20 - (Post-)minimalisms 1970–2000: the search for a new mainstream

Summary

The conventional wisdom is that Minimalism – an idiom of clear, non-decorative lines, repetition, and great tonal simplicity which arose in the 1960s and 70s – was the last identifiable new style in music history. Actually, there has since been an accelerating series of new styles, many of them building on minimalist roots toward greater and world-music-inspired complexity.

Kyle Gann

My music is very much an example of what’s happened to music at the end of the twentieth century. We’re in a kind of post-style era. Composers my age and younger, we are not writing in one, highly defined, overarching expression, like Steve Reich or Luciano Berio would write.

John Adams

After the last new style

As a label for trends in music history since 1970, the term ‘post-minimalism’ has, at first, a seductively familiar ring – if by ‘music history’ we mean the succession of compositional styles conceptualized as a linear progression, most memorably analogized by Donald Francis Tovey as ‘the mainstream of music’. If ‘post-minimalist’ is a music-historical adjective of time, like ‘post-Romantic’ or ‘pre-classical’, then the familiar narrative strategies of classical music might still apply: an early style (minimalism) progresses – either through evolutionary ramification or dialectical synthesis – to another, later one (post-minimalism). The stream flows on.

So argues Kyle Gann, in the epigraph above and in his 1997 survey American Music in the Twentieth Century. But, as Gann acknowledges, minimalism is most often seen not as the beginning of a new drama of stylistic evolution, but as finis Terrae musicologicae, as the ‘last identifiable new style in music history’.