Minimalism is a strong movement in many art forms, including musical composition. While it has a recognizable structure, there is also plenty of room within the genre to evolve your own style and create a specific flavor of minimalistic music.
Piano composers known for their minimalistic works include:
- La Monte Young
- Steve Reich
- Michael Nyman
- Philip Glass
- Jeroen van Veen
- Ludovico Einaudi
- Yann Tiersen
- Simeon Ten Holt
- Max Richter
- Michael Vincent Waller
While you may know what minimalism sounds like in music, some specific features set the groundwork for these composers to build on. Keep reading to gain a basic understanding of the genre and how each piano composer involves it in their works.
What is Minimalist Piano Music?
Minimalist piano music is any piano piece that fits into this subgenre of classical music.
Minimalism relies heavily on:
- Repetition
- Subtle rhythmic changes
- Harmonic dissonance
While these pieces focus on the piano, they may also feature other classical instruments like violins, violas, cellos, clarinet, or flute. As minimalism evolved in the mid-20th century, modern instruments like guitar or saxophone may be seen in some of their works.
History of Minimalist Music
Minimalism started in the avant-garde classical scene of New York in the 1960s, so it’s a relatively new subgenre. It quickly spread to the San Francisco Bay Area and then exploded to concert houses and musical academies worldwide.
The subgenre has heavy influence from India and Africa, as easily noted in the works of La Monte Young, Philip Glass, and Steve Reich.
Features of Minimalist Music
While minimalist piano music has several key features, many works are avant-garde and focus on innovation. Composers use these features in a number of ways. Most minimalist piano pieces include at least one that you can easily identify.
Repetition: usually repeated phrases with gradual changes
Phasing: based on the idea of the canon; common in the works of Reich
A mix of standard classical and modern instruments: based on standard classical but allows the inclusion of modern technology
Droning: sustained notes, both dissonant and not; typical in the works of La Monte Young
While two pieces may not sound similar, these key details form the connections that link minimalist composers and innovators in their forward-moving endeavors.
Minimalist Piano Composers
Minimalist piano composers often work with other instruments. Still, they write truly haunting pieces for the keys that utilize the tenets of minimalism. Within the following group, there can also be a great deal of overlap with modern contemporary piano composers, with many fitting into both categories.
La Monte Young
La Monte Young is often considered the pioneer of minimalist music, and he includes the tenants of the subgenre in both compositions and performances.
He is best known for his study and pursuit of sustained notes. While growing up, he recalls a fascination with droning sounds, highlighting the held voice of step-down transformers on telephone poles.
Young’s work is also heavily influenced by Indian classical music and Japanese gagaku (the ancient court music of Japan that featured sustained tones).
One of Young’s most famous pieces, The Tortoise, His Dream, and Journeys, highlights his exploration of sustained notes alongside his inclination to question both nature and the definition of music.
Another signature piece from Young is The Well-Tuned Piano, an excerpt of which can be found in the video above. This is a continuous piece for solo piano that has yet to be completed. He began the composition in 1964 but has never considered it finished, and when it is performed live, it can last over 5 hours! To reflect this, he has dated it “1964-73-81-Present” to illustrate the tune’s continuous evolution through different tunings.
Steve Reich
Steve Reich is another American composer highlighted for developing the minimalist genre. Reich’s work is branded explicitly by:
- Repetitive figures
- A slow, harmonic rhythm
- Canons
Reich wanted to explicitly reject the Western classical tradition, and he looked to create music in which you could pick up on the compositional process. One of the most haunting of his pieces is the 1967 work Piano Phase.
In the piece, you start with two pianos working through a figure in unison. One keeps tempo with precision while the other gradually increases and continues with the dizzying pace until they lap the original.
Michael Nyman
Michael Nyman is an English composer, pianist, librettist, and musicologist. He studied music at King’s College London and the Royal Academy of Music, focusing on piano and 17th-century baroque music.
Nyman is noted for coining the term “minimal music” when working as a music critic for The Spectator in 1968.
His pieces involve emotional dynamics and focus on articulation and texture to support the desired response. His name is attached to several film scores, including the multi-platinum soundtrack for Jane Campion’s The Piano.
Philip Glass
Philip Glass is an American pianist and composer and is often regarded as one of the most influential composers of the later 20th century. His style of minimalism builds pieces using layers and phrases that both shift and repeat.
While he studied flute as a child, the keyboard was his main instrument at Juilliard. After he left in 1962, he spent some time in the public school system. He later left due to dissatisfaction with modern music.
