minimalism
Introduction
Sections in this article:
Minimalism in Music
In music, the minimalist movement was, like minimal art, a reaction against a then-current style, with composers rejecting many of the dry intellectual complexities and the emotional sterility of serial music and other modern compositional approaches. Generally, minimalist compositions tend to emphasize simplicity in melodic line and harmonic progression, to stress repetition and rhythmic patterns, and to reduce historical or expressive reference. The use of electronic instruments is common in minimalist music, as are influences from Asia and Africa. Among minimalist composers are the more prominent Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Terry Riley, La Monte Young, and John Adams and the less well-known Terry Jennings, Dennis Johnson, and Julius Eastman.
Minimalism in the Visual Arts
Reacting against the formal excesses and raw emotionalism of abstract expressionism, the practitioners of minimal art (also sometimes called ABC art) strove to focus attention on the object as an object, reducing its historical and expressive content to the bare minimum. Many minimalist artists were sculptors concerned with reducing form to its utmost simplicity. They used flat surface colors, factory finishes, and industrial materials. The use of serial repetitions contributed to their goal. Carl Andre regarded the Italian artist Enrico Castellani (1930–2017) as the father of minimalism for his monochromatic paintings, begun in the late 1950s, on canvases topographically altered by underlying rows of items. Perhaps the earliest uses of the term “minimalism” regarding art was in the essay
Bibliography
See K. Gann et al.,
The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th ed. Copyright © 2025, Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.
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