Sic Semper Tyrannis

On Steve Reich, My Most Recent Musical Love

All right, today I will discuss the last world-shattering musical artist I discovered-Steve Reich. I first got an earful of Reich’s music when I was in college on a CD set that accompanied the textbook for my music history class. The piece was called “Violin Phase,” and it was one of the most interesting things I’ve ever heard in my twenty-nine years. It was the sound of a single violin playing a two-bar phrase over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and, well, you get the idea. But over the course of the hundreds of repetitions, a second violin, (either recorded or live, couldn’t tell), played the same repeating phrase, but gradually became ever so slightly out of time. The second violin kept tweaking the time-relationship between the two parts until it was “locked-in” to the tempo of the first line, except now it was an eighth note behind. (I’m pretty sure this was the inspiration behind King Crimson’s “interlocking” guitar parts.) So, this process continued over hundreds of repetitions, the two parts clicking in and out of phase with each other. The result was the original line being harmonized with itself and then another violin would enter to reinforce the “resulting patterns” that developed as the second line clicked into being two notes behind, and then three, and then four, etc.

For some reason, I was stupefied at the sound of it all. “This is what genius sounds like,” I thought to myself. Just when the line of music history after Schoenberg had looked like nothing new could possibly be done; this strange, beautiful music arrived. Reich’s music was an out and out reaction against Schoenbergian serialism-the process by which academic music became mathematical, cold, atonalism. Reich was part of an aesthetic called “minimalism,” or “process music,” and it was the new avant-garde that appeared to supplant Schoenberg’s cronies.

I liked this music for several reasons: 1) It was tonal. I had heard all kinds of modern music that became increasingly hard on the ears. The dissolution of modern music in the early 1900’s made conservatory music less of a belle arte and more of a puzzle. But Reich’s music was a wonderful bridge. He was modern, (requiring lots of patience from his audience), yet his music also sounded pleasant, usually working in the major and minor modes. 2) This was music you could either listen to and try to figure out what was going on, or you could ignore it like audio wallpaper. 3) I went on to hear just about everything he wrote and I learned that his music was often times very rhythmic, unlike the music of the total serialists, who left the determination of note values to mathematical processes. Reich’s primary instrument was percussion and he wrote for all kinds of drums and mallets, as well as the other usuals, like strings and brass and vocalists. 4) I also came to learn from reading that Reich was a very spiritual, philosophical guy, rediscovering his Jewish heritage well into his adulthood, after traveling the world and studying Indian drumming. And his Jewishness is easily found in the texts that he chose to score and his philosophical bent is also apparent in his works. There’s something I like about the idea of a cutting-edge, avant-garde artist also being a person of faith.

Anyway, like I said, Reich’s music was mind-blowing even on the first exposure, so I’m going to give this some more thought and recommend some individual pieces if you’ve never heard this stuff and are the kind that wants to have your mind…………blown.

posted by Mike @ 2:27 PM