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Webern. But he interpreted Webern’s twelve-tone pieces in a fresh, unexpected

way. He noticed, for example, that any one note in a Webern row tended to

come back in the same register (high, low, middle) and that those recurring

notes created hidden through-lines in the music. He made it his mission to bring

those continuities to light. Like Feldman, he slowed the pace of events in the

twelve-tone cosmos, only in his case each note in the series became an

extended tone, or “long tone,” as he called it. Twelve-tone writing became

something like Tai Chi, combat in slow motion.

Young wrote his first long-tone work, for Brass, in June 1957. The following

summer, at Berkeley, he wrote a Trio for Strings, which has all the headlong

momentum of continental drift. In a 1989 performance timed by Edward

Strickland, the viola began with a sustained C-sharp and was joined fifty-one

seconds later by a violin playing E-flat. The whole-tone interval lasted for more

than a minute before the cello entered with a D. The three notes clashed for one

minute and forty-two seconds before the instruments began dropping out at the

same glacial pace.

To hear the piece is to enter into the same kind of waking dream state that is

encouraged by Feldman’s later music. Events move so slowly that you can no

longer detect the twelve-tone motion of the piece, or even the identities of the

tones themselves. You become accustomed to the rapid beats of clashing

frequencies. And you wait for the revelatory moments when the composer

rediscovers clear intervals such as the fourth and the fifth. The Trio ends with a

C and a G on the cello, sounding for minutes on end and then dying away

ppppp. That glowing open fifth points the way to minimalist tonality.

When Young presented his Trio to his Berkeley colleagues, they reacted with

disbelief, although two of the younger composers, Terry Jennings and Dennis

Johnson, picked up on the long-tone concept. In 1959 Young ventured to

Stockhausen’s composition seminar in Darmstadt, where he made contact with

many kindred spirits, notably John Cage. Under Cage’s influence Young veered

toward conceptual art: works that involved furniture being dragged across

floors, garbage cans thrown down stairwells, butterflies released in the

performance space, and fires built onstage. Here are three scores in their

entirety:

Composition 1960 #10: Draw a straight line and follow it.

Composition 1960 #15: This piece is little whirlpools out in the middle of

the ocean.

Piano Piece for David Tudor #3: Most of them were very old

grasshoppers.

As these works were being written, the Berkeley music department awarded

Young a travel fellowship—according to legend, to get him out of town.

Downtown New York welcomed him. With the electronic composer Richard

Maxfield, Young curated a series of concerts at the downtown loft of the

expatriate Japanese artist Yoko Ono, who, at that time, was married to the

avant-garde composer Toshi Ichiyanagi.

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In a few short years Young went from being a Webern disciple to a sort of

musical shaman. For some time he had been experimenting with drugs,

especially mescaline; an Andy Warhol associate later described him as “the

best drug connection in New York.” But Young claimed that he would have

followed the same path even if he had never dabbled in psychedelics. Just as

important was his exploration of Indian music, in which the tambura drones the

tonic note as the rest of the ensemble plays. (His guru in later years was the

North Indian classical singer Pandit Pran Nath.) The drone took center stage in

Composition 1960 #7, which takes off where Trio for Strings left off, with the

sound of an open fifth. The score consists of the notes B and F-sharp, below

which is the instruction “To be held for a long time.”

By the early sixties Young had dropped notated composition in favor of evening-

length ritual improvisations, which he dubbed the Theatre of Eternal Music. The

first Eternal Music event happened in 1963, on a New Jersey farm, and in

tribute to Young’s childhood fascination with the sounds of power plants it was

called The Second Dream of the High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer.

This led to a tetralogy called The Four Dreams of China, each part of which was

based on different arrangements of the pitches C, F-natural, F-sharp, and G.

The performers were Young, who played sopranino saxophone; Young’s

companion Marian Zazeela, who sang or intoned; the musician-poet Angus

MacLise, who beat African rhythms on bongos; and, particularly critical in the

evolution of the sound, the violinist-composer Tony Conrad, who had studied up

on the just-intonation music of Harry Partch, Lou Harrison, and Ben Johnston.

