The worship of science was rampant, and music had become scientific. In the conditioned milieu of 1960s avant-garde music, mere expression of emotion seemed at the time unworthy of serious study subjectivity was distrusted. We had come out of a period of serialism and strict chance processes, glorifying mathematics and the natural world. It is odd to remember at this distance how important this criterion of objectivity seemed at the time. Only Terry Riley seemed a little loopy, pardon the pun, but even in In C we heard the echoes of melodies as a strict canonic process. Charlemagne Palestine’s piano improvisations conjured up overtones. La Monte Young’s sine-tone installations were comfortingly based in mathematics. The similarly phasing 12-note pattern of Piano Phase created its own objective geometry, as did the change-ringing patterns of Jon Gibson. Steve Reich’s out-of-phase tape loops amplified microscopic phenomena of the human voice. Philip Glass’s Music in Fifths and Music in Contrary Motion offered us perceptual exercises in additive process, and taught us to hear the gradual expansion of a time frame. We thought of it, pretty much, as gradual-process music.

Minimalism in its first manifestation was a strict, objectivist style. Some of us are old enough to remember the public impression that minimalist music made before the premiere of Einstein on the Beach.

Einstein on the beach album cover