MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM...............,
though this may sound like the hum of a refrigerator or car motor, it was
once a sound of the birth of a new and challenging form of experimental
music, minimalism.
        Throughout history, the majority of music that has achieved status
worth listening to among the public, has had many positive characteristics
attached to it.  Most of these characteristics deal with a degree of
complexity that most of the population is unaware of.  For example, most
of western classical music entails page after page of extraordinarily
involved and intricate notation that only a handful of people might be
able to truly appreciate.  Not just in classical music, but in other forms
as well, has the idea of great composition been related to one that deals
in complexities.  However, as time progressed and the minds of musicians
begin to break the molds of classical structure, things began to change.
All of a sudden a performer could sit at a piano on stage and not touch a
single key and be hailed as a master.  The idea behind the music was
gaining just as much attention as the aesthetic and aural part had
formerly received.  When John Cage opened the door to this revolution, he
let in a range of people from those trying to destroy the grand canon of
music and those who simply wanted their ideas given a chance.  This gave
way to four men named Young, Riley, Reich and Glass, otherwise known as
the fathers of minimalism.
        Minimalism is a term that was first coined by Michael Nyman when
trying to label the music of these pioneers of experimental music.
However, the label is one that is very broad and can only be used in the
simplest of descriptions.  Obviously the label minimalism is meant to
describe a music that has very little change or complexity and is for the
most part very static.  This implies however, that all other forms of
music fall into one category, one abundant with change and complexity,
which is an extremely broad and pointless description as well.  Hence, we
must understand that the term minimalism is something that can be seen as
a designation used merely for categorization and not as a purely accurate
descriptive label.
        As I spoke of before, John Cage opened a door to a world of sound
that shattered the ideas of aural art that had been previously feed to the
public in the form of music.  Cage and the school of Feldman, Brown and
Wolff brought forth the sounds of indeterminacy to those of multiplicity
and non-involvement.  These performances brought about events that the
artists had not planned and they loved it.  They also put forth
performances that contained such a multitude of material, that an audience
might not even be able to soak it all in, one example being Cage's HPSCHD.
        From the experiences of the Cagean school, the minimalists did not
exactly revolt, but found certain deficiencies that they were displeased
with.  One of the major components that the minimalists sought to change
from the ideas of Cage was to bring back some sort of structure to their
pieces, not just complete randomness.  The other factor being the fact
that experimentalists often used such a multitude of actions and sounds
that they could not be completely comprehended.  From these
dissatisfactions was born what we now tend to label "minimalism".
        Over the course of the past forty-five years there have been a few
dozen minimalists who have contributed to the overall movement, but there
are four in particular who made the majority of contribution in forming
the school.  The four figureheads are La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve
Reich and Phillip Glass.  The order I have put them in is not random, but
constructed in the manner that minimalism was constructed.  La Monte Young
was a teacher to Terry Riley, Riley was a teacher to Reich and finally
Reich to Glass.
        Throughout the course of my studies on minimalism I have
discovered a very interesting quirk that I will point out as I recount the
history and impact of minimalism.  This quirk I have discovered is the
fact that even though the minimalist movement was supposedly a reaction
and in some ways opposition to the experimental music of Cage, the
minimalist music produced by the four fathers in certain ways began to
embrace and implement Cagean ideas.
        The father of this school of thought was raised in a strict Mormon
household in the middle of the Utah countryside.  It is almost an
unimaginable transformation that La Monte Young made from conservative
country boy to one of the most avant garde performers in the history of
music.  As a boy he used to lay on his back in bed in the middle of his
parents farm and listen to the soothing and constant tones that surrounded
him in nature.  It would be these sounds of the wind and the ever-flowing
creek that would be his first influences in the world of minimalism.  As a
young man, now studying music in high school he would become deeply
enraptured by the sounds of serialism and tonal jazz, hence his idols
became people like Webern and Coltrane.  What he found so interesting in
these styles of music is that one could take a certain tone or twelve tone
scale and create an entire entity of sound and music by playing variations
off of that tone.  He began, as did the majority of the four fathers of
minimalism by creating compositions in the style of serialism.  However,
just like all of the fathers, became fed up with this system that was so
incredibly complex and restricting in ways, that they began to veer away
from this system of atonal music.
        The point at which Young's compositional style began to change
drastically, and again so did the other composers, was upon their
introduction to classical Indian music, in particular that of the
Hindustani or northern classical style.  When exposed to this music all
composers found common attractions - tone, vibration and a cyclic nature.
This style of Indian music became the ultimate influence upon the school
of minimalism.
