February 3, 2006

Adam Bard, 0330183

Steve Reich

Minimalist composer and electronic music pioneer Steve Reich was born in New York in 1936. He began studying music at the age of 14, and took Music Courses at Cornell University, although he graduated with a degree in Philosophy in 1957. He studied at Julliard from 1958-1961, and then proceeded to Mills College, from which he graduated with a master's degree in musical composition. During this time he studied with such names as Hall Overton, William Bergsma, Vincent Persichetti, Luciano Berio, and Darius Milhaud.

Reich describes his earliest works as being influenced heavily by Terry Riley, an American minimalist composer. Specifically, Reich used the concept of Riley's song In C as the base for his own first major composition, It's Gonna Rain. It's Gonna Rain was produced using a clip from a recording of a black pentecostal preacher named Brother Walter preaching a sermon about Noah's Ark. In an interview, he describes the accident that lead him to compose the piece, using a technique he calls “phasing”:

“I put on headphones (which were stereo with each ear with a separate plug going into the two machines). By chance, two machines were lined up in unison. So what I heard was this unison sound sort of swimming in my head, spatially moving back and forth. It finally moved over to the left, which meant that the machine on the left was slightly faster passing in speed than the machine on the right. So the apparent phenomenon in your head is the sound moving to the left, moves down your left shoulder and then across the floor! (laughs) Then after a while, it comes into an imitation and then finally after four or five minutes, you hear "it's gonna... it's gonna... rain... rain...”

The first 7 minutes of It's Gonna Rain are composed of a two-track looping of the title phrase. This segment is popularly referred to as “part 1” of It's Gonna Rain. The second part is more complex, consisting of several clips pasted together and looped in the style of the first in two channels, then splitting into four and eight channels later in the piece, becoming progressively more chaotic and never truly resolving.

The piece is about the Cuban Missle crisis:

“In those days, the voice was recorded in '64, you had the Cuban Missle Crisis and so it was very much a part of many peoples' thinking at that time. We were at the point where we could all turn into so much radioactive ash at any given time... So "It's Gonna Rain," especially the second half of it, is very bleak. You're literally hearing the world come apart.”

For the first displays of the piece, Reich suppressed the latter half of the piece, thinking it “too depressing.”

Reich's next major work was a similar piece entitled Come out, which he composed for civil rights activist Truman Nelson, to be played at the murder trial of six black youths who was involved in a race riot (one of the “Harlem Six”), of whom only one was actually guilty. The piece manipulates a quote from one of the youths, trying to prove that he was in fact a victim, and not a criminal: “I had to open the bruise up and let some of the bruise blood come out to show them.” The phrase “Come out to show them” is looped in the same manner as in It's Gonna Rain, although the recording of it is markedly more refined. Reich states that he purposely did not alter the voices to retain the human effect: “By not altering its pitch or timbre, one keeps the original emotional power that speech has while intensifying its melody and meaning through repetition and rhythm.”

Reich later moved on to compose a number of pieces translating this “phasing” theory into performance. Violin Phase and Piano Phase both involve a short, repeated riff (performed on the respective title instruments) that is performed by several people, in which one player plays slightly faster than the other to create a similar effect to his two voice compositions. His final work with this technique is Drumming, composed in 1971.

In contrast to his earlier process pieces (pieces characterized not by rhythm or melody but rather the process used to create the music), Reich's later compositions are far more traditional music, although calling these pieces “traditional” is a great stretch at best and an outright lie at worst. His most accessible and famous work is entitled Music for 18 Musicians, which, predictable, was performed by Reich and 17 other individuals. Although Music for 18 Musicians features some very electronic-sounding elements, such as the pulsing that permeates the entire piece, Reich notes that the piece contained more harmonic movement in the first five minutes then any other work he had written up to that time. The piece is 56 minutes long.

Reich has composed dozens of major pieces since his “debut” in 1965, and performed in many more. He is considered a major pioneer of electronic music, and his works have heavily influenced innumerable artists.