Anne Midgette has a piece in the Washington Post about an upcoming debut at the Kennedy Center:
The Kennedy Center will see a long-overdue debut Friday when the composer Philip Glass, 81, will perform there for the first time, playing his piano etudes with four other pianists as part of the Direct Current festival. On March 16, the festival will present another Glass work: the score to Godfrey Reggio’s 1982 film “Koyaanisqatsi,” with the Philip Glass Ensemble and the Washington Chorus.
Not this Friday, sorry, the article is a few days old. You have to really admire Philip Glass for his stamina, productivity and agelessness. No child prodigy, he! Indeed, he had to support himself working at various jobs including driving a cab and doing plumbing and furniture moving well into his forties. Since then he has managed to live off commissions and performances. As he said recently, if you live long enough, you can actually make a living at this! I recommend his memoir, Words Without Music, a pretty good read, even if one longs for an unauthorized biography.
It seems that most of the composers who really managed a prolific production of music throughout their lives were ones who discovered a niche and then explored it over and over again, always discovering new glints of creativity. A couple of examples would be Dominico Scarlatti with his 555 keyboard sonatas and Joseph Haydn with his 106 symphonies. Philip Glass has a harmonic and rhythmic spectrum that, while certainly limited, has served him very well for decade after decade.
Indy Week has an article on Philip Glass, who just celebrated his 80th birthday. As he said in another publication recently, if you live long enough, you can actually make a living at this!
Philip Glass
Here is an excerpt from the Indy Week piece:
In October 1982, composer Philip Glass appeared in an ad for Cutty Sark scotch. Floating above an illustration of Glass with his trademark messy flop of hair, his left hand clutching a brace of musical notes, the tagline reads, "Here's to those who can make history out of the same 12 notes." Alongside is a biography that details his rise from a life of odd jobs to his success as a composer with "an audience so large and so diverse it even includes rock fans."
The sight of a composer in an ad for a product unrelated to music is certainly unusual, but then, Glass is an unusual figure. As the Cutty Sark biography says, his music has garnered a following far beyond classical music—though it's telling that having rock fans is the ultimate sign of credibility here. He is one of the few composers who are household names in the twenty-first century, and his brand of pulsating minimalism is heard the world over.
Philip Glass and Steve Reich are the two larger-than-life role models for composers these days, in America at least, as they have both done the seemingly impossible: achieved wide recognition in the public eye at the same time as they created a large repertoire of music in the classical tradition. They pandered to neither audiences nor the avant-garde and achieved genuine musical success.
But while they may seem superficially similar, they approached their careers in very different ways. For one thing, Glass has always seemed more media savvy than Reich. You won't find a photographic portrait of him nearly as finely-executed as a number of ones of Philip Glass:
Steve Reich
Philip Glass is more a downtown composer and Steve Reich an uptown one and by that I just mean that the former has moved more in the Greenwich Village arts circles and the latter more in the intellectual academic circles. Philip Glass had the more traditional academic training, oddly, at the Peabody Institute, Julliard and with Nadia Boulanger in Paris--exactly where any aspiring mainstream composer would have gone. Steve Reich, on the other hand, was a drum student in his youth, but was a philosophy student at Cornell (though he later studied composition at Mills College in California with Luciano Berio and others). This, combined with later studies of African drumming in Ghana and Balinese gamelan in California makes for a more unusual foundation.
Philip Glass has always been involved in theater, opera and other multi-media projects. He also wrote a fine memoir. Steve Reich is an intensely focused worker both in terms of how he structures his music, but also in his overall approach. He composes far more exclusively instrumental pieces than ones with voice and has done very, very little theater or opera composing. He has written almost nothing for orchestra, focusing instead on small and medium sized ensembles. Philip Glass, on the other hand, has written several concertos and is about to premiere his Symphony No. 11
In the early days, there were similarities between their styles, but they have grown further and further apart. Here is an early piece by Philip Glass, Music in 12 Parts:
And one by Steve Reich, Eight Lines:
But this is the sort of texture that Glass' music has evolved to, his Symphony No. 10:
And here is a recent one by Reich, his WTC 9/11 (the first piece in the clip):
I'm sure that people will be writing about and discussing the differences and similarities between Philip Glass and Steve Reich for decades, I just wanted to get a head start. It is interesting how, in music history, we have so often had pairs of composers, both working in similar styles at the same time, but who achieved rather different results: Léonin and Pérotin, Bach and Handel, Couperin and Rameau, Haydn and Mozart and now Glass and Reich.
