Minimal music

Minimal music is a style built from limited musical materials, repeated patterns, and gradual changes in rhythm, harmony, or texture. Its processes make small shifts perceptible over extended durations.

Additive process: A compositional procedure that lengthens or shortens a pattern by adding or removing notes. Some minimalist works build changing phrases through incremental additions to a repeated pattern.
La Monte Young: An American composer whose sustained tones and long durations helped establish early minimal music. His experiments with drones and duration helped open the style’s earliest path.
Serialism: A compositional method that organizes musical parameters through ordered series, especially pitch. Its dense systematic ordering contrasts with minimal music’s restricted materials and audible repetition.
Einstein on the Beach: A 1976 opera by Philip Glass and Robert Wilson built from repeating musical and theatrical structures. The opera demonstrates how repetition can organize an expansive stage work.
Repetition in music: The recurrence of musical material within a composition or performance. Minimal music makes repetition a foregrounded structure rather than a supporting device.
Phase music: Music made by performing identical patterns at slightly different speeds so they gradually move out of sync. Steve Reich’s phasing turns repetition into audible rhythmic change.
Terry Riley: An American composer known for repetitive works including the 1964 piece In C. In C became a landmark model for modular repetition and flexible performance.
Indeterminacy in music: A compositional approach that leaves some musical choices to chance or performer decisions. Minimalist repetition often relies on fixed processes, unlike indeterminate works that leave outcomes open.
Music for 18 Musicians: A 1976–1978 ensemble work by Steve Reich based on repeating pulses, cycles, and gradual changes. Its interlocking patterns show minimalist process at large ensemble scale.
Musical process: A compositional procedure whose unfolding generates much or all of a piece’s musical form. Process makes the work’s gradual transformation itself part of what listeners hear.

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