This piece is the poster child for minimalist controversy. It consists of four electric organs playing a single, repeating dominant eleventh chord that slowly elongates over 24 minutes, accompanied by a maraca keeping a steady pulse.

During a famous 1973 performance at Carnegie Hall, the audience lost its mind. People began heckling, booing, and screaming for the music to stop. One frustrated woman reportedly ran down the aisle, banged her head against the stage, and yelled, "All right, I’ll confess!"

“Steve Reich once said about popular music that ‘it comes and it goes’, but he fell under its spell at an early age, as did Glass and Adams. Reich’s mother was a singer-songwriter and lyricist who wrote tunes for Broadway shows during the 1930s and 40s. Before entering Cornell University, at only sixteen, to study philosophy, Reich immersed himself in jazz, heading down to Manhattan from the leafy suburbia of Larchmont, New York, during the early 1950s to hear Miles Davis, Bud Powell and Kenny Clarke. Bebop drummer Clarke was especially influential, and for a few years Reich harboured aspirations of becoming a jazz drummer himself. The notion of a propulsive groove serving as a musical work’s rhythmic backbone has formed an integral part of Reich’s musical language ever since.”

“Reich’s music also reflects an ‘America of the self’ and ties in with the composer’s quest during the late 1970s and 80s to look inwards in order to rediscover his own religious roots and identity. It resulted in a series of notable works, such as the rich, vibrant psalm settings of Tehillim (1982), and later on, the multi-layered multimedia opera The Cave (1993). In reality, The Cave is no more ‘religious’ than Adams’s Nixon in China is ‘political’, although both are informed respectively by religious and political themes.”