A recent run of New York concerts look back at the composer's conceptual origins
In the 1979 essay “Avant-Garde Issues in Seventies Music,” composer Thomas DeLio retells the momentous changes in experimental composition that unfolded throughout the decade, as artists began to shift their attention to the “mechanisms” of perceiving and constructing “creative acts.” Perhaps no figure in the era’s avant-garde is more closely associated with the turn to systemically produced music than Steve Reich, a composer who unreservedly embraced the approach of making “pieces of music that are, literally, processes.” This October, Reich celebrated his ninetieth birthday with two concerts at New York’s Park Avenue Armory and Carnegie Hall, which showcased landmark compositions from his extensive catalogue.
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Across three nights at the Armory, musicians from the Steve Reich Ensemble, Alarm Will Sound, and the Manhattan School of Music’s group Tactus performed three productions of Reich’s masterpiece Music for 18 Musicians, composed between 1974 and 1976. The durational nature of the Armory’s production—the fifty-five-minute piece was performed in its entirety three times, without intermissions—placed particular emphasis on what DeLio described as Reich’s “gradualism,” a technique that transforms an audience’s perception of an unchanging musical phrase through constant and slow-moving alteration of its context. By the late 1970s, this gradualism had clearly cemented itself as one of the hallmarks of Reich’s style.
Music for 18 Musicians was composed in a similar manner to other Reich works from the 1970s; it builds from a simple repeated sequence to include “more and more notes . . . until the complete pattern is heard and the main body of the piece begins.” As DeLio noted of the earlier composition Drumming, the compositional gesture “affirms to the listener the importance of that pattern as the central element of the structure and the subject to which all subsequent activity will be addressed.” When performed at the Armory, Music for 18 Musicians incrementally transitioned through its eleven sections in three cycles, habituating the audience to the rhythms of the work’s evolution as they learned to recognize and anticipate each coming shift. While the piece undoubtedly contains “multiple views of a single gesture within the context of gradual transformation,” the threefold repetition highlighted the universal intelligibility of Reich’s compositional processes, as the various musicians and performance styles inevitably produced the piece’s signature patterns and pulses.
For those interested in DeLio’s roundup of Minimalist and experimental composition, read “Avant-Garde Issues in Seventies Music” from Artforum’s September 1979 issue. Steve Reich’s ninetieth-birthday celebrations will continue on December 8 with a performance at the New York Philharmonic.
–Theo Belci
And explore more essays on Steve Reich from Artforum‘s archive. . .
May 1972: An Interview with Composer Steve Reich
March 1999: Remix and Match: Steve Reich
March 1974: Steve Reich