Minimalism: A Matter of Time, or The Theme of the Dawn of Eternal Time

Richard Serra's sculpture "A Matter of Time," Guggenheim Museum Bilbao 

The term minimalism seems to be as evasive and slippery for Steve Reich and Philip Glass in a similar way that being pigeonholed as "impressionists" irked Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel.  Since this music has been associated with minimalist sculptor Richard Serra and painter Sol LeWitt, I have posted some of images of their works.

Here is some of Sol DeWitt's work:

I ended up spending a long time perusing images of Serra and LeWitt simply because these visual images seem so appealing, so clean, so fresh.  However, while it might create an interesting listening experience to absorb this visual medium simultaneously while hearing a minimalist music performance, I can understand why the term "minimalism" has seemed inadequate to composers.  Visual repetition often appears organic, balanced, cohesive, and ordered; hearing a sonic version of repetition that is phased, or seemingly "out of sync," becomes mesmerizing, psychedelic, entrancing, time altering. Add the many layers of rhythmic cells, sophisticated just tuning capable with synthesizers, and the assistance of electronic devices to provide digital delay and looping, and we have suddenly ventured off the cliff into a new territory entirely.

In regards to musicologist Leonard Meyer's theory of "reduced redundancy," musicologists now have ground to argue that the emergence of minimalism marks a drastic shift: the kind of shift that creates a demarcation of a new stylistic period.  Meyer's theory poses that each accepted musical period (Renaissance, Baroque, Classical, Romantic, etc.) progresses through three developmental stages: preclassic, classic, and mannerist.  From a cursory glance at the surface of things, works belonging to the beginning of a style period (the preclassic stage) may appear naive, simplistic, and overly formulaic.  However, this preclassic stage also brings to the limelight material that is unprecedented.  Artists composing within this stylistic parameter have been forced by their immediate mannerist predecessors to create a vacuum.  Blow the field wide open, into oblivion.  With oblivion, take the nothingness, fill it up.  Fill it with something new...

We see a steady pendulum in music history, constantly ameliorating the decadence of the preceeding stylistic period.  Thus, Bach's fugal technique gives way to the accessibility of the Rococo; the masses of Palestrina (so many rules of counterpoint!) pave the way to the Florentine Camerata; the extravagance of Baroque opera leads to Gluck's opera reform.  Sometimes a composer may progress through these three stages within his or her own compositional career.  Consider how Stravinsky delved into his Neoclassic stage after his first romantic, colossal-scale works like "Le Sacre du Printemps."  

Here's a question: do we see the emergence of minimalism as a direct result of Milton Babbitt's extreme, paramount application of serialism, or as a question arising from the implications of John Cage's "nothingness" and "silence?"  Perhaps, John Cage answered Babbitt's sophisticated and elitist works with the "bomb" necessary to usher in a postmodern age.  Bombs, whether proactive or reactionary, are designed to obliterate and destroy.  But rising from the ashes of the nothingness creates the new.  Minimalism, like the dawn, poses a question.  

The question is this: where are we headed today?  

(Answer: anywhere!)