Another Steve
I didn’t have a clue what Steve Reich looked like, so I watched him perform the first phase of Drumming last night thinking that he was ‘that charming old man in a blue baseball cap.’
A man that made me miss my grandfather. But my, my, my, that man was Steve Reich, a brilliant composer, and I watched him play piano during Music for 18 Musicians, his 1976 piece that I listened to hundreds of times while drafting my senior thesis last spring. I listened to it so much that it inspired me to connect the music’s concept with the concept of my thesis. I eventually wrote the two paragraphs below, which are likely incoherent.
There is a beautiful piece of music by Steve Reich called Music for Eighteen Musicians that I listen to whenever I sit down to work on this paper. As I am nonmusical, I can only give a partial explanation of the work, which is a droning — though not unexciting — cycle of eleven chords. The opening section, which is called a “Pulse” and lasts several minutes, slowly works its way through the entire cycle with piano, violin, cello, marimba, maracas, xylophone, clarinet, and chanting female voices. The next eleven sections each develop a piece of music based around each of the eleven chords in the original cycle. Thus, each chord of the original cycle is isolated to create, in a sense, a new, but not unrelated, cycle. As such, any given chord is both a separable piece of a cycle and a possible generator of a new cycle. Each chord is parasitic and creative; child and parent; part and whole.
If you could imagine slowing down the opening cycle of eleven chords playing each chord’s individually generated cycle at the same time as its section in the original cycle, you would suddenly be overwhelmed by the cacophonous synecdoche that assaults you. Moreover, if you continued this process ad infinitum — isolating each chord and creating a cycle around it and then playing these cycles simultaneously —you will perhaps be struck by the fascinating opposition that strikes me: each subsequent individuation is, at the same time, a very potent universalization. Each individual chord is a relation to the other chords, and when it is separated, it becomes, once again, a relation to the other chords. So too are the individual instruments necessarily bound up in a number of identifiable relations: consider, for example, that the A note played by the violin and sung by the female voice is the “same” particular sound emitted first by the tension between bow and string, then by the exertion of human breath. The A note can be viewed both as an individual note and as a rule for what constitutes an A emanating from one instrument or another; an instrument, likewise, is both subject to these musical laws and is also generative of particular instantiations that follow from those laws. The piece is sublime.
It was wonderful to see the piece played live. The singers are absolutely amazing in their control, their timing. The xylophone players are profound. Later on in the evening, during a discussion, someone commented that the piece is constructed such that it interrupts the normal perception of time – it’s repetitiveness, it’s circularity, it’s jarring juxtaposition between the quickness with which each note is played and the languid pace at which the music as a whole develops makes hours like seconds, seconds like hours, hours like seconds… I’m tremendously fortunate to have seen him perform live.
Below, I’ve attached a video of the Grand Valley State University’s teaser video for their wonderful recording of Music for 18 Musicians. That is the version I listened to while writing my thesis, and I think it’s a piece of music that everyone would be pleased to hear. A recording of the discussion that I saw following Steve Reich’s performance at Hellerau in Dresden can be found in four parts on Youtube.