The year-long Minimalism Unwrapped festival in London’s Kings Place has been focusing on major figures in one of the late 20th century’s most significant movements. After weekends devoted to Steve Reich, Philip Glass, and the Bang on a Can composers, the latest in the spotlight was Michael Nyman. There were surveys of his piano trios and his string quartets, and the event ended with a concert by four members of the ensemble Chroma, which included the first performance of a piece specially commissioned from Nyman.

Nyman himself is credited with first using the word “minimalism” in a musical sense around 1970, when he borrowed a visual-arts term to categorise the early system-based works of Terry Riley, Reich and Glass. But as this series unwraps, it has shown how conveniently imprecise the term has become. Now it seems that anyone who composes more or less diatonic, non-developmental music can call themselves a minimalist, without any pretence at the rigour and process that the term once denoted.

Even Nyman’s own music seems now only to pay lip-service to the movement he once defined. His new piece, Chromattic, played around with some melodic scraps and riffs in a desultory sort of way, but ended up in bland, easy-listening mode, as if it were a piece of background music left over from a TV documentary or a costume drama.

Though the tight, alive playing of the Chroma instrumentalists and the spiky, edgy sound of their arrangements for saxophone, accordion, double bass and percussion constantly lifted the performances well above the routine, only a few of the other pieces in the programme really caught the ear. Moondog’s joyous, canonic Chaconne, and Ayuo Takahashi’s exuberantly eclectic Eurasian Tango, wonderfully played by accordionist Ian Watson, stood out; Wojciech Kilar’s Orawa and arrangements of Gavin Bryars’s After the Requiem and Joby Talbot’s String Quartet No 2 left little impression.

• Minimalism Unwrapped continues at Kings Place, London, 22-25 October. Box office: 020-7520 1490.