RCM Bmus1 Essay Plan: What is meant by the term Minimalism? Discuss 3 different techniques associated with the style, each technique taken from a different piece. (1500 Words)
Bibliography
1. Burkholder, J., Grout, D. and Palisca, C. (2009). A history of western music. 8th ed. New York: W.W. Norton & Company Inc., pp.Page 969-970.
2. Potter, Keith, Pwyll ap Siôn, and Kyle Gann, eds. The Ashgate research companion to minimalist and postminimalist music. Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., 2013. pp.Page 1-6
3. Potter, Keith. 2002. Four Musical Minimalists: La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass. Vol. 11. Cambridge University Press
4. "La Monte Young". 2018. En.Wikipedia.Org. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Monte_Young.
5. "Drone (Music)". 2018. En.Wikipedia.Org. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drone_(music).
6. Hitchcock, Hugh Wiley (1968) Music in the United States: A Historical Introduction. Eaglewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. p272
7. "Violin Phase". 2018. En.Wikipedia.Org. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violin_Phase.
8. Reich, S. and Hillier, P. (2004). Writings on music, 1965-2000. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p."Music as a gradual process (1968)."
9. Service, T. (2018). A guide to Terry Riley's music. [online] the Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/music/tomserviceblog/2013/jan/28/terry-riley-contemporary-music-guide [Accessed 22 Nov. 2018].
10. Carl, R. (2009). Terry Riley's In C. 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Introduction – Minimalism in Art
• Throughout the mid-1900s, composers of music cultivated a range of styles and approaches.
• One of the most famous trends, beginning in the early 1960s and rising to prominence in the 1970s, is minimalism.
• However, the question remains, what is minimalism.
• Art Critic Richard Wollheim coined the term ‘minimal art’ in 1965 as a term describing a new art style. This art reduced materials and form to their fundamentals and was not intended to express feelings or convey the artist’s state of mind.
• The post-war art world was dominated by the complex, dense and irregular forms of abstract expressionism (shown for instance in Jackson Pollock’s painting No. 5 from 1948).
• ‘Minimal art’ represented a reaction to this style.
• Favoured simplicity, clarity and regularity in artworks that do not require interpretation. For instance, Hyena stomp by Frank Stella (born 1936) was a spiral created by straight lines of varying colours and was intended simply to be a play on form and colour rather than an expression of feelings.
Introduction – Minimalism in Music
• A similar movement came about in music around the same time and, like in the art world, minimalist composers were reacting against the complexity, density and inaccessibility of the avant-garde music of Stockhausen and Boulez, the chance music of Cage and the Serialist music of Schönberg and the second Viennese School.
• In contrast to these styles, where the listener would be assaulted by strange and unfamiliar subject matter, minimalist composers created music that had been stripped to its bare bones. This came in a variety of methods and so, like many genres, minimalism has morphed over time making it difficult to define.
• Analysis of three major minimalist works: La Monte Young’s ‘Composition 1960 No. 7’, Steve Reich’s ‘Violin Phase’ and Terry Riley’s ‘In C’ shows that the way composers have reduced music to its basic form varies significantly but the attitude of simplicity remains.
Young ‘Composition 1960 No. 7’ – Drones and Harmonic Stasis
• La Monte Thornton Young (born 1935) – regarded as one of the first minimalist composers.
• Famous for his drone music, inspired by the sounds of his childhood home, a log cabin in Idaho. A drone is simply defined as a “Harmonic…effect…where a note or chord is continuously sounded throughout most of or all of a piece of music”.
• ‘Composition 1960 No. 7’ is a piece from the collection of works ‘Compositions 1960’ and consists simply of the notes B3 and F#4, a perfect fifth, “to be held for a long time”.
• The piece demonstrates the use of minimised harmony, or harmonic Stasis techniques.
• As music goes, it does not get much simpler – a held perfect fifth with no specific instrumentation, no fixed duration, no dynamics. Young himself described it as ‘extraordinarily minimal’.
• However, there is change in the piece since the listener will begin to notice the minute changes in pitch and timbre that will inevitably occur as the performer holds the same note for so long. The overtones in the notes also become more prominent giving rise to a sort of meta-music.
• Thus, if we looked at minimalism solely from this piece, we would have the impression that it involves reducing the music to simply sustained tones – in essence minimalism is simple harmony with no real structure (other than the obvious structure of a held fifth). Rhythm most certainly seems to have been abandoned along with instrumentation and the idea of either unchanging harmony (harmonic stasis) or very simple harmony certainly seems to be a hallmark of minimalism.
N.B. Bibliography point 6 used for research on this section although not explicitly used in plan
Reich ‘Violin Phase’ – Phasing and process music
• Steve Reich’s ‘Violin Phase’ is a work for four violins written by the composer in 1967.
