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Repetition is a principle of music Repetition is a principle of music Repetition is a principle of music Repetition is a principle of music Repetition is a principle of
Repetition is a principle of music Repetition is a principle of music Repetition is a principle of music Repetition is a principle of music Repetition is a principle of music Repetition is a principle of music
Steve Reich and his
OSVALDO GLIECA Repetition is a principle of music Repetition is a principle of music Repetition is a
Repetition is a principle of music Repetition is a principle of music Repetition is a principle of music
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Repetition is a principle of music Repetition is a principle of music Repetition is a principle of music Repetition is a principle of music Repetition is a principle of music Repetition is a principle of
Repetition is a principle of music Repetition is a principle of music
Repetition is a principle of music Repetition is a principle of music Repetition is a principle of music Repetition is a principle of music Repetition is a principle of music Repetition is a principle of music Repetition is a principle of music Repetition is a principle of music Repetition is a principle of music Repetition is a principle of music Repetition is a principle of music Repetition is a principle of Repetition is a principle of music Repetition is a principle of music Repetition is a principle of Repet Repetition is a principle of music Repetition is a principle of music Repetition is a principle of music Repetition is a principle of music Repetition is a principle of music Repetition is a principle of music Repetition is a principle of music Repetition is a principle of music Repetition is a principle of music Repetition is a principle of music Repetition is a principle of music Repetition is a principle of music
REPETITION IS A PRINCIPLE OF MUSIC “Steve Reich and his Minimalist World” written by Osvaldo Glieca
Copyright © 2007 Osvaldo Glieca
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London, 14th June 2009
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The Minimalist movement exists in various forms as a development of Western Art most strongly linked with American visual arts, music and design of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The American tradition of experiments in music, encouraged new and distinctive styles in the 1960s, especially in the works of four composers; La Monte Young, Philip Glass, Terry Riley and Steve Reich. The unifying features of their music were long-phrase repetitions, ostinati, diatonic melody, harmony, and the use of conscious improvisation. Minimalism has been a distinctive American phenomenon seen as a modernistic experimental type of music, with an under-current of social and musical rebellion that had an early association with mind-altering drugs, for the hypnotic and repetitious tonality, which attracted younger audiences raised on the Rock and Psychedelic Psychedelic music music of that era.
Minimalism was
originally used in art criticism to refer to simple forms made only by primary structures. Later, the term was borrowed and applied to music; musical minimalism can be defined not so much as a style, but as a way of thinking about music. It was a category of concept art with not only influences from a non- Western music like in the works of Young and Glass, but also in Rock, improvisations and audio technology. Steve Reich’s early works were pieces based on tape loops, and is the composer who best represents the developmental potentiality and structural possibilities of this genre. He made the discovery that provided the starting point from which his music would grow, two tape machines playing identical loops of recorded speech that would slowly move out of synchrony with each other. Reich became well-known for tape-loop pieces such as It’s Gonna Rain (1965) and Come out (1966), by changing by changing the synchronization and phasing of short spoken phrases, as his only musical material, and superimposing constant changes on what had gone before. The words were played repeatedly on a tape loop in two channels, one channel moved gradually ahead of the other becoming out-of-phase creating an effect of slow changing rhythms and new melodic fragments by the t he interplay between channels.
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The results should not only be seen as an hypnotic musical experience, but also as a series of changing patterns and intensification of rhythm that can be perceived as aural illusions. At the beginning of 1967, Reich moved from the tape machine phase process to live instrumental music. At this stage his concern was to test whether phasing could be done with instruments, and to integrate himself into the existing tradition of music-making. From here a series of instrumental phase pieces followed; Piano Phase (1967), Violin Phase (1967), Four Organs (1970), Phase Pattern (1970) and Drumming (1971). (1971). In Piano Phase, two pianists play a short repeated figure in unison, then one player gradually increases the tempo moving out of phase with the other, and eventually the two return to the unison. The composer during this “phase-period” of his career forged this style that was to become his brand name based on this experimental technique. Violin phase, written in the same year, is the best example of those phase-pieces which contains similar rhythms and melodic fragmentations that cause the listener to hear sub-melodies between the melodic repeated patterns; at this point of phase shifting the second violin is two crochet beats ahead of the first, and the third violin two beats ahead of the second, and therefore, two behind the first, while the fourth picks out the resulting pattern. However, from the combination of all the four instruments the listener may deduce other patterns. This process is the main ingredient that creates the stimulating liveliness of Reich’s music; the real and imaginary emphasis as the phasing process continues. Also significant is the metrical ambiguity. There is no time signature giving no clear conducting indications; if the bar is heard as one of 12/8 or 6/4 and not as two bars in 3/4 or three bars in 4/8, where is the first beat?
