Minimal Music - Minimalist Style in Music

Minimalist Style in Music

Leonard Meyer described minimal music in 1994:

Because there is little sense of goal-directed motion, music does not seem to move from one place to another. Within any musical segment there may be some sense of direction, but frequently the segments fail to lead to or imply one another. They simply follow one another.

David Cope (1997) lists the following qualities as possible characteristics of minimal music:

• Silence
• Concept music
• Brevity
• Continuities: requiring slow modulation of one or more parameters
• Phase and pattern music, including repetition

Consonant harmony is a much noted feature: it means the use of intervals which in a tonal context would be considered to be "stable", that is the form to which other chords are resolved by voice leading. The "texture" of much minimalist music is based on canonic imitation, exact repetitions of the same material, offset in time. Famous pieces that use this technique are the number section of Glass' Einstein on the Beach and Adams' Shaker Loops.