I recently finished reading Philip Glass' memoir titled Words Without Music and want to add a bit to my previous posts on it. One was "Words About Words." I strongly recommend reading the book, by the way. It is one of the most fascinating composer memoirs I have ever read.
There is a passage in the last chapter that I want to quote:
In my first year at the University of Chicago, the question I asked myself was, "Where does music come from?" The attempt to answer that question led to the composition of my first piece of music.
More than a dozen years later, still pondering the same question, I asked Ravi Shankar where music comes from. His reply was to bow toward a photo of his guru and say, "Through his grace, the power of his music has come through him into me."
Over time, for me, the question has evolved into another question: "What is music?"
For a while, the answer I found was that music is a place.
He goes on to say that he means this poetically: you can take a plane to Chicago either in reality or in your imagination and you can go to the place "music" in your imagination. I think I have talked about this in several places. Just before a performer begins a piece on stage, he goes to that place called "music". I often think of it as a place in the mind, but it seems to be a particular place in the brain as well. There was the case of the German cellist who had a terrible infection in his brain that wiped out much of his memory: he could no longer recall his friends or relatives or place names. But he could still read music and play the cello, indicating that these functions were in a different part of the brain. Glass talks about this quite differently, but I think that the basic idea is similar.
Music is like its own universe, close to but different from the ordinary world. If you have the aptitude and the discipline and the devotion, you can inhabit this universe, at least partly. I also sometimes think of music as being like a bridge between people. I will never forget a summer spent touring Europe with a flute player. We spent months in France, Germany and Italy and never visited a single art gallery or museum, but we met thousands of people (including my future wife). A musician is a kind of ambassador from another universe. Since it can be quite a magical universe, music can bring you many friends.
So let me thank all the wonderful friends I have met through this blog, itself a kind of bridge.
“Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying.”
--George Orwell
This is another post on Philip Glass' memoir, Words Without Music that I previous wrote about here.
I just briefly browsed a few reviews of the book and one interesting thing is how uncritical they are. This is a widespread phenomenon that is probably not as remarked as it might be. Genuinely critical reviews--of anything--are anathema these days. Too "negative" or something. If we look back several decades, we find quite a lot of criticism in reviews, some of it very funny. I am thinking of a review of a play where, I believe it was Audrey Hepburn, was described as covering the whole emotional gamut from A to B. But in the writings of Alex Ross, to name a prominent music critic, there really is no criticism. This is also true of Philip Glass in his book. He is pretty careful to depict himself as getting along with pretty well everyone, even film producers. In looking over reviews of Words Without Music the only criticism I found was in this one in the Boston Globe:
The infidelity that ended Glass’s marriage to Akalaitis flits past in a single line, for example. Prominent recording contracts, without which Glass’s music might not have spread as far and as fast as it did, go unexamined. And while third wife, Candy Jernigan, is the subject of a late chapter and some of Glass’s most touching reminiscences, his second wife, Luba Burtyk, and fourth, Holly Critchlow — mother to the boys I’d watched in 2007, cited in the book’s dedication alongside Glass’s older children by Akalaitis — go unacknowledged.
Philip Glass tends to downplay or simply omit details. On some occasions, where you might have expected a bit more detail, such as when he describes a rehearsal that was going very badly, it is simply missing. In the case of the rehearsal, he proposes to the group of forty or so string players that were working on the piece, that everyone who wished could simply go home. Some fifteen players did leave and, as he says, the piece then started to sound pretty good. This is probably one instance out of many in which the more traditional classical musicians have resisted playing Philip Glass' music. Even compared to the string parts in Bruckner and Schubert, it can be extremely repetitive.
Another odd moment is after the death of his third wife, Candy Jernigan, who gets a whole chapter. She passed away at age thirty-nine of liver cancer and afterwards Glass took some time off to mourn. He was staying with his Tibetan teacher Tomo Geshe Rimpoche in the Catskills:
One afternoon, Geshe Rimpoche caught up with me walking around the lake. He patted me hard on the back and with a quiet smile said, "That was a big lesson on impermanence." I smiled slightly and nodded.
