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A R T S &I C M U S / L E B R E C H T F R E E M A N , B E T T Y / A L A M Y I C T U R E S P, H A Y T H A M L A N D R Y I C A R D R : P H O T O G R A P H Y Fifty years of MINIMALISMPhilipClarksearchesouttherootsofminimalismandtracesthedevelopmentofthe highly influential musical movement over the past half-century The humble and subservient arpeggio, which had always been one of music’s essential building blocks as the staging posts around which melodies were constructed and as the filigree of Classical passagework, found itself in the foreground of modern composition during the mid-1960s. It was as if a minor triad could fulfil Andy Warhol’s decree that, in New York City, everyone could bask in their 15 minutes of fame. As Warhol plastered the walls of downtown galleries with looping images of Campbell’s tomato soup cans and the recently deceased Marilyn Monroe, the earliest pieces of Philip Glass and Steve Reich, performed in equivalent gallery spaces, or if not in lofts – no concert hall would have been foolhardy enough to give these arpeggio-fixated reprobates a gig – built apparently comparable structures with sound. Warhol’s Marilyn Diptych of 1962 comprised 50 repeats of the same epochal image, bright blond yellow on the left, and on the right a phased disintegration of a black-and-white version that faded towards nothing. Reich’s 1965 piece for tape It’s Gonna Rain opened with an equally potent sonic image: the voice of Brother Walter, a black preacher, proclaiming the words ‘It’s gonna rain!’ which smudge into harmonic potash as Reich runs the recording on two tape recorders that are moved out of phase. Warhol’s 32 Campbell’s Soup Cans was deliberately non-painterly – the same soup can depicted 32 times, the desired uniformity of each canvas secured by mechanical screen-printing. In Glass’s Music in Contrary Motion (1969), a basic melodic hook was added to with each repetition scratching a similar structural itch. The aesthetic disjoint between gramophone.co.uk GRAMOPHONE APRIL 2015 11

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