Later in 1963 the group took in the young Welsh composer John Cale, who

strung a viola with electric-guitar strings and let loose drones of incomparable

roaring power. Nothing like this had been heard in notated music, because

there was no way to notate it. Nothing like it had been heard in jazz, either,

although the free jazz of Sun Ra and Albert Ayler came close. Young had

reached the outer limits, and he remains there still, presiding in guru style over

musical rituals in his Church Street loft.

Young has never written anything resembling conventional tonal music. For

some reason, his ears have a strong aversion to the fifth partial of the harmonic

series, which is tied to the interval of the major third. Without the major third,

tonality is impossible. Terry Riley’s contribution was to add the sweet sound of

triads to the long-tone process. This move completed the minimalist

metamorphosis.

An easygoing character of the rural-hippie type, Riley grew up in the foothills of

the Sierra Nevada. He met Young in 1958 while studying at Berkeley. “What La

Monte introduced me to,” Riley said, “was this concept of not having to press

ahead to create interest.” Young also introduced Riley to the postserialist

tendencies of marijuana and mescaline. Feeling the pull of Young’s shamanistic

world, Riley wrote his own long-tone String Trio. In it the viola drones the notes

A and C-sharp—the major third that Young preferred to avoid.

While working at the San Francisco Tape Music Center alongside Subotnick

and Oliveros, Riley strung loops of tape between the reels of one or more tape

recorders, elaborating techniques that Stockhausen had used in Kontakte.

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Riley’s first tape-loop work was called Mescalin Mix. In 1962 he went to France,

where he made a living playing lounge piano at Strategic Air Command bases;

in the off-hours he kept on tinkering with tape. One day in a French radio studio

he said to the engineer, “I want this kind of long, repeated loop.” The engineer—

“a very straight guy in a white coat,” Riley recalled—ran a piece of tape through

two machines and set one on record and the other on play. When a sound was

fed into this extended loop, it would replicate itself, building into a layered blur of

beats and textures. Riley called the effect “time-lag accumulation technique”

and he decided to mix it with live performance. He hooked up with the jazz

trumpeter Chet Baker, who had just served time in jail for heroin possession.

Riley, Baker, and others improvised an accompaniment to Ken Dewey’s play

The Gift. The tune they jammed on was, naturally, Miles Davis’s “So What.”

On returning to America in February 1964, Riley heard the Theatre of Eternal

Music in New York and likened it to “the sun coming up over the Ganges.” He

then set to work on an instrumental piece that would unite static drones and

busy loops, that would somehow move quickly and slowly at the same time. The

score took the form of a chart of fifty-three “modules,” or brief motivic figures.

Each player in the ensemble is instructed to proceed from one module to the

next at his or her own pace, tailoring the music to the needs of the instrument

and the desires of the moment. The modules derive from the seven notes of the

C-major scale, with a few F-sharps and B-flats thrown in for good measure. No

matter what choices are made in performance, the harmony tends to move into

E minor in the middle and into G major (the dominant of C) toward the end, with

the B-flats supplying a touch of blues at the close. Tying the whole thing

together is a pair of high Cs on the piano, pulsing without variation from

beginning to end. Hence the title: In C.

The premiere took place on November 4, 1964. Alfred Frankenstein, the broad-

minded critic of the San Francisco Chronicle, wrote a review that remains the

best description of the piece: “Climaxes of great sonority and high complexity

appear and are dissolved in the endlessness. At times you feel you have never

done anything all your life long but listen to this music and as if that is all there

is or ever will be.”

Playing electric piano that night was the twenty-eight-year-old Steve Reich.

He’d moved to northern California in 1961 and met Riley in the spring of 1964. It

was Reich’s idea to introduce the chiming Cs and thus to organize the piece

around a crisp, unvarying pulse. The aesthetic tension at the heart of In C—

between Riley’s lust for liberation and Reich’s liking for order—anticipated the

divergent trajectories of the two composers in coming years. Riley threw himself

into hippie culture, attracting throngs of tie-dyed fans with all-night

improvisations on electronically enhanced saxophone and organ. Liner notes for

his 1969 album A Rainbow in Curved Air look forward to the lamentably still

unrealized moment when “the Pentagon was turned on its side and painted

purple, yellow & green… The concept of work was forgotten.” Reich, on the

other hand, cast off psychedelic trappings and made minimalism a rapid-fire

urban discourse. The endless highway led back to New York.

