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I grew up as a classical music nerd in Chicago, saving up to buy a CSO concert subscription when I was 15. Solti was god, and if there were baseball cards for the wind players, I would have collected them. Le Sacre is the piece that made me want to be a composer, and I waited for the release of this LP the way others waited for Sgt. Pepper. It's still definitive as far as I'm concerned.

I live in New England, and I'm at Walden Pond almost every day in the summer, so I take my transcendentalism seriously. For me, Ives evokes the universal mind as much in the popular tunes themselves as in the glorious cacophony they create when mashed together. It feels highly mystical, in a distinctly American way, when it’s done right. There are complaints that this isn’t the most accurate or detailed of recordings – that wouldn’t have bothered Ives, and It doesn’t bother. It also includes the somewhat obscure Central Park in the Dark, a little known companion piece to The Unanswered Question, and to me much more evocative and haunting.

My high school music theory teacher - the beloved Betty Jacobsen - had turned me onto Reich's early works, but in university in the late 70s minimalism was still a forbidden pleasure. I came to this more through ECM, which was the gold standard as far as I was concerned (where have you gone, Eberhard Weber?). I now get to perform this piece as part of Reich's ensemble, and I always tear up when it comes to the final cycle of chords - I just don't want it to end. So even though I'm on the Nonesuch recording (which - I feel compelled to point out - won a Grammy), this first recording is the one I come back to. The textures and grooves are almost unbearably beautiful, the pacing is astonishing, but what really moves me is the social structure of the piece, the way it impels a kind of utopian cooperation among the players. It's a western gamelan, something very few other pieces in our culture have achieved in such an authentic manner.

This was a surprise, also courtesy of ECM. Now that he's a household word, with 7 gazillion artistic descendants in Eastern Europe and around the world, it's hard to describe how revolutionary this disc was when it came out. It cleared out all the cobwebs, and even more than the minimalists helped me rediscover the profundity of simple intervals and hearable formal processes. Everything on this record is a masterpiece, all in a slightly different way. This was also my first encounter with Gidon Kremer, and all it took was his first high note to make me never hear the violin in the same way again.

This is music by kindred spirits, past and present - a beautiful compilation of Bali-inspired compositions by Canadian composers. It starts with Colin McPhee's elegant and amazingly forward-looking Suite in Six Movements, in literal terms simply an arrangement of various gamelan tunes, but which actually anticipates by decades Lou Harrison, Steve Reich, etc. I also deeply admire José Evangelista's title track, which demonstrates the composer's deep understanding of both gamelan and contemporary western music, finding a link between them that feels completely right and yet absolutely personal.

I'm not a baroque expert, I still have to look at the footnotes to see how to do the ornaments when I read through the WTC, and I came to Vivaldi late, mainly through music cognition guru Jeanne Bamberger, but also through Michael Gordon’s Weather (Nonesuch), after which I always listened to Vivaldi in a different way – an another antecedent to Glass and the minimalists. Meanwhile, I'm also a total sucker for the reinvigorated Italian baroque that this ensemble seems to be spearheading. I have no idea how 'period' it actually is, but it feels like a road not taken, one we as a culture have finally found our way back to. To be honest, this may not actually be my favorite recording either by this group (I like Viaggio Musicale) or of Vivaldi (try Giuliano Carmignola), but it rescues this piece, taking it out of the elevator and back into the forefront of our consciousness, where it belongs.