The American composers la Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich and Philip Glass are widely regarded as pioneers of the aesthetic and the techniques of minimalism in musical composition during the 1960s and early 1970s. This book offers the most detailed account so far of their early works, putting extensive discussion of the music into a biographical perspective. The true musical minimalism of these years is placed in the wider context of their music as a whole, and considered within the cultural conditions of the period which saw not only the rise of minimalism in the fine arts but also crucial changes in the theory and practice of musical composition in the Western cultivated tradition.