Steve Reich on Music Theory Print

2×5

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

History#

2x5, composed in 2008 in the wake of Double Sextet, is a piece commissioned for the Manchester International Festival. The debut performance of the piece was given by 5 musicians and magnetic tape. The piece was debuted by the musicians of Bang on a Can, Mark Stewart (Bang On a Can All Star guitarist and musical director), the guitarist Paul Simon, two musicians of The National, Aaron Dessner and Bryce Dessner, and Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead at the Manchester velodrome during the film festival during as the opener of a Kraftwerk concert.

Cello Counterpoint

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Composition#

Cello Counterpoint has a duration of roughly 11 minutes and is composed in three movements: The composition is scored for eight cellos and can either be performed by a solo cello, with the seven other parts played on a pre-recorded tape, or by a cello octet. In the score program notes, Reich described the piece as one of the most difficult he had ever written, noting “extremely tight, fast moving rhythmic relationships not commonly found in the cello literature.”

City Life (music)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Movements#

The work is divided into five movements, and like many other Reich compositions they follow an arch-like form of A-B-C-B-A. They are: Each movement is named for a sample contained within it. The first, third, and fifth movements use speech samples (often doubled with instruments, as in Different Trains), while the second and fourth use only rhythmic samples, which drives the tempo in these movements. In true Reich style, the paired movements share a chord cycle. The first movement does not open with pulses (as in many of Reich’s other pieces), but with a chorale. This same chorale appears in a slightly more dissonant voicing at the end of the fifth movement, leading the final chord which ends on an ambiguous C dominant/minor seventh chord.

Clapping Music

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

External links#

*Reich, Steve. “Steve Reich Clapping Music Video Medium” . stevereich.com

Come Out (Reich)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

References in other recordings and media#

Captain Beefheart’s song “Moonlight on Vermont,” from Trout Mask Replica (1969), includes the phrase “come out to show them” repeated several times. Pamela Des Barres recalled the piece being played on repeat during the rehearsals for the Trout Mask Replica sessions. Mark Saucier’s notes on “Moonlight on Vermont” reinterpret the phrase: “somewhere in this section he’s clearly singing ‘Come out to Sodom, come out to Sodom.’”
Come Out was sampled at the beginning of the Madvillain song “America’s Most Blunted”.
Part of the sampled quotation also appears in the song “The Caliphate” on the collaborative album Voir Dire by Earl Sweatshirt and the Alchemist.
It also appears on the Unkle Bruise Blood remix of Tortoise’s song “Djed.”
Camper Van Beethoven performed an abbreviated “cover version” of Come Out on their 2004 album New Roman Times.
The quotation again appears at the beginning of the Maximillian Colby song “New Jello”.
A sample from the quotation is repeatedly looped on the D
Note track “D
Votion”.
A part of the quotation is sampled in the track “Rush” by Prometheus (Benji Vaughan) on his third studio album Spike.
The track appears on Nicolas Jaar’s Resident Advisor 500 Mix, which was recorded in December 2015 in Brooklyn, New York.
In 2016, DJs Leon Vynehall and Ellen Allien both opened their respective entries in BBC Radio 1’s Essential Mix series with a clip from the piece.
Doug Gillard’s “Come out and Show Me” from his album Parade On (2014), contains the eponymous lyrics as well as a reference to Reich’s original using the title words in the background of the latter part of the song.
JPEGMAFIA replicates the line at the beginning of the song “Polly”.
Slauson Malone replicates the line in the songs “My feet’s hurt ‘I was a fugitive but then I realized there was nowhere I could run to’ (see page 110 and 113)” and “My feet’s tired (see page 108)”.
The piece is used in the soundtrack of the film Diane.
A small section is used in season 1, episode 7 of the TV show Devs.

External links#

Blom, Eric, ed. Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. 5th edition, hardcover ed. 10 vols. St. Martin’s Press, 1954.
Griffiths, Paul. “Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians” Grove Music Online: the World’s Premier Authority on All Aspects of Music. Ed. L Macy. Oxford Univ. Pr. 7 Nov. 2005.
Steve Reich Interview -Gabrielle Zuckerman, July 2002
Bomb Magazine: Steve Reich and Beryl Korot, by Julia Wolfe
Transcription and analysis of Come Out, by Michael Schell

Different Trains

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Background#

During World War II, Reich made train journeys between New York and Los Angeles to visit his parents, who had separated. Years later, he pondered the fact that, as a Jew, had he been in Europe instead of the United States at that time, he might have been traveling in Holocaust trains. Steve Reich’s earlier work had frequently used tape, looped and played back at different speeds. However, Different Trains was a novel experiment, using recorded speech as a source for melodies.

