"Harmonielehre" jars our expectations in that it ''looks'' like a Romantic work but does not behave like one. Sonata form and its offshoots make us passengers of sorts, riders seated to the rear who follow musical ideas as they move from place to place, growing, shrinking, transforming themselves in the process. Mr. Adams's piece, on the other hand, goes nowhere. Neither does it evolve from a center outward. Indeed, we come upon it as a stationary object - anchored, already complete but incompletely perceived, seen only in outline and from a single angle. We hear first the music's repetitive heartbeats and its rhythmic mutations, but it is only as we gradually circle this object that its finer details are revealed - the rippling triadic figures, the little slivers of wind color, the mallet percussion detail, the timpani which booms out loudly when it arrives in view. Even the long Mahlerian violin melodies seem directionless, spinning out but then circling back to their beginnings.

Mr. Adams, whose "Harmonielehre" was performed last evening by the New York Philharmonic under Leonard Slatkin's direction, is reputed to be one of the movers [of minimalism], even though at times one would have been hard pressed to notice movement of any sort in this 40-minute, three-movement work. Things start off unpromisingly, with an insistent clanging and steady pulsations that sound like a large modern orchestra imitating a Balinese gamelan. In the long opening movement, Mr. Adams works over a few ideas with great economy and no little craft, though the musical effect is ultimately to make little out of little. In the true Minimalist style, he provides an underlay of slowly shifting harmonic patterns and then superimposes lines that might become melodic if they were meant to go anywhere. At no time does the work present difficulties to the listener, even at first hearing. In this score, at any rate, Mr. Adams is not in the business of antagonizing or disturbing anyone. It was all the more puzzling, then, to see Philharmonic subscribers leaving throughout the performance. [snip] [In the second movement] the purposeful stress on what used to be known to composers as padding [ouch] is made considerably less apparent and something surprisingly like a conventional melodic profile emerges. For dozens of bars at a stretch one might be listening to a lugubrious tone poem by, say, Rachmaninoff.