He studied in Europe with Nadia Boulanger, known for her strict and pedantic teaching, before returning to New York to form the Philip Glass Ensemble. Glass never liked the term minimalism, instead describing himself as a composer that used repetition in music. His ability to twist and turn these brief melodies, both evolving and devolving them through a piece, is strongly evident in works like Mad Rush.
Jeroen van Veen
Jeroen van Veen is credited as a leading influence of minimalism in Holland, and his structured approach to piano composition has created quite a list of accomplishments. Jeroen van Veen has hours of compositions under his name, all described as minimal with crossovers into:
- Blues
- Jazz
- Soundscape
- Avant-garde
- Techno
- Trance
- Pop
He works as a solo pianist, in duos (such as with his brother and wife), and in ensembles such as the
Piano Ensemble, The Simeon Quartet, and Jeroen van Veen and Friends. Jeroen van Veen’s reputation is built on his touch and technical command, and it fits nicely into the definition of minimalist music.
Ludovico Einaudi
Ludovico Einaudi is both a pianist and composer. His mother, Renata Aldrovandi, played piano for him in his youth, and he is the grandson of composer, pianist, and opera conductor Waldro Aldrovandi.
Einaudi continued in composition as a teenager, starting first on folk guitar. Einaudi’s study with Luciano Berio exposed him to the African vocal movement. He came into contact with American minimalism at the Tanglewood Music Festival in 1982.
His minimalist pieces are known for their ambient texture and call for introspection using fundamental ideas of minimalism. Much of his work involves nature. You see this theme carried from Le Onde in 1996 (above video) to the recent release of Underwater in 2022.
Yann Tiersen
Yann Tiersen is a Breton musician and composer who divides his time between the studio and collaborations. While many of his pieces are used for soundtracks, including those for Amelie that introduced him to an international audience, he doesn’t consider himself a composer of such and doesn’t note a classical background.
Tiersen’s work often incorporates classical ideas but combines them with contemporary instruments. He’s influenced by the traditional training he received as a child but also by the American and British punk subculture he was exposed to as a teenager. This makes his music both easy to recognize and difficult to define, especially as it shifts from album to album.
Overall, Tiersen has a delicate and emotional touch to his pieces, and he’s compared to Philip Glass as a significant influence on minimalism in the late 20th century. You’ll note his stylistic melancholic repetition common in pieces like Porz Goret in the above video.
Simeon Ten Holt
Simeon Ten Holt is well known for his contribution to contemporary classical Dutch composition. While he’s considered a minimalist composer, his pieces also branch off from what you would expect in terms of rhythm and tonal structure.
Ten Holt’s work focuses on consonant and tonal material. His works were often arranged into cells of a few measures each. These are repeated ad libitum, to the player’s discretion, paving the way for more innovation in influence for players.
Canto Ostinato is considered one of the most famous works in contemporary classical Dutch music history. It involves the droning, repetition, and celebratory evolution of the phrases you would expect from a minimalist piece.
Max Richter
While Max Richter was born in Hamelin, Germany, he spent his formative years in Bedford, England, and is primarily known as a British composer and pianist. His works involve post-minimalism and introduce the concept to contemporary classical and popular alternative styles.
Richter was classically trained, and he graduated studying composition and piano from the University of Edinburgh, Royal Academy of Music in London. Before branching off on his own, he studied with Luciano Berio in Italy.
He works by arranging, performing, and composing music for the stage, ballet, opera, and screen. While many of his works are solo, he collaborates with other musicians as well as installation, performance, and media artists.
Richter’s fourth solo album, 24 Postcards in Full Color, is an excellent example of minimalistic music. This collection of 24 classically composed miniatures, including H in New England (above) and Lullaby from the West Coast Sleepers, stands stylistically as ringtones.
Michael Vincent Waller
American composer Michael Waller was born and raised in Staten Island, New York, in 1985. He studied with La Monte Young, and his works have been compared to composers such as Erik Satie and Claude Debussy.
Waller’s sound blend many different styles, including:
- Minimalism
- Impressionism
- Gamelan
- World music
- Melodic classicism
While Waller’s early work contained features from the Avant-Garde, he has recently ventured into the world of hip hop and, more specifically, trap music. During lockdown, he worked with the producer Lex Luger to produce CLASSIC$, where a variety of multinational trap performers contributed remotely.
Focusing on his piano compositions, much of Waller’s work showcases minimalistic characteristics. You can find an overall appreciation for slow durations and processes, as seen in the above video ‘By Itself’ from his Trajectories album.
