American Minimalism

Minimalism is a kind of fascism, a needless constriction reducing forms to something devoid of meaning, both technically and historically. It is simply an intellectual crime
(Luciano Berio)

Minimalism was an avant-garde musical movement born in America that developed over roughly fifteen years, from the early 1960s through the second half of the 1970s. While pinpointing its end date is fairly straightforward — it's universally considered to be 1976, the year that saw the release of two of the movement's most representative works, "Einstein On The Beach" by Philip Glass and "Music For 18 Musicians" by Steve Reich — establishing its starting point is a trickier matter.

The fundamental traits: repetition and reduction

First of all, to determine whether a work can be considered minimalist, we need some objective criteria defining its characteristics. Minimalist music has two main traits, which are usually, though not always, both present. The first and most important is repetition. The most important minimalist compositions are built on small, very simple sound patterns — often no more than two or three notes — that repeat compulsively over a long stretch of time, with small variations occurring along the way. This insistent repetition brings about a change that, minute after minute, becomes ever more evident, almost without the listener noticing. This explains why a minimalist composition can only really work at considerable length (upwards of twenty minutes), in order to evolve in any meaningful way.

Repetition is a form of change
(Brian Eno)

The second aspect is the reduction of sound material to the barest minimum possible, which in the case of La Monte Young's early minimalism translates into endless one- or two-note drones, and in the case of repetitive minimalism into tiny, rapid-fire sound fragments of two or three notes.

The avant-garde meets youth music

These two foundational concepts — drawn from Anton Webern's serialism (repetition) and John Cage's ideas (reduction) — thanks to minimalism, which made them popular, broke free from the confines of the avant-garde to spill widely into the world of pop and rock. Minimalism deserves enormous credit for carrying the avant-garde beyond the walls of academia and thrusting it forcefully into the world of youth music (pop or rock, it hardly matters), and, in turn, for drawing young rock musicians toward an interest in the avant-garde. The long viola drones of "Heroin" by Velvet Underground are clearly inspired by those of La Monte Young, the intro of "Baba O' Riley" by Who is inspired by Terry Riley, and the music of Red Crayola, Frank Zappa or Captain Beefheart, and the mysticism of Popol Vuh, are simply unimaginable without avant-garde music (from the minimalists to Edgard Varese) becoming, in some way, of interest to the young generation of musicians of the '60s and '70s. Minimalism also proved decisive in the musical formation of Brian Eno and in the development of all ambient music and drone music, in the loops of William Basinski but also in the walls of guitar sound built by Glenn Branca or by parts of the post-rock scene, which can be understood as the offspring of La Monte Young's long drones, played through electric guitars amplified to deafening volumes.

Minimalism's anti-narrative stance and the ecstasy of sound

Another significant trait, almost always present, is the anti-narrative quality of minimalist music, an element drawn from the ideas of the proto-minimalists, who looked in particular to the abstract painting of Barnett Newman or Mark Rothko. The minimalist composer does not seek to communicate personal points of view; there is no emotionality in his sonic choices. He is instead interested in the pure beauty of sound, in sound for its own sake, in the ecstasy it produces in the listener, as Steve Reich would put it.

The pleasure I feel in playing is not the pleasure of expressing myself, but of feeling subjugated by the music and living the ecstasy that comes from being part of it
(Steve Reich)

Brian Eno confirms this too, defining minimalism as music that moves away from narrative in favor of landscape. This certainly holds true for the vast majority of minimalist works, particularly in Steve Reich, but a partial exception might be Terry Riley's "A Rainbow In A Curved Air", an example of mystical minimalism that, being mystical and influenced by Eastern culture, does contain a landscape (a basic rule of minimalism), but probably also a philosophy, and therefore a message. Even Reich, one of the most anti-narrative of the minimalist composers, would in fact betray this dogma on more than one occasion, clearly revealing his political views, as we shall see further on.
In any case, the history of traditional American minimalism can be split between the two great coasts of the United States: the Californian minimalism of La Monte Young and Terry Riley, and the New York minimalism of Steve Reich and Philip Glass. This history unfolds from the early '60s through to 1976, at which point it gives way to a second wave, which would come to be called "post-minimalism", one so long-running that it hasn't concluded even today. But it's clear that to understand the genesis and evolution of this cultural movement, we first need a broad grasp of who it was that, without quite realizing it, laid down its basic rules.

