Steve Reich's infinite loops influenced David Bowie and Radiohead

A beginner’s guide to minimalism in music from Steve Reich all the way to Radiohead You may never have listened to Steve Reich or Philip Glass, but if you're under 90, chances are your musical tastes have been influenced by them. Emerging from New York's experimental counterculture in the 1960s, minimalist composers and artists such as Philip Glass, Steve Reich, La Monte Young and Yoko Ono pushed the boundaries of what music could be. Their ideas would go on to reshape the musical landscape far beyond their experimental circles. The movement's fingerprints can be heard everywhere: in Brian Eno's ambient albums, Kraftwerk's electronic grooves, Radiohead's atmospheric soundscapes, and the film scores of Max Richter and Hans Zimmer. To mark Steve Reich's 90th birthday on October 3, ABC Classic explores what minimalist music is, why it became one of the most influential musical movements of the past century, and where you might already be hearing it in everyday life. What is minimalist music? "Minimalist music is often harmonically static, or if it does change, it changes incredibly slowly," explains ABC Classic presenter Ed Le Brocq. Loading...Emerging as a reaction against the increasingly complex music of the 1950s, minimalism sought to "return to the purity of a single sound", Le Brocq says. According to Le Brocq, the seeds of minimalism were sown in the late 19th century with music such as French composer Erik Satie's Vexations and Furniture Music. "Vexations comprises a short musical phrase repeated [840] times, and a complete performance can last nearly a day," he says. The most influential minimalist composers also drew inspiration from jazz. "John Coltrane was a great influence on [composers like] Terry Riley, Steve Reich, La Monte Young and Philip Glass," Le Brocq says. Minimalism was also shaped by influences beyond Western classical music traditions. "La Monte Young and Terry Riley were both students of an Indian classical musician, Pandit Pran Nath." In essence, minimalist music is "simplicity in one direction, which allows complexity in other directions". Some works were so simple that they blurred the line between music and performance art. What does it sound like? Sometimes, minimalist music can be just two notes sustained for minutes on end, such as La Monte Young's Composition 1960 No. 7, according to Le Brocq. Sometimes it's a sustained chord, as in Yves Klein's Monotone Symphony. In the case of John Cage's 4′33″, it's silence. More commonly, however, minimalist music is built around repeating musical patterns that evolve gradually over time. These "infinite loops" can be heard in Reich's Piano Phase, Arvo Pärt's Spiegel im Spiegel and Philip Glass's Etudes and Metamorphosis. Loading...Pianist and composer Sally Whitwell, who has recorded and frequently performed Reich and Glass's music, describes the harmonic changes as "almost glacial", with patterns slowly shifting into something new. But don't mistake simplicity for ease. Whitwell says performing minimalist music is technically demanding. "You have to always be extremely aware of where you are as a performer," she says. What's special about minimalist music? While some minimalist music can seem deceptively simple, Le Brocq says the point is to allow listeners to "hear more and more things just from a simple sound." Whitwell remembers attending Philip Glass's four-hour opera Einstein on the Beach, which became her favourite opera. "It's like sitting inside some kind of giant magical '70s analogue synthesiser," she says. "There wasn't even a narrative, but I was just crying because it was so beautiful." Whitwell says the opera's power comes from the way each elements come together. "Every element, the music, the dance, the acting, the spoken word, the design, all of it together forms a complete work. None of those elements is really more important than any other." For Le Brocq, Steve Reich's contribution to minimalism was equally transformative. "Reich is so important because of his development of phase music," Le Brocq explains. "Reich takes simple cells of sound and creates a new universe of music through his use of repetition to reveal new patterns in the music." Le Brocq points to Reich's Different Trains as "one of the most moving and significant works of our time." "He uses recordings of Holocaust survivors, takes their speech and turns it into musical phrases, then creates loops to form a tapestry of sound." Loading...How did minimalism influence popular music? By the 1970s, minimalist ideas, including repetition, loops and gradual musical change, had already moved beyond experimental music circles into ambient and electronic genres. "Brian Eno was heavily influenced by the minimalist movement in the 1970s," Le Brocq says. Eno's 1978 album Music for Airports, often credited with helping define the ambient genre, uses layers of tape loops of different lengths to create a continuous soundscape that is "as ignorable as it is interesting". "Everything from micro beats to synth-pop and that kind of thing is very rooted in loops," Whitwell says. The minimalist fingerprint, particularly that of Steve Reich, can also be heard in David Bowie's "Weeping Wall" from his 1977 album Low and Radiohead's "Let Down" from the 1997 album OK Computer. In some cases, the worlds of minimalism, avant-garde art and popular music overlapped directly. Yoko Ono, a classically trained musician and a leading figure in New York's avant-garde scene in the 1960s, met her future husband, John Lennon, while assisting composer John Cage with his Notations project. How did minimalism influence film music? Minimalism's influence is perhaps most obvious today in film and television music. Le Brocq describes composers such as Max Richter and Hans Zimmer as part of a direct line from Philip Glass and Steve Reich. They use simple musical cells, gradual harmonic shifts and layered textures to create music that feels rooted in the minimalist tradition. Zimmer's score for Christopher Nolan's Interstellar is perhaps one of the best examples of minimalist film music. Richter's On the Nature of Daylight, featured in films including Arrival and Hamnet, has become one of the most recognisable descendants of the movement. Richter and fellow composer Ludovico Einaudi are also among the most-streamed contemporary classical composers on Spotify. Listen to Infinite Loops, a four-part audio series presented by Ed Le Brocq, every Saturday at 5pm throughout October and available on ABC Listen.