Double Sextet

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Structure#

The Double Sextet is in three movements, lasting about 22 minutes in its entirety: The piece is strongly driven by the two pianos and the two vibraphones, marking out each phrase and key change, particularly in the fast movements. Within each movement are four harmonic sections in the keys of D, F, A and B (or their relative minors), similar to many of Reich’s works; the reason being that the sections eventually return to the original key. The interlocking piano rhythm themes occur throughout the piece. The pianos interlock, creating the effect of constant eighth-note chords.

Drumming (Reich)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Phasing#

The piece employs Reich’s trademark technique of phasing. Phasing is achieved when two players, or one player and a recording, are playing a single repeated pattern in unison, usually on the same kind of instrument. One player changes tempo slightly, while the other remains constant, and eventually the two players are one or several beats out of sync with each other. They may either stay there, or phase further, depending on the piece.

Eight Lines

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

History#

Under its original title, Octet, the work was commissioned by the Hessischer Rundfunk (Radio Frankfurt) and completed in April 1979. It was premiered at Radio Frankfurt on June 21, 1979, by members of the Netherlands Wind Ensemble, conducted by Reinbert de Leeuw . It was originally scored for string quartet, two pianos, and two woodwind players each playing clarinet, bass clarinet, and flute as well as piccolo. Reich rescored it in 1983 to make performance easier, by adding a second string quartet, and retitling the work Eight Lines. The additional two violins solve “the difficulty of playing rather awkward double stops in tune,” and the additional viola and cello “allow the rapid eighth-note patterns to be broken up between … two players” to prevent fatigue . The wind parts were originally conceived for two clarinet players doubling both bass clarinet and flute as well as piccolo, though right from the world premiere in Frankfurt in 1979 ten players were used, dividing the wind parts among four musicians. The composer regarded this as a perfectly ordinary option, while pointing out “whether there are eight, nine, or ten performers, the piece is always musically an octet” . In 1985, New York City Ballet’s balletmaster Jerome Robbins made an eponymous ballet to this music . Reich made a new recording for his 1997 Works 1965–1995 boxed set.

Electric Counterpoint

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

First recording#

It was first recorded in 1987 by guitarist Pat Metheny, who made extensive use of overdubbing, and was released along with Reich’s Different Trains, performed by the Kronos Quartet, on Nonesuch Records (catalogue number 979 176-2). Guitarists wishing to perform the piece may use Metheny’s pre-recorded ensemble part or opt to record their own, adding the 13th guitar part in live performance. In 2007, the guitar ensemble Forestare made the first recording of the lesser known second version, on ATMA Classique. The original recording, as included in the Works 1965–1995 box set, lasts slightly under fifteen minutes.

Four Organs

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Music#

The four organs harmonically expound a dominant eleventh chord (E–D–E–F–G–A–B), dissecting the chord by playing parts of it sequentially while the chord slowly increases in duration from a single 1/8 note at the beginning to 200 beats at the end. The process of increased augmentation is accomplished first by causing notes to sustain after the chord, and then notes start anticipating the chord. As the piece progresses, this “deconstruction” of the chord emphasizes certain harmonies. At the climax of the work, each tone sounds almost in sequence. A continuous maraca beat serves as a rhythmic framework. Reich describes the piece as “the longest V–I cadence in the history of Western Music”, the V and I chords being contained within the one chord. “You’ll find the chord in Debussy and Thelonious Monk – the tonic on top and the dominant on the bottom.” He has cited the music of Pérotin and other twelfth- and thirteenth-century composers as suggesting the technique of note augmentation used in Four Organs. For performances of the piece, Reich recommended using electronic organs with as plain and simple a timbre as possible, without vibrato, to avoid the sound of the instrument itself distracting from the harmonic and rhythmic aspects of the piece. Reich himself employed four Farfisa “mini compact” models. A typical performance lasts around 16 minutes.

