- Philip Glass
Philip Glass (born January 31, 1937) is an Academy Award-nominated American composer. His music is frequently described as "minimalist", though he prefers the term "theater music". He is considered one of the most influential composers of the late-20th century and is widely acknowledged as a composer who has brought art music to the public (apart from precursors such as Kurt Weill and Leonard Bernstein), … - Steve Reich
Stephen Michael Reich (born October 3, 1936) is an American composer. He is a pioneer of minimalism, although his music has increasingly deviated from a purely minimalist style. Reich's innovations include using tape loops to create phasing patterns (examples are his early compositions, "It's Gonna Rain" and "Come Out"), and the use of processes to create and explore musical concepts (for instance, "Pendulum Music" and "Four Organs"). - Michael Nyman
Michael Laurence Nyman (born March 23, 1944, London) is an English composer of Minimalist music, pianist, librettist and musicologist, perhaps best known for the many scores he wrote during his lengthy collaboration with the filmmaker Peter Greenaway. - Arvo Pärt
Arvo Pärt, is an Estonian composer, often identified with the school of minimalism and more specifically, that of "mystic minimalism" or "sacred minimalism". He is considered a pioneer of this style, along with contemporaries Henryk Górecki and John Tavener. Arvo Pärt is best known for his choral works. - Jon Gibson
Jon Gibson (b. Los Angeles, California, March 11, 1940) is a flautist, saxophonist, and composer who uses other instruments from around the world in his performances and is known for his Jazz and Classical contributions. He worked with the Philip Glass Ensemble for many years, and also performed in the premiers of "In C" (by Terry Riley) and "Drumming" (by Steve Reich). He has also performed and recorded with a number of other minimalist composers, … - Yann Tiersen
Yann Tiersen is a French Avant-Garde Musician and composer known for his versatility, minimalist compositions, and virtuosity as a multi-instrumentalist. Most of his pieces include piano, accordion,melodica and violin, although many offer a much wider selection of instruments and sounds. Critics sometimes compare him to Erik Satie, Nino Rota, and the Penguin Café Orchestra for their musical proximity. - Charlemagne Palestine
Charlemagne Palestine (born Charles Martin or Chaim Moshe Tzadik Palestine August 15, 1945 or 1947, in Brooklyn, New York) is an American minimalist composer, performer, and visual artist. A contemporary of Philip Glass, Terry Riley, Phill Niblock, and Steve Reich, Palestine wrote intense, ritualistic music in the 1970s, intended by the composer to rub against Western audiences’ expectations of what is beautiful and meaningful in music. - David Lang
David Lang (born January 8, 1957 in Los Angeles, California) is an American composer. Together with Julia Wolfe and Michael Gordon, Lang co-founded Bang on a Can in 1987. His first recognition came from the BMI Foundation's Student Composer Awards in 1980 and 1981. He can be seen as a composer who challenges the status quo. He sometimes gives his concert pieces strange, and even iconoclastic titles such as "Eating Living Monkeys" (1985) and "Bonehead" (1990). - Paul Dresher
Paul Joseph Dresher (born January 8, 1951 in Los Angeles) is an American composer. Dresher received his B.A. in music from the University of California, Berkeley and his M.A. in composition from the University of California, San Diego, where he studied with Robert Erickson, Roger Reynolds, Pauline Oliveros, and Bernard Rands. He also studied Ghanaian drumming with C. K. and Kobla Ladzekpo, Hindustani classical music with Nikhil Banerjee, … - Wim Mertens
Wim Mertens (b. Neerpelt, Belgium, May 14, 1953) is a Flemish Belgian composer, countertenor vocalist, pianist, guitarist, and musicologist. Mertens studied social and political science at the University of Leuven (graduating in 1975) and musicology at Ghent University; he also studied music theory and piano at the Royal Conservatories of Ghent and Brussels. In 1978, he became a producer at the then BRT (Belgian Radio and Television). - Sufjan Stevens
Sufjan Stevens (born July 1, 1975) is an American singer-songwriter and musician from Petoskey, Michigan. He is known for his lyrically focused and instrumentally rich songs that often relate to faith and family. Stevens has enjoyed wide critical success in the United States. He is considered part of the folk revival in indie pop, but his influences are very broad. His music has been likened to electronica and the minimalism of Steve Reich. - David Borden
David Borden (b. December 25, 1938 in Boston, Massachusetts) is an American composer of minimalist music. In 1969, with the support of Robert Moog, he founded what is considered to be the first synthesizer ensemble, Mother Mallard's Portable Masterpiece Company. In addition to his work with electronics and the Mother Mallard ensemble, David Borden has written music for various chamber and vocal ensembles. He is also an accomplished jazz pianist. - Arnold Dreyblatt
Arnold Dreyblatt (b. New York City, 1953) is an American composer and visual artist. He studied with Pauline Oliveros, La Monte Young, and Alvin Lucier and has been based in Berlin, Germany since 1984. His compositions are based on harmonics, and thus just intonation, played either through a bowing technique he developed for his modified bass, a children's piano he specially tuned, or conventional instruments. - Mikel Rouse
