The term is amorphous, but still useful
With minimalism so widely accepted and practiced today, it’s easy to forget that the name began as a pejorative and that this umbrella of musical styles had to fight for the cultural space it now occupies.
The history is worth a brief recap — both as a reminder that every artist working in this space is standing on the shoulders of giants, and as a framework for seeing the common underlying tenets of music that might on the surface seem quite different.
What is minimalism? It’s exactly what the name implies: a stripping down of art to its essence; a spare, judicious use of the basic building blocks of creation.
In visual art, minimalism came into focus in the late 1950s and early ‘60s in Frank Stella’s black paintings. In music, it came out of 1960s New York City and composers such as LaMonte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich and Phillip Glass. Their music incorporated elements such as drone, repeated patterns (often arpeggios) and consonant rather than dissonant harmonies.
No doubt there were numerous sources of inspiration for these composers: the philosophies and music of John Cage and Morton Feldman; Indian raga; African drumming; John Coltrane; and Miles Davis, whose explorations of mood, tone and space offer inspiration for both compositional ambient and minimalism more generally.
The shadows of those early pioneers have since been cast in literally hundreds of directions: Brian Eno, Max Richter, Talk Talk, Godspeed You Black Emperor!, Low, Stars of the Lid, Nils Frahm and many, many more.
What was the knock against minimalism? Essentially that it is quite literally not enough — that its elements are too simple to engage a serious ear. In a classical context — Western art music, if you want to call it that — this criticism comes from the fact that minimalism represented a repudiation of what came before it, which was fiendishly complex modernism.
Clearly I’m on the side of the minimalists or I wouldn’t be writing this blog. But there was a kernel of truth to the criticism: When taken too far, minimalism can become too predictable — too harmonically or melodically static. Of course, where that line falls is subjective: No doubt the music I make is too slow and devoid of surprise for some, while others might take comfort in its repeated patterns, layers of instrumentation and subtle variations.
At a certain point, it’s fair to ask whether “minimalist” still has any meaning. After all, the movement’s influence has spread so far and wide — among classical, film and ambient composers, and all along the spectrum from “art” to “pop” music — that it’s no doubt become an amorphous term. Not to mention that plenty of musicians and composers who have been tagged with the label reject it — and some of them have produced large, complex works that don’t fit easily under a minimalist banner. Also, terminology evolves. In the visual arts, the term “post-minimalism” has been used since the early 1970s, while in music it’s been around since about 1980.
So, is there any point to continuing to use the word “minimalism”? Again, it’s a fair question.
My answer is simple: Musicologists might split hairs over this, but I’m not going to. When I use the term “minimalist,” I’m referring to a framework of ideas — not strictly to the 1960s movement where those ideas originated. While there are certainly many subgenres that have spun out of the decades-old minimalist movement — and I’ll use those identifiers as needed — there’s still a common element that unites them all: the idea that less is more.
That’s not to say that minimalist music is always simple — in fact, lots of it has plenty of musical sophistication and subtlety — only that it starts from a philosophy that a single note, or even silence itself, can speak volumes. And that’s enough commonality for me to continue to use the term to denote a big-tent philosophy that continues to yield beautiful and meaningful creative works, both throughout the decades and across a range of related genres.