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New York Minimalism

Circa 2000, you could ride the subway to the lower end of Manhattan, emerge

onto a street within sight of the Brooklyn Bridge, walk for a minute or two, press

a buzzer marked REICH, and hear a crisp voice say, “Come on up.” The

composer does not look the part of a musical revolutionist. Within his black

button-down shirts and signature baseball cap, he fits the image of an

independent film director, a cultural-studies professor, or some other out-in-the-

world intellectual. Once he starts speaking, you feel the peculiar velocity of his

mind. He is as much a listener as a talker, although he talks at blistering speed.

He reacts swiftly to slight sounds in his midst—the soft buzz of a cell phone, a

siren on the street outside, the whistle of a teakettle. Each sound contains

information. The 1995 work City Life conveys what it would be like to

experience the world through Reich’s ears: the hidden melodies of overheard

conversations and the rhythms of pile drivers melt together into a smoothly

flowing five-movement composition, a digital symphony of the street.

Reich was born one year after Young and Riley, in 1936. His parents, of

Eastern European and German-Jewish descent, separated when he was still a

baby, and he spent much of his childhood riding trains between New York and

Los Angeles, where his mother moved to pursue a career as singer and lyricist.

He later said that the clickety-clack of wheels on rails helped shape his rhythmic

sense. And he offered a melancholy reflection: “If I had been in Europe during

this period, as a Jew I would have had to ride on very different trains.” In one of

his finest later works, Different Trains, he combined the voices of Pullman

porters with those of Holocaust survivors over a nervously mournful string-

quartet accompaniment, joining American idyll to European horror.

Like many American teenagers of the fifties, Reich grew up listening to music

on recordings. Bach’s Fifth Brandenburg Concerto, Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring,

and bebop records featuring Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, and Kenny Clarke

played nonstop on his turntable. After majoring in philosophy at Cornell, Reich

switched to music and studied composition at Juilliard, where one of his fellow

students was Philip Glass. Feeling the call of West Coast freedom, he moved to

San Francisco and enrolled in the music school at Mills College. Although

Darius Milhaud was then the dominant presence on the Mills faculty, the

principal attraction for a jumpy young composer such as Reich was Luciano

Berio, who was a visiting professor in the early sixties. Impressed by the

intellectual force in the twelve-tone method, Reich spent his days analyzing

Webern scores under Berio’s tutelage. Yet tonal harmonies kept cropping up in

his works, prompting the undogmatic Berio to say to him, “If you want to write

tonal music, why don’t you write tonal music?”

At night Reich haunted the jazz clubs, seeing John Coltrane at least fifty times.

He also wore out 78-rpm recordings of polyrhythmic African drumming and

studied A. M. Jones’s classic treatise on African rhythm, which provided a

blueprint for a music of multiple interlocking patterns. San Francisco prankster

culture beckoned; starting in 1963, Reich was the house composer for various

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mess-with-your-head productions by the San Francisco Mime Troupe, the most

notorious of which was a satire of racial stereotypes titled Minstrel Show. With

two other Berio students, Phil Lesh and Tom Constanten, Reich formed an

improvisation group of uncertain classification. He and Lesh also presented

Event III/Coffee Break, blending live and tape music, street theater by the Mime

Troupe, and a light show (the spirit of ONCE gone west). Having completed his

master’s at Mills, Reich bowed out of academic life and never looked back.

Rather than seek a Guggenheim or an assistant professorship, he drove a taxi

and worked at the post office.

In the fall of 1964, while the Free Speech Movement was flaring up on the

Berkeley campus, Reich was pursuing his own tape-loop experiments. In San

Francisco’s Union Square, he recorded a Pentecostal preacher named Brother

Walter, who was sermonizing on the subject of Noah and the Flood. The tape

included the words: “[God] began to warn the people. He said, #x0027;After a

while, it’s gonna rain, after a while, for forty days and for forty nights.’ And the

people didn’t believe him, and they began to laugh at him, and they began to

mock him, and they began to say, ‘It ain’t gonna rain!’”

