Minimalism and since: Reich, Glass, Pärt and the late twentieth century

By 1960 the advanced music of the day had no pulse you could tap, no key, no repetition and no consonance. What happened next was the most complete reversal in the history of the art: a handful of young Americans, working outside the conservatories and mostly in lofts, wrote music that had nothing but pulse, repetition and consonance. Minimalism is the one twentieth-century style that the general listener took to immediately, and — conveniently for the quizzer — it is the easiest of all to identify by ear.

The four tells

Almost all minimalism has these together, and the combination is what matters:

A constant audible pulse. Steady quavers, usually fast, usually unvaried, usually with no rubato at all. Nothing slows down for expressive effect.

Literal repetition. A short figure — often four to eight notes — repeated many times without variation, or with change so gradual that you notice it only in retrospect.

Very slow harmonic change. This is the decisive one. The music can sit on a single chord for a minute or more, and a whole movement may pass through five or six harmonies.

Consonance. Triads, fourths and fifths, diatonic or modal. After fifty years of dissonance this was the provocation.

To those add the surface: bright, dry, percussive timbres (marimba, vibraphone, piano, electric organ, amplified winds and voices), an even unsentimental dynamic, and — very often — an audible process, a mechanism the listener can hear working itself out.

The founders

Minimalism began in New York and California in the early 1960s, as a repudiation of European serialism. Its raw materials came from outside the tradition: West African drumming, which Steve Reich went to Ghana to study in 1970; Balinese gamelan; Indian raga, which Philip Glass and Terry Riley absorbed through Ravi Shankar; La Monte Young’s sustained drones; and the deliberate plainness of Satie.

Riley

Terry Riley’s In C (1964) is generally taken as the starting gun. The score is 53 short melodic fragments; any number of players work through them in order, repeating each as often as they like, over a pulsing high C on the piano. No two performances last the same time. Riley’s other contribution was the long modal improvisation over tape delay, as on A Rainbow in Curved Air (1969), which fed directly into progressive rock and later ambient music.

Reich

Steve Reich’s device is phasing. Two players begin the same short pattern in unison; one imperceptibly accelerates until they are a quaver apart, then two, and so on until they realign. The pitches never change — only the rhythmic relationship does, and the interest lies in the resultant patterns that emerge as a by-product. He found it in tape loops in It's Gonna Rain (1965) and transferred it to live players in Piano Phase (1967) and Clapping Music (1972).

Phasing is the most diagnostic single device in this whole repertoire. If you hear two identical lines sliding out of alignment, you are hearing Reich or a direct imitator, and you can date it to 1965 onwards.

Reich’s later music — Music for 18 Musicians (1974–76), Different Trains (1988), Music for a Large Ensemble — drops literal phasing for interlocking rhythmic canons, pulsing chords that breathe with the players’ breath, and, later, recorded speech whose melodic contour the instruments double.

Glass

Philip Glass’s method is additive process. A cell of five notes becomes six, then seven, then contracts again, so the bar length breathes while the surface stays constant. His textures are keyboard-led, not percussion-led: churning arpeggios on electric organs, soprano saxophone, wordless voices, all amplified, cycling round short chord progressions. Einstein on the Beach (1976) and Koyaanisqatsi (1982) are the reference points.

The Reich-versus-Glass confusion is the one that catches people, and it resolves on texture. Reich is percussive and canonic; Glass is keyboard-driven and harmonic. Reich’s ancestry is African and Balinese; Glass’s is Indian, and more theatrical.

Adams

John Adams, a generation younger, keeps minimalism’s motor but restores everything it had renounced. Shaker Loops (1978), Harmonielehre (1985) and Nixon in China (1987) pulse like Reich and swell like Mahler — rich, shifting harmony, full Romantic orchestra, real climaxes, real drama. He is the standard example of post-minimalism: the technique domesticated and put back to work inside the tradition. If it repeats and pulses but also builds to an emotional peak, it is Adams or someone following him.

Holy minimalism

A separate strand emerged in Europe, and its resemblance to the American school is mostly superficial.