It's Gonna Rain

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Analysis#

Around 1964, influenced by his work with Terry Riley on the composition In C and Riley’s use of tape looping and delay systems, Reich started experimenting with these techniques as well. Up until January 1968, the full title of It’s Gonna Rain was It’s Gonna Rain, or meet Brother Walter in Union Square after listening to Terry Riley. The source material of It’s Gonna Rain consists entirely of a tape recording made in 1964 at San Francisco’s Union Square. In the recording, a Pentecostal preacher, Brother Walter, rails about the end of the world, while accompanying background noises, including the sound of a pigeon taking flight, are heard. The piece opens with the story of Noah, and the phrase “It’s Gonna Rain” is repeated and eventually looped throughout the first half of the piece. For the recording, Reich used two normal Wollensak tape recorders with the same recording, originally attempting to align the phrase with itself at the halfway point (180 degrees). However, due to the imprecise technology in 1965, the two recordings fell out of sync, with one tape gradually falling ahead or behind the other due to minute differences in the machines, the length of the spliced tape loops, and playback speed. Reich decided to exploit what is known as phase shifting, where all possible repeated harmonies are explored before the two loops eventually get back in sync. The following year, Reich created another composition, Come Out, in which the phrase “come out to show them” is looped to create the same effect. The work is in two parts of roughly equal length, the first using the “It’s Gonna Rain” sample as mentioned above, the second using a separate section of the speech with short phrases cut together and the resultant pattern then phased as in the first part, but with additional tape delay to create a more processed sound. During a lecture at the Long Now Foundation, electronic musician Brian Eno cited It’s Gonna Rain as his first experience with minimalism and the genre that would come to be known as ambient music.

Music for 18 Musicians

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Composition#

Music for 18 Musicians was composed between May 1974 and March 1976. Rehearsals began in early 1975. Instrumentation shifted throughout early rehearsals; eventually, Reich settled on “three marimbas, two xylophones, vibraphone, maracas, violin, cello, two clarinets doubling on bass clarinets, four women’s voices, and four pianos”. The composition and performance process was iterative and collaborative. Performers developed cues for one another, sometimes relying on a particular sound and sometimes on a specific musician. In his introduction to the score, Reich mentions that although the piece is named Music for 18 Musicians, it is not necessarily advisable to perform the piece with that few players due to the extensive need for musicians to perform on multiple instruments.

Music for a Large Ensemble

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Sources#

*LaBarbara, Joan (June 1980). “Three by Reich”, High Fidelity/Musical America 29, no.6: MA 12 quoted in Fink, Robert (2005). Repeating Ourselves: American Minimal Music as Cultural Practice. .

New York Counterpoint

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

History#

The piece was commissioned in 1984 by clarinetist Richard Stoltzman for nine B-flat clarinets and three bass clarinets. This was the second in Reich’s “counterpoint” series, preceded by Vermont Counterpoint (1982) for flutes, and followed by Electric Counterpoint (1987) for electric guitars and Cello Counterpoint (2003) for celli. Each of these works are scored for one live performer who plays against up to a dozen recordings of the same instrument. The canonic interplay in the composition creates multiple layers of sound, akin to Reich’s earlier phase pieces. Out of the series, New York Counterpoint is considered the most rhythmically intricate and one of Reich’s most well known works. The second movement of the piece was featured as a set work for Edexcel music A level between 2005 and 2016

Pendulum Music

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Notable recordings#

Experimental rock group Sonic Youth recorded the piece on its 1999 album SYR4: Goodbye 20th Century. The Avant-Garde Ensemble recorded three different versions of “Pendulum Music”. In 2014, composer Daniel Fishkin created a new transcription of the piece, in which, instead of using audio feedback, the feedback takes place in the domain of light, using solar cells and oscilloscopes instead of microphones and loudspeakers. In 2012, Richard D James performed a version of the piece using lasers reflected off of giant Newton’s cradles.

