Word: minimalist
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Raised in Glen Ellyn, Ill., a Chicago suburb, Anderson first studied the violin but decided to major in art history at Barnard College in New York City. Influenced by minimalists like Sol LeWitt, she tried her hand at sculpture. In the '70s, Manhattan galleries also featured musicians like Minimalist Composer Philip Glass, and Anderson gradually drifted into performance art. In one early conceptualist effort, she stood playing the violin while wearing ice skates implanted in a block of ice; when the ice melted, the piece was over...
...Democrats, and only recently have party leaders--including some presidential hopefuls--begun seriously backing plans for heightened military expenditures. It is time for Democrats to realize that their longtime blanket opposition to costly military programs has been misguided--and that there is a viable middle ground between the minimalist defense posture of Kennedy and the indiscriminate military spending of the current Administration...
With its short, catchy melodic fragments, simple chordal harmonies, rock-steady rhythms and virtually trance-inducing repetitions, the minimalist music of such composers as Reich, 45, Philip Glass, 45, and John Adams, 35, is directly emotional in its appeal, a deliberate rebuke to three decades of arid, overly intellectualized music produced by the post-war avantgarde. Although minimal music is often tightly organized, its objective is to create a mood in the listener, not to have him follow a complicated puzzle. Minimal music (the term is borrowed from the less-is-more visual-arts movement...
...costume of unadorned white shirt and dark trousers, there is a deep warmth in his best works: Music for 18 Musicians (1976), one of Reich's longest (nearly an hour) and texturally richest pieces, infused with an uncharacteristic sense of brooding and menace; the Octet (1979), a sunny minimalist ode to joy; and Tehillim...
...fastest-rising minimalist composer-and potentially the most influential of all-is John Adams, a New Englander who now lives in San Francisco, where he is composer in residence with the San Francisco Symphony. Adams' music represents less of a conscious break with the past than either Reich's or Glass's; instead of reducing his music to the bare bones, Adams draws inspiration from composers like Beethoven, Mahler, Sibelius and Stravinsky. His works have a lushness and emotional depth largely absent in the ascetic though fundamentally cheerful sounds of Reich or the giddy, explosive rhythms...