At the time, Reich was suffering through a painful divorce, and, along with the

rest of the country, he felt spiritually battered by the Cuban missile crisis of 1962

and the Kennedy assassination of 1963. Brother Walter’s anguished prophecy

of “It’s gonna rain!” articulated his free-floating feelings of panic and fear.

One day in January 1965, Reich was sitting in front of two tape decks with the

words “It’s gonna rain” cued up on each. His intention was to cut quickly from

“It’s gonna” on one machine to “rain” on the other. But he had lined up the tapes

wrong, and when he hit play, they sounded in unison: “It’s gonna rain! It’s gonna

rain! It’s gonna rain!” He was reaching to shut them off when he became aware

of an interesting phenomenon. One tape was playing slightly faster than the

other, so that the unison began to break up into a phasing pattern: “It’s-s gonna-

a rain-n! It’s-’s gonn-nna rai-in! It’s-t’s gonna-onna rai-ain! It’s-it’s gonna-gonna

rain-rain!” Listening on stereo headphones, with one ear tuned to the left

machine and the other to the right, Reich had a physical reaction to the sound.

“It’s an acoustical reality that if you hear one sound a fraction of a second after

another it appears to be directional,” he later said. “The feeling here was that

the sound was going over to my left ear and coming down my left shoulder and

down my leg and out on to the floor.”

The remarkable thing about the tape piece It’s Gonna Rain is not just the

intricacy of the rhythmic patterns but the almost operatic power of the voice

itself. Reich doesn’t reduce Brother Walter’s sermon to a found object in a

collage; instead, he magnifies the emotion inherent in the voice to an almost

unbearable degree. In 1964, that outsider black preacher probably caused

passersby to wince and walk faster. Now his warning will ring out forever, or as

long as recordings last.

By the summer of 1965, psychedelia was in full swing. The surreal provocations

of the Mime Troupe gave way to Acid Tests, radical demonstrations, parties

curated by the Hells Angels. Bill Graham, the business manager of the Mime

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Troupe, saw the commercial possibilities of new bands like Jefferson Airplane,

the Warlocks, and the Mothers of Invention. Later that year he opened the

Fillmore, which became the epicenter of the scene. Phil Lesh, his mind forever

altered by a night during which he had tripped on LSD while listening to

Mahler’s Sixth Symphony at high volume, abandoned composition to play bass

for the Warlocks, who later became the Grateful Dead.

Reich grew uneasy with the scene. Sidestepping a question about drugs, he

told the writer Keith Potter: “In the group of people I seemed to form a contact

with, I did not feel on solid psychic footing.” In September 1965 he returned to

New York, taking with him the sublime accident of It’s Gonna Rain.

For most of 1966 Reich contemplated the mechanics of his phasing procedure.

In one sense, all he’d done was to isolate a technological quirk: the machines

essentially wrote It’s Gonna Rain by themselves, and he was simply smart

enough not to stop them. Many radical American works of the sixties and

seventies were created this way, with the composer setting up a musical

situation and sitting back to observe the outcome; it was an attitude that

originated with Cage, the master of coordinated accidents. The English

composer Michael Nyman, in his book Experimental Music, dubbed minimalism

a subspecies of “process” music, classifying it alongside the chance processes

of Cage, the “people processes” of Frederic Rzewski (players going through

their parts at their own speeds), and the electronic processes of Lucier and

Ashley. But minimalism was a different kind of process from the start.

Composers immediately grasped all kinds of opportunities—temptations, the

pure Cagean might say—to interfere with the playing out of the process, to bend

it toward a more personal mode of expression.

In his next tape piece, Come Out, Reich made use of another angry African-

American voice, that of Daniel Hamm, one of six African-American boys who

were beaten up in a Harlem police precinct house in 1964. “I had to, like, open

the bruise up and let some of the bruise blood come out to show them,” Hamm

said on tape.

