Minimal music in the United States has now been with us for fifty years, and it's safe to say that the style has given concert music a new lease on life. Some critics have hailed it as a music that can speak to large audiences because of its imaginative play with convention.Footnote ¹ Others have argued that minimalist composers have succeeded only in creating a pop music for musically illiterate, upper-class intellectuals, or that the music acts as a reflection of a society largely anesthetized through Fordism and pervasive consumption.Footnote ² Whatever its critical legacy, U.S. minimal music has proved remarkably adaptable to a number of varying cultural milieus, as these two films demonstrate.

Terry Riley's In C (1964) deftly evokes the countercultural, hallucinogen-fueled atmosphere of San Francisco, when musical experimentation of every stripe ruled the day. Yet the composition's fifty-three patterns, and the deceptively simple instructions for the performers, contain unexpected depth and nuance. Riley allows the performers to realize the patterns in a variety of ways: the individual iterations can be layered at any rhythmic distance that the performers can reasonably manage, can be played in augmentation, and so on. In addition, of course, the piece can be played by any combination of instruments, resulting in many different, musically compelling performances over the years.Footnote ³

Performing on laptops, the Salt Lake Electric Ensemble (SLEE) aims to update the work and make it connect to a generation brought up on the sounds and expression of vernacular electronic music. (Laptops aren't the only instruments heard; some acoustic instruments, principally percussion and piano, were overdubbed afterward.) The laptops produce a variety of timbres (some adding noticeable dissonance), many fascinating overlappings, and all sorts of compelling rhythmic patterns—much of which occur as the laptop players perform in real time. The ensemble takes a slower tempo than is customary, nudging the piece in the direction of ambient or hip-hop music; selected percussion entrances make these connections clear without becoming overwhelming or gratuitous.

The imagery for the video consists entirely of interlocking, computer-generated geometric shapes that constantly change in size and gradually give way to other interlocking shapes. Each group of shapes is generally uniform in color, and there seems to be some attention paid to the relationship among the shapes, their colors, and particular moments in the musical performance. However, I found myself missing the sight of the performers at their instruments. (The cover art includes a still photograph from what probably was a concert performance, and in the background one can see similar images to the ones in the video.) In C is one of the most potent examples of what I would term samgha, the Buddhist term for community; showing the musicians who bring this wonderful piece to life would augment that impression.

Reich, now in his 70s and a recent winner of the Pulitzer Prize, enjoys wide acclaim rivaled by very few concert composers. The bulk of Steve Reich: Phase to Face is spent on Reich's own chronological narration of his life and work, usually medium close-up shots of Reich talking by himself in response to unheard questions. For those familiar with the composer, the tale is, for the most part, a very familiar one: the epiphanic discovery of The Rite of Spring, Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. 5, and bebop at the age of fourteen; the recollection of Luciano Berio's remark, “If you want to write tonal music, why don't you write tonal music?”; the repudiation of the idea that Drumming was written because Reich visited Africa (he had always been a percussionist). Occasionally, more interesting remarks appear: for instance, following a rehearsal of 2×5, Reich observes that a new generation of professional musicians from conservatories or music schools can play in any style required, including rock and jazz. Elsewhere he credits the importance of John Coltrane's album Africa/Brass to his development as a composer, and indeed of Coltrane's immense importance to all composers of his generation.

The interview is supplemented by rehearsals and performances of various works (from concerts in Le Havre, Tokyo, and Manchester) including It's Gonna Rain (1965), Clapping Music (1972), Tehillim (1981), Different Trains (1988), The Cave (1990–93), and 2×5 (2008). Occasionally the music serves an accompanimental role—for instance, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker's fabulous choreography for Reich's Piano Phase (1967). More often than not, unfortunately, the directors impose rather unimaginative visual images that are meant to evoke the textures of Reich's music: for example, crowds crossing the street to Music for 18 Musicians (1974–76).

Much more successful are clips from The Cave, which include visual elements produced by the artist Beryl Korot (Reich's wife). Korot creates a powerful counterpart to the compelling music and demonstrates exactly how central the visual component is to understanding the work as a novel form of music theater.

As an introduction to Reich's life and music, Phase to Face functions satisfactorily, but because the narrative comes only from the composer, a simplistic and occasionally self-aggrandizing report of his achievement cannot help but emerge. One example occurs in Reich's discussion of Different Trains; in this work, he employs digital samples of interviews taken from Holocaust survivors as part of the musical content, observing that the “documentary reality and the musical reality are one and the same thing.” However, as Amy Wlodarski has argued in a fine study of the work, Reich's methods mediate and in some cases distort the original content of the interviews, prompting a re-evaluation of its moral and political implications.Footnote ⁴

Taken together, the two DVDs illustrate how minimalism continues to develop as a musical style. SLEE's performance of In C allows the work to retain a bit of its legendary fringe status even as it updates its sensibility for a new, younger audience. Phase to Face demonstrates how widespread minimalism's presence has become in the mainstream of concert music. The videos, then, can facilitate discussion on important aspects of the reception of minimalism. For instance, one can argue that the image of Reich's minimalism functions as the salvation of the concert music tradition or claim instead that it has become simply another new-music party line that has silenced much variety in contemporary music and, in that sense, actually limited the concert music tradition. More hopefully, one can argue that SLEE's emphasis of minimalism's underground roots—which for the ensemble embrace both hip hop and the dissonance of noise for its own sake—points toward the growth of a more pluralistic and vital new music tradition.