And that is how the chapter ends. I don't know about you, but that strikes me as ghoulish. In fact, Glass' account of his spiritual explorations all seems vapid and puzzling. He talks about it in very standard terms, transcendence, meditation, vegetarianism, but it lacks the individuality and convincing detail of his discussion of music.
But the fact that this memoir is selective and excludes warts merely makes it like most autobiographies. To be trusted for some things and not for others. Composers, and Stravinsky comes immediately to mind, have a track record of rewriting history.
Very much to the credit of the book is its considerable detail about the author's long and exhaustive preparation and education as a composer. Anyone reading it will come away with no illusions about the hard work necessary. This is one of the most interesting revelations in the book: Philip Glass, he who is renowned for the extreme repetitive simplicity of his early music and for his turning away from the mainstream trends and traditions of classical music, had as lengthy and conventional a training as any composer working today.
He began as a child studying flute at the Peabody Conservatory and entered the University of Chicago as an undergraduate at age fifteen, studying mathematics and philosophy. After a year as a student in the extension division at Juilliard, he qualified to enter as a composition student. He also studied with Darius Milhaud at a summer course. He was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to study in Paris with the renowned Nadia Boulanger who, after reviewing some of his work, promptly put him on a rigorous study of species counterpoint! If this is unfamiliar, it is the traditional way of studying counterpoint and begins with writing lines to go with plainsong melodies. First one note against one, then two, three and so on. The rules are very strict! Composers have used this method of studying counterpoint for centuries.
The point is that Philip Glass had the kind of grounding in traditional composition that few composers have gotten since the Second World War. He bypassed or rejected almost the whole of high modernism and did so pretty early on.
Here is his String Quartet No. 5, from 1991, the performers are the Kronos Quartet:
Yes, blogging has been very light of late. I was off to Virginia for the holidays, but now I am back: revived, recalibrated and resonant.
I have been reading a fairly new book recently and it deserves a review in some depth. The book is Philip Glass' autobiography Words Without Music and it is well worth your time. It recounts his whole life from childhood and is surprisingly interesting and well-written. Some of the most fascinating material deals with just how he built up a constituency by moving within the New York avant-garde art and theater circles whom he slowly won over to his music. The blurbs on the back contain positive comments from Martin Scorsese, Laurie Anderson, Paul Simon and Peter Gelb, general manager of the Metropolitan Opera in New York, but none from any of the big name classical composers or performers. My composition teacher in Montreal has been known to comment that he is not sure if Philip Glass is a classical composer or not.
Whether it is "classical" or not, it is fairly certainly "concert" or "art" music as, alongside his extensive music for theater and opera, are his numerous outings for orchestra in the form of symphonies and concertos. But his music, like that of Steve Reich, has a unique sensibility that tends to rub traditional classical musicians the wrong way. I have been a fan of Steve Reich since the middle 70s, but less so of Philip Glass. But I see from reading the book that I may have simply not given his music enough of a listen.
Philip Glass has the kind of determination and commitment that one rarely encounters. For example, at one point in his life he decided that he needed to formalize, to discipline, his compositional activities. To this end he confined himself for three hours every day, from 10 am to 1 pm, to his studio where, if nothing came to him, he would simply sit at the piano for the three hours. Finally, out of a kind of insane boredom, it started to work for him. I completely understand this.
The book is full of interesting insights like this. There is also a lot about his devotion to yoga and spirituality generally that I find less interesting, but that may be just me. He talks a lot about transcendence as the point and destination of his music and I understand that as well. Tomorrow I am going to get started on a series of posts talking about the book in some detail, but this is just an introduction.
For those who are new to Philip Glass, he is a composer of what was often called "minimalist" music, though it is a lot less "minimal" than it used to be. He was born in Baltimore in 1937, but has lived most of his life in New York. From his early public concerts (one of the first was attended by a mere six people, including his mother) to his major US breakthrough, the performance at the Met of Einstein on the Beach in late 1976, took surprisingly little time. One of the most fascinating aspects of the book is his detailed narrative of exactly how he lived, with no "arts grants", developing his musical style and doing various day jobs to support it: plumber, furniture mover, taxi-driver and so on.
For today, let's just listen to a selection of his music. First, an early piece called Two Pages (from his discovery of a way of notating it that made it possible to fit onto two pages of score). This was written in 1967 or 68.
