• An important 20th Century American composer whose music anticipated many future musical trends and aesthetic values. Rejecting the vogues of Americana, serialism and atonality, he pioneered contemporary development of archaic models and was amongst the earliest to integrate Western musical idioms with Eastern ones, making him a pioneer of East-West 'fusion' decades before the term 'World Music' had been coined. • Introduced 'ad libitum' or aleatoric counterpoint from 1944, almost two decades before the European avant garde. • From the 1940s, his employment of incantatory melodies over static harmonies, plus use of rhythmic cycles, presaged the Minimalist vogue of the 1960s/70s. • The visionary and mystical nature of his work, often intoxicating in its directness and simplicity, rank him as the musical progenitor to the later, so-called New Age-ists and Spiritual Minimalists, such as Arvo Pärt and John Tavener • His significance remains overlooked by musical academia, partly due to his aloofness from the establishment, and also because scholars have not looked for radical developments in post-War music which is broadly tonal and deliberately appealing.