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REPETITIVE MINIMALISM: A HISTORICAL STYLE OR A

PERSPECTIVE IN MUSIC

Introduction
Minimal repetitive music began to appear in the sixties as a consequence of and/or a reaction
against the avant-garde movements of European serialism and north American New York School
(Cage, Brown, Feldman, etc).
Steve Reich wrote,
“Serialism and Cage gave me something to push against”(Reich, 2002, p. 159)

Minimal music, at first very American, began to be a new trend in art music, a style that was
exported, enlarged and developed by different composers in Europe and Asia. It was a different way
of approaching composition and of perceiving music, far from the already academic and powerful
serialism. It was, for some, the beginning of a new (post-)modernity, a new - more public friendly -
way for contemporary composers to develop their craft with public success. For others, just an idiot
play with sounds, a regression in terms of culture, even in terms of psychological development.

Characteristics
What are the characteristics of this style of music?
Perhaps it is important to divide the two concepts “minimal” and “repetitive”. “Minimal” refers to
the used musical material: it has to be very poor, reduced to a minimum of musical parameters (a
chord, a melody with just one or a few sounds, a simple infrastructure like pentatonic or modal,
basic rhythms and meter). Long melodies, motives with changing chords, twelve-tone
infrastructures, non metrical and complicated rhythms are, therefore, excluded. “Repetitive” refers
to the process of composition, the way the composer chooses to deal with the musical material:
simple, repetitive, slow transformation. It is also important that the process of composition stays
clear, able to be heard, open to the comprehension of the common audience (whatever it is
understood by “common audience”).
Early minimal repetitive experiments of La Monte Young and Terry Riley seemed to be an extent of
Cage's experimentalism, another step of confrontation of an audacious, challenging generation of
artists and intellectuals, against bourgeois mass culture. Soon the social shock effect became less
important: a new way of interacting with music (for both musicians and public), a new public, a
new stylistic tribe, perhaps a new academic counter-power. It grew with later proposals of Terry
Riley and, specially, with Steve Reich, John Adams, Philip Glass, Michael Nyman, Louis
Andriessen, and others.
The roots of minimal repetitive music are very large: Cage's experimentalism, native American
music, African and far east music, Zen and Buddhism, Blues and Jazz, Rock and Roll, Funky, Disco
sound; but also Bauhaus constructivism, op art, new Quantum physics and chaos theories, pop art,
etc.
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Minimal repetitive music proposes, most of the times, a different kind of understanding and of
listening, far from the European musical tradition - minimal repetitive music has no hidden
structure:
“a compositional process and a sounding music that are one and the same thing” (Steve
Reich, p.165)

This music is so clear and obvious that frustrates analysis and an intellectual driven listening: it is a
“perceptible process. (…) To facilitate closely detailed a musical process should happen
extremely gradually”. Reich (2004: p.34)

As it is minimal and repetitive, memory functions in a different way, compared with traditional
European art music. When listening to it, the audience is not expected to remember and to follow
different themes, motives, contrasting structural units, sound relationships, harmonic drama: there is
no drama in minimal repetitive music, no obvious contrasts, no tensions and relaxations, even no
clear climax, understood as a dialectic process; no dialectics at all. Minimal repetitive music never
has one clear climax, but, following Fink (2005: p.42), it can be understood as enormous succession
of climaxes, like a succession of multiple orgasms from the beginning to the end.
Time (vital in all kinds of music) seems to occur in an almost chronometric way: psychological time
perception stays unchangeable for very long periods, proposing some kind of abstraction. As Glass
said
“(the listener) can perhaps discover another mode of listening – one in which neither
memory nor anticipation (the usual psychological devices of programmatic music
whether Baroque, Classical, Romantic, or Modernistic) have a place.”Quoted in Reich
(2004: p.33)

Minimal repetitive composers were known, in 1969, as the “New York Hypnotic School” or, as
Harold Schönberg wrote,
“hypnotic or boring - depending on one's reaction to that sort of thing” Strickland
(2000: p. 242).

The “hypnotics” were la Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich and Philip Glass. In fact, the
“minimal repetitive” label was used later.

A historically embedded style or way of understanding music

Minimal repetitive music was born as a style in the sixties. However, traces of minimal and/or
repetitive music can be seen in different examples of music of the past.
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BEETHOVEN

M AETZEL ' S M ETRONOME AND OTHER MACH IN ES

It is common to trace a relation between the use of repetition in Beethoven's music with the
invention of Maetzel's Metronome.
In 1811 Beethoven wrote to Maetzle:
“Thanks for your metronome; let us try whether we can measure Time into Eternity
with it, for it is so simple and easily managed that there seems to be no impediment to
this! In the mean time we will have a conference on the subject. The mathematical
precision of clockwork is of course greater; yet formerly, in watching the little
experiments you made in my presence, I thought there was something worthy of notice
in your metronome, and I hope we shall soon succeed in setting it thoroughly right.”
Beethoven, Letter to Maetzel, September 10th, 1811.

