Can the most minimal musical notes produce the greatest emotional impact?
In short: We often assume that complexity equals depth, believing that more notes and denser textures yield a richer aesthetic experience. Yet, some of the most profound musical moments emerge from extreme simplicity, using a tiny fraction of musical materials to create something unexpectedly transcendent and vast.
In his lecture, Milton Mermikost, Gresham Professor of Music, explores the paradox of 'simple' music—works that seem to outgrow their limited content. While florid, complex styles like the Romantic era use density to achieve emotional impact, minimalist and process music operates on the principle of 'less is more.' This isn't merely about short duration; for instance, Erik Satie’s 'Vexations' is gargantuan in length, repeating a 13-beat melody 840 times, yet it remains arguably predictable. Conversely, a miniature by Anton Webern may last only 20 seconds but contains a dizzying array of non-repeating gestures in pitch, rhythm, and timbre.
To understand how we perceive this complexity, we can look to Claude Shannon, a Bell Labs researcher whose 1948 paper, 'A Mathematical Theory of Communication,' revolutionized how we quantify information. Shannon introduced the 'bit' as the fundamental unit of information and developed the concept of entropy (Shannon Entropy). In this framework, entropy measures unpredictability or informational density. A highly predictable or redundant dataset has low entropy, whereas a variable, less compressible dataset has high entropy.
This mathematical lens allows us to compare the 'informational weight' of vastly different subjects, from a pop song to a Bach fugue. In music, entropy depends on the size of the symbolic alphabet—such as the number of distinct pitches and rhythms used—and the frequency of repeating patterns. By analyzing how much information is contained within a musical structure, we can begin to understand the elegant mechanisms that allow simple, repetitive processes, like Steve Reich’s use of Ewe drumming rhythms, to achieve such profound, emergent power.
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Sources
- Summary by Intellect · source: From Thin Air: Minimalist and process music from Africa to Arvo Pärt - Milton Mermikides
- Also: From Thin Air: Minimalist and Process Music from Africa to Arvo Pärt
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