In 1968, Steve Reich defined his musical aesthetic in a dogmatic, tersely worded essay entitled Music as a Gradual Process.' Reich viewed the act of composition as consisting of the gradual unfolding of a predetermined technique or structure. Musical processes are hardly unique to Reich; from the isorhythmic motets of Machaut and the canons of the Goldberg Variations to the row-rotations of the serialists, they have a long history. Yet in the context of the music of the 1960swhich ranged from the inaudible structure of serialism to the chaos of the aleatory-the clarity of Reich's processes was genuinely shocking:
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Kathryn Schwarz (1990) studied this question.
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