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Steve Reich - Process music and Minimalism

Steve Reich - Process music and Minimalism: Encyclopedia II - Steve Reich - Process music and Minimalism

Early on, Reich was influenced by fellow minimalist Terry Riley. Riley's loosely structured aleatoric work In C combines simple musical patterns, offset in time, to create a slowly shifting, cohesive whole. Reich adopted this approach to compose his first major work, It's Gonna Rain. Written in 1965, It's Gonna Rain is made up of recordings of a sermon about the end of the world given by the African American Pentecostal preacher Brother Walter. The sermon was transferred to multiple tape loops played in and o ...

Steve Reich: Encyclopedia II - Steve Reich - Process music and Minimalism

Steve Reich - Process music and Minimalism

Early on, Reich was influenced by fellow minimalist Terry Riley. Riley's loosely structured aleatoric work In C combines simple musical patterns, offset in time, to create a slowly shifting, cohesive whole. Reich adopted this approach to compose his first major work, It's Gonna Rain. Written in 1965, It's Gonna Rain is made up of recordings of a sermon about the end of the world given by the African American Pentecostal preacher Brother Walter. The sermon was transferred to multiple tape loops played in and out of phase, with segments of the sermon cut and rearranged.

Come Out (1966) was constructed along similar lines. A single spoken line given by an injured survivor of a race riot is manipulated. The survivor, who had been beaten, punctured a bruise on his own body to convince police about his beating. The spoken line includes the phrase "to let the bruise blood come out to show them." Reich rerecorded the fragment "come out to show them" on two channels, which are initially played in unison. They quickly slip out of sync; gradually the discrepancy widens and becomes a reverberation. The two voices then split into four, looped continuously, then eight, and continues splitting until the actual words are unintelligible, leaving the listener with only the rhythmic and tonal patterns of speech.

The 11-minute piece is an example of process music. So is 1968's Pendulum Music, which consists of the sound of a microphone swinging over a loudspeaker, producing feedback as it swings. (Pendulum Music was recorded by Sonic Youth in the late 1990s.)

Reich's first attempt at applying this phasing technique to live performance rather than recorded work was the 1967 Piano Phase, for two pianos. The performers begin by repeating a rapid twelve-note melodic figure in unison. One player continues, keeping tempo with robotic precision, while the other slowly speeds up until they are lined up, one note apart, and then resumes the previous tempo. The cycle of speeding up and locking in continues throughout the piece, with a new figure being introduced once the original figure has come full circle. Violin Phase, also written in 1967, is built on these same lines, a theme later explored in Clapping Music (1972) and The Desert Music (1984). Piano Phase and Violin Phase both premiered in a series of concerts given in New York art galleries.

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Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Process music and Minimalism", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki

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