Minimalism at 50: how less became more The Guardian by Tom Service November 24, 2011

Minimalism is 50 years old this month. Today, the 20th centurys most

successful musical ism has got its repetitive, beat-based tentacles in every part

of musical culture, from film scores to pop albums, jazz riffs to contemporary

classical soundscapes, and a musical movement that began in lofts, galleries and

collective spaces in New York and San Francisco in the 1960s has become an

international phenomenon. If its big idea is that less is more, then minimalism

has done more with less than pretty well any other musical movement in history.

But since you can hear debts to similar ideas in music from composers as

different as Bjrk, Radiohead, Arvo Prt, Louis Andriessen and Terry Riley, you

could say minimalism died a long time ago, and whats left is a musical

maximalism.

This weeks festival with the piano-playing Labque sisters at Londons Kings

Place invites us to listen to music from John Cage to Steve Reich, Glenn Branca

to Brian Eno, Michael Nyman (who first coined the term minimalism in 1968)

to the Who, and hear the cross-cultural connections. But I think what the 50-

year history (well, 50-ish: the movements year zero is pretty arbitrary what

could be more minimalist than John Cages 433, written nearly 60 years ago?)

tells us is how what started as an ideology of purity of process, of music stripped

back to its essentials, has become a grab-bag of ideas composers draw on when

they want to create hallucinogenic textures of pulse-based sensuality, or to lull us

into supplication with holy reverie.

But thats all a long way from whatever it was minimalism meant to the

composers who were at its vanguard in the 60s. The big four back then, as now,

were Terry Riley, La Monte Young, Steve Reich and Philip Glass. None of them,

it is worth pointing out, has ever fully embraced the term minimalism, and the

seeds of how differently the minimalist impulse would be taken up by later

composers are already there in the huge aesthetic and temperamental gulfs that

separate Rileys music from Reichs, or Glasss from Youngs. All are now in their

mid-70s: Riley is a devotee of Indian philosophy, Young lives according to a 27-

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hour day in his Dream-House in downtown New York, Glass writes symphonies

and film scores, and Reich, the most revered of the quartet, continues to plough

his furrow of pulses, phases and rhythmic richness.

But 50 years ago, all four did have something in common: a commitment to

exploring the base materials of music with forensic, analytical detail. Reichs

early works, such as the tape piece Its Gonna Rain and Piano Phase, for two

pianists, that the Labques played in yesterdays opening concert, are about a

single, obsessively pursued idea. Reichs revolution was to loop different versions

of the same material at different speeds against itself. Written down here, it

sounds like a tortuous, solipsistic process but its really pretty simple to hear.

In Its Gonna Rain, the voice of a Pentecostal preacher is looped at gradually

different speeds, creating a sumptuous sonic texture, and in Piano Phase the

pianists have to move in and out of phase with one another, subtly shifting from

one semiquaver of a melodic pattern to the next. The effect is the sonic

equivalent of slowly turning a kaleidoscope as the music comes in and out of

focus. If you havent heard it yet, do it now its a thrilling, essential listen.

But theres something else in early Reich, Glass and Riley, too an insistence on

returning music to the roots that all three composers felt European modernisms,

such as serialism, had left behind: melody, modality and rhythm. Rileys In

Cputs all of that together in a piece that remains a masterpiece of compression,

one of the great musical proofs of how less really can be more. From 53 tiny cells

of musical material the whole score fits on one page Riley allows his

performers to create an unpredictable, ever-changing tapestry of sound as the

musicians (of which there can be any number) move from one bar to the next. In

C is a game-changer not just for minimalism but for music history. Glass wasnt

far behind, either, in such pieces as Music With Changing Parts, while Young

created music of slowly shifting chords and harmonies, extending the minimalist

idea into larger, longer spheres of time and being.

Yet what happened in the generation after these composers had started to

stretch the definition of minimalism to breaking point? Even John Adams, often

called a second-generation minimalist, only uses the surfaces of the rhythms and

energies of the pioneering minimalist quartet of composers, creating the huge,

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pumped-up pounding of his opera Nixon in China or his orchestral

piece Harmonielehre. This is minimalism on steroids, in which Adams is as

indebted to the European late Romantics Mahler and Schoenberg as he is to

Reich.

Once minimalism became just another style for composers to use, it stopped

being minimalist in any meaningful aesthetic sense. Such composers as David

Lang or Michael Gordon, or any of the Bang on a Can group of New York-based

post-minimalists, couldnt have written their music without Glass; but equally,

they couldnt have written it without the influence of rock. The impulse for any

composer who uses minimalism as a style today whether youre Thom Yorke

orNico Muhly is the diametrical opposite of what Reich and Riley were up to

half a century ago. Stylistic free-for-all has replaced forensic,

monomaniacal obsession.

Maybe thats no bad thing. The 50 Years of Minimalism concerts really reflect a

history of how a single-minded ideology became an aesthetic, then a style, then

simply one option among hundreds for composers to choose from. Minimalism

won the battle for stylistic supremacy in the 20th and 21st centuries, no

question, but where once less was more, its a maxed-out more that now rules

the roost. More or less

50 Years of Minimalism continues at Kings Place, London until 26

November.

The Guardian by Tom Service November 24, 2011

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