Piano Phase

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

History#

Piano Phase represents Steve Reich’s first attempt to apply his “phasing” technique. Reich had earlier used tape loops in It’s Gonna Rain (1965) and Come Out (1966), but wanted to apply the technique to live performance. Reich carried out a hybrid test with Reed Phase (1966), combining an instrument (a soprano saxophone) and a magnetic tape. Not having two pianos at his disposal, Reich experimented by first recording a piano part on tape, and then trying to play mostly in sync with the recording, albeit with slight shifts, or phases, with occasional re-alignments of the twelve successive notes against each other. Reich found the experience satisfying, showing that a musician can phase with concentration. With the premiere of Reed Phase at Fairleigh Dickinson University in early 1967, Reich and a musician friend, Arthur Murphy, had the opportunity to attempt Piano Phase with two pianos in live concert. Reich discovered that it was possible to dispense with tape and phase without mechanical assistance. Reich experimented phasing with several versions, including a version for four electric pianos titled Four Pianos dating from March 1967, before settling on a final version of the piece written for two pianos.

Proverb (Reich)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Recordings#

“Proverb/Nagoya Marimbas/City Life” with Paul Hillier, Theatre of Voices, Bradley Lubman, Jay Elfenbein, Jeanne LeBlanc, on Nonesuch Records, October 15, 1996.
“Steve Reich 1965-1995 Box Set " on Nonesuch Records, June 3, 1997.
The score of Proverb is available for rental from Boosey & Hawkes.
YouTube: Steve Reich - Proverb.

References#

Paul Griffiths. “Steve Reich”, Grove Music Online, ed. L. Macy (accessed September 13, 2006), grovemusic.com (subscription access).
Woodley, Ronald. ‘Steve Reich’s Proverb, Canon, and a little Wittgenstein’ in Canons and Canonic Techniques, 14th-16th centuries: Theory, Practice and Reception history. Proceedings of the International Conference, 2005. pp. 457-end
Composer’s notes, Boosey and Hawkes.

Radio Rewrite

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Background#

Reich is one of the founders of the minimalist movement in music. While his work takes inspiration from Baroque music, Igor Stravinsky, jazz, Hebrew cantillation and West African and Balinese music, the composer states that he has composed only two earlier pieces that directly reference material from existing music. Reich does not describe himself as a fan of rock music, and had never previously investigated the potential of western pop/rock music for such treatment. Reich says he is happy for disc jockeys to remix his work.

Reed Phase

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

History#

Reed Phase was composed in 1966 for Jon Gibson, the score having been finished in December 1966. The world premiere was given by Gibson in the art gallery of Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey on January 5, 1967, under the title Saxophone Phase, and was repeated in New York at the Park Place Gallery on March 17, 1967. The score was published the next year in a version “for any reed instrument and two channel tape or three reeds”, now retitled Reed Phase or Three Reeds. Reed Phase is the first work in which Reich attempted to apply the discoveries of phasing made with the tape works It’s Gonna Rain (1965) and Come Out (1966) to live performance. It represents a transitional stage in that it combined, in its original version, live instrumental performance and tape accompaniment. A technical difference between the tape and live mediums is that in the former, phasing was accomplished by slowing down one tape loop against the other, using the technique of flanging, whereas in the instrumental compositions it proved easier for one player to speed up against the other’s fixed tempo. From the listener’s point of view, however, the difference in effect is indistinguishable. Reed Phase begins a sequence, followed directly by Piano Phase and Violin Phase (both 1967), in which the composer explores phasing technique for a single performer with tape and, in the case of Piano Phase, just two players. The two later compositions are among the most familiar of Reich’s early works but Reed Phase has remained relatively unknown, in part because Reich soon came to regard it as a failure. Already with the publication of his collected Writings about Music in 1974, he excluded it from the compositions he regarded as “worth keeping”, and never mentions the work in that book, even in passing. Later, Reich characterized the work as “discarded”. The limited harmonic material aside, Reich had come to realise that unusual numbers of beats, such as the quintuple meter of Reed Phase, offered less than they initially suggested. In Piano Phase, work on which was already begun in late 1966, he chose a pattern of twelve eighth notes, subdivided into two groups of six, and began to discover the possibilities of metric reorientation which lay behind the potential subdivisions of a twelve-beat pattern. Twelve-unit rhythmic patterns

