2.2 Reception

tempt to create completely non-commercial pop music, performance/ Fluxus artists, artists with jazz backgrounds focusing on free improvisation, artists experimenting with sound installations and with the tape recorder, by cutting up and rearranging tape, and by means of looping and fazing.

A good example of this non-commercial pop music is Smiley Smile by the Beach Boys, undoubtedly their most interesting album. Brian Wilson, their principal songwriter, had finished the material around 1965. Most of it had already been recorded, but the album was not released until 1967. The fan base thought it was a queer album and it did not sell very well. But it did enhance Brian Wilson’s status as he was suddenly considered a genius who simply could not be understood.

The origin of minimal music catalysed with the Fluxus movement. The minimalist, armed with only a simple electronic keyboard, would enter a small auditorium or a gallery and start endlessly repeating tiny musical patterns. Visitors would lie on the floor on pillows and smoke hash.

2.2 RECEPTION Minimalism came as a godsend for classical music. For the listener, it combines diatonics, ambient, dance (thanks to the pulse and rhythmic patterns), a new tone-colour, and a kind of pleasant anti-intellectualism. It provided a counterpart with a human face to the not so popular Young Music.

To most avant-gardists ‘minimal’ was the devil. Elliott Carter, America’s best-known avant-garde composer and a protégé of Boulez, likened minimal music to speeches by Adolf Hitler, and Boulez – never lost for a spiteful remark – considered it a social pathology, inherent to the primitive American audiences.

Of course, their warnings were to no avail. Most of the often-performed living composers are minimalists: Arvo Pärt (Tabula Rasa, 1977), Gorecki (Symphony of Sorrowful Songs 1976), John Adams (Short Ride in a Fast Machine, 1986), Gavin Bryars (Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet, 1971), Louis Andriessen (De tijd, 1981), Steve Reich (Octet,1979) Philip Glass (Violin Concerto nr 1, 1987), Simeon ten Holt (Canto Ostinato, 1976) and Michael Nyman (film score of The Piano, 1993). This list mentions only one work for each composer, but most of them had several ‘hits’.