Steve Reich – Music for Pieces of Wood

I was entranced by this music. Once all claves were playing I stopped moving and blinking. I had to keep listening. I am a huge fan of percussion, so it’s no wonder I love not only this piece of Steve Reich genius, but his Clapping Music as well.

There are three distinct parts to this piece, which can be determined by their key signatures. Part one is in 6/4, part two in 4/4 and part three in 3/4. There isn’t much of the music either, just a mere 59 bars. What is most amazing about this piece is how the different rhythms blend in to each other. Without looking at the score, it’s hard to tell just when a new rhythm begins and another ends. I suppose this is helped by Reich’s performance notes, in which he states that “…when you hear that a particular pattern has become clear and absorbed by yourself and the audience, move on to the next bar.” This also removed the horrible pressure of knowing when to move bar, and removes the fear of losing one’s place in the music. Another element of this piece that I love, is that a lot of how it sounds is up to the performers’ interpretation: the tempo, the duration and the dynamics are all up to the particular performer.

An absolute joy to analyse.

Emma

 

Steve Reich – City Life Pt 2: Pile-drivers/Alarms

I have decided that I quite like Steve Reich’s stuff, having not listened to much of it till this year.

Steve Reich’s “City Life” is a minimalist work in which samples are used. These samples were recorded by Reich himself around his home city of New York. I have been toying with the idea of sampling real life sounds into my compositions, and hearing part two of “City Life”,  Pile-driver/Alarms has only heightened my curiosity. I decided to focus on only this part of “City Life”, as it was this particular movement that really caught my attention.

Reich uses the sampled sound of a pile-driver to maintain the rhythm and drive of the entire piece, it maintains and manipulates the tempo throughout the piece. He also incorporates alarm sounds, which then accentuate the beat. When listening to the orchestral side of things, there seems to be an underlying tension throughout the piece, a tension that doesn’t get released. As the audience expects the orchestra to release the tension, they instead here the sounds of the alarms. The texture is quite chordal near the beginning, but by the end many of the sections split off from that, playing their own little snippets of melody. The piece then ends with the beginning of the next section “It’s been a honeymoon!”

 

Emma

Steve Reich- Music for 18 Musicians

Music for 18 Musicians is probably Steve Reichs most well known piece and is considered to be a prime example of minimalism. The term ‘minimalism’ itself has been applied to describe the style of composition from the likes of Steve Reich, Terry Riley, Phillip Glass and many others (so ‘minimalism,’ as it was first conceived during the 60′s-70′s). That particular era of minimalism focused on a limited used of pitch material and rhythmic values, with pieces that tended to last between 15 minutes, to up to several hours.

Nowadays, aspects of minimalism can be found in the music of artists as diverse as LFO, Aphex Twin, The Orb, Stars of the Lid, just to name a few. Therefore, it is silly to pigeonhole an artist into the ‘minimalism’ category, since concepts such as repetition can be found in genres across the board.

Music for 18 Musicians can then be considered a precursor to what electronic dance music and ambient music would realise in the years to come. Aspects such as short, repeated fragments, simple (minimal) harmonic structures, strict rhythmic values, a strong focus on timbral quality and a lengthy, drawn out compositional process. Its influence not only resonates with the evolution of musical technology, but also towards the aspiring mind of the artist, as the simplicity of minimalism is quite easy to replicate for anyone with a drum machine or an appropriate digital-audio-workstation. This is perhaps why so many aspects of minimalism appear in such vast quantities of contemporary music today,

Shannon Barnes

Steve Reich – Music for 18 Musicians

This is a brilliant minimalist work which I thoroughly enjoyed having a listen to.

The instrumentation is the first thing that captures the attention: Reich has used violin, cello, 2 clarinets/bass clarinets, 4 pianos, 3 marimbas, 2 xylophones and vibraphone as well as four female singers (SSSA).

As is the case in many of Reich’s most well-known compositions, rhythm plays a key creative role. Music for 18 Musicians contains two different kinds of time which occur simultaneously. There is first and foremost a seemingly never-ending rhythmic pulse provided by the pianos and mallet instruments. Secondly, there is the rhythm of the human breath in the voices and clarinets; the musicians are instructed to take a full breath, then sing or play pulses of particular notes for as long as they can sustain that breath. The end of a particular phrase or measure occurs when the musicians are out of breath. There is then a small gap (filled, of course, by the constant pulsing of the mallets) before the next “human breath” comes along. Reich has enhanced this concept by including a crescendo-diminuendo through each rhythmic phrase. The result is comparable to that of waves rolling evenly onto a beach before once again receding back out into the ocean; it is a fantastic effect to listen to.

