A nine-hour car ride with Steve Reich rewired Marc Mellits’s plan: skip the safe teaching job, move to New York, and start an ensemble. After years of mailing tapes to Bang on a Can with no reply, a surprise call from Michael Gordon led to a commission and Five Machines—a piece the All-Stars toured widely. Those performances sparked more invitations (Kronos among them) and a lesson Mellits passes on: rejection isn’t always the last word when performers champion the music.

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