Much of Gavin Bryars' work has a distinctive cinematic, multimedia quality to it. Perhaps this is the result of sheer acculturation: listening to the incessant arpeggios and slippery semitone modulations in Bryars' 1990 chamber work Four Elements, we get the sense that we are hearing the soundtrack to an Errol Morris documentary or a blurry art film dream sequence. The familiarity of such gestures and textures does not automatically render them cliché, however; indeed, while working within a harmonic language associated with later stages of minimalism and drawing upon sonorities that share affinities with Philip Glass' music in particular, Bryars nonetheless exercises a flexibility of tonal trajectory and variety of instrumental combinations that maintain the piece's interest over the course of its 30-minute duration.

It should come as no surprise that Four Elements bears the imprint of Philip Glass. The work was composed for a ballet by Lucinda Childs, one of the most prominent figures in dance during the last decades of the twentieth century. Childs had been a co-collaborator with Glass and Robert Wilson on Einstein on the Beach (1976), and had crossed paths with Bryars when both of them had been enlisted by Wilson for his project The CIVIL WarS. Just as Glass' undulating stases followed the contours of compelling underlying harmonic progressions, Bryars' Four Elements maintains a careful balance between textural seamlessness and slow but constant tonal propulsion. The overall shape of the work, in its original dance context, complements Childs' various combinations of dancers and their articulation of visual spaces.

The work is divided into four main sections, each corresponding to one of the four elements. The movements evoke their respective images and distinguish themselves from each other primarily through changes in instrumentation and tempo. The background accompaniment in the first movement, "Water," takes a relatively restrained tempo, placing in the foreground a lyrical melody offered by the bass clarinet. Bryars employs a variety of percussion sounds as well, including, as a clever musical pun, a water gong (a gong struck while being dipped in water, altering its pitch). The second movement, "Earth," assumes a somewhat faster tempo, and gives tandem melodic lines to woodwinds, on the one hand, and the vibraphone and marimba, on the other. If the piece has a weak point, it is found here; Bryars admits that in composing the piece he took on the challenge of writing for instruments normally outside his comfort zone, and some of his timbral combinations come off a bit clumsily when they get too busy. The third movement, "Air," is the fastest, with a series of woodwind and brass soloists above busy figurations in the piano and keyboard, while the final movement, "Fire," is slow and surreal, its melody passed smoothly from instrument to instrument, sometimes subjected to electronic effects. The piece ends with a surprising but staid coda, in which a plaintive melody sung by a countertenor hovers above the sustained tones of the instrumental ensemble.

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