KALW RADIO SHOW #2: Anticipations of Minimalism

This program, first broadcast on November 10, 2024, examines early modernist anticipations of minimalist music. Although essentially a postmodern innovation, minimalism can also boast several works by early modernist composers, which anticipate this trend. This survey begins with France’s Erik Satie, whose piano music of the 1880s and 1890s displays minimalist qualities; by the 1920s, Satie had arrived at ambient music – or as he called it, “furniture music.” American George Antheil, then working in Paris, shocked audiences by punctuating the din of his Ballet pour instruments mécanique et percussion with unexpected oases of silence. Another Frenchman, Maurice Ravel, scored a huge success with his repetitious and non-developmental orchestral score Boléro (which sounds even more minimalist in Ravel’s arrangement for two pianos). American Virgil Thomson embraced the non-dramatic libretto Gertrude Stein wrote for their opera Four Saints in Three Acts. In the United States, German-born American composer Johanna Magdalena Beyer arrived at minimalism avant la lettre in her percussion music of the 1930s.