Minimal Music—Convince Me!
Does minimal music still invite debate? Or is it now so ingrained that it’s just part of our music listening DNA? Do any of you still have strong reactions about it? Let me know. I’m curious. Here’s why—
Last week, vigorous discussion followed my presentation of minimalist string quartets by Steve Reich (Different Trains) and Philip Glass (String Quartet No. 5). Our reactions engaged a yin-yang tug of war. On the up side, minimalism overthrew the tyranny of serialism that so dominated contemporary music after WW II. Minimalism made major and minor triads “permissible” again. This isn’t a joke—in the 1960s-1980s, writing traditional tonal harmony was practically a criminal act in many universities. Further, minimalism is the only modern “classical” genre since Stravinsky’s 1913 premiere of Rite of Spring to engage more than an elite handful of passionate devotees. Minimal music successfully attracts traditional symphony patrons as well as the mass audience for popular music. Head-bobbers at rock concerts keep on head-bobbing to the pulses of the Reich and Glass. No small accomplishment.
But there are discomforts, for me at least. Ideas in minimal music don’t unfold organically, but rather progress in a repetitive, slow, systematic process that can feel mechanical. Minimalism’s continuous pulse is fatiguing and draining, a quality it shares with the throbbing electronica of club music. I find that its rigidity and repetition makes for a limited emotional spectrum. The return to “pretty harmony” revitalizes traditional chords, yet that freshness goes stale as the music obsesses with the least interesting qualities of those chords. Where Schubert transforms those same chords in unpredictable ways that continually forge new paths, Reich and Glass wear deep grooves in the same chords, spinning out long static moments where repetition can reach the point of torture.
That’s all my subjective response. But here is perhaps a more interesting point: underlying minimal music is the celebration and imitation of the machine, perhaps even the triumph of robot over man. It is not natural for musicians to execute the same note pattern sans variation over and over as if performing on an assembly line. In fact, many performers tell me they actually get physical pain playing minimal music. But literal repetition is absolutely a natural task for automated machines and robots. Even on the structural level, repetition with small variations is a feature we have all absorbed from the computer we use. We call it copy and paste. To create layers of imitation at odd or even micro intervals is complex for a human, but is a simple repetition of copy and paste for the machine, which can even play it back.
Of course, minimal music is hardly alone in celebrating the machine. That has been a pursuit of many avant-garde music styles, whether it be the early 20th century innovations of Varése (“what is music but organized noise?”), Ligeti with his micropolyphony, or the entire electronic music genre itself. Yet the minimalists take the extra step of subsuming human performs into the role of machines. On the one hand, that root tension produces the excitement of watching the musicians be machines. But on the other, it also establishes something deeply unsettling and a little creepy!
Please feel free to comment. If you want to learn more about minimal music, these early works by Steve Reich are clear examples of the type of systems that so fascinated minimalist composers:
Reich Pianophase piece with visual graphics
Steve Reich describing ‘Eureka’ moment with It’s Gonna Rain
5 minute Doc on Steve Reich’s Different Trains
Steve Reich Different Trains Recording with Kronos Quartet
Philip Glass String Quartet No. 5 Recording with Kronos Quartet