The forerunners. The origins of minimalism

• Erik Satie
• John Cage
• Morton Feldman

As with all cultural movements, fully understanding them requires tracing the path that led, step by step, to their birth. In the case of American musical minimalism, the route is a winding one, since the minimalist idea touched on various art forms. There is, in fact, minimalist architecture, minimalist theatre, minimalist painting (on the left, as a pictorial example, a work by Piet Mondrian). This creative impulse crossed American borders to spread to every corner of the world.

The general traits of minimalist art are the reduction of reality, anti-expressiveness, impersonality, and the reproduction of simple, elementary geometric shapes, in an attempt to return to the simplicity of ancient art, which in many cases was already considered minimalist. For instance, minimalist architect John Pawson argues that the Theatre of Epidaurus could be regarded as the first example of minimalist art.
It's clear that anti-expressiveness, or anti-narrativity, in painting would become the foundation of abstraction, so much so that painter Mark Rothko (1903-1970) becomes a key reference point, particularly for proto-minimalist composer Morton Feldman, who in 1971 would compose "Rothko Chapel". He is the main forerunner, alongside John Cage. Taking a small step back, though, one can trace this lineage all the way to Erik Satie, without whom much of Cage's and Feldman's work would be hard to imagine.

Erik Satie. The Sounds of the New Century

It's possible to recognize in Erik Satie (1866-1925) a forerunner of minimalism, precisely because it was John Cage who was chiefly responsible for his rediscovery after a long period of obscurity. In 1948 Cage organized the "Erik Satie Festival" at Black Mountain College in an attempt to bring the French composer back into the spotlight, effectively acknowledging his influence on his own development, since Cage rightly saw in him what could be described as the first true composer of the twentieth century.
According to Cage, Satie was the musician who rediscovered silence and broke with classical tradition, opening the door to the new century. In Satie's compositions, pauses carry no less weight than notes, and the dynamics are unpredictable, not being built on standardized foundations. Cage set Satie against Beethoven, causing a scandal at the Festival by declaring that Beethoven was wrong and Satie was right. Beethoven's music, rigorously structured into introduction, development and conclusion, had to be superseded by music (Satie's) with no rigid structure — free and unpredictable instead. In any case, compositions such as "Gymnopédies" (1888), "Gnossiennes" (1890) and above all "Vexations" (1893) — which introduced the concept of repetition (its score consists of a single page to be repeated 840 times, for a total of roughly 18 hours) — though composed in the nineteenth century, truly seem to anticipate the sound of the new century.

John Cage. Mastering Silence

Generally, when silence isn't the focus, the composer is
(John Cage)

John Cage is the composer who, in the twentieth century, discovered noise and silence, sensing how all the sounds around us can be understood as music, if listened to with attention and a passion for sound itself. His music therefore carries the anti-narrative elements of minimalism, aiming for a pure, exclusive listening experience centered on sound, which made it incomprehensible to his contemporaries and caused scandal in academic circles. His music is an assault on tradition, and his legacy survives unbroken to this day.
In truth, Cage experimented with everything, from electronic music to aleatoric music, from proto-minimalist piano to prepared piano, from musique concrète to the use of magnetic tape. But if we stick to the pieces that contain the embryonic phases of American minimalism, at least two works deserve mention. Cage anticipates minimalism in a number of piano compositions, chief among them the celebrated "In A Landscape" (1948).