• In this piece, the music is not created by the instruments in the traditional way but through the interactions between the different lines. All parts play the same motif over and over again. However, every so often, a line’s motif may fall behind by a semiquaver. This produces a completely different set of interactions between parts and so the listener hears a new idea.
• This technique is known as phase-shifting and is defined as when “two identical phrases would be played at the same time but at different tempi so that they go out of phase with each other” (Ashgate).
• This music is therefore created entirely by a process developed by the composer involving gradual changes. It clearly shows the listener what the structure of the piece is – a purely surface listen can tell you that the piece is made by phase-shifting.
• Reich himself describes this process music more generally than purely concerning phase-shifting. He defines it not as "the process of composition but rather pieces of music that are, literally, processes. The distinctive thing about musical processes is that they determine all the note-to-note (sound-to-sound) details and the overall form simultaneously. (Think of a round or infinite canon.)"
• This piece is clearly extremely simplistic and is commonly categorised as minimalist. Therefore, it is clear that we can say that minimalist can also be categorised as music involving a simple phase-shifting process or more generally, music that is governed by a simple process that defines “all the note-to-note details” of a piece. ‘Process music’ seems to be a clear technique used by minimalists.
• We should note that phase-shifting may not necessarily be the only form of process music. There are many other possibilities for this kind of music. For instance, it a repeating pattern was used and then had notes added and subtracted to it by some kind of algorithm, this could also count as process music (seen clearly in some of the work Philip Glass and in other works by Reich).
Riley’s ‘In C’ – Repetition
• Whilst Young’s compositions were composed before Riley’s ‘In C’, many people have described this piece as the original minimalist composition.
• Consists of 53 cells (or fragments of musical material and melodies) that are repeated any number of times in order through the music. The length of each piece therefore dependent on the number of repetitions and the number of performers.
• There are no dynamic or tempi markings so these are left to the discretion of the performer and if playing a cell is not possible, it is completely fine to simply skip it and move on.
• These fragments are accompanied by an ever-present chiming octave C in a piano or mallet instrument. No instrumentation as such so the piece can be performed on any combination of instruments – best optimised by a recording done by ‘Africa Express’ with a strange mixture of typical western instruments such as the violin and African instruments (the Balafon). Ideas from source 10 used.
• Influenced by Riley’s studies with Indian vocal master Prandit Pran Nath, this piece shows Riley exploring the relationship between improvisation and composition in a piece.
• The sound world resulting from this shows a constant pulsation with a process of slow change form consonance to diatonic dissonance and back.
• The textures and overall patterns can be extremely complex (depending on the instrumentation) and unlike any compositions up to that point.
• However, the principles, rhythm and audible structure behind it are extremely simple. We see from this piece the effect of incessant repetition and the use of this technique characterises the piece.
• Therefore, from this piece, we see that a minimalist piece may not necessarily have to be only a few instruments, it could be a large-scale work. It is clear that this use of repetition of short motifs is a characteristic of minimalistic music (it should be noted that phase-shifting is a kind of repetition).
Conclusion
• Each of these three pieces is extremely different. However, they are all certainly minimalist and so demonstrate the fact that minimalism in music cannot be clearly defined to be music using a specific set of techniques.
• We have seen that minimalist music may often be characterised by simple harmony (either completely unchanging as in Young’s Composition 1960 No.7 or changing extremely slowly). It can also often be characterised by the music be defined by a process that determines the note-to-note details of the composition as in ‘Violin Phase’ and commonly may use repetition to create certain kinds of musical effects as in Riley’s ‘In C’. The audible structure or process behind all of these pieces were very clear for the listener to observe and so it is possible that this may also characterise minimalistic music. The main ideas heard by the listener in all three pieces are not necessarily the notes written on the page but the interactions between those notes (where new patterns emerge that the listener can latch onto). This kind of ‘metamusic’ could also be seen as a characteristic of minimalism.
• However, this short description of ideas from three minimalist pieces cannot hope to completely define a whole genre of music that is constantly being expanded by many composers (e.g. Adams, Reich, Nyman) and so it may be more appropriate to explore the approach that these composers take towards their music. All these composers approached their music with the idea of making the maximum use of minimal material (or reducing the music to its fundamental). Thus, Minimalism, at its most general, seems to be a response to the complexity of modernist music that takes the philosophy of simplifying musical ideas to the maximum extent. This takes a range of forms as seen previously but the approach is the same each time.
Discography
1. Riley, Terry, and Paul Hillier. 1968. In C. Vinyl. Ars Nova: Columbia Masterworks. https://www.naxos.com/catalogue/item.asp?item_code=8.226049.
2. Reich, Steve, and Paul Zukofsky. 1969. Live/Electric Music. Violin Phase. LP Recording. New York: Columbia Masterworks.
3. Academy, Veni. 2018. Online. Kosice. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NiD2bvBJ3KA&t=64s.