In 1966, then 30-year-old New York-based composer Steve Reich published a remarkable sound collage. For 13 minutes, a male voice kept repeating the words “come out to show them”; Reich had edited, looped and layered the fragment to haunting effects. After a few minutes, the vocal became almost intelligible, dissolving into pure texture.
The voice belonged to 19-year old Daniel Hamm, one of six Black youths arrested for the murder of a white woman during the Harlem riot of 1964. Hamm didn’t commit the crime, but was still severely beaten in jail. Trying to convince police he was seriously wounded to get medical treatment, he said, "I had to, like, open the bruise up, and let some of the bruise blood come out to show them".
Released in the midst of the Black liberation era, “Come Out” was a political piece on many levels. The recording came from a tape Reich had obtained from a civil rights activist.
Reich wasn’t an activist, but he was captured by a general spirit of rebellion that had taken over his generation. As a young classical composer, his personal insubordination targeted the academic music elite.
At the colleges he’d attended back in the late 1950s and early 1960s, just two styles of composition were accepted: Stockhausen’s serialist school, and the John Cage school of indeterminacy.
Both rejected steady rhythms, conventional melodies and harmonics. The resulting music had no beats to nod along to, and no melodies to whistle along with. Tonality was frowned upon.
Reich didn’t want to follow this route. Instead he turned to the beginning of the century, before the European avant-garde had first ventured off from the classical-romantic tradition. A quintessential document of that transition, Igor Stravinsky’s ballet music for “Le Sacre du printemps” (1913), became one of Reich’s most important influences.
In a speech reproduced in Alvin Lucier’s book “Eight Lectures on Experimental Music”, Reich explained his basic theory: At the beginning of the 20th century, he wrote, the European avant-garde had stopped composing in service of the audience. By rejecting accepted rules of meter, harmony and melody, they had decided to make music for a tiny academic niche. Reich’s idea was to reinstate classical music as a popular music, not just for a class of elitists.
That actually feels quite reminiscent of a story that Ludovico Einaudi, one of the defining composers of the neoclassical movement, likes to tell. After studying serial composition with Luciano Berio, a Stockhausen contemporary, Einaudi reinvented himself by doing away with the complex, heady concepts in favour of an unabashedly melodic, almost naive style of writing music.
He didn’t know it then, but at the time he started his ascent to becoming possibly the most successful composer of contemporary music. Of course, the elites wouldn’t approve of his new direction, essentially expelling him from their circles.
40 years earlier, Steve Reich had similar thoughts. To inform his compositions, he didn’t look towards serialism – he looked towards the jazz of John Coltrane and the soul music of Motown, the mesmerizing, trance-inducing polyrhythms of African drumming and Balinese gamelan music.
The Californian composer Terry Riley had developed similar ideas and techniques around the same time. Working with repeating patterns through tape loops, editing and feedback techniques, he finished his composition “In C” in 1964. It is often considered the defining piece of Minimal Music.
While Riley tended towards the opaque and esoteric, the music of Philip Glass followed in Reich’s meticulously notated tradition. Glass focused on tiny, repetitive motives that evolve incrementally – leading to groundbreaking pieces such as “Music In Similar Motion” (1969).
More akin to Riley’s spiritual search, the composer LaMonte Young performed extremely long concerts, sometimes even designed as ‘all-nighters’. Inspired by the tanpura drones of Indian ragas, Young desired to build a rich spectrum of overtones for the audience to get lost in.
All of these similar compositional approaches were soon summarized under the catchphrase of Minimal Music – a reference to Minimal Art and the reliance on a limited set of ingredients.
The revolutionary spirit of that music needs to be seen within the wider societal shifts and changes of the era.
An underpinning idea of Minimalism was to fight “cultural imperialism”, as represented by the European tradition. These composers were iconoclasts. Authorities represented their natural enemies – including the canon of established composers and academics.
In non-Western music, they discovered new techniques, scales and modes, experimenting with non-standard tunings and ecstatic forms of real-time composition.
In the beginning, Minimal Music found just a small audience in the bohemian art scenes of New York and on the West Coast. But during the 1970s, it massively gained popularity. With their repetitive patterns and pulses, these artist-composers drew a new, younger audience into the concert halls – students, hippies and other non-conformists.
After peaking in the 1970s and early 1980s, Minimal Music started disappearing from concert halls again. But in the 2000s, neoclassical music appeared, silently breathing new life into the ideas of Minimalism – using repetition and simplicity as their main guidelines, while mixing classical instrumentation with ideas from pop, electronic, ambient and post-rock music.
Young people started showing up to pensive solo piano shows, and classical musicians suddenly found themselves playing in hip electronic music clubs. Whether purists and academics like it or not, neoclassical composers have successfully implemented classical aesthetics and ideas into a popular style of contemporary music.
Many of them have been referencing Minimalism as an inspiration – in their music, but in interviews as well. (Some even go as far as to call Einaudi, the master of the repetitive arpeggio, a Minimalist at heart.) In turn, the sound of 1960s and 1970s America was eventually rediscovered and started reappearing on the setlists of philharmonic orchestras, festivals and concert halls.
Though female and queer composers were denied wider success and visibility at the time, their contributions were still fundamental. Pauline Oliveros, Catherine Christer Hennix, Ann Southam – these names finally need to be mentioned in the same breath as their male peers, and their works need to be reexamined and reappraised.