Best Ever
Classical Album?

The first pulse of Music for 18 Musicians arrives like a heartbeat you didn’t know you were missing. A single chord, struck and sustained, the musicians breathing together, and then the patterns begin — interlocking, shifting, building something that feels less composed than discovered. Steve Reich didn’t write this music. He excavated it.

Minimalism is a terrible name for what Reich does. It suggests reduction, austerity, less. But Music for 18 Musicians is maximal in every way that matters — dense with information, rich with harmonic movement, overwhelming in its cumulative effect. The piece runs nearly an hour, and by the end you’ve traveled somewhere, even though the journey happened so gradually you couldn’t point to any single moment of departure.

The structure is deceptively simple. Eleven chords form a cycle, each chord generating a section of music, each section exploring the chord’s possibilities before moving to the next. The players — pianos, marimbas, xylophones, voices, violin, cello, clarinets, bass clarinet — weave patterns that phase in and out of alignment, creating interference patterns that shimmer and pulse. No conductor. The ensemble breathes together, literally: the duration of certain patterns is determined by how long a singer can hold a note on one breath.

The effect is hypnotic without being soporific. Your attention doesn’t drift; it expands. You start hearing details you missed — the way the bass clarinet anchors a section, the way the voices blend into the mallets until you can’t separate them, the way a single note added or subtracted changes everything. Reich has said he wanted to create music you could pay close attention to or let wash over you, and Music for 18 Musicians delivers on both promises simultaneously.

The 1978 ECM recording remains the benchmark. Reich’s own ensemble, captured with a clarity that lets every strand of the texture breathe. The pressing plant struggled with the dynamic range — the piece moves from near-silence to massed sound without warning — but the performance is definitive. Later recordings have different virtues, but this is the one that changed how people thought about what music could do.

The influence is everywhere once you know where to look. Ambient music, electronic dance music, post-rock, the Radiohead albums from Kid A onward — all of them owe something to Reich’s discovery that repetition isn’t stasis, that patterns can move while standing still. Brian Eno heard this piece and started making records. Aphex Twin heard this piece and started making beats. The line runs straight.

But influence isn’t the point. The point is what happens when you put on Music for 18 Musicians and let it run. Time changes. Your breathing slows. The patterns enter your body and start doing something to your nervous system that you can’t quite name. It’s not relaxation, exactly — the music is too alive for that. It’s more like synchronization. You tune to its frequency.

Reich was forty when this piece premiered, and he’d been building toward it for a decade — Drumming, Music for Mallet Instruments, all the tape pieces. Everything he’d learned about phase relationships and interlocking patterns converged here, in a work that feels both inevitable and miraculous. He’s made great music since, but nothing that quite matches this — the moment when all the ideas clicked into a single, sustained breath.

Put on headphones. Turn down the lights. Let the pulse find you.

Steve Reich: The Best Ever is pattern as revelation. Is Music for 18 Musicians the Best Ever Minimalist Album? You tell us.

Decide for Yourself:

• The original 1978 ECM recording is the definitive version — Reich’s own ensemble at their peak.
• The 1998 Nonesuch re-recording offers improved fidelity and a slightly different interpretation.
• The vinyl reissue of the ECM recording restores the original LP experience.