The Spectator is responsible for many coinages. One of the most significant came in 1968, when an article by our 24-year-old music critic, Michael Nyman, appeared with the headline ‘Minimal Music’ (reprinted below). It was a wry joke about music that was more experimental than strictly minimal but it stuck and a musical style that, whatever you think of it, has rarely been matched in influence or reach was born.
Walking home from the Fugs’ concert, organised by the Middle Earth at the Round House last week, I was shocked by the 4 a.m. silence — by its awesome superiority to a lot of modern music, and by its unfamiliarity. But I listened harder — having trained myself never to take things at ear-value — and heard a medium-pitch humming in my ears not unlike the buzzing of electric fences with which the controlling hand of man has added his audible presence to country silences. The buzzing was the only musical memory I had left of the warm-up group, the Spooky Tooth, whose amplification system, as is usual, acted as a physical conditioner: the amplified pulse of bass guitar and drums striking simultaneously through ear and floor, charging the frame with an obsessive sound transfusion.
Such crude physical involvement is, of course, disruptive in theory, habit-forming in practice. Yet the violent political message of the Fugs is embodied in gentle, nostalgic, even elegiac music, some of which would not be out of place in the Burl Ives Song Book. This scatalogical, crass, entertaining unconfined and imaginative show was the climax of a fortnight’s off-the-beaten-circuit concerts, which had led me to cultivate a receptive mindlessness, rather than the more or less rational perceptivity that most forms of music require.
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