Charlemagne Palestine is an American composer, performer and visual artist, born in Brooklyn in 1947 and trained as a synagogue cantor. A contemporary of Terry Riley, Philip Glass, Steve Reich and Phill Niblock, he wrote intense, ritual music in the 1970s meant to unsettle Western ideas of what is beautiful, and has always performed it himself, surrounded by stuffed animals and a glass of cognac. His early works were for the carillon of St. Thomas Church in New York and for long electronic drones; Strumming Music (1974), two notes hammered on a Bösendorfer with the pedal down until the overtones bloom into chords nobody struck, is one of the founding records of minimalism, though he prefers the word maximalism.