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How minimalism reshaped modern music
Steve Reich and Philip Glass's experimental movement from 1960s New York influenced everything from Radiohead to film scores.
In brief
Steve Reich and Philip Glass's experimental movement from 1960s New York influenced everything from Radiohead to film scores. Minimalist composers including Steve Reich and Philip Glass emerged from nineteen sixties New York and reshaped music far beyond experimental circles, influencing ambient, electronic, and film…
Quick answers
- What is minimalist music?
- Minimalist music is often harmonically static or changes incredibly slowly. It emerged as a reaction against the increasingly complex music of the nineteen fifties, seeking to return to the purity of a single sound.
- What is the key takeaway from How minimalism reshaped modern music?
- Minimalist composers including Steve Reich and Philip Glass emerged from nineteen sixties New York and reshaped music far beyond experimental circles, influencing ambient, electronic, and film music.
Minimalism emerged from New York
Steve Reich, Philip Glass, La Monte Young and Yoko Ono pushed the boundaries of music in the nineteen sixties experimental counterculture. Their ideas reshaped the musical landscape far beyond experimental circles.
What is minimalist music?
Minimalist music is often harmonically static or changes incredibly slowly. It emerged as a reaction against the increasingly complex music of the nineteen fifties, seeking to return to the purity of a single sound.
Roots in Satie and beyond
The seeds of minimalism were sown in the late nineteenth century with French composer Erik Satie's Vexations and Furniture Music. Vexations comprises a short musical phrase repeated eight hundred forty times, lasting nearly a day.
Jazz and Indian classical shaped it
John Coltrane was a great influence on composers like Terry Riley, Steve Reich, La Monte Young and Philip Glass. La Monte Young and Terry Riley were both students of Indian classical musician Pandit Pran Nath.
Simple sounds, complex results
Minimalist music ranges from two notes sustained for minutes, like La Monte Young's Composition nineteen sixty No. seven, to silence in John Cage's four thirty-three. More commonly it uses repeating patterns that evolve gradually over time.
Reich's phase music transformed it
Steve Reich developed phase music, taking simple cells of sound and creating a new universe through repetition to reveal new patterns. His Different Trains uses recordings of Holocaust survivors, turning their speech into musical phrases and loops.
“Reich takes simple cells of sound and creates a new universe of music through his use of repetition to reveal new patterns in the music.”
Minimalism moved into popular music
By the nineteen seventies, minimalist ideas including repetition, loops and gradual change moved into ambient and electronic genres. Brian Eno's nineteen seventy-eight album Music for Airports used layers of tape loops to create a continuous soundscape.
Radiohead and Bowie adopted it
Radiohead's Let Down from the nineteen ninety-seven album OK Computer was influenced by Steve Reich's phasing technique, creating intricate hypnotic rhythms. David Bowie's Weeping Wall from his nineteen seventy-seven album Low also shows the minimalist fingerprint.
Film composers carry it forward
Max Richter and Hans Zimmer are part of a direct line from Philip Glass and Steve Reich. Zimmer's score for Christopher Nolan's Interstellar and Richter's On the Nature of Daylight, featured in Arrival and Hamnet, exemplify minimalist film music.
Minimalism's reach today
Minimalism's influence is most obvious today in film and television music. Max Richter and Ludovico Einaudi are among the most-streamed contemporary classical composers on Spotify, showing how deeply minimalist ideas have penetrated modern listening.
The main idea
Minimalist composers including Steve Reich and Philip Glass emerged from nineteen sixties New York and reshaped music far beyond experimental circles, influencing ambient, electronic, and film music.