Once you get past the initial "is he trying to drive me mad" stage you start to notice the groupings and additive structure. Some of the idea for this kind of music came from working with Ravi Shankar. He was given the task of writing out accompaniments for musicians to play with Shankar and was struggling with how to write down what was essentially improvised music. Shankar was telling him he had the rhythms all wrong so he erased all the barlines and noticed how that would work better! Glass remarks in a few places how it all comes back to 2 and 3 note groups.
A much more developed piece is Music in Twelve Parts, written between 1971 and 1974, this is the slow, stately Part 1:
And this is the more active Part 2:
I purchased, way back in the 70s, an LP of some of his very early music that I recall was played on piano. Later on, in the 1980s, he released the very charming album of piano and other music called Glassworks which I also owned:
If you have never heard his music before, then I hope that this intrigues you a bit, at least.
The very prolific Philip Glass (apart from all his opera, theater and film music, he has also written ten symphonies and a lot of chamber music) has just published a memoir titled "Words Without Music." This isn't a review as I haven't read it--I have a stack of books I must finish about 2 1/2 feet high. But I did just read a review of it in Slate that was interesting:
The most important thing to understand for a listener new to “modern” art music—the thing I’m always trying to impress upon those patient souls who let me drag them to such concerts—is the need to shift their paradigm of judgment from beautiful/ugly to interesting/boring. To approach much of art music after, say, WWI with beauty as one’s primary criteria for liking something is to misunderstand the motivations of many of the most prominent composers working over the past century. For many 20th- and 21st-century composers, the working out of compositional processes—dodecaphonic series, mathematical formulae, grand minimalist arcs, etc.—is an end in itself, and composition is a quest for ingenuity and freshness of construction, rather than attractiveness to the ear. This is why listening to the music of our era requires a certain amount of work. To appraise it fairly, you’ve got to try to understand what formal element or problem the composer was trying to address—only then can you reasonably decide whether or not she succeeded, whether or not the work is compelling.
That's the introduction and it proposes an interesting aesthetic theory. Yes, if you want to appreciate contemporary music, you need to approach it with some variant of the above method. You have to accept the methodology, reasoning and ideology of the composer as a given. In other words, you mustn't question it. Isn't that interesting?
Now the average listener's "paradigm of judgement" is probably rather narrower than it should be. Most people's aesthetic judgements are probably based on not much more than what they are familiar with. I have heard many assert that our basic music tastes are a reflection of what we heard when we were seventeen. On that criterion, the pinnacle of music for me, personally, would be Eric Burden and the Animals:
I used to love that song. However, thankfully, I soon discovered the Beatles, Bob Dylan and Bach.
But given that most of us need to widen our aesthetic paradigms and learn to appreciate more challenging music, does that necessarily imply that we need to accept without question whatever "motivations" are behind contemporary music? Surely these motivations span a spectrum and therefore can also be judged? If a composer sets out to completely remove himself from the creative process and thereby comes up with a piece through entirely random processes (if that is even possible) then we should just understand that motivation and cheerily applaud? Are all "formal elements" or "problems" of composition equally worthy of our appreciation? If that is the case, then my job as a composer suddenly got really, really easy, didn't it? I can just pick a formal element or problem and "address" it in any way whatsoever and your job as listener is to appreciate that that is what I did and, again, applaud cheerily.
That paragraph from Slate, that seemed so reasonable a moment ago, doesn't make quite as much sense now, does it? In point of fact, the practice of philosophical aesthetics has been in such bad odor for the last century very largely because most contemporary artists have been saying it is irrelevant, pointless and obsolescent. They say this for very practical reasons: they don't want to be judged, not just by traditional standards, but by any standards. They just want you to applaud cheerily.
J. Bryan Lowder, the author of the piece in Slate, says that you need to shift your paradigm from "beautiful/ugly" to "interesting/boring" which would certainly lead to the acceptance of more contemporary music. But it still proposes aesthetic standards. What if you listen to several contemporary pieces and find their relentless dissonance not only ugly, but also boring? Because all dissonance, all the time is, frankly, not very interesting. Ironically, this is in the lead-up to a review of a book by Philip Glass, who is renowned for writing music that consists largely of relentless repetition!
But perhaps what you find interesting is not so much the music as the process, the justification, the ideology? For me that is usually the case with John Cage. His books have claimed more of my attention than his music.
