 Musicians (1978), written for his amorphous group Steve Reich and Musicians.

Reich has a large body of works that utilitize the phasing process that gives most of his works continuity. A notable exception is Pendulum Music, another kind of process piece in which feedback is created by microphones swinging over a speaker, finally coming to rest above the speaker, creating a "drone of feedback."25 Although this work does not employ phase process, it does have the same sense of an inevitabile conclusion implied at the onset. Another inevitable process heard in Four Organs (1970) is the continual augmentation of a chord until it slows down to drone-length; it can be seen as an extension of Reich's earlier conceptual work Slow Motion Sound (1967), which reads "very gradually slow down a recorded sound to many times its original length without changing its pitch or timbre at all."26 ; the central aspect of the music is the working out of the process over time.

A very important aspect of Reich's approach to Minimalism is his strict adherence to a process, be it phasing, augmentation or anything else. Unlike Riley, who relies to a large extent on improvisation or Young who employs controlled improvisation in his Theatre of Eternal Music works and The Well-Tuned Piano, Reich's processes for the most part define the shape of the music. Without excessive manipulation, a process such a phasing is able to create an interesting musical form.

By linking together the smaller units, and then combining the resultant shapes in similar arrangement, an entire piece can be spawned from minimal material. In his next works Glass uses not even eight units, but creates the entire work from only one; the 1967 work Two Pages is a "study of the elongation and subsequent contraction of a simple musical line," employing one idea which gradually becomes longer as the piece progresses by added notes or groups of notes.29 In other works the line is also elongated by the lengthening of notes, as in Reich's Four Organs.

Cyclic rhythm is the other important device Glass uses in his music. Like additive process, cyclic rhythm is an Indian technique which Glass brought into the Western musical vocabulary. It is created by interaction of two or more cells of different lengths being played and repeated at the same time. For example: pattern A consists of four eighth notes, whereas pattern B contains only three. When the two are played and repeated at once, the two patterns starting eighth notes will sound at the same time every twelve eighths. The effect is what Glass recalls someone terming "wheels within wheels."30 The result of both of these processes allows the music surprising complexity despite spare Original material. As would be expected, it often does not fit into the very regular Western conception meter; certainly it is much more akin to Indian music. Just like Reich's music, rhythmic pulse is always present, which gives Glass's music life and vitality.

Some other smaller works include Music in the Shape of a Square (1967), Strung Out (1967), and an interesting work for building blocks and tabletop entitled 1+1 (1967). All these works employed one or two musicians, but around this time Glass began to write for a larger group of instruments. The Philip Glass ensemble was formed in 1968, and it employs amplified keyboards, voices, and winds. Works for the group include Glass's large scale work, Music with Changing Parts (1973). In this peice Glass uses both additive process and cyclic rhythms, as well as controlled improvisations. As explained by Glass: "During rehearsal we noticed sustained sounds emerging from the repeated beats of the music. I stopped and asked who was singing. And nobody was singing; it was just a psychoacoustical effect of the music."31 Glass then added instruments to reinforce this effect by having them play whatever pitch they felt coming out the keyboard patterns for the length of a breath. Like Reich, the improvisation is very controlled; movement between large divisions of the work are determined by Glass during performance, and the improvisers are encouraged not to create melodies.32

Strickland defines the end of Minimalism proper as May of 1974, a point at which all the early influential works had been written. By this point all the major foundations of "bare-bones" Minimalism had been laid and the composers were moving on to expanded horizons and integrating new influences into their works. While Glass's 1976 opera Einstein on the Beach has minimal elements, it is not the pure minimalism of Two Pages. Reich's later works, such as Telhelleim, have a much larger musical vocabulary that earlier works allowed. Likewise, Riley moved on to different styles and influences in works like Songs for the Ten Voices of the Two Prophets. Young alone has retained the same quality of his early music, and is still in the process of changing and revising both Tortoise and The Well-Tuned Piano; perhaps the epic scope of these works has occupied his creative energies.

During the course of research several themes recurred in reference to the four minimalist composers and scholarly discussion of Minimalism in general. It seems that scholars are trying to piece together and chronologically order the development of Minimalism; not only the musical style, but the term itself. Strickland devotes the last section of the musical portion of his book to tracing the history of the term "Minimal", which scholars and composers alike find unsuitable in many circumstances. Also, there is debate as to the first truly minimalist piece of music, ranging from Ravel's Bolero to the organum of PerÛtin. Although these have minimalist traits, the intent of the works was not necessarily to be minimal. All four Minimalist composers found Serialism or the New American School to be unacceptable for their compositional needs, and looked for influences from other forms of music including the Balinese gamelan, John Coltrane's modal jazz, the Indian raga, African drumming, and fundamental pitches of aquarium motors.

While the minimalist composers may have their rebellion against convention in common, there seems to be a large debate between them all, revolving most often around who did what first. For example, in reference to who developed the melodic cell, such as those used in Riley's In C, Reich and Glass give very different stories. Glass says "No, I never heard the tape" while Reich states "I undoubtedly played the tape for Philip."33 Continually in interviews the composers attempt to downplay the influences that the others had on them; not every time, but it became obvious that separate agendas were obscuring the truth. The truth is, as far as can be seen, is that the ideas and concepts probably began to arise at the same time to many people, due to the musical climate of the time, not to mention the fact that the composers spent a lot of time in each other's company, often performing together. Riley played in the Theatre of Eternal Music, Reich played the premiere of In C, Glass played with Reich in Four Log Drums and Pendulum Music, Reich played with Glass at the premiere of Two Pages (originally entitled Two Pages for Steve Reich).34 There was a definite sense community among the minimalist composers, rivaling that of the early Romantic period, which deteriorated with popularity.

Footnotes