The story of musical minimalism has been told many, many times—and for good reason. Emerging from the New York and San Francisco countercultures of the 1960s and quickly becoming an international phenomenon, minimalism’s hypnotic drones and toe-tapping pulses represent the rare avant-garde idiom that is both experimental and popular. Historians of minimalism have typically focused on the pioneering work of four composers, sometimes dubbed the “Big Four”: La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and Philip Glass. But there were many, many more musicians working in the world of minimalism, and our new book, On Minimalism: Documenting a Musical Movement, which releases this week in Europe, tells their stories by reprinting dozens of rare and out-of-print documents.
In this playlist, we highlight an alternative history of minimalist music, guided by quotations from the documents featured in our book. What does the most important avant-garde movement of our time sound like, when the Big Four aren’t given center stage?
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