One of my favourite aspects of this piece was the texture and timbre created by the interesting set of instruments. Apart from providing the important rhythmic movement, the vibrant, tinny resonance of the mallets and pianos are an essential element in this piece, blending superbly with the wholesome, mellow clarinet sound, the chunky string instruments and the somewhat lighter-sounding singers (whose voices are actually quite hard to pick up; they sit beautifully in the timbre’s framework). I particularly enjoyed hearing the syncopated clarinet harmonies which appear at numerous times throughout the composition. The overall atmosphere created through this piece, I found, was incredibly uplifting and powerful. Well worth a listen.

-Tully

Steve Reich – Different Trains

A wonderful piece to end the semester of blogging. Although Different Trains does require quite a bit of context explanation.

This is the piece which started the hugely successful ‘documentary music’ compositional genre of the late 1980s. Actually, I’m not sure whether this genre ever took off at all, but Reich gave it one hell of a good try. The idea for the piece came from Reich’s childhood, when, after his parents separated, he was made to travel back and forth frequently between New York and Los Angeles from 1939 to 1942. Looking back on these numerous exciting trips, Reich notes how, as a Jew, he would have been riding very ‘different trains’ over in Europe. He therefore wanted to create a piece which reflected the entire situation of that time.

In preparation for the piece, Reich recorded the musings of a number of people relevant to that time in his childhood; among them his governess, who always travelled with Reich on the journeys, and a retired porter who also used to ride between New York and Los Angeles at the same time as Reich.

The next step was to combine the recorded speech with string instruments (2 violins, viola and cello). In order to do this, Reich selected very brief speech samples which were almost clearly pitched, and which could be accurately notated for music. The result is that the strings literally imitate the speech melodies. In performance, a pre-recorded tape containing the speech samples, a variety of train sounds, as well as three separate string quartets is used. Another string quartet then plays a fourth live part.

All sounds a bit too hard to pull off? Not so; as soon as the driving, vibrant string patterns appear in the first movement, you can almost see that young boy, excited to be travelling on the train as he goes to visit one of his parents. The speech samples, which include phrases such as ‘from Chicago to New York’, ‘one of the fastest trains’, and ‘different trains every time’, fit in with the string parts quite comfortably. They reinforce the notion that even our everyday speech can be translated into interesting musical motifs.

It may be hard for a listener to know what is going on in this piece if they don’t understand what context it was written in, but after reading the performance notes I really did begin to see the situation that Reich was trying to express. The upbeat and positive sounding first movement, titled ‘America – Before the war’, is in stark contrast to the second and third movements, titled ‘Europe – During the war’ and ‘After the war’ respectively. These sections evidently convey the feelings of terror and misery which defined this appalling period of the 20^th century.

- Tully

Reich, S. Music for Pieces of Wood (rhythmic variation)

Reich is an American composer with minimalist roots. He began his career as a percussionist, so it’s really no wonder why his work is very rhythmically based. The piece is composed for 5 musicians each playing a pair of claves.  I found looking at the score the instructions for the musicians were very detailed, which showed something similar to what Luciano Berio would have done. His influence is evident in Reich’s work because during his time at Julliard he studied his works of serialism. From the beginning there is a constant metronomic beat that continues throughout. The second player follows this with a 12-note pattern, which lays down the foundation for the other players who play the same 12 note motif either in unison or in an off beat pattern.Once the piece reached a sort of climax the melodic subject matter then reversed, stripping the material until only the first melodic idea is heard.This build-up/stripping in repeated until exhausted and makes for quite a great minimalist work.

- Sascha

Steve Reich – Music for Pieces of Wood

I have just had my first taste of Steve Reich in the form of Music for Pieces of Wood. And what a piece it is. Take five claves, all specifically tuned to a set of pitches (Reich says this should be done by power sanding the clave), then throw in rhythmic pattern after rhythmic pattern. Genius.

The piece can be divided into 3 sections depending on time signature: 6/4, 4/4 and 3/4. There are only 59 bars, but each of these bars is repeated a certain amount of times; in the 6/4 section, the bars can be repeated around 5 to 9 times, in the 4/4 section around 10 to 16 times and in the 3/4 section around 12 to 18 times. The number of approximate repeats is written above the clave part which is responsible for making the change to the next bar. Other musical elements such as tempo, duration and to an extent dynamics also depend on the performers’ interpretations.

Reich obviously did not want to have individual players counting endless repeats in each bar and therefore becoming unsure as to when to change. As he advises in the performance notes, “…when you hear that a particular pattern has become clear and absorbed by yourself and the audience, move on to the next bar.” This appears to have been Reich’s intention with Music for Pieces of Wood; he did not want each rhythmic change to be distinguishable. Rather, each rhythmic pattern or motif should blend into the next, in turn creating an ongoing, seemingly never-ending musical experience. This is certainly what I felt when listening to the music with my eyes closed.

