Minimalism today has become the soundtrack for everyday life. In film and TV soundtracks, adverts and concert music, its repetitive, unambiguous tonality can all too easily shift into the background. But minimalism has a radical history. It’s especially true in the Netherlands, where from the 1960s a generation of Dutch musicians made a series of striking interventions and new democratic ensembles. It was a disruption of the musical establishment which at one time even led to musicians’ imprisonment.
In recent years, the cohort of artists and composers acknowledged as important to musical minimalism has been significantly expanded. Kerry O’Brien and William Robin’s 2023 book On Minimal Music persuasively enlarges the minimal canon to include John and Alice Coltrane, Don Cherry and Arthur Russell. This expansive ethos is reflected by the programming at Amsterdam’s Muziekgebouw aan ’t IJ: at its Minimal Music Festival this April, new works by Oren Ambarchi and Charlemagne Palestine were heard alongside music by Terry Riley, Éliane Radigue and Pauline Oliveros.
The Muziekgebouw’s 2026–27 Minimal series continues this trend, while also celebrating minimalism’s established figures. The 90th birthdays of Steve Reich and Philip Glass are marked by a number of performances. Reich’s Desert Music – setting texts by poet William Carlos Williams written in the shadow of the Bomb – will be heard in October. Next March, Drumming is paired with the world premiere of Aart Strootman’s Strumming, for eight single-stringed instruments. Glass will be heard in November and January, with pieces including the ballet Aguas de Amazonia. The series culminates next April in a birthday concert for Reich, Glass and John Adams.
But it’s not just the big names of American minimalism that will be celebrated. In October, the Muziekgebow celebrates the 50th anniversary of the Dutch ensemble Hoketus. Louis Andriessen’s work of the same name will be performed by Het Muziek, alongside a new work by Michael Gordon (co-founder of New York minimalist ensemble Bang on a Can). 2026 is also the 50th anniversary of Andriessen’s magnum opus De Staat (The State), which will be performed next May.
As musicologist Robert Adlington explains in his book Composing Dissent, musical modernism took hold relatively late in the Dutch music scene. But society was changing. In 1966, the countercultural movement Provo won a seat on Amsterdam’s city council. They launched a series of ‘White Plans’ aimed at playfully improving the city’s infrastructure: closing the city centre to motorised traffic, offering free bikes and sex education services, taxing pollution, and promoting squatting and collective childcare.
In 1966, composer Peter Schat, a contributor to The Situationist Times, premiered the multi-media Labyrint at the Holland Festival, just after the murder of construction worker Jan Weggelaar by police. Schat explicitly associated the piece with the White Plans. For the 1969 festival, Schat spearheaded the collaborative opera Reconstructie with composers including Louis Andriessen and Misha Mengelberg. The programming of this ‘big cabaret performance’ underneath a 12-meter-high statue of Che Guevara reportedly caused Richard Nixon to cancel a state visit. That year, the composers protested the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra’s lack of new music programming in a group known as the ‘nutcrackers’. For disrupting one of the orchestra’s concerts, they were given one-week prison sentences.
For the Dutch avant-gardists, new music meant new ways of organising the musical ensemble. In 1967, Mengelberg, Han Bennink and Willem Breuker co-founded the Instant Composers Pool, embracing total improvisation. Accomplished jazz musicians, Mengelberg and Bennink had played with African American multi-instrumentalist Eric Dolphy. They also had a dada side. Breuker later founded an ensemble drawing on the Brecht-Weill tradition alongside free jazz and new music.
In the early 70s, Andriessen organised a series of ‘Inclusive Concerts’ lasting up to nine hours, mixing new music with medieval, pop, jazz, and electronic music. In 1972, he and Breuker formed the ‘street orchestra’ De Volharding (Perseverance) to play at concerts, demonstrations, and neighbourhood festivals. The group, writes Adlington, was “organised as a democratic collective,” with all members equally involved in decision making about repertoire, venues and artistic direction. In their debut at the Theater Carré they performed boogie-woogie pieces by Jimmy Yancey, Andriessen’s piece De Volharding, and the Viet Cong anthem.
‘Democratising’ music, Andriessen felt, also applied to composition itself. He became interested in process, simplicity and the involvement of amateurs. Over the next few years, he wrote a series of compositions in which musical processes reflected or interrogated political ideas. Volkslied (1971) gradually replaces the pitches of the Dutch national anthem with those of The Internationale, transforming a nationalist melody into an internationalist one. The tape piece Il Duce (1973), renders a Mussolini speech progressively unintelligible. In Workers Union (1975), fixed rhythms and unfixed pitches combine what Andriessen terms “individual freedom and severe discipline”, paralleling the difficulties of political organising.
