Minimalism... a revolution in American classical music
It’s shocking now to look back at my student days, doing a music degree at a respected British university, and recall that not once in three years did I hear either a fellow student or a tutor utter the word ‘minimalism’. Yet this was the 1970s. In California and later New York, a group of composers led by Steve Reich had already been writing pieces with pared-down structures and shockingly ‘basic’ chords for a decade. Why, on this side of the Atlantic, were we unaware of this revolution?
Why was Europe so reluctant to acknowledge minimalism?
The simple answer is that trends travelled more slowly in that pre-internet era. The complicated and more truthful answer is that minimalism was initially treated by the 20th-century European musical establishment rather as Galileo’s observation of the solar system was treated by the 17th-century Catholic Church – as a heresy and a challenge, best ignored if not actively ridiculed and suppressed. Why? Because in the 1970s our university music departments, music publishers and those festivals and radio stations that programmed contemporary music were all run by people convinced that new music was only to be taken seriously if composed using the highly cerebral serialist and post-serialist methods pioneered by Arnold Schoenberg and then taken up by Pierre Boulez and his circle.
What made those influential promoters and programmers so narrow-minded? I believe they were clinging to a belief that the history of musical harmony was like the history of science: that it was destined to become more and more complicated and enriched as generation succeeded generation. To some extent that theory holds good. The modal-based harmonies of early Renaissance composers were indeed succeeded by the expressive word-painting of the great madrigalists. Bach enormously advanced the emotional capability of early 18th-century harmony. And his German successors – Beethoven, Schumann, Wagner – went further.
For Schoenberg and his generation to turn the saturated chromaticism of Wagner into a system where the tonal root is completely abandoned was (according to this theory) the logical next step. To them it seemed that there was no other way forward except ever-increasing mathematical complexity.
How minimalism reconnected classical music with the public
But music differs from science in one big respect. It is supposed to be a form of communication with the public. And at some point in this unending journey into complexity the general public lost the plot and gave up listening altogether. Concert audiences started to think of new music as they probably thought of cod-liver oil: something you were told to take because it was ‘good for you’, not because it was remotely enjoyable.
In Europe there seemed no way out of this impasse. Composers who didn’t go down the complexity route found commissions and performances hard to get. What the American minimalists did was cut this Gordian Knot. They didn’t accept that harmony was destined to get ever more unfathomable to the human ear. They didn’t believe that traditional triadic chords were dead. And they certainly didn’t want to be stuck in an ivory tower from which all but their own acolytes were excluded.
Minimalism was more complicated than a return to tonal harmony
But equally, they didn’t want to use triadic harmony in an old-fashioned, tonal way. So, although the chords they deployed were reassuringly familiar to audiences, the way they used them wasn’t. The triads didn’t follow each other in traditional ‘progressions’. Sometimes they didn’t progress at all, for maybe minutes at a time. Instead, they were repeated in syncopated rhythmic patterns that (in Reich’s case) were often derived from African drumming, then overlaid so that each layer moved in and out of sync with the layers above and below.
So, minimalism was much more than a ‘back to basics’ movement – though it was definitely that. It was also a meshing of world cultures, and as such it represented a long-overdue break with the European avant-garde. And its creators seemed far more vivid, down-to-earth figures than the dry French and German intellectuals dominating serialism. I love Philip Glass’s story of how, when still largely unknown, he dealt with an infuriated audience member who had jumped on the stage at a concert in Amsterdam and started bashing Glass’s keyboard. ‘Acting on pure instinct I belted him across the jaw and he staggered and fell off the stage,’ Glass recalled. ‘Half the audience cheered and the rest either booed or laughed.’
Minimalist in style, maximalist in personality, such figures changed the musical world forever. When I finally discovered them, years after leaving university, I was at first bemused, then fascinated. The fascination remains.
