Minimalism, Postminimalism, and the Resurgence of Tonality in Recent American Music

music they have been writing for the past twenty-five years or so.' While would seem that during the early 1970s had been accorded a certain grudging acceptance, as time went on most composers found progressively less satisfactory.2 Reich, for instance, has asserted that it becomes more pejorative than descriptive starting about 1973 with my Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices, and Organ.'3 Furthermore, some prominent critics over the past two decades have come to the conclusion that minimalism was finished by the mid-1970s, its original practitioners having gone on to other things.4 But this episode in the history of contemporary art-music composition is not really as simply characterized as such denials might suggest. What have Reich, Glass, and others actually repudiated? Is an aesthetic orientation, or a style, or simply the word used to identify it? It is the word itself which seems to have become the lightning rod