The processes at work in Steve Reich's Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices, and Organ (1973) find precedent in the music of the Medieval period. In much the same way that composers of the Middle Ages utilized a musical line in augmentation or diminution—that is, overlaid or juxtaposed with an elongated or shortened version of itself—Reich creates figures that are stretched or compressed to various extremes, so that short melodic fragments become an accompanimental figure, and vice-versa. (Reich took this technique to even greater extremes in Proverb [1995], which draws heavily upon the sounds of the twelfth-century Notre Dame School.)

The work's main melodic figures appear in the voices and organ, while the percussion provides a subterranean network of rhythmic and harmonic patterns. The textures of the percussion section are also permuted from a single figure: but where the figures in the voices and organ undergo durational transformation, those of the percussion section are varied by the offsetting of rhythms. That is, a pattern in one instrument is duplicated in another instrument, but played one, two, or four beats ahead. Reich first explored this technique of rhythmic phasing in the early tape pieces It's Gonna Rain (1965) and Come Out (1967), further developing its possibilities in works for live performers such as Drumming (1971) and Clapping Music (1973). Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices, and Organ, then, represents the combination of two compositional processes—one developed centuries before, the other, in Reich's own music—that rely on the manipulation of simple musical ideas to construct a work's melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic substance.

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