A Typology of Multistability in Minimalist Music
Kristen Wallentinsen · 2025
Chapter 3 explores how multistability can be understood in different ways across the compositional practices of a diverse range of minimalist composers. For example, while multistability manifests as the possibility of different patterns emerging from a background texture in Steve Reich’s phasing works, we experience multistability as a shifting of melodic shape due to additive processes in Philip Glass’s and Terry Riley’s works, and we experience multistability through emerging phantom timbres in the work of Charlemagne Palestine and La Monte Young. By comparing the ways multistability manifests differently across various works, the chapter outlines a typology of multistable experiences based on analogs in other perceptual domains (such as vision). The chapter explores meaningful differences in the perceptual mechanisms of each type, and provides examples from the minimalist repertoire by way of demonstrating the typological differences. This typology serves as a meaningful way to articulate the multistable effects experienced by listeners and performers based on shared structural affordances in the musical work.