When people ask me if I enjoy minimalist music, I generally answer, much less facetiously than it would seem at first, "Yes, I love Mozart." Tonality, or at least so-called 'common-practice' tonality, is essentially a minimalist idea; a pitch-class, through a triadic expression, is extended through time via a tonal mode. E.g., a piece in C major is "about" some class of sound, "C," using tonality's major system to express its primacy. Incidentally, my view differs slightly from Schenker's views on this. Nevertheless, my Mozart answer expresses two ideas; first, that incessant repetition, with nothing more than that, needn't be the only means of expressing minimal content (i.e., it is, ultimately, inherently not particularly interesting); second, in general, I'm not a fan (but, I am open to having this generally-held view altered. A good number of people I admire are big fans, too. For example, I worked for several years with the late, great Jim Preiss, one of Steve Reich's musicians. Indeed, my own Die Selbstdarstellung #1's harmonic language, while not tonal, is so bare-boned as to be, in essence, minimalist, to a certain degree).

At any rate, it is a breath of fresh air, then, to become familiar with the work of the English composer, Philip Cashian. In this month's clip, from his moving work, So lonely, he brilliantly evokes the churning of the train, melding with the narrator's observations upon it, and the musical metaphors poet Louis MacNeice uses. The result is very effective, and quite beautiful. The clip is part of the first of the two poems set, here showing the seamless flow from the aforementioned churning to the gentle pulsing of the train's stopping. For me, the pulsing brings to mind, too, the easy breath and slowed heartbeat of the slumbering mystery girl:

...we pass without spectators,
Braiding a voiceless creed.

And the girl opposite, name unknown, is still
Asleep and the colour of her eyes unknown
Which might be wells of sun or moons of wish
But it is still very early.

The movement ends, the train has come to a stop
In buttercup fields, the fiddles are silent, ...