These works culminated in De Staat (1976). Andriessen sets texts from Plato’s Republic advocating banning the Mixolydian mode for its socially negative effect. The music draws on the timbres of bebop and cool jazz and on Indonesian scales. Critic Thea Derks calls it a “ruthless explosion of sound”. Does the music represent an ideal state, doing away with hierarchy and individualism? Or is it a vision of authoritarianism? Andriessen refuses to give easy answers. Music, he claimed, has no inherent political meaning. On the other hand, it cannot help but reflect the social and political context in which it is written.
I spoke to Robert Adlington to get his thoughts on this period of Andriessen’s work. Andriessen, he suggests, “regarded American minimal music as having sold out, following the confrontational radicalism of Reich’s and Glass’s earliest pieces.” In De Staat, “tonal continuous sound masses” recalling American minimalism are “bluntly juxtaposed with far more abrasive, strongly dissonant music, creating a kind of abrupt dialectic. I hear the piece as reflecting a strong attraction to American minimal music,” Adlington continues, “together with its opposite – something like, ‘I love it; I hate that I love it’!”
In January 1977, Andriessen began a project at the Royal Conservatory in the Hague “to study the history of the American avant-garde movement both theoretically and practically”. “I intended to finish the project”, he explained, “by performing a composition that, making use of certain stylistic devices of minimal art, would at the same time criticise this style.”
Hoketus, Adlington suggests, “offered a more wholehearted repudiation of the American style”, while “still adopting repetition and incremental change as fundamental method”. Andriessen drew on a musical technique associated with the 14th century Ars Nova. The melody is distributed among different instruments, rendering it as much a function of rhythm as of harmony. The piece, Andriessen suggested, reacted against what he called the “cosmic nonsense” of American minimalism. Rather than floating or gliding, the music hammered. There was little chance it could become background.
To play it, Andriessen founded a new ensemble with students from the Hague. Divided into two groups, sitting on opposite sides of the stage, each instrument was doubled: acoustic and two Fender Rhodes pianos, panpipes, saxophones, bass guitars, percussion. The group played at maximum amplification. The aesthetic drew on rock and Stravinsky’s neoclassicism. It was loud, austere, impersonal, rhythmically precise and propulsive.
“In America, there is not enough angst!” Andriessen once remarked. “I’m much more aggressive”. But Hoketus also anticipates the minimal sounds created in conjunction with the Downtown, No Wave and avant-rock scenes: Glenn Branca, Rhys Chatham, early Sonic Youth.
Today, Adlington suggests, Andriessen’s influence remains strong, not so much in the sound of his music as the philosophical, practical and political questions it raises. “Especially in the late 1960s”, Andriessen and his fellow composers “were remarkably tenacious in exploring ways to create an alternative musical culture, independent of the trappings of classical concert life. This included critiquing their own efforts, meaning that they progressively moved away from orchestras, then from traditional concert venues, then (for a short period) from the dominant role of the composer.”
The social movements of the 1960s had an undeniable impact – not always for the better. As Adlington argues: “The loosening of social convention in 1960s Europe and North America had immeasurable effects that shaped everything that followed, including perhaps the confident individualism of the political right through the 1980s and beyond.” “Musically”, he suggests, “the experimentation of this period – including American as well as Dutch minimalism – has had an equally dramatic effect in dismantling genre boundaries and challenging taboos.”
Many of the Dutch radicals mellowed with age, returning to conventional orchestras and concert settings. (Andriessen attributed the shift to “a new generation of orchestral administrators who were open to our ideas.”) “What I admire about their more radical years”, Adlington continues, “is that they were asking lots of questions about how musical life is structured, which I think still need to be asked today, and often aren’t.”
In part, what was radical about the music was its “unapologetic endorsement of pleasure, a quality that many people felt had been comprehensively expunged from modern music.” And, Adlington suggests, “one of the lasting lessons of minimalism, perhaps, is that the radical should not necessarily be regarded as the antithesis of the enjoyable.”
The Muziekgebow’s Minimal Series reminds us of a time when the music of Andriessen and others used it to model social change. Fifty years on, it will provide a welcome opportunity to view this music afresh.
The Muziekgebouw’s Minimal Series 2026–27 runs until May.
See all upcoming performances Muziekgebouw aan ’t IJ.
This article was sponsored by the Muziekgebouw aan ’t IJ.
