Minimalism
A spare, patient, and deeply influential strand of 20th-century concert music, minimalism turns repetition into motion and small changes into drama. Its best-known works can feel almost architectural: simple materials, steadily re-lit from different angles.
Origins and context
Documented histories place the style’s emergence in the U.S. avant-garde of the 1960s, especially New York and the San Francisco Tape Music Center scene around Terry Riley, Steve Reich, La Monte Young, and Philip Glass.
The sound
Characteristics
- Steady pulse
- Repetition
- Gradual harmonic change
- Modular phrases
- Tape loops
- Keyboard ensembles
- Strings
- Woodwinds
- Percussion
History
Minimalism took shape in the United States during the 1960s, when a handful of composers began pushing back against the density and academic rigor of postwar modernism. Terry Riley’s *In C* is widely treated as a breakthrough moment for the style, and La Monte Young, Steve Reich, and Philip Glass soon gave the music its other defining voices. What made the music feel new was not just repetition, but the way repetition became a space for drift: phased patterns, sustained tones, modular phrases, and long spans where change arrives almost imperceptibly. Philip Glass has described his early work in terms of “repetitive structures,” and both Apple Music and AllMusic place the movement’s roots in the U.S. late-20th-century avant-garde, with a strong pull from Indian music and other non-Western traditions.
Notable artists
- TRTerry Riley
- SRSteve Reich
- PGPhilip Glass
- LMLa Monte Young
Essential listening
- 1
Terry Riley: In C
Terry Riley, Members of the Creative & Performing Arts at SUNY-Buffalo
- 2
- 3
- 4
