![]() Gay Guerrilla is minimalist in multiple ways - for one thing, it begins with just single notes on the piano, and it builds and builds over about 20 or 30 minutes. "This is 10 years after Stonewall, and kind of at the cusp of the AIDS epidemic. "And he said if he was called upon to be one, he would want to be a gay guerrilla," O'Brien says. O'Brien points to Eastman's Gay Guerilla, which in a pre-concert talk the composer compared to the language applied to Afghani and PLO guerrillas - people who are in a fight. He was part of this next generation of composers who were engaging with minimalism in the '70s and '80s, who were thinking less about the kind of abstraction of the music and instead engaging with it as a part of identity - in this case, as a queer Black man." "His work is undergoing a really important revival, after it was largely neglected in the years around his early and untimely death. Music was a byproduct of her practice, that was really a tuning of the mind and body."Īnother important figure in this period is Julius Eastman, Robin says. She went so far as to say that music wasn't necessarily the whole point. "She once spent an entire year dedicated to droning on a single note, an A, on her accordion, and using her voice. "She was drawn to drones she found in the environment, like the droning of highway noise or buzzing electricity," O'Brien says. O'Brien also points to more experimental figures like composer Pauline Oliveros. A few years later, you have Brian Eno and David Bowie collaborating on a series of albums that are very much influenced by the fact that they're listening to a lot of Steve Reich and Philip Glass in this period." "In the early '70s, The Who pay overt homage to minimalism in the opening of their song ' Baba O'Riley,' which is named for Terry Riley. "One of the reasons this music has endured is because it has this continued engagement with pop music, and especially with rock music," Robin notes. In albums like Africa/Brass and tracks like ' India,' he, like Reich and Riley, was significantly influenced by North Indian music and West African music, and incorporated those influences into the music, which resulted in an attraction to drones and repetition." You could also call John Coltrane one of our first minimalists. "There's a case to be made that Miles Davis was one of our first minimalists. "There's also an important part of early minimalism viewed through modal jazz," O'Brien says. ![]() All of a sudden, musicians were able to study firsthand with gurus." In the Indian tradition, single notes are sustained for hours, and musicians, Robin explains, "are trying to hear all of the complexity that comes out of just sustaining a single drone." "The lifting of the changed the ability of musicians from India to come to the U.S. "A number of things changed in the '60s," O'Brien adds. Robin says that the early minimalists were profoundly influenced by the first recordings of Indian music that were reaching the West in the late '50s and early '60s. So they rejected the title, but it stuck." Once it eventually was described as 'minimalist,' the composers were not fans, because it can have connotations of simplicity. A lot of people called it 'trance' music. "People who didn't like it called it 'needle-stuck-in-the-groove' music. "Some people called it hypnotic," O'Brien explains. The two spoke with All Things Considered about tracing the evolution of the style era by era - beginning with the artistic and cultural influences that set the stage for the early minimalists, including music from the other side of the world. Their book, published this spring, is titled On Minimalism: Documenting a Musical Movement. Which is why Robin and fellow musicologist Kerry O'Brien set out to capture the lesser-known stories of minimalism and its development. ![]() There were so many others creating minimalist music in this period - that includes women, people of color and LGBTQ+ musicians." As musicologist William Robin puts it, "There are limitations to a story that relies on the Founding Fathers. And yet, to view the scene's foundations only through the lens of that Mount Rushmore of names is to ignore the fullness and diversity that defined it even from the start. By the end of the 1960s, minimalism had not only solidified - it had produced a quartet of founding fathers credited with bringing the genre to life: Terry Riley, Steve Reich, La Monte Young and Philip Glass. Around the same time, similar experiments in avant-garde music were being performed in lofts in New York City, and a new genre was emerging.
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