Sextet (Reich)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Analysis#

Sextet plays with two aspects of music. First, it tries to overcome natural acoustic limitations of percussion instruments. Vibraphones are normally incapable of sustaining pitches at the same volume like wind or string instruments; they act much like a piano, where notes are struck and then allowed to ring, eventually decaying. To counter this limitation, Reich employs the extended technique of bowing of the bars with a bass bow. A similar limitation in the percussion section is countered by the use of the synthesizers. At the time Sextet was written, keyboard percussion instruments capable of reaching into the bass range (5-octave marimbas or bass marimbas) were not widely available. To give the work more depth in the lower pitch ranges, the bass drum is employed with doubling from the pianos or synthesizers. Second, the piece plays with ambiguity. In the third movement, a basic 12-beat pattern is ambiguous between a division into three and into four. In other parts of the piece, the line that was the melody becomes the accompaniment, even though the actual notes do not change.

Six Pianos

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Structure#

The piece begins with four pianists playing different notes to the same 8-beat rhythmic pattern. Then two more pianists begin to play the same pattern shifted two beats out of phase. (Phasing is a prominent technique in most of Steve Reich’s work.) Different phase shifts of the same motifs fade in and out of the ever-changing musical texture for the duration of the piece. The piece also uses the additive technique of gradually building up parts by substituting notes for rests, and the opposite. Six Pianos is also notable by being one of Reich’s only pieces in duple time. Six Pianos has three sections, separated by relatively sudden changes of tonal center, though they all use the same seven pitch classes of the D major diatonic scale. The first section is in D major, with the tonality anchored in place by a persistent pattern of D and A in the bass. Then that pattern slowly fades out, leaving a B minor tonality which serves as a short transition to the second section in E Dorian. A sudden transition leads to the third section in B natural minor. Six Marimbas follows the same structure, but is transposed down by one semitone so that the piece opens in D flat major and concludes in B flat natural minor.

Tehillim (Reich)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Title#

The title comes from the Hebrew word for “psalms”, and the work is the first to reflect Reich’s Jewish heritage. It is in four parts, marked fast, fast, slow, and fast. Tehillim is the setting of Psalms 19:2–5 (19:1–4 in Christian translations); Psalm 34:13–15 (34:12–14); Psalm 18:26–27 (18:25–26); and finally Psalm 150:4–6. “Literally translated the word Tehillim means ‘praises’,” writes Steve Reich in his composer’s notes, “and it derives from the three letter Hebrew root ‘hey, lamed, lamed’ (hll) which is also the root of halleluyah.”

The Cave (opera)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Plot#

The main narrative thread that runs through the opera is the story of the life of Abraham, as it is told in the various religious texts, and how this story is now understood and interpreted, using modern-day accounts by individual people from three different major religious and cultural contexts. During the individual interviews, Steve Reich and Beryl Korot asked questions such as “Who is Abraham?”, “Who is Sarah?” and “Who is Ishmael?” and recorded answers that were given by Israeli, Palestinian and American interviewees. These three groups of people viewed the story of Abraham/Ibrahim and his immediate family in varying ways. Brief spoken extracts from the interviews were used both as they were recorded during the interviews, but also as repeated musical phrases. The melodic phrases used in the opera are all taken directly from the intonation, tone, stress, and rhythm of the natural spoken phrases and sentences used by the individuals interviewed. In other words, the musical phrases are based on the prosody which can be heard in the phrases and sentences spoken by the individuals. Images of the interviewees are also shown on an array of video screens.

The Desert Music

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Orchestration#

The piece is scored for a chorus of 27 voices: nine sopranos, and six each of altos, tenors and basses. The orchestra calls for: * 4 flutes (doubling on 3 piccolos), 4 oboes (doubling on 3 cor anglais), 4 B clarinets (doubling on 3 B bass clarinets), 4 bassoons (doubling on 1 contrabassoon) * 4 horns, 4 trumpets (doubling on 1 optional piccolo trumpet), 2 trombones, bass trombone, tuba. * 2 timpani players (doubling rototoms); 7 percussionists (including 2 players on marimba; 2 players on vibraphone; 2 players on xylophones, doubling glockenspiels; maracas paired with sticks; 2 bass drums, and medium tam-tam). * 2 pianos, played by four musicians (doubling 3 synthesizers) * The strings (12-12-9-9-6) are broken into three sections of (4-4-3-3-2) seated by their section with the first set of 16 players stage right, the next 16 center stage, and the last 16 stage left There is also a reduced orchestration, prepared by Reich himself, for a chorus of 10 voices (3 sopranos, 3 altos, 2 tenors, 2 basses), accompanied by: * 4 flutes (doubling on 3 piccolos) * 2 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones (all brass optional) * 4 pianos, all doubling synthesizer * 12 solo strings, broken into three quartets, plus one or two basses No reductions are made in the percussion.