Mikel Rouse (born Michael Rouse in Saint Louis, Missouri, United States, January 26, 1957) is an American composer. He has been associated with a Downtown New York movement known as totalism, and is best known for his operas, including "Dennis Cleveland", about a television talk show host, which Rouse wrote and starred in. Rouse writes music that is idiomatically and stylistically indebted to popular music, … - Julia Wolfe
Julia Wolfe (born December 18, 1958) is an American composer. She was born in Philadelphia and works in New York. Wolfe's music is rhythmically vigorous, assertive, and often clangorously dissonant. As a composer associated with the downtown style of new music she is not averse to drawing on rock and minimalism as primary influences. Her music, however, shows a good deal more rhythmic complexity than is generally found in these genres, … - Steve Martland
Steve Martland is an English composer. Martland studied composition in the Netherlands with Louis Andriessen. He works almost exclusively with artists outside classical institutions - Dutch and American groups, freelance musicians and especially his own Steve Martland Band which tours his music internationally. He has also worked with the King’s Singers and Evelyn Glennie for whom he wrote "Street Songs". - Carl Stone
Carl Stone (born Carl Joseph Stone, February 10, 1953) is an American composer, primarily working in the field of live electronic music. His works have been performed in the United States, Canada, Europe, Asia, Australia, South America, and the Near East. Stone studied composition at the California Institute of the Arts with Morton Subotnick and James Tenney and has composed electro-acoustic music almost exclusively since 1972. - John Coolidge Adams
John Coolidge Adams (born February 15 1947) is an American composer, with strong roots in minimalism. - Howard Skempton
Howard Skempton (b. Chester, Cheshire, England, United Kingdom, 1947), is a British composer and accordionist, and one of the founder members of the Scratch Orchestra, formed in 1969. His output has been linked to the musical movement known as minimalism. Skempton studied musical composition with Cornelius Cardew, and took part in Cardew's new music lectures at Morley College, London. - Alan Licht
Alan Licht (6 June 1968-present) is an American guitarist and composer, whose work combines elements of pop, noise, free jazz and minimalism. - Stephen Scott
Stephen Scott (b. Corvallis, Oregon, 1944) is an American composer best known for his development of the bowed piano, which involves a grand piano being played by an ensemble of ten musicians who utilize lengths of horsehair, nylon filament, and other utensils to bow the strings of the piano, creating an orchestra-like sound. Scott founded the Bowed Piano Ensemble in 1977, for which he composes. His work is associated with the minimal style of composition. - Tetsu Inoue
Tetsu Inoue is a well-known producer of electronic music which could be described as ambient music with a heavy influence from minimalist music. He has lived in Japan, San Francisco, and New York. He has collaborated with musicians such as Pete Namlook, Bill Laswell, Andrew Deutsch, Jonah Sharp, and Taylor Deupree. - Andrew Poppy
Andrew Poppy (b. Kent, England, May 29, 1954) is a British composer, pianist, and music producer. From 1974 to 1979 he studied music at Royal Holloway College and Goldsmiths College University of London, studying piano with Susan Bradshaw and earning a B.M. degree in piano performance. One of the least internationally known of British minimalist composers, Poppy was a founding member (in 1981) of The Lost Jockey, … - John Harle
John Harle (born 20 September 1956 in Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom) is a saxophonist and composer. Attracted to minimalist music, he became a founding member of the Michael Nyman Band, with which he performed from 1981-1999. - Daniel Goode
Daniel Goode (b. New York, New York, January 24, 1936) is an American composer and clarinetist. He studied philosophy, and then music with Henry Cowell, Otto Luening, Pauline Oliveros, and Kenneth Gaburo. Goode's works show influence from several sources, including bird song, Cape Breton fiddling, drone, Indonesian gamelan music, and minimal music (specifically music as a gradual process). Often two or more of these elements are combined in a single composition. - Petr Kotik
Petr Kotik (surname originally Kotík is a composer, conductor and flutist living in New York City. He was educated in Europe (Prague Conservatory, graduated 1961; Vienna Music Academy, graduated 1966; AMU Prague, graduated 1969). From 1960 to 1963, Kotik studied composition privately with Jan Rychlík in Prague, and from 1963 to 1966 at the Music Academy in Vienna with Karl Schieske, Hans Jelinek, and Friedrich Cerha. - Marc Mellits
Marc Mellits (b. Baltimore Maryland, United States, 1966) is an American composer and musician. Mellits studied at the Eastman School of Music from 1984 to 1988, the Yale School of Music from 1989 to 1991, and Cornell University from 1991 to 1996, and at Tanglewood. His composition instructors include Joseph Schwantner, Samuel Adler, Martin Bresnick, Bernard Rands, Christopher Rouse, Roberto Sierra, and Steven Stucky. - Hans Otte