"In A Landscape" is made up of an extremely slow succession of simple notes, always single, all at the same tempo. It's precisely this fixed distance between the notes that feels anomalous, giving the impression of stepping into a world parallel to traditional classical music. The instrument is always the piano, but this constant repetition of different notes, always spaced the same distance apart, creates a kind of false pianistic loop of identical, repetitive note-fragments. As in the minimalist compositions to come, the music changes ever so slightly over time, but noticing that change requires following the piece step by step, without distraction; one has to enter into it, to "inhabit" it. Cage creates music meant to be inhabited, listened to by immersing oneself within it, in much the same way one stands before a landscape. Hence the title, which evokes precisely the composer's wish to transport the listener into a landscape. Music becomes something not only to be listened to (as usual) or inhabited (as Cage tries to make us do), but also to be observed, in the same way one might observe a landscape in a painting. It's an extraordinary blending of different worlds that Cage tries to merge into a new total art form, where "inhabiting" music means approaching it with a new mind (a third ear, as the Third Ear Band would put it), capable of grasping the importance of silence and the break with tradition.

I am going toward violence rather than tenderness, toward hell rather than heaven, toward the ugly rather than the beautiful
(John Cage)

In 1952 he shocks audiences with the provocative, conceptual composition "4'33''". Cage stakes everything on silence, forcing the concert hall to focus on the sounds involuntarily produced by the audience itself. On one hand he suggests that everything is music; on the other, he prompts reflection on the impossibility of absolute silence ever truly existing. At the first public performance in 1952, the performer — pianist David Tudor — sits at a piano without ever playing it, marking the three sections of the piece simply by closing and opening the keyboard lid. The sounds of the surrounding environment, whether external (wind, rain) or internal to the hall, become the true protagonists. Cage brings out the sounds that the environment itself produces, sometimes with the aid of microphones, sometimes without, confirming his initial hypothesis that everything around us produces music.

Morton Feldman. The Gentle Giant

Besides Cage, there are a number of composers who can be considered proto-minimalists, chief among them Morton Feldman: a giant in many respects. Beyond his extraordinary artistic life and his shy yet at the same time tough, uncompromising character, he stood six feet tall and weighed some 330 pounds. His imposing bulk and at times gruff temperament clash remarkably with the frailty of his music, very often pared down to the bone, comparable to a musical version of abstract painting. Feldman met Cage for the first time in 1950, during a performance of Anton Webern's Symphony No. 1, and from that meeting a spontaneous friendship was born at once.

Feldman is not a student of Cage, but he finds in Cage's words an encouragement to keep pursuing his experiments, which up to that point had received little or no recognition. Feldman sees in music the possibility of describing the images of the abstract painters he loved, while Cage encourages him never to give up, no matter what.

The 1950 "Intermission" series is a typical example of the absolute abstraction of his music. With the total absence of rhythm and melody, with silence as the unifying element of a series of scattered, isolated notes that follow one another with no apparent logic and are thus completely unpredictable for the listener, Feldman creates, like Cage, a space of contemplation devoid of temporality, where nothing really changes over time, generating a mental state not unlike the contemplation of an abstract painting.
Very similar are "Extension 3" (1952) and the string quartet "Structures" (1951), where the sounds are so reduced to a minimum that they create an unreal, wholly immaterial silence.

His passion for abstract painting reaches its culmination in "Rothko Chapel" (1971), explicitly dedicated to the painter Mark Rothko, who had died the previous year, a work so minimal in its means that it induces a state of absolute hypnosis.

Californian minimalism. Eastern philosophy and mysticism

• La Monte Young
• Terry Riley

Californian minimalism was born in Los Angeles thanks to La Monte Young, one of the scene's most extreme figures. Terry Riley would be influenced by him, though he would later break away stylistically, while still keeping a firm bond with mystical Eastern atmospheres.
Having moved to New York, Young founded the "Theatre of Eternal Music" in 1967, a name that makes his intentions explicit.

