How to appreciate the minimalism of contemporary music?

Minimalism is the last bastion of modern music, and it also pays attention to the logic and order of music. Because music is mainly the repetition of simple materials, it is easy for the audience to enter a state of meditation, also called meditation music. The main representatives are Reich, Glass and others in the United States.

Born in 1935, Avo Pat is the first composer in Estonia to gain international reputation. After eight centuries of occupation, Estonia, a small Baltic country, finally gained its independence after the First World War. Pat was born in this short period of independence, and the country was immediately annexed by the Soviet Union, followed by nearly four years of German occupation and 45 years of Soviet membership. Pat grew up and matured during this period. Pat joined the army according to the compulsory conscription system and became a military drummer. After leaving the army (1957), he worked as a recording engineer in the Estonian Ministry of Radio and Television for ten years, which provided an economic foundation for his early composition career. Like many socialist composers, he also devoted himself to the field of pop music-film and drama soundtrack. During the period of joining the Republic of China, the independence of art was placed under the guidance of the party's literary and artistic policy. Fortunately, the younger generation of composers have the guidance of their predecessors (Heino Eller, 1887- 1970). Pat joined the Tallinn Conservatory of Music on 1958, and studied under Eller. Later, Pat talked gratefully about his mentor: "He showed me a way, but it was an extremely broad way and never forced us to create in his way. He is a very humanized and energetic tutor. "

After graduation (1963), the first batch of works created by Pat were tonal music, mostly piano works with obvious neoclassical style. Under the guidance of Shostakovich and prokofiev, Cantata, which was created for children's choirs and large bands, won the first prize in the Soviet Young Composers Competition. In the 1960s, composers practiced sequential techniques according to some twelve-tone technique music scores and underground textbooks. The first achievement is Nekrolog, which was completed in 1960, and it is also the first twelve-tone work in Estonian music history. Since then, Pat has become more and more avantgarde, regarded as a dangerous person by the government and a blind follower of decadent western culture.

The second symphony (1966) used a lot of non-musical notes and collages, which shocked the Soviet music scene. Tenet written by 1968 is banned because it is a religious school. At the same time, Pat became interested in baroque music, and created baroque imitations with Bach's famous theme, which was in contrast with the harsh modern music (the Second Symphony).

Bach's average law, the first prelude in C major, is adopted in the creed, which is Pat's favorite material. In the late 1960s, Pat fell into a creative crisis, feeling that he could not find his own voice in the avant-garde techniques, and perhaps more importantly, he could not understand the * * * nature of his faith. Within a few years, he almost stopped writing and devoted himself to studying Gregorian hymns and medieval composers such as Scam, Matthew and O 'Keegan. The third symphony in the period of creative exhaustion is a transitional work.

1976, he composed "to Alina" (Für Alina), which marked the beginning of a new period of composer's creation, and his music style was completely new. The following sample fragment of "To Alina" shows that the tonic is the main triad in B minor: Pat draws renewal power from medieval elements and triads, which he calls "Tintinnabuli" (the composition method of Zhong Ming), that is, he returns to the simplest and most basic triads, that is, the cornerstone of tonal harmony, but removes the function of tonal system and makes it lose its sense of direction, which is similar to the parallel progression of medieval music. The composer described Tintinnabuli as follows: "I use as few elements as possible and only use one or two voices to build music on the most primitive and simple material-triad, a special tonal music." As can be seen from the following examples, there are several basic variation modes of "Zhong Ming Composition Method", and the main melody constitutes a triad in A minor: To Alina is the first work to adopt this composition method. The composer said, "This is the first work using the new color palette, and I found a triad series in it, applying an inconspicuous and simple guiding principle." As shown in the above two spectral examples, the principle of "inconspicuous and simple" is that no matter how the chord is inverted, it is firmly "fixed" on the triad. Since then, the composer Zhong Ming has become the starting point of every composer's works, and there is often a specific trisyllabic chord in the center of the works, just like a belief or a bell, which echoes throughout the works.

Pat regards this piece of music not only as his own musical expression, but also as a way out and saving force: "I entered this field in search of hesitation in order to find the answer to my life, music and creation." In the darkness of the low valley of life, I seem to feel that everything is external and meaningless. The complicated appearance confuses me. I must seek unity, which is the most important thing. How can I find it? The trajectory of the perfect thing is changeable and diverse, which makes the trivial thing spread out. The three sounds of a triad are like bells, very close to the perfect thing in my heart. "Music skills are integrated with life experience and monism. From this point of view, the composer's later works are all religious. Facts show that Zhong Ming's composition method is simple, but it has a lot of room for expansion, and Pat has also written a wealth of works with different personalities. 1976-77 wrote a series of works that quickly established his unique voice, such as Song in Memory of Britten, Brothers and Blank. Some critics attributed Pat to Jian Yuepai and even called him "the Jian Yuepai of religion", but the composer himself disagreed. Unlike Jian Yuepai, he doesn't use a lot of repetitive paragraphs to create a static and circular feeling. His structure is often variations, slow and gradual, with a long breath. By the 1980s, due to the tightening of the official ban on it, Pat could hardly find any performing agencies and musicians who were willing to accept his works. The composer said, "Almost overnight, I lost all the performers in the Eastern camp. "This is actually the official fear that Pat's religious music is too" poisonous ",so he simply forced Pat to leave the West. From 65438 to 0980, Pat had to move to the west with his family. In America, Pat is regarded as a saint and has many admirers. Pat doesn't want to accept this. He said, "I'm just a composer. The Passion of John, written in 1982, is a masterpiece of Zhong Ming's composition method. The core of this work is three overlapping five degrees (D–A–E–B), and the "Zhong Ming Composition Method" has also been applied to more levels. A basic time pattern is short, medium and long. Speed is also divided into three distinct grades. Most of the works after 1980s are choruses, but the composition method of Zhong Ming has not changed substantially. Composers further combine it with pitch and semitone, and recent works tend to separate lyrics from music.