- Tully

Steve Reich’s “Music for Pieces of Wood”

When I first approached the score of this piece, I thought it would be relatively easy to listen to and analyse. This was not the case! Reich’s “Music for Pieces of Wood” is, I believe, deceptively versatile. The textural structure and dynamic organisation are constructed in a manner that makes any alterations presented subtle and difficult to identify. The shifts in beat probably don’t even affect the listener at the conscious level, and you can listen to the music in many different ways.

Firstly, you can listen to it as a musical example of foreground and background. I believe that for many parts of the piece that this is the easiest, as the most prominant parts at any particular time have the loudest dynamics. However, as the pieces of wood are tuned to different pitches, I found it was also possible to isolate each part and identify its relationship with the other parts. Thus, Reich separates the textural elements through both pitch and dynamics – which I think is very clever, and makes the music far more interesting to listen to.

Simultaneously, the individual parts can “blend in” to the texture by doubling another part. I really liked bars 27-29 when four parts were doubling one another, and three of them slowly faded away. This effect is really unusual to listen to – especially without seeing a performance! – because it changes so slowly and yet so suddenly that it made me wonder what had happened (even though I was following the score!). At one point near the end I felt tired and stopped listening “actively” (i.e., I stopped following the individual parts), to find myself immersed in a bed of sound. I loved this! If you haven’t tried this, I really recommend it! I think that Reich constructed this by ensuring that there were no rests present in that bar.

In the end, what I liked most about this piece was the fact that you could have many different perspectives on how it sounds. This, to me, makes a piece far more worth listening to and far more enjoyable than a piece where the composer allows you to only have one perspective – such as Rossini’s William Tell Overture, for instance.

Timothy

Reich’s Music For 18 Musicians

This was a rather rewarding listen. It’s certainly changed the way i view music. This piece goes hand in hand with what Peter had been talking about in regards to transformation. “Music for 18 Musicians” is a minimalist piece composed on the 70s. It’s a piece based around a cycle of 11 chords with a small piece of music based around each chord. Reich uses loops (or repeat signs) to sustain the textures. In terms of musical material, there really isn’t much and it stays in the same key throughout. By ‘throughout’, I mean 55 minutes. Did it get boring? Well, sometimes. You can really follow how the main theme changes through its many transformations.

The texture of the piece was very interesting. The pianos and the marimbas served as kind of a background layer for the other more melodic parts. The way they did this is through repetitive ongoing quaver notes forming a chord. So, as you can probably imagine, it’s a fairly light and rich sounding kind of thing that just keeps stabbing away.

The clarinets have an interesting function and some sections in their parts are notated quite strangely. Reich wanted them to fade in and out whilst jabbing at overblown quaver notes. Sonically, it’s very interesting as it sounds like a train or car going by. Only, without the doppler effect.

The vibraphones function as a melodic instruments, but it also acts as a cue for when to move on to the next loop.

A highly rewarding listen.

Scott

Steve Reich – City Life

Oh god, where are the ladders?

City Life by Steve Reich is a minimalist piece that probably got its name from its use of samples. Throughout the piece we here car alarms, horns, brakes, boats. as well as vocal samples “check this out”, “stand by” and many others. The piece is divided into 5 sections, recognisable due to the samples used in that particular section. The first section, “Check it out” started off with some chords that for some reason seemed to scream Sim City. The following section has a really cool texture, with two parts playing an unothodox rhythm one beat apart from each other. The use of samples I found to be particularly brilliant, although I’m not sure why. They just worked. The long chords were often accompanied by a car horn sample or the sound of a door being slammed, and they really fit the mood of the piece.

In the second section, “Piledriver/Alarms”, the piece starts to become much more rhythmically strong, with the samples being used to accentuate the beat. The piledriver becomes almost like a metronome pulse in the first minute or so, then after the tempo change it is used in conjunction with the alarms to accenuate the beat. “It’s been a honeymoon”, part three, uses great repetition on the sample of the same name, and has some dissonent chords in the background. Eventually the sample is accompanied by a particularly dissonant chord and slowly the emphasis fades from the sample to the instruments. Later a second sample is heard and the samples once again becomes the focus. Again, the instruments slowly take the attention and there is some interesting counterpoint between the samples and instruments.

“Heartbeats/Boats and Buoys” features, as you would expect, a heartbeat sample and samples of boats (any buoys). A very dissonant section, there is something particularly disconcerting about the sound of the boat that comes in throughout. There is a low drone thoughout the section that mimics the sound of the boat. “Heavy smoke” uses samples from the NYC Fire Department the day the world trade centre was bombed. The alarms of the fire engines mark the tempo, and the samples are used frantically, often in conjunction with a very frantic rhythm from the instruments.

Overall I found this an incredible piece of music, the sample use was absolutely brilliant, and the rhythmic material was really interesting, as you’d expect from a Reich piece.

Nathan