Hans Otte is a German composer, pianist, radio promoter, and author of many pieces of musical theatre, sound installations, poems, drawings, and art videos. From 1959 to 1984 he served as music director for Radio Bremen. He still lives and works in Bremen, Germany. His current worklist contains more than 100 works. He studied in Germany, Italy, and at Yale University in the United States. - Erling Wold
Erling Wold (b. January 30, 1958) is a San Francisco based composer of opera and contemporary classical music. He is best known for his later chamber operas, especially "A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil" and his early experiments as a microtonalist. Although he rejected religion in his teens, he returned many times to religious themes in his works, including many of his operatic works, … - Peter Michael Hamel
Peter Michael Hamel (born in Munich, 15 July 1947) is a German composer. His works have been associated with the minimal style of composition, and in the late 1970s with the New Simplicity. He is the author of a book entitled "Through Music to the Self" (1976). - Giovanni Sollima
Giovanni Sollima is an Italian composer and cellist. He was born into a family of musicians and studied cello with Giovanni Perriera and composition with his father, Eliodoro Sollima, at the Conservatorio di Palermo, where he graduated with highest honors. He later studied with Antonio Janigro and Milko Kelemen at the Musikhochschule Stuttgart and at the Universität Mozarteum Salzburg. - Wayne Siegel
Wayne Siegel is an American composer living in Århus, Denmark. From 1971 to 1974 Siegel studied composition and philosophy at the University of California, Santa Barbara. After three years there he decided to complete his Bachelor of Arts degree in Århus, Denmark, where he studied with the noted Danish composer Per Nørgård. Remaining in Århus, in 1977 he received his degree in composition from the Royal Academy of Music in Århus. - Hamza el Din
Hamza El Din (b. Toshka, Egypt, July 10, 1929; d. Berkeley, California, May 22, 2006), was a Nubian oud player, "tar" player, and vocalist. Born in the village of Toshka, near Wadi Halfa in southern Egypt, he is considered by some to have been the father of modern Nubian music. Originally trained to be an electrical engineer and after working in Cairo for the Egyptian national railroad, El Din changed direction and began to study music at the Cairo University, … - László Sáry
László Sáry is a Hungarian composer and pianist. In the 1970s he began composing in a minimal style. - Zoltán Jeney
Zoltán Jeney is a Hungarian composer. He studied composition with Ferenc Farkas at the Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music in Budapest (1961-66) and pursued postgraduate studies with Goffredo Petrassi at the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome (1967-68). In the 1970s Jeney began composing music in the minimal style, and his works are often characterized by an extremely spare and static quality. - Erkki Salmenhaara
Erkki Salmenhaara was a Finnish composer and musicologist. Salmenhaara studied composition with Joonas Kokkonen at the Sibelius Academy, and with György Ligeti in Vienna, and received his doctorate in musicology from the University of Helsinki in 1970. He served as lecturer (1966-75) and associate professor (1975-2002) of musicology at the University of Helsinki and was also the leading writer on classical music in Finland. - Tim Risher
Tim Risher is an American composer, trombonist, and pianist. Risher received his B.A. in Music at the University of Central Florida and his M.M. in music composition from Florida State University. While living in Tallahassee, Florida, Risher was a member of the new music ensembles Paragaté and Tallahassee Camerata. Risher's output is typically tonal, with primary influences being minimal music, American and Brazilian popular musics, early music, … - László Melis
László Melis is a Hungarian composer and violinist. He writes primarily in the minimal style and his compositions are often characterized by a propulsive, bouncy quality. Melis was a founding member of the Hungarian new music group Group 180, which during its existence (1978-90) performed and recorded five of his compositions. Melis has also composed for film and worked extensively in theater, creating incidental music for theatrical productions. - Vladimir Tošić
Vladimir Tošić (b. Belgrade, Yugoslavia, 1949) is a Serbian composer and visual artist. His works are generally composed according to very stringent minimal principles, which he refers to as "reductionist principles of composing." Tošić teaches at the Faculty of Music in Belgrade, teaching counterpoint, harmony, and musical forms. He graduated with a composition degree from the same faculty, studying with Vasilije Mokranjac. - László Vidovszky
László Vidovszky is a Hungarian composer and pianist. During the 1970s he began composing works in a minimal style. Vidovszky studied composition with Géza Szatmári at the Szeged Conservatory in 1959, and with Ferenc Farkas at the Budapest Academy of Music from 1962 to 1967. In 1970-71, he studied in Paris, attending courses organized by the Groupe des Recherches Musicales as well as composition classes of Olivier Messiaen.
|
| |