Minimal music in the context of "20th-century classical music"

In visual arts, music, and other media, minimalism is an art movement that had emerged in the post-World War II era in Western art. It is often interpreted as a reaction to abstract expressionism and modernism. The movement anticipated various post-minimalist practices in contemporary art that extended or critically reflected on minimalism's original aims. Minimalism emphasized reducing art to its essentials, focusing on the object itself and the viewer's experience with minimal mediation from the artist. Prominent artists associated with minimalism include Donald Judd, Agnes Martin, Dan Flavin, Carl Andre, Robert Morris, Anne Truitt, and Frank Stella.

Minimalism in music features methods like repetition and gradual variation, such as the works of La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Julius Eastman and John Adams. The term is sometimes used to describe the plays and novels of Samuel Beckett, the films of Robert Bresson, the stories of Raymond Carver, and the automobile designs of Colin Chapman. In recent years, minimalism has come to refer to anything or anyone that is spare or reduced to its essentials.

Ambient music is a genre of music that emphasizes tone and atmosphere over traditional musical structure or rhythm. Often "peaceful" sounding and lacking composition, beat, and/or structured melody, ambient music uses textural layers of sound that can reward both passive and active listening, and encourage a sense of calm or contemplation. The genre evokes an "atmospheric", "visual", or "unobtrusive" quality. Nature soundscapes may be included, and some works use sustained or repeated notes, as in drone music. Bearing elements associated with new-age music, instruments such as the piano, strings and flute may be emulated through a synthesizer.

The genre originated in the 1960s and 1970s, when new musical instruments were being introduced to a wider market, such as the synthesizer. It was presaged by Erik Satie's furniture music and styles such as musique concrète, minimal music, Jamaican dub music and German electronic music, but was prominently named and popularized by British musician Brian Eno in 1978 with his album Ambient 1: Music for Airports; Eno opined that ambient music "must be as ignorable as it is interesting", however, in early years, there were artists that were pioneers in this genre, like Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze, Wendy Carlos, Kraftwerk, etc. It saw a revival towards the late 1980s with the prominence of house and techno music, growing a cult following by the 1990s.

Postminimalism is an art term coined (as post-minimalism) by Robert Pincus-Witten in 1971 and used in various artistic fields for work which is influenced by, or attempts to develop and go beyond, the aesthetic of minimalism. The expression is used specifically in relation to music and the visual arts, but can refer to any field using minimalism as a critical reference point. In music, postminimalism refers to music following minimal music.

Stephen Michael Reich (/raɪʃ/ RYSHE; born October 3, 1936) is an American composer best known as a pioneer of minimal music in the mid to late 1960s. Reich's work is marked by its use of repetitive figures, slow harmonic rhythm, and canons. Reich describes this concept in his essay "Music as a Gradual Process" by stating, "I am interested in perceptible processes. I want to be able to hear the process happening throughout the sounding music." For example, his early works experiment with phase shifting, in which one or more repeated phrases plays slower or faster than the others, causing it to go "out of phase." This creates new musical patterns in a perceptible flow.

His innovations include using tape loops to create phasing patterns, as on the early compositions It's Gonna Rain (1965) and Come Out (1966), and the use of simple, audible processes, as on Pendulum Music (1968) and Four Organs (1970). Works like Drumming (1971) and Music for 18 Musicians (1976), both considered landmarks of minimalism and important influences on experimental music, rock, and contemporary electronic music, would help entrench minimalism as a movement. Reich's work took on a darker character in the 1980s with the introduction of historical themes as well as themes from his Jewish heritage, notably Different Trains (1988).

Philip Glass (born January 31, 1937) is an American composer and pianist. He is widely regarded as one of the most influential composers of the late 20th century. Glass's work has been associated with minimalism, being built up from repetitive phrases and shifting layers. He described himself as a composer of "music with repetitive structures", which he has helped to evolve stylistically.

Glass founded the Philip Glass Ensemble in 1968. He has written 15 operas, numerous chamber operas and musical theatre works, 14 symphonies, 12 concertos, nine string quartets, various other chamber music pieces, and many film scores. He has received nominations for four Grammy Awards, including two for Best Contemporary Classical Composition for Satyagraha (1987) and String Quartet No. 2 (1988). He has received three Academy Award for Best Original Score nominations for Martin Scorsese's Kundun (1997), Stephen Daldry's The Hours (2002), and Richard Eyre's Notes on a Scandal (2006). He also composed the scores for Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985), Hamburger Hill (1987), The Thin Blue Line (1988), Candyman (1992), The Truman Show (1998), and The Illusionist (2006).

Drone music (also known as drone-based music, or simply drone) is a minimalist genre of music that emphasizes the use of sustained sounds, notes, or tone clusters called drones. It is typically characterized by lengthy compositions featuring relatively slight harmonic variations. La Monte Young, one of its 1960s originators, defined it in 2000 as "the sustained tone branch of minimalism." Music containing drones can be found in many regional traditions across Asia, Australia, and Europe, but the genre label is generally reserved for music originating with the Western classical tradition. Elements of drone music have been incorporated in diverse genres such as rock, ambient, and electronic music.

Brian Peter George Eno (/ˈiːnoʊ/ born 15 May 1948) is an English musician, songwriter, record producer, visual artist, and activist. He is best known for his pioneering contributions to ambient music and electronica, and for producing, recording, and writing works in rock and pop music. A self-described "non-musician", Eno has helped introduce unconventional concepts and approaches to contemporary music. He has been described as one of popular music's most influential and innovative figures. In 2019, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of Roxy Music.

Born in Suffolk, Eno studied painting and experimental music at the art school of Ipswich Civic College in the mid-1960s, and then at Winchester School of Art. He joined the glam rock group Roxy Music as its synthesiser player in 1971 and recorded two albums with them before departing in 1973. He then released solo albums, beginning with the rock-oriented Here Come the Warm Jets (1974), and explored minimal music on the influential recordings Discreet Music (1975) and Ambient 1: Music for Airports (1978), with the latter coining the term "ambient music".

Phase music is a form of music that uses phasing as a primary compositional process. It is an approach to musical composition that is often associated with minimal music, as it shares similar characteristics, but some commentators prefer to treat phase music as a separate category. Phasing is a compositional technique in which the same part (a repetitive phrase) is played on two musical instruments, in steady but not identical tempo. Thus, the two instruments gradually shift out of unison, creating first a slight echo as one instrument plays a little behind the other, then a doubling effect with each note heard twice, then a complex ringing effect, and eventually coming back through doubling and echo into unison.

Phasing is the rhythmic equivalent of cycling through the phase of two waveforms as in phasing. The tempi of the two instruments are almost identical, so that both parts are perceived as being in the same tempo: the changes only separate the parts gradually. In some cases, especially live performance where gradual separation is extremely difficult, phasing is accomplished by periodically inserting an extra note (or temporarily removing one) into the phrase of one of the two players playing the same repeated phrase, thus shifting the phase by a single beat at a time, rather than gradually.