        The first form of minimalism took place in Young's extended tone
performances that modeled Indian drones perfectly.  He and his partner,
Marian Zazeela, used a sine wave generator and voices to produce certain
ranges of vibrations and pitches that would be performed for hours at a
time at extreme volumes.  The purpose of this was to completely wrap the
listener up into the sound itself; the sound would engulf and consume the
listener and hopefully bring them to another level awareness.  The tones
that were performed were extremely tight in the sense that there was no
room for improvisation on the part of the performer.  Because there was
such a slight change in the music the listener was not constantly awaiting
what was going to happen next as one might at a Cage concert, but be
solely attentive to what was going on right now.  Just as the Indian raga
was intended to create an atmosphere and awareness for the listener, Young
attempted the same with his tones.  His tones were not only sounds, but
also meshes of vibrations of energy that reflected the energy that all
beings were composed of.
        As his performances progressed he became more wrapped up in the
idea of completely immersing the listener into the sound.  He eventually
formed what was known as The Theatre of Eternal Sound which composed of
Tony Conrad, Marian Zazeela, himself and John Cale who would eventually
move on the become the violist for the Velvet Underground.  Tony and John
played violin and viola respectively in an extended and drone like manner
while Young and Marian sang dhrupad, a form of Indian classical singing
which unfolds the tonal range in ragas in the form of an alap or opening
period. A master, who lived with he and Marian, Pandit Pran Nath taught
the Indian raga singing to him.  During their performances, Marian created
colored slides that were projected on the performers that moved at the
rate of Young's tonal changes, about one change every hour or so.  The
lights helped the idea of total immersion in the music.  The final stage
of Young's ideas of extended tones and enlightenment through vibration and
duration manifested in the form of The Dream House.  The Dream House was a
project that involved an entire house to be constantly flooded with tones
played by live performers.  When I speak of constantly I shall be more
accurate of saying that tones were played 24 hours a day for 8 whole
years.  Finally the funding of the project could not be held up and the
house had to be shut down, but it was a phenomenon in its time.  Young
eventually brought his theories to the young mind of a man named Terry
Riley, who became enamored with the idea and joined it with his own ideas
to create the next stage in a minimalist revolution.
        Terry Riley began to be mesmerized by the influence of minimalism
during his first days at school in Berkeley.  He came into the school with
an image of himself sitting behind a huge grand piano performing Beethoven
in front of a bourgeoisie crowd applauding at his grace and skill.  All of
these dreams changed when he heard the phrase "Hello, I'm La Monte Young".
From the moment he met Young onward, his intent was no longer to follow in
the tradition of Western classical music, but to alter, challenge and in
ways, destroy it.  He became a disciple of Young, assisting him in all of
his projects at Berkeley and eventually meeting up with him later on in
New York and working with the Theatre of Eternal Music.
        Following in the steps of Young and laying the foundation for
those ahead, Riley took a great deal of his musical influence from Indian
Classical Music.  Where as Young took his influence from the vibrations
and tones of the Hindustani system, Riley became more involved with the
rhythmic characteristics of the system.  The majority of western music has
rhythm set up in blocks, a place where the rhythm begins and the rhythm
ends.  In Indian classical music however, the rhythmic system, known as
tala, is set up in a circular manner.  The first beat of a new section is
the last beat of the old section; this way there is an interconnected
nature to the entire rhythm.  Riley took this idea and applied to the
minimalist theories that he and Young had been working on.  Instead of
merely playing tones for extended periods he used repetition to create his
form of minimalism.  He did a good deal of this work using tape loops of
repeated sound bites.  This was not only an era where minimalism was
entering a new stage, but electronic music as well with the improvement
and invention of new types of loop systems.
        It was through repetition that the anthem for minimalist music was
written.  The piece entitled In C, consisted of 53 separate sections of
music.  The performer was to repeat each phrase as many times as they
wanted and then move on to the next until the entire piece was completed.
The piece was named literally because it all takes place in C.  The fact
that the performer is given the option to play the portions of the piece
as many times as they want give it a distinct feel of indeterminacy.  This
would relate back to the works of Cage, Feldman, Brown and Wolff.  Since
there was the idea of indeterminacy going on, there would never be an
exact performance replicated.  This was not only a groundbreaking piece of
minimal music it was the first to show the creeping influence of Cage in
the minimalist school.  The works of La Monte Young, though not extremely
complex were very ordered.  The performer did not have much option as to
what they were going to play.
        The third performer/composer to appear on the minimalist scene was
a student of Terry Riley named Steve Reich.  Reich was one of the
performers in the premier of Riley's In C.  Being a student of Riley's,
Reich became more sided with the ideas of minimalism that were grounded in
repetition, rather than those of Young that dealt more with extended
tones.
