Minimalism, Postminimalism, and the Resurgence of Tonality in Recent American Music

By Jonathan W. Bernard

Does musical minimalism any longer exist as a living practice? "No—and good riddance, too," say several composers whose careers, for better or worse, have been associated with it. Steve Reich and Philip Glass, to mention two of them, clearly have been hoping for a permanent moratorium on the word minimalism in connection with the music they have been writing for the past twenty-five years or so. While it would seem that during the early 1970s "minimalism" had been accorded a certain grudging acceptance, as time went on most composers found it progressively less satisfactory. Reich, for instance, has asserted that "it becomes more pejorative than descriptive starting about 1973 with my Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices, and Organ." Furthermore, some prominent critics over the past two decades have come to the conclusion that minimalism was finished by the mid-1970s, its original practitioners having gone on to other things. But this episode in the history of contemporary art-music composition is not really as simply characterized as such denials might suggest. What have Reich, Glass, and others actually repudiated? Is it an aesthetic orientation, or a style, or simply the word used to identify it? It is the word itself which seems to have become the lightning rod for composers' annoyance, perhaps as the most blatant and outward symbol of the critical pigeonholing to which they had been subjected. If this is true, however, then they may have objected to it as much out of anxiety over its potentially misleading connotations as on more substantive grounds. Understood in its meaning in the plastic arts, which is after all where the word originated, minimalism makes a valid and convincing analogy to an approach to painting and sculpture that emerged in the 1960s. The problem was that most musicians, newspaper journalists, and audiences knew nothing of such art and thus construed the term minimalism, when applied to music, in a basically negative way—as if it meant "music with practically no substance" or "music where nothing happens." Or its apparently reductive character and the perception that nothing "new" was happening for long stretches of time led to confusing comparisons with other late twentieth-century music of relatively low event-density, such as the work of Morton Feldman—music whose principles are actually antithetical to those of minimalism.