Beethoven knew very well the multiple mechanical instruments that came to light in the turn of the
century. But, in the words of Schering (1955), Beethoven criticized this mechanical trend, as he
defended what E.T.A. Hoffmann called the “geistigen Prinzip” Shering (1955: p.16). Nevertheless,
the repetition was there, and he used it several times. For Shering, the 8 th symphony is a striking
example of the use of repetition, making a dubious humor with its changes and abnormalities.

O P. 53 P IA NO S ONATA

But already in 1803 we can see, in the Op.53 Piano Sonata, an interesting example of close
repetition: 80 consecutive eight notes with small gradual harmonic differences, followed by a
cadencial break. And then, again the same gesture, with a sixteenth note involvement. Repetition is,
in my view, the main interest of the first section of this sonata.
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With the appearance of the second section in E major, everything changes. Or perhaps not: the
repetition is not so much a rhythmic but rather a melodic one.

Here the idea of a melodic curved shape is systematically repeated and explored until the end of the
exposition. Altogether, rhythmic repetition and melodic shape repetition are, perhaps, the main
ideas explored in all the first movement.
After the Introduzione Adagio (the second movement) the third movement seems to be very
insisting on different kind of repetitions: curvilinear melodies (f. i. the insisting main theme and the
intermediate ones), chord repetitions (the insisting tonic of the main theme, the repeating chords at
bar 239 – in D flat Major), harmonic repetitions (the arpeggi in the beginning of the right hand, the
very slow harmonic rhythm in all the movement). In fact, earing this movement, it seems that the
musical idea is always the same, although there are different tonalities, changes of mood, different
ways of exploring the same material, of saying the same thing.
No doubt that this op.53 sonata is NOT an example of repetitive minimal music, because it is not
minimal at all. But the process of close repetition of a specific material can be valued in the analysis
and in interpretation, and, therefore, revealed in a contemporary performance of this piece.
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SCHUBERT

G REAT C M AJOR S YMPHONY

Franz Schubert is known for insisting on mesmerizing musical figurations and for exposing the
same musical idea consecutively at least twice.
In his Great C major symphony, two marching rhythms seem to take over almost all the first
movement. With exception of the introductory section and the last 14 bars, each single bar has at
least four quarter notes or the distinctive dotted quarter and eight note rhythm. It is, in fact, a ten
minute long march (or horse ride) without a break, full of consecutive melodic repetitions, always
insisting on the same motives. Following the hermeneutic approaches of Leonard G. Ratner (1980)
and the music treatises of the 17 th and 18th centuries, we can speak of a constant motion, of a long
journey, of passing time, even of the German Wanderer – an interesting archetype in 19th century's
central Europe.
The same repetitive spirit goes on in the second movement (Andante con moto), perhaps not so
systematically in terms of rhythmic figuration, but certainly in the consecutive repetition of phrases
and chords, for more 13 minutes. The last two movements follow the same spirit, altogether more
than 45 minutes.
I believe that repetition in such works as the Great C Major symphony can be somehow hypnotic, at
least much more than other works such as opera arias, Chopin Nocturnes or Bach suites.
It is possible to find further Schubert examples of close insisting repetitions in other works: the 3th
Impromptu op.90 in E-flat Major, the A minor D. 784 sonata, the B-flat major sonata, the Lied
Grätchen am Spinnrade.

STOCKHAUSEN

K LAVIERSTÜCK IX

Stockhausen's Klavierstück IX, composed in 1954 and finished in 1961/62, presents the repetition
of a specific chord: 140 times, 87 times, 13, 21, 8 and 5 times. Stockhausen's intentions in this work
was to explore the dialectic between periodical and nonperiodic occurrences. The chord repetitions
are the periodical factor: they are systematic, according to the Fibonacci series and the mythical
proportion PHI.
140 87 54 33 21 13 8 5 3
Phi→ 1,61 1,61 1,64 1,57 1,62 1,63 1,6 1,67
These chord repetitions appear several times during the piece, among other slow, nonperiodic
passages.
The piece seems to go from periodic to nonperiodic rhythms, lacking any climax. The process is
somehow continuous, presenting from time to time the repeating chord as a new – less and less
energetic – rebirth, reaching a point where a long ending passage presents agglomerates of very
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quick, light and high notes, assembled in free rhythmic groups, each time more sparse.
It is interesting to see that, although the obvious differences and the fact that it is not really minimal,
this Klavierstück matches many of the characteristics of minimal repetitive music: the lack of
climax, the continuous (but not clearcut and obvious) process of composition. It is also present a
certain indifference towards a vivid notion of time, as the consecutive reappearance of periodic
passages maintains the rhythmic fluidity of all the piece, although pointing to an end with no
chronometric meter, no motion, no time, as a very slow rhythmic fadeout. It seems that there is
little difference between insistent non-periodic durations and insisting repetition: both tend to
abstraction. The use of a Fibonacci numeric model helps a more vivid perception of motion and
rhythm: it creates a structure, a form, a direction in music; it emphasizes another layer of
periodicity, apart from pure repetition.
Stimmung of Stockhausen is, perhaps, an interesting example: it has apparently all the
characteristics of minimal repetitive music.
Other examples of repetitive music are Harmonics from the Portuguese composer Jorge Peixinho (a
20 minute long improvisation using a overtone series of 9 notes, with a 6'' canon), and the more
para-serial piece Étude I (with long repetition of the same chord).