        Reich, just as his predecessors, had been influenced by the ideas
of Indian classical music, but also had influences that the other
composers did not.  These influences came from the continent of Africa,
more specifically from the drummers of Ghana.  The West African drumming
shares some of the same ideas of Indian in the sense that it is very
cyclic and repetitive, but has interesting characteristics all to itself.
One of the most influential characteristics for Reich was the fact that
the Ghanaian drummers used incredible amounts of polyrhythms that were
held together by a base beat that was usually played by a bell.  One of
his most famous pieces that entailed percussion was entitled Drumming,
which was sound for bongos and glockenspiels.  This used minimalist
concepts, but instead of tape loops being employed to create the
repetitive nature of the music the performers themselves used repetitive
percussion to create the idea.  Though it seems rather simple to play a
single drum riff over and over, it has been noted that it takes a great
amount of concentration to not get lost in what you are playing.  Getting
lost in the circle of sound is, however, one of the ideas Reich was trying
to get his audience to experience.
        Reich, just as Riley, did use tape loops for a good deal of his
work.  Like Riley, Reich started using loops to aid with the repetitive
processes in his work, but by chance, created a whole new concept in the
forms of minimal music.  Reich wanted to create masses of tape loops and
spatial areas of his sounds so he began to play loops of the same thing
simultaneously on different recorders.  Because the recorders were not
perfect machines they began to slip out of sync after only a short while.
They would continue this way until completely opposite of each other, then
eventually they would fall back into sync and so on.  This idea amused
Reich very much and reminded him of the Ghanaian drummers who played
rhythms that seemingly did not have any common base, but were in fact held
together by one small common bell rhythm.  This process that Reich began
to use in his work he eventually coined "phase-shifting".  Just as Riley's
In C started to follow the experimentalists' tradition of random
occurrence, Reich's work now began taking this form when he did his
phase-shift pieces.  His most famous piece entitled It's Gonna Rain is
from a recording that Reich made of a street corner preacher, screaming
about the end of the world.  Reich repeated the phrase over on two
recorders until they began to shift phase and then added two more and two
more and two more until eventually there were eight recorders playing a
mass of sound that felt like it was the end of the world.
        During one of the performances Reich was giving in New York a
young man approached him wanting to show him his work.  Reich agreed and
thus began the last movement in the birth of minimalism, with Phillip
Glass.  Glass who began his career watching people like Young and Riley
perform started out in the same fashion, but ended up reaching the status
of a star.  The earlier works he did consisted of rhythmic work much in
the fashion of Reich.  One of his most famous earlier works, entitled 1+1,
consisted of the performer tapping a rhythmic sequence onto an amplified
flat surface such as a piano top.  The sequence consisted of two short
rhythms that the performer could combine into new rhythmic patterns as
they pleased.  This was obviously quite minimalist in the sense that it
was very limited in sound variation, but it now contained two ideas that
belonged to the Cagean school of thought, the indeterminacy (by giving the
performer options) and the use of the piano as an instrument in a way that
it was not intended (such as the Prepared Piano).  This minimalist music
that Glass was producing soon began to fade as he entered the limelight
and what was minimalist now became full scale shows with many other types
of mediums, such as Glass's Einstein on the Beach and Reich's The Cave.
        The work of Glass showed how minimalism had evolved from the pure
tones of Young all the way into what Young had apparently been trying to
escape, indeterminacy and multiplicity that Cage had created a decade
before.  Cage's influence had seeped through the ideals of this music
until it was in many aspects, just as much Cagean experimental music as it
was minimalist.  It is not surprising to me that the influence of Cage
entered the world of the minimalist because it seems in some regard that
Cage may have even been in some sense, a father of this style of sound as
well.  His piece entitled 4'33" may be seen as the most minimalist of all
pieces ever created.  The piece contains a static nature, a direct order
for the performance (in the matter of what it is supposed to sound like,
not the duration) and it absorbs the audience into the present state of
what is happening now, not what may happen next.
        These overlaps that I have found with Cage and the fathers of
minimalism only arise because of the strict labels such as "minimalism"
and "indeterminacy" that are applied to the styles of sound and ideas that
these men create.  As I stated before, the term minimalism should only be
regarded as a quick means to classify and not to interpret as if it were
in stone.  The fact is that the men of that time period all shared similar
quests in the vast world of art, searching for a way to uncover that great
source of mystery, spirituality, power, knowledge, expression and love
that we tend to classify as - SOUND.