Arvo Pärt stopped composing for years in the early 1970s, studied plainchant and early polyphony, and emerged in 1976 with tintinnabuli — Latin for little bells. The system locks two voices together: a melodic voice moving mostly by step, and a tintinnabuli voice sounding only the notes of one triad. Everything is derived from that pairing. The Pärt Centre describes it as a reduction of musical means to a basic level rather than an increase in complexity, and distinguishes it explicitly from serialism, though it is just as strictly rule-governed. Für Alina (1976) is where it begins; Fratres, Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten and Spiegel im Spiegel follow in 1977–78.

Henryk Górecki’s Third Symphony, the Symphony of Sorrowful Songs (1976), is slow, modal, immensely long-breathed, built on canon and a soprano setting Polish texts of loss; a 1992 recording sold over a million copies. John Tavener wrote The Protecting Veil (1989) out of Orthodox chant.

What separates these from Reich and Glass is easy to hear: there is no motor rhythm. The holy minimalists are slow, quiet, modal, often sacred in text, built on long pedal notes and silence. The Americans drive; the Europeans hover.

Minimalism versus Baroque repetition

This is the trap the brief is built for, and it deserves care, because Vivaldi also repeats short figures over an unvarying pulse.

The one-question test: does the harmony move? Baroque repetition is the surface of a journey. Minimalist repetition is the whole content. Once you listen for harmonic rate rather than for the pattern itself, the two stop resembling each other at all.

The wider late-century field

Minimalism was never the only thing happening, and a few neighbours are worth recognising.

Spectralism, in France from the mid-1970s, composed from acoustics. Gérard Grisey analysed the overtone spectrum of a trombone note and built Partiels (1975) from it; Tristan Murail worked similarly. The music sounds like one enormous, slowly evolving timbre, often microtonal, with harmony that behaves like the physics of a sound rather than like chords. Slow and unfamiliar, like holy minimalism, but sensuous and detuned rather than modal and pure.

The Eastern European turn. Górecki, Pärt and others abandoned the avant-garde for consonance and religion in the 1970s, partly in reaction to an official culture and partly out of exhaustion with modernism.

Post-minimalism and totalism — Adams, Louis Andriessen, Michael Nyman, Nico Muhly, Max Richter — keep the pulse and repetition and add back harmony, drama and, often, rock and jazz inflections.

Film music absorbed the lot. A pulsing ostinato under slowly changing harmony sustains tension indefinitely without fighting dialogue, which makes it perfect underscore. Glass scored Koyaanisqatsi and The Hours (2002); Nyman, Richter, Jóhann Jóhannsson, Hans Zimmer and Ludovico Einaudi all work in the idiom. This is the dating trap of the whole topic: arpeggiated strings over a slow chord change is now the default sound of serious television, and tells you nothing about the 1970s. Ask whether there is an actual audible process at work, or only a mood.

How to spot it in ten seconds

1. Is there a steady, unvaried pulse with no rubato? If yes, keep going; if the tempo breathes expressively, you are elsewhere.
2. How fast does the harmony change? This is the master test. Chords lasting many bars means minimalism; chords every beat means Baroque, whatever is repeating.
3. Is the repetition literal or sequential? Literal and unchanging is minimalist; restated a step higher and heading for a cadence is Baroque.
4. Listen for a process. Two identical lines sliding apart is Reich’s phasing. Figures growing by one note at a time is Glass’s additive process.
5. Check the instruments. Marimbas, pianos and clapping — Reich. Electric organs, saxophone and voices — Glass. Full symphony orchestra — Adams or later.
6. Is there a climax? Early minimalism avoids them. A genuine emotional peak over a minimalist motor means post-minimalism, so 1980 onwards.
7. Is it slow, quiet and sacred, with no motor rhythm? Holy minimalism: Pärt, Górecki, Tavener, from the mid-1970s.
8. For Pärt specifically, listen for the two-voice lock — a stepwise line against a voice that only ever sounds one triad, with bell-like silences.
9. Does it sound like one giant detuned chord, evolving over minutes? Spectralism: France, mid-1970s onwards.
10. Finally, ask whether it is underscore. Arpeggios over a slow harmonic drift with no audible process is film and television language, and dates to any point after about 1990.