Philip Glass

Minimalism

Minimal music started in the 1960’s in New York. In the beginning it was seen as a form of experimental hypnotic music. Characteristics of minimal music include a constant harmony, phase shifting, a steady pulse, gradual transformations and repetition.

Leonard Meyer describes minimal music; “Because there is little sense of goal-directed motion, [minimal] music does not seem to move from one place to another. Within any musical segment there may be some sense of direction, but frequently the segments fail to lead to or imply one another. They simply follow one another.”

“David Cope (1997) lists the following qualities as possible characteristics of minimal music:

Silence

Conceptmusic

Brevity

Continuities: requiring slowmodulationof one or moreparameters[implying length]

Phase andpatternmusic, including repetition [implying length]”

Glass' opera Waiting for the Barbarians was an opera developed for a novel. It was non traditional in a sense as Glass defined it as a "social/political opera" It was written as a critique about the war in Iraq. Even though this opera had a traditional sound it had controversial themes such as, imperialism, aparthied and tortue,