Maybe this New York–born composer would have found his way even if he had never left the East Coast, but his move westward brought him into contact with alternative American traditions that had been developing in relative isolation since the second decade of the century, with sporadic infusions from the European émigrés who had come to Los Angeles in the thirties and forties. In fact, the circuitous chain of events that led to minimalism began with a kind of California mutation of the Second Viennese School.