Reich isolated the phrase “come out to show them.” Again, the loops go out of

phase, splitting onto four channels and then onto eight. After a while the words

become unintelligible, although the pitches inherent in them—E-flat, C, D, C—

persist. You are essentially listening to an electronic canon for eight seething

voices in the key of C minor. Reich later extended this technique of generating

pitch from speaking voices in Different Trains, and also in the “video operas”

The Cave and Three Tales, cocreated with Beryl Korot.

Reich now had another brainstorm: he decided to transpose the going-out-of-

phase effect to instrumental music. He made an early attempt in the score to

Robert Nelson’s short film Oh Dem Watermelons, part of the Mime Troupe’s

Minstrel Show spectacle of 1965; that work, incidentally, makes ironic use of the

Stephen Foster tune “Massa’s in de Cold Ground,” which figures hauntingly in

the music of Charles Ives. Far more convincing was Piano Phase (1966–67), a

twenty-minute work generated from various permutations of the first six notes of

the A-major scale. As two pianists move in and out of sync with each other, an

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eventful narrative ensues, replete with modulations, transitions, and climaxes.

The opening section uses only the notes E, F-sharp, B, C-sharp, and D, which,

when run together in rapid patterns, suggest the key of B minor. Halfway in, the

note A is added, nudging the harmony toward A major. As in It’s Gonna Rain

and Come Out, a cool process stealthily takes on emotion: when that A enters,

it never fails to have a brightening, energizing, gladdening impact on the mind.

In 1968 Reich spelled out his new aesthetic in a terse essay titled “Music as a

Gradual Process.” “I am interested in perceptible processes,” he wrote. “I want

to be able to hear the process happening throughout the sounding music.”

This philosophy differs starkly from the thinking inherent in Boulez’s total

serialism and Cage’s I Ching pieces, where process works behind the scenes,

like a spy network employing front organizations. Reich’s music transpires in the

open air, every move audible to the naked ear. Recognizable in it are multiple

traces of the creator’s world: modal jazz, psychedelic trance, the lyrical rage of

African-American protest, the sexy bounce of rock ‘n’ roll. But there’s no

pretense of authenticity, no longing for the “real.” Instead, sounds from a variety

of sources are mediated by technology, broken down by repetition, folded into

the composer’s personal voice. As Reich once said, in an ingenious aphorism,

“All music turns out to be ethnic music.” The composer becomes an antenna

receiving signals, a satellite gathering messages from around the globe.

In 1968 and 1969, the culture tilted toward chaos and madness. Violence filled

the news—the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, the

massacre at My Lai in Vietnam, riots on university campuses and in inner cities.

Harry Partch’s onetime lover Ramon Novarro was tortured to death by a hustler

intent on finding money hidden in his home. Richard Maxfield, whose 1960 tape

piece Amazing Grace anticipated minimalism in its use of intersecting loops,

flung himself out of a San Francisco window, his mind undone by drugs. And, in

August 1969, Charles Manson directed his followers to commit grisly murders in

the canyons of Los Angeles, citing the Beatles’ White Album as inspiration.

That same month Reich conceived Four Organs, in its own way a cruel, end-of-

the-world piece. When the electric organs of the title are amplified at full

volume, they become a crushing mass. Yet it seems that a musical center, if not

a social one, can still hold. The piece is rooted in a set of six notes that sound

like a big dominant-eleventh chord on E, one that longs for resolution to the key

of A. As maracas provide a steady pulse in 11/8 meter, the notes of the chord

are prolonged by degrees and the harmony rotates this way and that. After

many changes, it comes to rest on E and A. As Reich commented to Edward

Strickland, the ending of the piece is contained within the opening chord, so that

it is a matter not of traveling from one place to another but of uncovering the

destination inside the point of departure.

In the last years of the twentieth century, minimalism acquired a degree of

popularity with mainstream audiences, saturating American music with its

influence. But in the early years it caused a fair amount of distress. When Four

Organs was played at Carnegie Hall in 1973—at a concert by the Boston

Symphony under the direction of Michael Tilson Thomas—an elderly woman

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went to the front of the hall and repeatedly struck the edge of the stage with her

shoe, demanding that the performance stop. Someone else shouted, “All right,

I’ll confess!”