La Monte Young. The obsession with eternal sound

If we were to define as beautiful whatever we appreciate, and to take an interest in whatever we find beautiful, we would end up always being interested in the same things (that is, the things we already appreciate). I'm not interested in the beautiful; I'm interested in the new, even if it might be disgusting
(La Monte Young)

The first true minimalist in history, and the father of the movement, is La Monte Young. He starts out playing jazz and — strange as it may sound, given his later music — becomes a virtuoso alto saxophonist. He is so skilled and original that at an audition for the Los Angeles City College jazz band he is actually preferred over Eric Dolphy. Yet he finds his true calling by listening to John Cage and delving into Eastern philosophies.
He joins the experimental music movement Fluxus and becomes a genuine high priest of the drone, taking those intuitions all the way to create the most extreme minimalism imaginable — and, precisely for that reason, the hardest to grasp. The idea of a continuous sound (an eminently Cage-ian notion), even an eternal one, likened to a living being that grows and changes with extreme slowness, becomes an obsession for him. La Monte Young lays the groundwork for the concept of music as a gradual process, one that evolves slowly, almost autonomously with respect to the will of the composer and the performer — an aspect that would become the cornerstone of Steve Reich's career.

His early minimalist works, such as "For Brass" (1957), "For Guitar" (1958) and "Trio For Strings" (1958), are aptly described by critic Alex Ross, who calls them "possessed of a momentum as headlong as continental drift." No definition could be more fitting.
In 1959 he moves to Europe, where he attends Stockhausen's classes in Darmstadt. The European experience is exhilarating for Young, who returns to America, settling in New York, with even more radical ideas. He gets in touch with Cage and moves toward conceptual, minimalist compositions such as "Composition", a series of short pieces that today read like a manifesto. Number 2 is accompanied by the sound of a fire lit in front of the audience, number 5 by the release of a swarm of butterflies.
He then founds, in a New York loft, the Dream House, an avant-garde workshop where he meets the members of his own creation, the Theatre Of Eternal Music. Among them: violinist John Cale, who would later join the Velvet Underground, Tony Conrad (a collaborator of Faust) and Terry Riley.

The products of those years are "The Tortoise, His Dreams And Journeys" (1964) and "Map Of 49's Dream The Two Systems Of Eleven Sets Of Galactic Intervals Ornamental Lightyears Tracery" (1966). Today his most important work is considered to be the monumental "The Well Tuned Piano", five hours performed on a piano whose peculiar tuning requires, on Young's part, as long as a month.
Young's influence is enormous: for instance, the viola drone in "Heroin" from the first Velvet Underground album is a direct offspring of those encounters, just as the early Third Ear Band, who played live pieces such as "Eternity In D", or even the ambient music of Brian Eno and German kosmische musik, largely stem from the experiences of the Dream House.

Terry Riley. The minimalist hippie

Terry Riley, although moving in the same circles, offers a minimalism very different from Young's. Where Young thinks of minimalism as music played with minimal means, Riley places the concept of repetition at its center. He is, more than any other minimalist, the one who best embodied the movement's mystical/spiritual soul, blending — in a context halfway between academia, Western popular music and Indian classical music — elements of pop-rock language with the counterculture typical of the American West Coast of the second half of the 1960s (pacifism, the hippie movement, a fascination with the East and with India in particular). Riley was, in a sense, the hippie of the minimalist movement, bringing the Summer Of Love and its ideals into Young's lofts; his experimentation combined mysticism and religiosity, pacifism and psychedelia, East and West — it's no coincidence that one of his points of reference was the Indian musician Pandit Pran Nath. His role is, in some ways, not unlike that played by Florian Fricke of Popol Vuh in the Germany of kraut-rock. An essential aspect for understanding Riley's music is his enormous communicative power, which sets him apart from most avant-garde composers; his boundless palette of colors allows him to paint vast chromatic and musical structures of great variety and vividness.
After his first experiments in repetitive music in 1963 ("Keyboard Studies") and after meeting Steve Reich in New York, with whom he delved deeper into the theoretical foundations of repetitive minimalism, he arrives together with Reich at a fundamental idea that would forever mark the story we are telling. While Reich and Riley's idea is to play short sonic patterns and then modify them after a certain number of repetitions, Reich comes up with the simple idea of setting everything to a steady pulse using a single repeated note, in this case a C. This is the basic idea that will allow Riley to release "In C" (1964), which can be considered the first truly minimalist work, in the sense of repetitive music.

