I LOVE TO WATCH MUSIC I love to watch ...

Robert Minden, the Canadian whose troupe I wrote about in a column on children's music, came close. Using vacuum cleaner hoses, PVC marimbas, hubcaps and water-filled dishes, he created both beautiful sounds and a kind of tension between the oddness of the instrument and the sound it could make.

An open-air performance on taiko drums?huge, stationary wooden drums thumped in choreographed rhythms using hand-held batons?given by an energetic bunch of Japanese Americans from South Jersey, tied motion and sound into a gorgeous unit. One of the leaders in particular, a lean young woman, combined smooth grace with an intuitive sense of flourish that seemed to push and pull the music at the same time. You can see something similar in the best Scottish bagpipe bands, as the drummers' pompoms whirl and swoop.

Speaking of bagpipes, my wife reminded me of the mammoth set of pipes that our friend Edwin George had to manhandle during early concerts of the Philadelphia Renaissance Wind Band. Here, it was the spectacle of watching this almost-wraith-like man taming the wild musical beast, which then bleated its submission.

In the avant-garde arena, I remember a concert (though not the name of the performer) set in a high, echoing chapel. A long loop of audio tape?perhaps 30 feet?wafted a simple composition into the upper reaches, then, at the recording head, picked up its own broadcast for the next cycle. Ever so slowly, the fed-back tune became less music, more ambiance, closer to pure architectural rumble.

And I can never think about tape manipulation without moving on to Steve Reich, which is where I was heading anyway. I wish I had taken down the name of a piece I heard over 20 years ago on the radio?probably, it was either It's Gonna Rain or Come Out. Reich recorded a line or two of speech by a young black guy, and by slowly setting tape loops out of phase, devolved them into a sort of disembodied urban rattle. I don't know if you could call it music in the usual sense, but it was decidedly unsettling.

But in concert, Reich can be the most visual of composers, using the simplest of means. Much of the simplicity in the two performance pieces I saw?Clapping Music (1972) and Drumming (1971)?was probably imposed: They can be staged with a minimum of performers and equipment.

Clapping Music is just that: two performers facing the audience with their human hands clapping out repeating, interlacing rhythms. It's a short piece?five minutes?but for that time, sound and instrument are one.

Drumming is the ultimate in visual music. Though it was composed in four parts, Part I can be performed alone, with four performers playing four pairs of tuned bongos. I've seen Reich perform Part I twice. Both times he set the bongos up in a diagonal, leading back stage left, the performers on either side, wielding drumsticks with both hands.

The first time, by sheer accident I was in about the fourth row, facing right up that drum alley. It was the best seat in the house. As the rhythms slowly evolved, the images formed by the moving drumsticks changed the wave pattern?you could actually see sine waves of music as white-tan streaks in the air. Black-light performances, I suppose, can ape this, but I've never seen another instance of the act of performance making its own visual mark.

What's Out There: Most of Reich's work is readily available. Get the versions played by his ensemble?they've worked together for years.