If we are called to apprise contemporary music fairly, as Lowder asks us to (and as is our responsibility) then yes, we do have to come to know and understand the motivations and working out of compositional processes and problems. But that is just step one. After that, then we still have to make aesthetic judgments because, though you would hardly know it from a lot of writing on contemporary music, there is just as much bad, boring, ugly, uninteresting contemporary music as there is music from any other era. And possibly just a bit more.
I just finished listening to four symphonies (nos. 2, 3, 8 and 9) by Philip Glass. The surprising thing to me about this is that he is writing symphonies at all, let alone nine of them. The first time I heard Philip Glass' music was on an LP I bought in the late 1970s from some composers' label and it consisted of strangely additive pieces for solo piano. Much later I owned "Glassworks" which is also for solo piano.
I quite liked that and still do. I was aware of his larger works like Music in 12 Parts:
Which is roughly in the same style as the music from the same time of Steve Reich:
But for quite some time now, Philip Glass has been writing music that is at least partly indebted to the older instrumental forms like the symphony and concerto. He has an interesting way of thinking about them. Having worked a great deal in the realm of theater he thinks of certain kinds of music as having what he calls a "narrative base". In other words there is either some text that offers narrative clues or, in the case of a concerto, the solo instrument is itself a kind of narrator. But the pure symphonic form, what he calls "numbered symphonies" has no narrative base other than "the language of music and the lineage of symphonic writing". [from the liner notes to the recording of the Symphony No. 9 conducted by Dennis Russell Davies.]
It is interesting to me that at this point in his life Philip Glass is so interested in the "lineage of symphonic writing". He relates that he and other students used to spend a lot of time listening to Mahler and Bruckner symphonies when they were undergraduates at the University of Chicago. Steve Reich, on the other hand, seems to have had no interest at any time in this kind of music.
There is certainly a rich lineage of symphonic writing and particularly when it comes to a symphony labeled with the number "9" as this resonates with the last completed symphonies of Beethoven, Bruckner and Mahler. Glass says that he actually had the Mahler 9 more on his mind than the Beethoven 9.
Here is the first movement of the Symphony No. 9 by Philip Glass.
Any symphony with no text and no external references he calls a "numbered symphony" and the lineage is that of the great symphonic writing extending from Haydn right up to the present day, with these symphonies of Philip Glass.
The other category, that of what he calls "narrative" symphonies, would include several other symphonies by Glass, such as his Symphony No. 6 "Plutonian Ode" with text by Allen Ginsberg. Examples by other composer would include the Symphony No. 9 by Beethoven with text by Schiller, but also the Symphony No. 6 by Beethoven, the "Pastoral" because of its programmatic aspect given by the composer. Another like this would be the Symphonie fantastique by Berlioz with its program. I would put "La Mer" by Debussy in this category because of its obvious symphonic nature. There are a host of tone poems that you might argue fall in this category, but it would probably be better to allow them their own category to avoid confusion.
Just for fun, let's have a listen to an older member of this lineage and one with the label "9": the Symphony No. 9 by Joseph Haydn, from very early in his output:
I'm not sure when it started exactly, but the "flash crowd" phenomenon keeps showing up in different forms. I think the first one I saw was a Canadian choir invading a shopping mall in Ontario somewhere and doing the Hallelujah chorus from Handel's Messiah. That really worked for some reason. But now it is starting to get a bit old hat. The latest one is a "flash choir" premiere of a new work by Philip Glass in Times Square.
Due to the ponderous production, the choir doesn't so much 'flash' into existence as slowly meander. Sometimes I wonder about Philip Glass. I don't think I have ever heard a single piece that really captivated me, but here he is, universally renowned. How did that happen? The one thoughtful discussion of his music I have seen published was far from praising. I put up a post about Philip Glass back in February that tries to get some perspective on him. Now, listening to this piece, I'm even less fond of his music. Dull, repetitive music that goes nowhere? Is that worth commissioning and performing? Just for comparison, let me dig out that clip of the Canadian choir doing Handel:
It is fascinating to me to test a critical opinion for accuracy. But for that, it is necessary for someone to actually express a critical opinion. By "critical opinion" I mean an evaluation of a piece of music that is genuine, that takes a stab a characterizing the music and discovering good and bad aspects. The vast majority of published talk about music seems to be what I would call "puff pieces"; pieces written to praise and publicize. One can learn little from them. But an evaluation that is earned, that is, where the writer tries to lay out why he or she has come to such and such a conclusion--now that is worth while.
