This article is the first study of the representation of minimalism in the history of Latvian academic music. The local adaptation of minimalist ideas and stylistics in Latvian academic music began in the mid-1970s. The repetition of musical structures characteristic of minimalism and the creation of a quasi-meditative expressiveness in Latvian composers' music is related to the great influence of the locally dominant neoromanticism stylistic trend in the late twentieth century and its relevance in the early twenty-first century. This article provides a more detailed characterisation of the local specificity and fragmentary (rare), as well as marginal (synthesised) instances of minimalist ideas and stylistic manifestations in musical works of three Latvian composers—Pēteris Vasks (b. 1946), Georgs Pelēcis (b. 1947), and Imants Zemzaris (b. 1951)—created during the 1970s and 1980s (the late period of the Soviet occupation and totalitarian regime). It also offers a panoramic view of the manifestations of minimalism in Latvian composers' creative work during the 1990s and the 2010s (after state independence and democracy were restored in the country).
Jānis Kudiņš (Thu,) studied this question.