"In C" is a foundational work, one that undeniably marks a watershed moment without which it would be impossible to imagine later works such as Steve Reich's Music For 18 Musicians (1976) or Philip Glass's Einstein On The Beach (1976), the two most mature works of the entire minimalist movement, as well as its formal swan song. These three compositions form the scaffolding of the whole movement, marking both the beginning and the end of the scene. A repeated C note runs throughout the roughly forty-minute performance, over which extremely short sound patterns of just three notes overlap and shift over time, divisible into fifty-three modules. There's no indication of the number or type of instruments making up the ensemble, nor of the octave the notes should be played in. All of these are variable choices to be agreed upon before the performance. At the first live performance in 1964, the piano was played by Steve Reich, who in the meantime was taking notes for his masterpiece Music For 18 Musicians. It's interesting to note how this work, so airy and liberating, strikes a balance between Riley's ideas of freedom and Reich's obsession with order and schematic structure.

But it's with the subsequent A Rainbow In Curved Air (1969) that Riley truly created the sound he had long aspired to, embracing hippie culture just as it was fading. The memorable title track (eighteen minutes) is a classic example of mystical minimalism; a brief pattern of a few electric organ notes repeats and overlaps at different speeds, while a new, absurdly sped-up electric harpsichord pattern joins in with results of extreme vitality. There are never any variations in melody or harmony – if anything, it's the timbres that change – but attention is always on small details that shift over time.
The repetitions are never rigid or mathematical, as in Steve Reich's case, but rather rich in inspiration, imagination, and unexpected surprises chasing one another in a whirl. The atmospheres can shift from Eastern to psychedelic, from Western electronics to tribal music. Joyous moments alternate with near-liturgical ones, but Riley's religion doesn't aim to instill guilt – it aims to liberate. A few years later he would reach similarly high levels with "Persian Surgery Dervishes" (1972).

With these two albums, Riley builds a bridge between avant-garde, Indian music and psychedelia, a mystical minimalism close to Eastern spirituality yet understandable to anyone, not a cold experiment but music that speaks to the listener's heart.

New York Minimalism. Mathematics and Repetition

• Steve Reich
• Philip Glass

The other face of American minimalism is found in New York, with two protagonists, Steve Reich and Philip Glass. Unlike the Californian side, which produced music with mystical and sentimental aspects, New York gave rise to an extremely technical, obsessive and mathematical minimalism, so cold that it opened up the concept of music as a process which, once set in motion by the composer, proceeds autonomously.

Steve Reich. The Master of Phasing

Steve Reich, philosopher and musician who studied under Luciano Berio, is an incredible figure – a New York cab driver by day, an avant-garde composer by night. Where Riley was open to psychedelic atmospheres, Reich created decidedly colder, more urban worlds. Obsessed with repetition, after various attempts he became an experimenter with tape music, working on out-of-phase sounds. His earliest works were therefore repeated magnetic tape recordings. The mechanism involved playing back a tape recording set to loop.
A second tape with the same recording would then start playing at a slightly different speed, with further tapes gradually added. While at first the sounds overlap, after several minutes the tapes drift into an increasingly pronounced phase shift, creating unexpected and unpredictable sounds, until eventually the words become utterly incomprehensible.
This is the foundation of his music as an autonomous, gradual process, since once set in motion in a certain way, the operation cannot be altered and proceeds entirely on its own (process music).
The works from this phase are "It's Gonna Rain" (1965) and "Come Out" (1966), two fundamental experiments in the history of minimalism. In the former he uses the words of a Protestant preacher foretelling an imminent apocalypse, while in "Come Out" he reveals his political views, looping and phasing the words of Daniel Hamm, a Black youth wrongly accused of murder. Hamm, with the words "Come Out To Show Them", says he had to show his blood to the police officers accusing him, to prove he had been unjustly beaten by the guards. Reich, in an America still gripped by racism, chooses – with this experiment – which side to take, immortalizing the words of the poor innocent young man.