I ran across a well-written piece on Philip Glass today in New York Magazine. Go have a read; it's worth it. Here are some excerpts:
I felt that I could have walked away in the middle of an arpeggio, had a four-course dinner, and returned to find those soothing chords still burbling away ... To criticize Glass for excessive reiteration is a little like complaining that the rain is too damp. He repeats therefore he is. But even as he abandoned the rigors of early Minimalism, he continued to wear out the products of his own invention.
Yep. I've known Philip Glass' music since the early 1970s when he was composing stuff like this:
Through the 1980s when he sounded like this:
Later in the 80s he turned to more historic forms like the violin concerto:
And even more recently he has taken up the symphony. The Symphony no 8 dates from 2006:
Now I have always thought that Glass was a bit of a lightweight. It was Steve Reich that was the original 'minimalist' and I've often wondered if early on Glass weren't just following in his footsteps. They have both wandered back from the austerity of the 70s, but while Reich still sounds just like Reich and each piece seems to carve out new ground, Glass sounds more and more like somebody else. The early stuff sounds like Reich simplified. The piano music Glassworks is a lovely frozen moment. With the violin concerto he starts sounding like Vivaldi if Vivaldi were kind of stoned and asked to score a movie. The Symphony No 8 sounds even more like movie music and, with the percussion, startlingly like that Rameau overture I put up yesterday.
I am reminded of the series Lost. It was very exciting at first because with all the cliffhangers you had the sense that something important was about to happen or be revealed. That is how Glass' music feels to me. The problem is that in both the TV show and the music, the "something important" never arrives--just more cliffhangers.
So I find Justin Davidson's view of Philip Glass to be pretty accurate--soft-pedaled if anything. He ends up by praising the recent music for cello Songs and Poems for Solo Cello. Let's have a listen:
I find myself hoping that he will take us somewhere after that powerful and dramatic opening. But no. We remain trapped in those few notes...
Philip Glass is a very famous, very popular, very prolific composer these days. I just wish the music were better. Perhaps we in the 21st century are just shallow, foolish people and this is the music we deserve. But if only he had been able to write for solo cello something like this (and you know what I am going to post!!):
The two big names in so-called minimal or process music (even though Philip Glass now calls himself a classicist) are Philip Glass and Steve Reich. Can we compare them? Should we compare them? How could we not compare them?
Here is the first piece on YouTube by Philip Glass:
And here is a piece by Steve Reich that is as similar as I could find:
Very different, of course, but the point is to observe the differences. What about string quartets? Here is one by Philip Glass (I recommend not watching the distracting video):
Now that's interesting. It sounds a bit like Glassworks in the two against three rhythmic patterns, but here and there is a sequence that almost reminds you of Vivaldi. Now for some Steve Reich. Unfortunately we don't have a simple string quartet by him, so I've chosen the first movement of his Triple Quartet for string quartet and two pre-recorded quartets:
That is certainly more complex than the piece by Glass. It ends abruptly because it goes without pause into the second movement. How about a large ensemble? Here is the first movement of Glass' Cello Concerto:
Steve Reich does not write for conventional orchestra, but here is a piece for largish ensemble:
So what do you think? My impression, without having studied the scores to any of these pieces, is that harmonically and rhythmically Philip Glass is consistently more tied to the past, especially when he takes on larger forms. The two against three of Glassworks for solo piano, the first excerpt, is something we find in a lot of previous composers, along with the fragmentary voice-leading. Steve Reich has an approach that is less easy to find precedents for. His idea of form is additive. His harmonies tend to unfold whereas, in shorter pieces, Glass' are static. In the string quartets there seem to be more interesting, and more difficult to understand, harmonies in the Reich piece. In both the string quartet and the cello concerto, Glass tends to revert back to harmonies and textures that we might find in Vivaldi or a host of orchestral pieces. But in the pieces by Reich, it is hard to hear previous music--at least from the Western world. Additive techniques and layered textures such as in the Music for 18 Musicians remind you more of gamelan than anything else.
The conclusion? We probably have to wait at least fifty to a hundred years, but my intuition is that while both are writing some fascinating and beautiful pieces, there seems to be more substance in Steve Reich. Just a preliminary feeling...
