Important Minimalist Composers: Classical Music of the 21st Century Part 2

Last week we discussed how minimalism became a musical movement in the mid-1900s. After decades of experimental music and a shift away from traditional melodic and harmonic ideas, a group of American composers aimed to return to the simple and – as a result – created minimalism. Today, let’s take a look at some* of these composers who solidified minimalism as a musical style.

*This post is by no means a comprehensive list of minimalist composers. Expect future posts on composers who influenced the development of, wrote in the style of, and further developed minimalism.

Important Minimalist Composers

Back in the 1950s/60s, La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and Philip Glass – who all went to school at the same time, studied under the same teachers, and interacted with each other – began composing in a unique, minimalist way. While they each had their own compositional style, these composers helped define minimalism as a musical movement.

La Monte Young (1935)

Generally recognized and accepted as the first truly minimalist composer, Young was heavily influenced by music ranging from the 12-tone system (read about that here) to drone sounds to Gregorian Chant. Before settling into minimalism, he experimented with many out-of-the-box musical ideas (including some written instructions for the performer to build a fire or release a butterfly into the room).

“Nobody ever took an interest in writing sustained tones without melodies over them before me,” Young said once. And this is what he did to shape minimalism: he pioneered the development of drone sounds in Western art music (an idea he got from listening to Asian – particularly Indian and Indonesian – music), and this helped shape the minimalist musical movement.

The Well-Tuned Piano (1964) is a 6-hour improvisatory work founded in the roots of minimalism. In fact, fellow composer (and former schoolmate) Dennis Johnson’s work November inspired Young to create The Well-Tuned Piano. Read more about Johnson’s work here.

The Well-Tuned Piano utilizes a small group of repeated pitches, gradually changing in rhythm over time. The sustained quality of the notes resembles a drone, while the space between the notes creates a feeling of separation and space.

But here’s the thing about this piece: it probably sounds a little weird to your ears. This is because the piano in the recording is using a tuning system called just intonation, or pure intonation. This basically means that the intervals are tuned using small whole numbers, whereas the standard tuning system (called equal temperament) tunes each interval based on the same frequency interval. For more information, read here.

Terry Riley (1935)

Another of Young’s schoolmates, Riley’s compositions were heavily inspired by both contemporary jazz and Indian classical music. In fact, Riley traveled to India many times before settling down to teach Indian classical music at Mills College.

Riley’s music is often based on improvising (there’s the jazz influence) through a specific set of musical cells (there’s the minimalism). His most famous work following this pattern, In C, consists of 53 separate musical cells (each about one measure long), and the performers have instructions to play the fragments however they want. A piano or marimba keeps the tempo steady in the background, and each musical cell pulses and fades as the performers work their way through the music. Read here for more.

Along with his improvisational minimalism, Reily is also known for his tape music and looping techniques. Tape music is the use of pre-recorded fragments of sound (can be loops or samples) in a composition, ranging from sounds in nature to purely electronic noise. This was the precursor to modern electronic music.

Steve Reich (1936)

Known for his unique take on music-making, one of Reich’s most well-known compositional styles is his looping of tape music to create phasing patterns. It’s Gonna Rain, for example, loops the phrase to create slow rhythms, rounds, repetitive figures, and – eventually – music. By taking the speech element out of the phrase “it’s gonna rain”, Reich creates subtle layers of harmony (skip ahead to 5:00 and listen to the major chords that start to appear):

To create this piece, Reich used two reel-to-reel tapes with the phrase recorded on each. He started the tapes playing at the same time and let them run; eventually, the two loops started to get out of sync with each other. This is phasing: where two separate instruments play the same musical idea in steady, but not identical, tempi. Each instrument gradually shifts out of sync with the other, creating a unique loop and rhythm.

Riley’s In C utilizes phasing, and this technique has influenced many contemporary composers to create music that expands the boundaries of physical time.

Philip Glass (1937)

Regarded as one of the most influential composers of the 20th century, Glass has developed minimalism through his film scores, operas, symphonies, and other classical genres. Like Riley, Glass often composed using small fragments weaving in and out of each other. This characteristic has come to define his music.

Glass is a classically trained musician. He studied harmony and counterpoint, Bach and Mozart. But like the other composers in this post, he was greatly influenced by jazz improvisation and Indian classical music. As a result, his music is richly harmonic with a touch of minimalism and improvisation.

Glass’s Metamorphosis series demonstrates his ability to create beautiful sounds based on repeated harmonic cells. He likes to use harmony as a means for development, but not in the traditional sense; Glass often abruptly changes to unexpected harmonies while keeping a smooth rhythm and flow. Glass said of his style,

“A simple figure can expand and then contract in many different ways, maintaining the same general melodic configuration but, because of the addition of one note, it takes on a very different rhythmic shape.”

For an interview with Glass on his musical perspective, read here.

Each of these composers shaped the development of minimalism as a musical style. In part 3, we will talk about how minimalism has impacted music in the 21st century.