Conclusion
It is possible to comprehend, to practice and to perform these sort of pieces in a particular way:
trying to emphasize chronometric time, to prefer abstraction instead of expression, to put a special
interest in very long structural relationships, to accentuate sameness instead of teleological
construction. The pleasure of close repetition and of circular movement seem to be also interesting
clues in a “repetitive” interpretation.
The fact of recognising repetition as a primordial matter in music implies a specific approach in
terms of interpretation/performance and, in the end, in music appreciation.

Bibliography
Beethoven, Ludwig (2004), Beethoven's Letters (1790—1826.) from the collection of dr. Ludwig
Nohl. Translated by Lady Wallace, Oliver Ditson & co., Boston. Consultado a 24 Março 2009, em
http://www.scribd.com/doc/2352775/Beethovens-Letters-17901826-Volume-1-by-Beethoven-
Ludwig-van-17701827.
Cervo, Dimitri (2005), O Minimalismo e suas ideias composicionais, Per Musi – Revista
Acadêmica de Música – n.11, 136 p., jan – jun., Belo Horizonte.
Fink, Robert (2005), Repeating Ourselves. University of California Press, Berkeley.
Johnson, Timothy A. (1994), Minimalism: Aesthetic, Style, or Technique? Musical Quarterly
volume 78, no. 4 (Winter): 742–73. Oxford Journals.
Potter, Keith (2007), 1976 and All That: minimalism and post-minimalism, analysis and listening
strategies, keynote lecture to the First International Conference on Music and Minimalism, 31 st
August, University of Wales, Bangor, published on the website of the new Society for Minimalist
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Music, www.musicminimalism.org.
Ratner, Leonard G. (1980), Classic music: expression, form, and style. Schirmer Books,
Farmington Hills - Michigan.
Reich, Steve (2004), Writings on Music 1965 – 2000. Oxford University Press, N.Y.
Schering, Arnold (1955), Humor, Heldentum, Tragic bei Beethoven, Librairie Heitz, Kohl.
Schwarz, Robert K. (2008), Minimalists. Phaidon Press ltd, London.
Stockhausen, Karlheinz e. a. (1991), Diálogos com Stockhausen. Edições 70, Lisboa.
Strickland, Edward (2000), Minimalism: Origins. Indiana University Press, Bloomington.

Title:
“Repetitive Minimalism: a historical style or a perspective in music”
Author:
Francisco Monteiro,
Diploma Piano – Music University of Vienna, Austria,
M. A. Musicology – University of Coimbra, Portugal,
Ph. D. Contemporary music – University of Sheffield, UK.
Institution:
C.E.S.E.M – Center of Studies on Sociology and Aesthetic of Music, Lisbon
E.S.E. - IPP – Superior School of Education, Polytechnic Institute of Porto
Contact e-mail:
franciscomonteiro@ese.ipp.pt
Aims:
To understand the process and the means of minimal repetitive music. To see traces of minimal
and/or repetitive procedures in different art music examples across history, redefining music
interpretation/performance.
Context:
Contemporary music and music interpretation/performance through western music history.
Methodology:
Bibliographic review, analysis.
Conclusions:
Although minimal repetitive music is a style only defined after 1960, their musical procedures can
give a new insight towards the understanding and interpretation of musical works along history,
proposing a new relevance on several means of interpretation used by composers far (historically or
stylistic) from the American minimalists.
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Table of Contents

Introduction....................................................................................................................................................................1
Characteristics................................................................................................................................................................1
A historically embedded style or way of understanding music..................................................................................2
BEETHOVEN ...........................................................................................................................................................3
Maetzel's Metronome and other machines.............................................................................................................3
Op. 53 Piano Sonata...............................................................................................................................................3
SCHUBERT ..............................................................................................................................................................5
Great C Major Symphony .....................................................................................................................................5
STOCKHAUSEN.......................................................................................................................................................5
Klavierstück IX......................................................................................................................................................5
Conclusion......................................................................................................................................................................6
Bibliography...................................................................................................................................................................6