Weekend self-care open thread: Minimalism

Posted by Liberal Librarian May 04, 2024

Weekend self-care open thread: Minimalism

Meredith Monk

I realized that I've never done a self-care weekend post on my favorite genre of modern Western art music: Minimalism.

The twentieth century saw a rupture with the dominant classical musical forms of the nineteenth century. Romanticism transitioned to modernism, which transitioned to atonality. After the Second World War and the horrors of Auschwitz, we saw a complete break with the musics of the past, led by the likes of Pierre Boulez and Gyorgy Ligeti.

The problem with these musics is that, well, they had no musicality. They were all discord and atonality. While the avant-garde wanted to dispense with tonality and melody, it couldn't bring the listening public to their revolutionary project. Even after Bergen-Belsen—or, maybe, especially after—people wanted, not the music of the nineteenth century, but not the cold, mechanical works of the 1950s and 1960s. Boulez became more famous for being a conductor of the type of music he rejected, rather than as the type of music he composed and championed.

Minimalism was a reaction to this type of music. It didn't hearken back to Mahler and Brahms. But it rejected the austerity of Boulez. It was rooted in popular music, and the music of the East. It sought a means to bring melody and rhythm back into Western art music, while forging new paths.

Minimalism has evolved since the early experiments of Terry Riley and Moondog. At the very beginning, it was very much a droning music. Philip Glass's Einstein on the Beach would either draw you into a transcendental meditation, or drive you out of the opera hall for the monotony. As minimalism evolved, it veered away from droning music and into melodic landscapes which were of the time, not of the Romantics.

For this weekend's self-care, we shall delve into this major Western art music movement.