Since the Schoenberg revolution began, audiences had been pleading for

contemporary composers to return to the plain old major and minor chords. Now

the minimalists were giving them more tonality than they could handle. Reich, a

meticulous man with no urge to provoke, had the honor of setting off the last

great scandal concert of the century.

Having invented a new kind of music, Reich needed to find a new breed of

performers to play it, a new kind of space in which to present it, and, not least, a

new audience to hear it. He elected to form his own ensemble, which came to

be called Steve Reich and Musicians, and put on performances in whatever

venues accommodated him—art galleries, warehouses, rock clubs, even

discos. The group acted more like a jazz combo than a purebred classical

ensemble. Like his hero Coltrane, Reich could rent a space, perform, pack up,

and walk into the night.

The downtown New York arts scene embraced this new sound from the start,

as it had Cage’s and Feldman’s music some years before. In March 1967 Reich

put together a series of concerts at Paula Cooper’s Park Place cooperative on

West Broadway, and in 1969 he performed at the Whitney Museum as part of a

multimedia show called Anti-Illusion. Practitioners of so-called minimal art—in

particular, the conceptual artist Sol LeWitt and the sculptors Richard Serra and

Donald Judd—responded instinctively to what Reich was doing. Perceived

affinities between Reich’s geometric arrays of musical modules, LeWitt’s

geometric arrays of white cubes, and Serra’s geometric arrays of plates and

rods brought the term “minimalism” into musical circulation.

As with most A-B comparisons between music and other arts, the linkage is

partly a matter of intellectual convenience. Minimalist painting and sculpture

remained arts of abstraction. Minimalist music, with its restoration of tonality,

rejected abstraction and often came closer to the spirit of the Pop Art of Robert

Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein, and Andy Warhol. That resemblance was

especially strong in the music of Philip Glass, which gives off a kind of Times

Square neon glow.

Glass attended one of Reich’s Park Place concerts and talked to his old

schoolmate afterward. He, too, had been seeking his “way outside.” He had

absorbed neoclassical technique at Juilliard, taken Darius Milhaud’s summer

class in Aspen in 1960, and studied in Paris with Nadia Boulanger, who had

taught Copland almost forty years earlier.

The European avant-garde did nothing for Glass. He later called it “a wasteland,

dominated by these maniacs, these creeps, who were trying to make everyone

write this crazy creepy music.” Instead, he was drawn to the usual array of non-

Western musics, and in particular to Indian music. After working with the sitarist

Ravi Shankar on a score for a hallucinogenic film titled Chappaqua, he began to

think, as Indian improvisers do, in terms of recurring cycles of tones, of rhythmic

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pulses added and subtracted. His String Quartet of 1966 shows him working

with drastically reduced means, often with motivic strands made up of only two

notes.

Only when Glass encountered Reich’s music, however, did his new style come

into focus. His 1968 piece Two Pages for Steve Reich owes an obvious debt to

Piano Phase: where the latter took off from the first six notes of the A-major

scale, the former is based on rapid rearrangements of the first five notes of the

C-minor scale. But Glass developed his own technique of variation: in place of

patterns shifting in and out of phase, Glass introduced constant rhythmic

change,adding or subtracting notes in the style of Indian music. Segments of a

phrase would also repeat themselves by rising multiples—three times, four

times, five times, six times—before contracting toward a more manageable size.

Like Reich, Glass made his living outside academia, driving taxis and doing odd

jobs. The two minimalists briefly formed a company called Chelsea Light

Moving and eked out a wage carrying furniture up and down the narrow

staircases of New York walk-ups. Glass also worked as a plumber, and one day

installed a dishwasher in the apartment of the art critic Robert Hughes, who

could not understand why SoHo’s composer laureate was crawling around the

floor of his kitchen.

After Glass found fame, his up-by-the-bootstraps image put him in good stead

with a wider public: there was nothing of the snob about him. If Steve Reich and

Musicians had the detached cool of a bebop group, the Philip Glass Ensemble

had the extrovert energy of a rock band. It traveled to art galleries, Upper East

Side apartments, city parks, and nightclubs (the famous Max’s Kansas City,

among others). On the strength of his operas and film scores, Glass eventually

vaulted to a level of popular recognition that no modern composer since

Stravinsky had enjoyed.

