When judged against the artistic currents of the era, Four Organs was a truly shocking piece in 1970. Based on a seemingly elementary process—the gradual elongation of a single chord, extended by one note at a time—it represents minimalism at its purest and most uncompromising. The severity and unyielding nature of the augmentation process is heightened by the fact that there is absolutely no change in pitch, timbre or dynamics throughout its nearly twenty minute length. At the time of its premiere, Steve Reich (1936) described the intended effect: "I had the idea that if a group of tones were all pulsing together in a repeating chord...one tone at a time could gradually get longer and longer.... The tones would simply begin in unison...and then gradually extend out like a sort of horizontal bar graph."

What effect Reich planned for his audiences may be harder to speculate, but nonetheless, Four Organs—unlike many non-linear minimalist works—provides a certain visceral thrill as it pulls the listener towards its inevitable climax. As another point of reference, Reich specified in the score for the work to be performed on four small Farfisa organs, the electronic keyboard heard in numerous rock recordings of that era (and one which gave The Doors their distinctive sound). It is the job of a fifth player to shake a pair of maracas throughout the entire piece, supplying the steady, unceasing pulse that enables the organists to remain synchronized to the fundamental pulse. The essential building block of the piece is a dominant eleventh (another common feature of 70s rock), which, while building vertically, is also elongated from the length of a brief eighth note to a dense, sustaining mass.

In 1970, Reich received a phone call from the conductor Michael Tilson Thomas asking for some new orchestral repertory, and he jokingly responded, 'Of course, my new piece Four Organs." To his great surprise, Tilson Thomas agreed to Reich's suggestion. While it was anything but symphonic, Four Organs was performed by the Boston Symphony in Boston's Symphony Hall in October, 1971, along with works by Mozart, Liszt and Bartók. The stoic New England audience took the work in stride, but a more volatile New York audience was less approving when it came to Carnegie Hall in 1973. Shouts, boos, cheers, threats and counter-threats by patrons broke out during the performance, and one elderly lady even banged her shoe on the edge of the stage in an attempt to stop the music. The New York Times critic Harold Schonberg reported that "the audience behaved as though red-hot needles were being inserted under fingernails." Nevertheless, Reich soon became a hot commodity and his reputation took off soon after the notorious concert.

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