"And what of the term itself? For better or worse, it has become universally accepted. Shorn of it original derisive implications, minimalism is better than the many other terms - trance music, hypnotic music, repetitive music - that have also been proposed. Besides, composers do not have the luxury of deciding how they will be labelled by history; all they can do is sit back and try to make peace with the result. As Reich has observed of the unfortunate '-isms' that plagued his predecessors: 'Debussy resented "impressionism". Schoenberg preferred "pantonal" to "atonal" or "twelve-tone" or "Expressionist". Too bad for them.
Excerpt from "Minimalists" by K. Robert Schwarz.