But the spirit of camaraderie that infused New York minimalism in the late

sixties did not last. Glass and Reich quarreled over who had done what first and

eventually stopped speaking. Reich took offense at the fact that Glass

shortened the title Two Pages for Steve Reich to Two Pages, as if to deny

Reich’s influence. Glass, for his part, seems to have resented Reich’s lofty

intellectual reputation, the tendency of critics to identify Reich as the serious

one and himself as the more commercial artist.

In the early years Glass was as austere and severe as anyone. His amplified

ensemble of winds and organs focused with almost maddening thoroughness

on the basic mechanism of repetition, addition, and subtraction. Over the course

of 1969, Glass added new components one by one. In Music in Fifths, two lines

move exactly parallel to each other; in Music in Contrary Motion, two lines

unfold as mirror images of each other, the mode indicating a key of A minor. In

Music in Similar Motion, written at the end of 1969, four voices enter in

staggered fashion, the arrival of the bass line four and a half minutes in

triggering the sort of “Ah!” effect on which minimalism thrives. In Music with

Changing Parts, from 1970, Glass and his ensemble stretched out to the

spacey length of an hour, tracing limpid patterns around static harmonies.

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Over the next four years, Glass assembled the monumental cycle Music in

Twelve Parts, which in some performances went on for as long as four hours.

Here he summed up his various methods to date, explored some new rhythmic

and harmonic fields, and, in the final two parts, switched to a music of relatively

quick chord changes. As the critic Tim Page notes, there’s an inside joke in the

final section of Part Twelve: a crazy creepy twelve-tone row snakes through the

bass.

The end point of Glass’s early phase was the theater event Einstein on the

Beach, created in 1975 and 1976 in collaboration with the director Robert

Wilson. It is opera without plot, a conceptual piece held together by recurring

visual motifs and found-object texts. Singers chant numbers and “do re mi”; a

Civil War–era locomotive inches across the stage; a cryptic courtroom scene

features an elderly judge speaking poor French; an Einstein figure saws on a

violin; a dancer soliloquizes about the “prematurely air-conditioned

supermarket”; the lineup of the New York station WABC is recited; three of the

four Beatles are named (no Ringo); a beam of light described as a bed tilts

upward for twenty minutes; and some sort of spaceship arrives at the end.

There are echoes of past musical styles, but from a cosmic distance: quasi-

Bachian organ solos, nondenominational church choirs, Alberti bass

accompaniments swirling around like lost pages of Mozart. Glass and Wilson

discovered that minimal harmonic movement and minimal onstage action can

together suggest a canyon of emotion behind the stage, a zone of nameless

loss.

Four centuries into the history of opera, Einstein engendered a new kind of

theater. It had its premiere in Avignon in the summer of 1976, and in November

of that year it played for two nights at the Metropolitan Opera, which had been

booked for the occasion. The performances were sold out, but the composer

emerged from the experience ninety thousand dollars in debt, and for a while he

went back to driving his cab.

Downtown music had entered a phase that might be called grand minimalism.

Large-scale structures and modulatory schemes ascended toward moments of

transcendence. Perhaps Beethoven wasn’t so wrong after all.

In the summer of 1970 Reich went to Ghana to study with the master drummer

Gideon Alorwoyie, who taught him to play the polyrhythms that he had read

about in the writings of A. M. Jones. He returned to America with an urge to

write a more spread-out kind of music for large ensemble, in which the

participants could add their own energies to the action. The result was

Drumming, a ninety-minute minimalist tour de force. Knowing that the phasing

processes would not sustain a piece of such length, Reich added other devices

to his armory, including a technique of setting up repeating patterns with

alternating beats and rests and then slowly filling in the rests with beats. He also

enriched his palette of timbres, supplementing an array of percussion with

female voices and a piccolo. The drama of Drumming is the transfer of molten

material from one group to another: the pummeling tones of bongo drums give

way to the mesmerizing patter of marimbas, and then to the higher-pitched