In my mind’s eye, I can see the composer on stage, participating in a performance of his Clapping Music (1972). The piece is performed by two, facing each other, clapping increasingly intricate rhythmic patterns which appear to require the highest degree of concentration. What could be more basic to music than two people clapping? And yet it is immensely thrilling, you respond to it with your body as well as with your mind and the tension in you leaves you perhaps nearly as exhausted as the two performers must be feeling, even though the exercise only lasts for five minutes at the most.

At the other extreme, there is Tehillim (1981) for voices and ensemble. I have not heard it for decades but its majesty still haunts me. It is a setting in Hebrew of Psalms 19, 34, 18, and 150; whether or not it is an expression of Reich’s faith is immaterial. If it is true that “beauty is in the eyes of the beholder,” I suppose you can also claim that the “message” of music is in the mind of the listener.

I.

I have had no experience that is the same as Lutosławski’s, but I have had a number of experiences with music that may be somewhat similar.

1. A. When I was fourteen years old, I heard a recording of Le Sacre du Printemps for the first time. I had never heard anything like it. (In fact, at that time I had not heard any Stravinsky, Bartók, Schoenberg, Berg, or Webern.) It made an enormous impression on me and I believe that the seeds of my desire to become a composer were planted at that moment.

2. B. In the same year—when I was fourteen—I also heard my first jazz recording. It was by Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Kenny Clarke, and others. It also made a huge impression on me and I decided to begin studying snare drum with Roland Kohloff (formerly timpanist with the New York Philharmonic) that same year. I would say that my drumming studies and the rhythmic impulse in me that was touched by Stravinsky, jazz and, later that same year, by my first hearing of the Brandenburg Concerto No. 5 formed the basic musical energy in me which is still at work in my own compositions.