Minimalism: Adams, Reich and Riley

Minimalism: process instead of themes

Minimalism is one of the four listening strands in Area of Study 4. In the exam you might hear an unfamiliar extract and have to recognise it as minimalism within seconds, so you need to know what the technique actually sounds like, not just its name.

Area of Study 1 trained you to listen for themes and their development in sonata form. Minimalism works the opposite way: there is no theme to develop. A composer sets up a short musical idea and a rule for changing it, then lets that rule run. The structure you hear is the process itself, not a plot of themes coming and going.

Many minimalist extracts use a pulse that never lets up, and a cell — a short pattern repeated over and over. Everything else in this lesson is a way of changing that cell over time.

Adams, Reich and Riley are all in copyright, so the links below open official recordings on the performers’ or label’s own channels rather than audio hosted here.

The additive process, and how In C differs — Terry Riley

In an additive process, a cell grows by one note at a time: play it, add a note, play the new version, add another note, and the pattern lengthens in front of you. Terry Riley’s In C works differently — built not on note-by-note growth but on staggered repetition. It is not one fixed melody but 53 short numbered patterns; every player in the ensemble repeats each pattern as many times as they like before moving to the next, The players keep the same tempo but create staggered layers, so no two performances are identical.

A performance of In C typically runs anywhere from forty-five to ninety minutes — far too long for a revision session. Play a few minutes instead, with the additive process in mind.

• Terry Riley, In C (Bang on a Can All-Stars) — the players repeat the 53 numbered patterns independently at a shared tempo, creating staggered layers.

Phasing and gradual change — Steve Reich

Steve Reich’s signature technique is phasing: two players start an identical pattern together, then one very gradually pulls ahead until the two lines lock into a new relationship. Reich built entire pieces from this single idea. In large ensemble works such as Music for 18 Musicians, that same instinct for extremely gradual, almost imperceptible change is stretched across a much bigger canvas: pulsing chords, tuned percussion parts that interlock note against note in a technique called hocket, and a very slow harmonic rhythm that only shifts every few minutes.

Music for 18 Musicians runs to roughly an hour, so do not attempt the whole piece. Pick any five minutes and listen for how little happens, and how gradually it happens — that slowness is the point, not a flaw.

• Steve Reich, Music for 18 Musicians — sample any five minutes and notice how little changes, and how gradually it changes.

Layering and texture — John Adams

A minimalist texture rarely arrives all at once. Layer after layer is added on top of the pulse, thickening the sound until a listener notices the piece has quietly built from a bare few instruments into a full ensemble. This layering is easiest to hear when a piece is short enough to take in whole. John Adams’ Short Ride in a Fast Machine lasts about four minutes, which makes it the most immediately graspable of the three pieces in this lesson and a good place to start.

• John Adams, Short Ride in a Fast Machine (Berliner Philharmoniker) — at under four minutes this is the clearest introduction to the whole technique, so start here before the longer pieces.

Why this matters in the exam

Section A of the listening exam plays short unfamiliar extracts and asks you to identify and describe what you hear. Name the element, give the correct technical term, and say where in the extract it happened. Avoid vague impressions such as “it sounds repetitive”.