Schoenberg invented the twelve-tone row; Webern found a secret stillness in its patterns; Cage and Feldman abandoned the row and accentuated the stillness; Young slowed down the row and rendered it hypnotic; Riley pulled the long tones toward tonality; Reich systematized the process and gave it depth of field; Glass gave it motorized momentum. The chain didn’t stop there. Starting in the late sixties, a small legion of popular artists, headed by the Velvet Underground, carried the minimalist idea toward the mainstream.
