Sic Semper Tyrannis

The Last Word on Reich

Like I said yesterday, I’ve heard (and have a copy of) just about every Steve Reich piece that has been recorded. Here are some highlights for me.

Music for 18 Musicians is a good introduction to his extended works. There is so much going on in this piece on a technical level that I’ve kind of forgotten how to talk about it. But I do know that this piece was moving on from his “phasing” technique that I talked about yesterday with Violin Phase, to a “note-for-rest substitution” technique, where he would gradually build up great little repeating motifs starting with one note, a technique he also employed in Drumming, probably my favorite Reich work.

There’s a similar “building something out of nothing” approach to his piece Four Organs. Just like its name implies, the instrumentation is four farfisa organs, (and a shaker), and there is only one harmony-one chord. And it all starts with small note values and by the end of the piece, all four organists are sustaining the chord for probably a minute or so. Obviously, this is music that requires a certain kind of patience and curiosity of the listener. (At its premier, I have read a story of one of the audience members running down to the front of the stage and yelling, “All right! I confess!”) But I just love the compositional idea behind it. And in his book, Reich says that he was very interested in an aesthetic in which the listener could hear the methods used in composition. Thus the term “process music” to describe this stuff. This idea would be pretty much directly contrasted with serialism, which is also composition with a mathematical process, such as taking a row of notes and playing it backwards against itself, but the listener is very rarely aware of the games that the composer is playing with the material.

Another cool “something out of nothing” piece of Reich’s is Proverb, a choral work employing one line of text: “How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life,” an aphorism of Ludwig Wittgenstein. And indeed, the whole piece is filled with one small, minor-key melody stretched out and then sung in harmony with itself in all kinds of ways. Again, this is masterful genius in my book! The construction methods of the piece match the text that is being set!

One final compositional technique of Reich’s that I love is “speech-melody,” in which he would transcribe recording of people’s ordinary speech patterns into musical notes. And by interviewing people about a topic of interest or importance to him, he would have a wealth of potentially poignant statements to play against the resultant little interesting musical motifs. Two pieces that employ this technique beautifully are Different Trains, (about the Holocaust) and The Cave, (about Jewish-Muslim relations, as well as faith in general.)

There are a whole bunch of interesting pieces by Reich and these are just my personal highlights of what I’ve heard. I highly suggest you seek out some of this Reich stuff, my babies, but only if you want your minds to be blown.

posted by Mike @ 1:08 PM