Pan-European Minimalism Beyond the Iron Curtain? Michael Fahres’s European Minimal Music Project 1980–1982

Bibliographic Data

ID14810423
AuthorsChristoph Schuller (0009-0006-2847-930X, Hochschule für Musik und Theater München, corresponding author)
Year2025
Volume43
Issue2-4
Pages1-22
Publication date2025-10-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueContemporary Music Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0749-4467 • E-ISSN: 1477-2256
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/07494467.2025.2559469
OpenAlexW4414685404
LanguageEN
References cited13

This article examines Michael Fahres’s European Minimal Music Project (EMMP, 1980–1982) as a pioneering yet overlooked attempt to document a pan-European minimalist movement during the Cold War. While scholarship favoured American minimalism as the genre’s centre, Fahres’s initiative—supported by the West German Goethe Institute—foregrounded European contributions from both East and West and fostered networks across the Iron Curtain. Drawing on EMMP archival documents and the published project book, the study situates the EMMP as both a catalyst for discourse and repository of otherwise ephemeral sources, particularly on Eastern European minimalism. The project’s inclusive approach enabled participation from ensembles and composers in Yugoslavia, Hungary, Romania, and the GDR. Special attention is given to the reception of the EMMP in southeast Europe, notably through ensembles such as Opus 4 and Group 180, as well as to the contrasting responses to Fahres’s project letters by Costin Cazaban and Hans-Karsten Raecke. These illuminate divergent Eastern European views on minimalism’s relation to American models and serialist traditions. Although the EMMP failed to achieve lasting impact and was soon overshadowed by Wim Mertens’s influential American Minimal Music (1983), its materials remain crucial for reassessing the historiography of European minimalism, especially in its Eastern manifestations

Contemporary classical music · Experimentalism · Performance art · Art, Technology, and Culture · Eastern European Communism and Reforms · European Cultural and National Identity

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