Piano Music Piano Music Music by Philip Glass Jay Gottlieb, Piano 1999 1. Since the sixties, Minimalism continues to be a liberating experience allowing artists to break away from a Europe totally immersed in the Darmstadtian avant-garde. This avant-garde differs from the American one in that its origin stems from a philosophical foundation.
Music is thus an extension of life.
It is no longer a closed system, but rather an opening enriched with freedom for the individual. From a European point of view, this conception is equivocal. Moreover, all these musicians are of the same generation - the first one, Young, was born in 1929 and the last one, Glass, in 1937. Glass studied composition with William Bergsma and Vincent Persichetti, and then studied with Darius Milhaud and Nadia Boulanger. If Young offers a continuous sound of a constant pitch , Riley a repetitive principle subject to the improviser's fancy , and Reich a process of gradual progression , Glass, however, insists on the use of an additive process of development founded on the progression of a repeated figure.