Milos Raickovich’s ‘Ascetic Minimalism’ and the Legacy of 1976

Abstract

The year 1976 stands as a watershed moment in the global history of minimalist music, marked by the world premiere of Philip Glass’s Einstein on the Beach. The Belgrade performance of Einstein took place only a few months later. This paper examines the pivotal year 1976 through the lens of Serbian-American composer Milos Raickovich’s foundational cycle, Permutations. Developed within the fertile avant-garde environment of Belgrade’s Student Cultural Center (SKC) and the Ensemble for Different New Music, when Raickovich was only 20 years old, this work offered a distinctive departure from the “repetitive” minimalism dominant in the West.https://www.minimalismsociety.net/umd202