I decided to have a shot at writing something Minimalist myself. Now, I don’t feel that I could ever listen primarily to Minimalist music, or that many people could do so and be happy. I have, at times, thought it was incredibly boring. That said, I decided to commit myself to it and disregard my own criticical feelings for an evening.
Like most musical movements, genres and styles, Minimalism cannot be defined in black and white terms. The understanding of the concept from which I worked is this: The Western music tradition is an epic of cluttering up good, simple music ideas with a lot of extraneous ornamentation. So, I attempted to write a piece of music that embodies what I’ve been working on as Longing for Orpheus, stripped bare of ornamentation. There are no counter-melodies. There aren’t really any melodies. The whole point of “Orpheus, Briefly” is to move from a static a7 to an interplay between that chord and an Fmaj7.
To reflect the World Music influence of Longing for Orpheus, I included a quiet 1-bar hand drum pattern in the background, with accents every 4th bar. It never changes.
Longing for Orpheus makes heavy use of reverb, so there is reverb on the synthesizer line of “Orphic, Briefly.” What I did not anticipate is that the changes in the level of reverb that I programmed in over the course of the song are the most interesting part of the song. Until the very end, the changes are subtle, and you never would have heard them in a more complex soundscape. I think this kind of thing is what the creators of Minimalism found so intriguing about extreme simplicity, and I can understand why.
