[norman bates]

I've perhaps rather erroneously seen Satie described as 'minimalist' due to the nature of repetition and gradual change of small cells in some of his music, but I guess this is probably only a comparison point with the movement in music developed in the 50s and 60s by the composers mentioned above.

I guess he was associated with minimalism (and rightly so) because he did a (probably ironic, I would say defnitely ironic) piece called Vexations, where the same thing has to be repeated a huge number of times without any variation.
But there are many other examples. But if with minimalism we talk about phasing I don't know if there are similar things before the sixties (maybe the polymetric Turkish mambo composed by Lennie Tristano, but still there are some differences).