Repetition is a Principle of Music"Steve Reich and his minimal world"

Repetition is a principle of musicRepetition is a principle of music



Repetition is a principle of music









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Repetition is a principle of

OSVALDO GLIECARepetition is a principle of music


Repetition is a










Repetition is a principle of Repetition is a principle of musicRepetition is a principle of music


Steve Reich and hisminimalist world

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REPETITION IS A PRINCIPLE OF MUSIC

“Steve Reich and his Minimalist World”

written by Osvaldo Glieca

Copyright © 2007 Osvaldo Glieca [email protected]

All Rights for this publications reserved. No part of this document may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without

the prior permission of the copyright owner.

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 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 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 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). 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 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 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 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, political 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 rhythmic 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 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), 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 non-

musicians. Harmony and melody were abolished, causing from the point 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 serialism found an 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 of music in which

the interaction 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 computer-

controlled sounds; re-evaluating It’s Gonna Rain and Come Out as pioneering

examples of a characteristic technique of the late twentieth century. He 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 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”.











Repetition is a principle of Repetition is a principle of music















Repetition is a principle of










Repetition is a principle of Repetition is a principle of musicRepetition is a principle of music


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Repetition is a Principle of Music"Steve Reich and his minimal world"