I love minimalist music! It is (usually) very tonal and melodic, it presents very – if any – little technical difficulty, it sounds more difficult than it actually is, and it is usually very good quality in musical terms. It is ideal for adult beginners, who otherwise may end up having to play for a couple of years some cretin pedagogical piece from some method or other.
Here are some favourites you may wish to investigate:
1. Ludovico Einaudi. (born 1955?) Einaudi is an Italian composer in his early fifties who after some experimental work (he was a student of Luciano Berio) and movie soundtracks, started producing highly melodic piano pieces. He has become a huge success in Italy and then in the UK after Classical FM started championing him. Some purists dislike him and criticise him highly, calling his music “lift music”, and it is true that he threads a very fine line there. Nevertheless, I find his music very pleasant both to play and to listen to. From a teaching point of view, he is a heaven sent gift. Ricordi has published the sheet music for most of his works and it is all available on CD as well (with Einaudi at the piano). For instance:
“Due Tramonti” (from Eden Roc) – I have taught this to complete beginners in one lesson. It teaches how to bring out a melody both in the right and left hand and it even features some hand-crossing. I don’t need to tell you how empowering and motivating for a new student such experience can be: S/he gets home from the first piano lesson and is able to play a beautiful piece that moves through the whole extent of the keyboard with crossing hands on top of it!
“Nefeli” (from Eden Roc) – Another very easy piece that sounds very busy and difficult with two beautiful themes. Ideal to teach arpeggio accompaniment with a single melodic line that must “sing”.
“Julia” (From Eden Roc) – This is similar in style to Nyman’s “The heart asks pleasure first”, but far easier to play. Both hands play arpeggio figurations together, while the melodic line is on the little finger of the right hand, so again an excellent piece to learn how to do this.
“Le Onde” (From Le Onde) – This is the piece that made Einaudi famous in the UK. Now you can listen to it everywhere, since a lot of adverts use it. A bit more complex than the ones above, but not that much. Again, the general figuration is of arpeggios in both hands with a melodic line that must be brought out in the right hand.
La Linea Escura (from Le Onde) – A fast repetitive broken chord figuration (in the RH) that sounds mysterious and atmospheric. An excellent alternative to similar exercises in Czerny, but which, contrary to Czerny can be a most worthwhile addition to one’s repertory, specially for beginners.
Questa Notte (from Le Onde) – Possibly the most difficult piece in this list (and arguably the nicest). The guitar imitation is spot on. Excellent piece to teach how the piano can be made to imitate other instruments.
“Dietro L’incanto” (from Le Onde) – a delicate, haunting melodic theme – not one of the easiest, but well worthwhile the effort to master it.
“Stella del Matino” (from “I Giorni”) – Spaced octaves in the left hand (good for accurate jumps) and fast arpeggio figurations on the RH with the melody played by the RH little finger. Again, excellent for developping a beginner’s technique being at the same time a good repertory piece.
“I Giorni” (from “I Giorni”) – Another beautiful piece with much scope for a student’s expressivity while being technically simple. All these pieces are also excellent to introduce a student to musical analysis, since they use very limited and standard chord progressions and are mostly based on a single scale.
2. Howard Skempton (born 1947) A little known British contemporary composer, Oxford University Press has published a collection of 55 of his short pieces (“Howard Skempton – Collected piano pieces”) and many of them have been recorded by John Tilbury for Sony (“Howard Skempton: Well Well, Cornelius). Most if not all of the pieces are tonal, and all are very easy technically. Be prepared for an absence of bar lines and time signatures. Skempton rarely uses key signatures preferring to add sharps and flats to the notes, which makes his scores sometimes difficult to sight read. Most ofit has none of the tunefulness of Einaudi or Glass, and some of his pieces are definitely grating and dissonant. I particularly like “Saltaire Melody”, “One for Molly”, “Even Tenor”, “Air”, “Trace (for right hand)”, “Passing fancy (for left hand)”, “Well, Well Cornelius”, and “Campanella 3”. From a teaching point of view I find Skempton very useful to teach
composition and free improvisation. Consider what Skempton himself says about melody and rhythm in his piano music:
“The piano would seem the ideal medium for the musical explorer, not least because, in many musical households, it is already there at hand. Also, the extraordinary range of colours and sonorities offers more than enough to a budding composer with more imagination than skill. Action is merely a prelude to observation. It’s so easy, like dropping a pebble in a pool: a single gesture, a forearm cluster or whatever reveals an entire landscape, a vast space in a changing light. (…) The many chorale pieces, of which June 77 and Postlude are examples; introduce melody as a means of governing a sequence of chords of similar character. Much, though, still depends on the quality of the raw material: the expressive power of the individual chord. For both types of pieces, landscapes and chorales rhythm is controlled almost out of existence. Yet it would be unnatural to keep at bay forever something so essential to musical utterance. When it appears, at first sporadically, it serves to liberate melody. There is tenderness and compassion in colour and sonority, but the sheer generosity of pure melody is something special.”
3. Arvo Part (born) is one of my favourite contemporary composers. Unfortunately (as mentioned above), he composed very little for piano. The other piece besides “Fur Alina” is “Variationen zur gesundung von Arinuschka” (be prepared for some unusual notation). Both are published by Universal Edition.
4. Phillip Glass – As mentioned above, “Metamorphosis” (There are five of them – no. 2 is my favourite), “Mad Rush” and “Wichita Sutra Vortex” are all for solo piano.
Opening for Piano (1982) is stylistically like Metamorphosis, and from a teaching point of view it is a great exercise for 3 against 2, while being an excellent repertory piece.
The Olympian - Lighting of the Torch is the most solemn piece, (it was originally written for the opening of the Olympic Games in Los Angeles of 1984). Hymn-like.
There are two CDs of these pieces: Jay Gottlieb recorded them for Pianovox and Glass himself recorded them (except for “Opening” and “The Olympian” for CBS)
5. Alan Hovhaness (1911 - 2000) Have a look here:
https://www.hovhaness.com/(“1. An important but marginalised 20th Century American composer. A 'true original' who foreshadowed future musical techniques and aesthetic values. Rejecting the vogues of Americana, serialism and atonality, he pioneered contemporary development of archaic models and (like Henry Cowell and Lou Harrison) melded Western models with those of the East, making him a pioneer of East-West 'fusion' decades before the term 'World Music' had been coined. 2. Pioneered 'ad libitum' aleatoricism in 1944, some 15 years before the European avant garde. 3. As early as the 1940s, his employment of ever-shifting melodies over static harmonies, plus use of rhythmic cycles, pre-empted the Minimalist movement of the late 1960s. 4. The visionary and mystical nature of some phases of his work, often intoxicating in its directness and simplicity, rank him as the musical progenitor to the later, so-called New Age-ists and Spiritual Minimalists, such as Arvo Pärt and John Tavener 5. His significance remains overlooked by musical academia, partly because scholars have not looked for radical developments within post-War tonal music, still less in music of great beauty with audience appeal.”)
He has some interesting piano pieces, and you can find a list here:
https://www.musicweb-international.com/classrev/2000/feb00/hovanessworks3.htm#pianoMichael Nyman (born 1944) apparently was the first to use the term “minimalism” in connection with Cornelius Cardew’s “The Great Digest”. (Incidentally, Cardew was Skempton’s composition teacher, and Skempton;s piece “Well, well, Cornelius” was written on the occasion of his passing away). The whole soundtrack of “The Piano” can be considered minimalist music.
Best wishes,
Bernhard.
Topic: Minimalist piano music suggestions