Three Tales (opera)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Summary#

The musical narrative of Three Tales follows “speech melodies” of pre-recorded interviews, and in many ways resembles Reich’s works The Cave (1990–1993), City Life (1995) and Different Trains (1988). The libretto of Three Tales can be found on the website of the composer (see bottom of page). Three Tales is a response to nearly a hundred years of modern technology, concerning the explosion of the Hindenburg, nuclear testings on Bikini Atoll, and the cloning of Dolly the sheep (drawing connections between genetic engineering and artificial intelligence). The different stories are told from various perspectives, with speech culled from interviews with eyewitnesses, audiovisual documentary material of both the Hindenburg and Bikini tragedies, and experts in computer science (e.g. Marvin Minsky and Kevin Warwick), artificial intelligence (Rodney Brooks), Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz, and genetic engineering (Richard Dawkins and Robert Pollack).

Variations for Winds, Strings and Keyboards

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Structure and Instrumentation#

Reich describes the piece as being in the form of a chaconne, variations on a repeated short harmonic progression. The piece has three variations of a complete cycle of harmonic progressions (C minor to C flat, and then gradually back through several keys to C minor), moving one note of a chord at a time, a process of suspension. The three movements are approximately six, ten, and nine minutes. The winds and keyboards (three oboes doubled by electric organs, alternating with three flutes doubled by pianos and electric organs) play the melody throughout. Harmonies are played by the strings doubled by organs. The brass add to the harmonies in the first and last sections of the piece. The chord form for the piece was taken from the opening of the second movement of Béla Bartók’s Second Piano Concerto. Reich initially wrote the first movement for only strings, with a significant amount of dissonance. He discarded that effort but kept the basic idea of suspensions, inverting the chords within a middle register to reduce the dissonance.

Violin Phase

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Structure#

Violin Phase is an example of Reich’s phasing technique, previously used in It’s Gonna Rain, Come Out, Reed Phase, and Piano Phase, in which the music itself is created not by the instruments but by interactions of temporal variations on an original melody. Music of this kind is generally referred to as process music. It is the third in a series of instrumental compositions (together with Reed Phase and Piano Phase) in which Reich explored the possibility of phasing in music for a live player with tape accompaniment or, in the case of Piano Phase, for just two players . In Violin Phase, two violins are recorded and played back, together at first. They are then made to go slowly out of sync by adding silence to one of the tapes. A new melody is formed by the interaction of the two out of sync instruments and is then accented by a third violin. This process is repeated with variations throughout the rest of the piece. The most conspicuous difference between a “live” process piece like Violin Phase and Reich’s tape pieces is that the latter consist of “pure phasing”, with a slow and regular rate of change, whereas the live pieces are “stepped”, alternating sections of gradual dephasing with sections of temporary rhythmic stability . Dominic Frasca arranged the piece for electric guitar and tape (or four electric guitars), recorded in 2001 as ‘Electric Guitar Phase’ and released on the album Steve Reich: Triple Quartet.

WTC 9/11

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Background#

The project began when the Kronos Quartet asked Reich to write a piece that utilized pre-recorded voice parts to go along with the music. Reich recalled an idea he had in 1973 of drawing out the end of the speaker’s words. In January 2010, Reich decided to use voice recordings related to the September 11 attacks, specifically recordings from the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) and the New York City Fire Department (FDNY), as well as parts of interviews with friends and neighbors of Reich that lived in Manhattan at the time of the attacks. Reich’s son, daughter-in law, and granddaughter were staying in Reich’s apartment, four blocks from the World Trade Center, at the time of the attacks. WTC 9/11 is the third “major commission” for Reich to write for the Kronos Quartet.