Reich arrives at the extraordinary and, at the same time, ingenious decision to renew this mechanical, robotic process by recreating it with two musicians in the subsequent "Piano Phase" and "Violin Phase" (1967). In "Piano Phase", two pianists repeat an extremely short sound pattern at barely different speeds. Naturally, as time passes, the phase shift between the pianos creates unexpected notes and patterns, not decided by the composer, which immediately become new sequences to be looped. These same loops keep changing over time, demanding an almost inhuman level of performing difficulty, and enormous concentration from the pianists, who must repeat their own loop in robotic fashion and then switch to a new one.

Similar works would be "Drumming" (1971) and "Clapping Music" (1971). After this phase, Reich reaches his fully realized work through intermediate stages. "Music For Mallet Instruments, Voices And Organ" (1974) is a classic example of repetitive composition, foreshadowing the colossal Music For 18 Musicians (1976), an extremely complex work requiring at least eighteen musicians. Here too, the performing complexity is pushed to the limit. There are even two musicians playing the same note on piano or marimba, always at the same speed, but one on the beat and the other off the beat, for the entire duration of the performance. This creates a very fast rhythmic pulse that runs through the whole piece but requires the musician to almost detach themselves from the rest of the group.

"Music For 18 Musicians" represents the culmination of an extraordinary decade that had begun with Terry Riley's "In C". But the story, though drawing to a close, still had something left to say. 

Philip Glass. Operatic Minimalism

Philip Glass, before becoming one of the most famous composers of Hollywood film scores, was a repetitive minimalist composer in the wake of Steve Reich. Having also started out as a New York cab driver, he managed to become the best-known minimalist composer in the world, capable of carrying his style from lofts and garages all the way to the Metropolitan in New York.
Initially, his music too was marked by a total lack of emotionality and by a mathematical approach, much like Reich's, as heard in his early works "Two Pages" (1968) or "Music In Contrary Motion" (1969). Things begin to change with the sprawling "Music In Twelve Parts", which shows a slight departure from Reich's coldness.

He then turns his attention to music for theatre and creates – in collaboration with Robert Wilson – one of his best-known works, "Einstein On The Beach" (1976). It's an extremely long piece, about five hours, and when it's first staged in Manhattan it's met with enthusiasm. In a sense, it's the summa of the idea of repetitive, anti-narrative music, so emblematic that it could be described as the final chapter of our story.
"Einstein On The Beach" marks the beginning of Glass's artistic career, but it's still typically minimalist: there's no story, the work is nothing more than a set of environments and images to inhabit or watch, like viewing a painting. The structure is so akin to painting that audience members can leave the theatre and return a few minutes later.
The music is completely detached from any narrative; the lyrics are simple numbers or vocalizations that mimic instrumental sound patterns. The subject is the beauty of sound itself, of pure sound. A turning point that effectively brings to completion what had originally been the project of John Cage, Morton Feldman or La Monte Young. The circle closes magnificently. After this, history would never be the same, and people would start talking about post-minimalism, a scene that remains of enormous historical importance nonetheless. Glass would go on to become a highly sought-after film composer and release essential works, even though the minimalist season could by then be considered over. In an interview, he himself tells us that, in his view, minimalism had already lost its innovative charge by 1974 – as much as two years before "Einstein On The Beach".

In any case, at least two later works deserve mention. "Glassworks" (1982) for piano and orchestra, an example of romantic minimalist pianism, decidedly influential on all subsequent generations of pianists and in particular on the contemporary modern classical scene inspired by Max Richter, and the soundtrack to Godfrey Reggio's documentary "Koyaanisqatsi" (1983), one of the most emotionally powerful achievements of his career, still rich with references to repetitive minimalism.

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07/03/2026