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Violin Phase; this passage is emblematic of the way Reich used phase shifting.
Similar processes of phasing and pattern enhancement are involved in Phase Pattern and Four Organs. Drumming is Drumming is the final expansion and refinement of the phasing process, a work in which it is taken to its logical extreme. Subsequently, Reich never used the tape-phasing technique again. Drumming was Drumming was more like a summation of his early works than the beginning of something new, but at the same time marked a move to his music in a new aesthetically pleasing dimension. Nevertheless, Drumming is Drumming is a starting point for the first use of four new different techniques; the process of gradually substituting rest for beats, gradual changes in timbre while rhythm and pitch remain constant, the simultaneous combination of instruments of different timbre, and the use of the human voice to become part of the musical ensemble by imitating the exact sound of the instruments. Reich’s concentration from 1967 to 1971 was with structures and, particularly to the clarity of the pattern configurations. In order to achieve structural audibility the music had to be extremely simple and the process of phase shifting had to be slow in order to allow the listener to hear what is gradually happening in what the composer called the “musical process”. At this point of his career Reich was a mature minimalist composer, and his music moved from an unorthodox alternative experimental existence in New York to international acclaim and imitations.
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Drumming. Here, the Reich phase period arrives at a point of maximum expansion; the first example show how beats are replacing rests systematically, while on the second example it is completely the opposite way around. Construction and de-construction; a beloved basic concept term of minimalism-art in general.
In the middle of 1970s his music began to develop progressively in new directions. From an ensemble of percussion, keyboards, and amplified voices he gradually added wind and string instruments. The most important pieces of this metamorphosis are Music for 18 Musicians (1974), Music for a Large Ensemble (1978), and Octet (1979).
He modified his instrumentation in the
direction of chamber and classical orchestral music combinations. These works established a large audience for Reich, and at the same time the traditional musical institutions accepted his music and the relative aesthetics more favourably.
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Through the 1980s Steve Reich’s music is more harmonically driven using cycles of chords and counterpoint. Also, his music became somehow dark and mysterious having possible associations with extra-musical meanings, in which he expresses his feelings about some of the decade’s problems such as pollution, AIDS, AIDS, political cynicism, cynicism, and the Israeli-Arab war. This can be seen in works like Tehillim (1980), The Desert Music (1982), and Different Trains (1988) The technique of speech-melody, and his use of texts, was now making new structural changes in transforming the character of his music. The voices are used to give prominence to the text rather than, as in his early works, simply as an instrument-like part of the ensemble. The results are much longer pieces, replacing his usual steady pulsation with more complex metric showing this technical evolution continuing in the future.
Desert music; an extract in which is notable the metric continuous changes.
New York Counterpoint (1985) is an instrumental work that indicates an inflection in darkening the harmony with the introduction of chromatic modes. In his later music, Reich moved away from the pure repetition toward a much more symphonic approach without losing the individual character of his own style. The evolution of a continuous rhythmic tonality using cycles of harmonies, the expansion of the concept of the repetition and r hythmic cycles, took the music from a hypnotic and abstract form to a more structural one.
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During his very recent career, Reich took new directions about messages and the whole concept of ideas of his style. He collaborated with his wife, the video artist Beryl Korot, on a musical documentary, The Cave (1993), which explores the roots of Judaism, Christianity and Islam through the words of Israelis, Palestinians, and Americans. The two collaborated again on a video-opera performance Three Tales (2002), which concerns the Hindenburg disaster, the testing of nuclear weapons and other modern issues related to animal cloning, and the use of artificial intelligence to replace replace the human genre. In these years Reich used sampling techniques, but he also returned to composing purely instrumental works for the concert hall. Starting with Triple Quartet (1998) that can either be performed by string quartet and tape, three string quartets or 36-piece string orchestra, Cello Counterpoint (2003), Counterpoint (2003), and You Are Variations (2004).
Triple quartet; premiered at the Kennedy Center the 22 May 1999 in Washington.
