Download Minimalism

Your Task
• Complete the table, by reading the following 4
slides (they aren’t in the same order as in your
workbook!)
Steve Reich
• Stephen Michael Reich (born October 3, 1936) is an
American composer who, along with La Monte Young, Terry
Riley, and Philip Glass, pioneered minimal music in the mid
to late 1960s.
• His innovations include using tape loops to create phasing
patterns and the use of simple, audible processes to
explore musical concepts
• Reich often cites J.S. Bach, Debussy, Bartók, and Stravinsky
as composers whom he admires and who greatly
influenced him when he was young.
• Jazz is a major part of the formation of Reich's musical style
• He composed clapping music and Electric Counterpoint
Philip Glass
• Philip Morris Glass (born January 31, 1937) is an
American composer from a Jewish family.
• Currently, he describes himself as a "classicist",
pointing out that he is trained in harmony and
counterpoint and studied composers Schubert, Bach
and Mozart
• Three of his film scores have been nominated for
Academy Awards.
• His music has ties to rock, ambient music, electronic
music, and world music. Early admirers of his
minimalism include musicians Brian Eno and David
Bowie. In the 1990s, Glass composed Low (1992) and
Heroes (1996)
John Adams
• John Coolidge Adams (born February 15, 1947) is an American
composer
• His works include Short Ride in a Fast Machine (1986) and On the
Transmigration of Souls (2002), a choral piece commemorating the
victims of the September 11, 2001 attacks (for which he won a
Pulitzer Prize in 2003),
• Adams employs minimalist techniques, such as repeating patterns,
• Adams professes his love of other genres other than classical music;
his parents were jazz musicians, and he has also listened to rock
music, albeit only passively.
La Monte Young
• La Monte Thornton Young (born October 14, 1935) is an American
composer and musician,
• Young's first musical influence came in early childhood in Bern. He
relates that "the very first sound that I recall hearing was the sound
of wind blowing under the eaves and around the log extensions at
the corners of the log cabin".
• Jazz is one of his main influences and until 1956 he planned to
devote his career to it.
• His Compositions 1960 includes a number of unusual actions. Some
of them are un-performable,
• One instructs the performer to build a fire. Another says the
performer should release a butterfly into the room. Yet another
challenges the performer to push a piano through a wall.
Year 9 Minimalism
1. Do Now (Rests and Missing Rests work Sheet)
2. Listen to Steve Riech’s Clapping Music
3. Phase Shifting Worksheets
4. Listen to Adrift by Volker Bertelmann
5. Repetition Revision Worksheet
6. Minimalist Composers
Clapping Music (1972) / Steve
Reich
Task 2
On the back of the worksheet, create a fact-file
about 2 of these composers.