The Brooklyn Rail

Music is repetition and change, within each piece and in the overall course of music. Having only time with which to work, music lays out sequences of organized sonic events through linear time. It has no physical properties—other than reaching and literally touching the listener via sound waves—or dimensions. Musical analysis often uses terms like “structure” and “form” to describe identifiable abstract features like counterpoint or a C Major chord (structures) or to say, “this thing is a song; that is a sonata-allegro movement” (forms). These can be preserved on recordings or written down—represented—where they can be heard or read in music notation, but they do not exist. Except in time, which means that for us to hear these things come into shape through time—to hear that the chorus has arrived in a song, or that the first eight bars of a Joseph Haydn symphony have passed, and to enjoy the uncanny and wonderful pleasure of anticipating their return—sequences of sounds have to be apprehensible to our listening and stick in the memory long enough that there is a certain order that makes sense and is satisfying.

As musicologist Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis writes in The Psychology of Music: A Very Short Introduction:

Music unfolds dynamically, note by note, moment by moment. A performance cannot be taken in all at once; listeners must orient to each passing musical moment using memory systems to reconstruct events that have passed, perceptual systems to take in events that are presently sounding, and predictive mechanisms to anticipate what might happen next.

This is the description of a process and how it works, “dynamically” through time, “note by note,” listeners perceiving events and how they relate to previous events, through time.

It is obvious that one of the main, and the most immediate, characteristics of minimalist music is that it uses repetition. But then so does almost all but the most experimental or conceptual stuff. Even drone and noise music build structures and forms along linear time. And those structures and forms only become apparent through how the drone or noise changes; even these seemingly abstract and monolithic sounds can and ideally do change, the drone of a steadily held note can shift in timbre through time, noise can be washed with filters so its quality transforms. Neither may have any repetition—they’re often just sustained—but the intentional shaping of even steady sounds like these, through time, is a significant way to organize them as music, and why the background hum of current and electronic devices is part of our soundscape, but isn’t music in the critical sense.

Instead it is the note-to-note details—the getting from one note to the next and one moment in time to the next—that make minimalist music. Those notes form repeating patterns, impress themselves into memory. The note-to-note movement and repetition continues, but gradually shifts; e.g., a four-note pattern repeats four times, then it becomes five notes, and that repeats four times, then six notes, etc. Notes get added to the end, and taken from the beginning, and eventually it’s a four-note pattern as at the start, but a completely different one. The music repeats and by repeating changes. It shows the progression of time in its sound and its bones, because that’s all it means to do. Minimalist music is process music that marks the passage of time as both its foundational method and its sound. The distinction that it marks time in a way that’s at least a metaphor for a watch is essential; minimalist music has duration not to fill time but to show time passing. This is another reason why one of its features is that it stops rather than finishing. Minimalism processes time, and is the process of time put into organized sound.

Physicist Richard A. Muller argues in his book Now: The Physics of Time that time is a property of space, and that the reason we have time that predictably keeps moving into the future—which is both how it is you can keep moving on to the next word after you finish reading this one, and how music can even exist, much less define a temporary abstract structure that connects past to present—is because the universe keeps expanding. That is, as the universe keeps moving outward from the central point of the Big Bang, it creates new space in which to expand, and that time is a property of space. Each new bit of space created means one additional moment of time.

But there is time as a property of the universe, and there is time as human experience: a dimension in which to think and write and make music. There is history as a product of time, the memory and record of what has gone before. With that understanding, there can be no deeper, more insightful, elegant, or meaningful depiction of the physical nature of time in music—and nothing describes time better than music does—than minimalism.