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Conclusion To some extent Steve Reich’s music, and the relative Minimalist music movement, can be seen as a revolution to Serialism, which by that time was in a developmental phase in the full advent of the electronics in late 1950s, pushing the music to an even more and abstract explorative stage. But where serialism was the most complicated, dissonant, highly structured, and intellectualized music ever imaginable, minimalism was the simplest, based on common diatonic triads and melodic lines repeated over and over. It was the antitheses of the complexities of serialism. This is why the minimalist composers, and, particularly Reich were so successful; the avant-garde and serialism were fundamentally written for musician and critics. Conversely, minimalism was written more accessibly to a non-academic public and nonmusicians. Harmony and melody were abolished, abolished, causing from the point of of view of art criticism, long discussion about the philosophy of monotony and dullness as a new aesthetic. Young people, especially, considered this music chic and fashionable, and it was modern for people who did not like modern music. One could listen to this flow of sequential patterns with no intellectual strain at all. Indeed, it was anti-intellectual, but because minimalism received high support and approval from certain art-criticism such as the American visual Pop-Art, its audience listened to this music with the comfort of being in an avant-garde forefront of an accepted aesthetic phenomenon. Personally, minimalism can be in so many ways technically analyzed as a New Baroque. A large part of Baroque music (except for Handel and Bach) is like minimalism, music made of patterns. It moves in purely sequential, predictable melodic patterns and its harmonies, most of the time, were mostly restricted to tonic, dominant and subdominant chords. Part of the attraction of Baroque music and that of Reich’s, one does not have to think while listening to it; the patterns are predictable.
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Nevertheless, minimalism, unlike unlike serialism serialism found an audience. audience. Minimalism has focused on forms and structure. The latter one has an important meaning outside the music contest in the researches of anthropologists and psychologists interested with problems of human perception and culture. Method of interpretations and analysis of human aspects in cognition, behavior, and culture, such as Structuralism, support the theory that there are basic patterns in the brain for visual and aural cognitions, and these provide a starting point for comparisons and evaluation of new informations. In accordance with this, tonality, rhythmic pulsations, and repetitive patterns correspond to structures already present in the brain. Consequently, this explains of the use of regular rhythms, familiar melodies and harmonic patterns in ethnic and popular music, the strong impact that minimalism has had on popular audiences and the pop-rock composers. Reich is arguably the real pioneer in the creation of a kind kind of music in which which the interaction between between man and machine involved in the creative process and development of the music. The tape recorder works and the discovering of phasing, which he later transferred to live performance, are among the major influences which electronic music has had on his own development later on. Moreover, the composer’s use of vernacular speech as a basis for composition has inspired Rap music and the Hip Hop. His original use of tape influenced in the mid-1980s what we now call “sampling” and computercontrolled sounds; re-evaluating It’s Gonna Rain and Come Out as Out as pioneering examples of a characteristic technique of the late twentieth century. He has has been appreciated on how he integrated ideas of non-Western ethnic music into Western composition and the contrapuntal capacities of his polyrhythmic compositions has brought to him a greater approval from both theorist and musicologist.
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Finally, Western popular music, which is a significant part of Reich’s reputation from the middle 70s, caused famous rock musician in Britain such as Brian Eno and Mike Oldfield to be impressed by him. The latter released an album with clear influences of Reich in a genre between minimalism and rock which has definitely introduced the mass-popular audiences to the minimalist musical world. Tubular Bells (1973) has been a remarkable worldwide success being five years in the UK chart and sales of more than ten million copies. A curios thing, about Reich is in the influences of his style. According to Paul Hillier in his introduction to “Writings on Music” the most easy to recognize are Stravinsky, Bartok, and Coltrane, which, none of them is a purely Western classical artist. Steve Reich was born in 1936 in New York, where today he still lives and works.
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Steve Reich and Musicians ensemble rehearsal at Center For Contemporary Art in Warsaw “CSW” (1997) Courtesy from http;//csw.art.pl/new/97/reich_p.html
Steve Reich performing his works with his ensemble; this this
approach has later demonstrated the
advantages to composers being directly involved in playing their own music.
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FURTHER
Writings on Music (2002) by Steve Reich edited by Paul Hillier Oxford University Press ISBN 0 19 515115 1 Four Musical Minimalists (2000) by Keith Potter Cambridge University Press ISBN 0 521 01501 4 Music of the Twentieth Century (1996) by Brian Simms Shirmer-Thomson Learning ISBN 0 02 872392 9 What it the Matter of Today’s Experimental Music (1991) by Leigh Landy Harwood Academic Publisher ISBN 3 7186 5168 8 Twentieth Century Music (2002) fifth edition by Eric Salzman Pearson Education inc. ISBN 0 13 095941 3 Modern Music and After (1995) by Paul Griffiths Oxford University Press ISBN 0 19 816511 0
All music examples are taken from Steve Reich’s book “Writings on Music”.
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