Steve Reich - Six Pianos. Brillant.

[Rabrrrrrr]

WOW! I love this piece. Listening to it now after being away from it for many months. I think I like Six Marimbas better (in terms of music of this type from the oeuvre of Reich), but then, that's like asking, Is sex better in the morning or the evening. And I think the only reason I like the marimba piece better is that the tone is mellower and not so percussive as a piano is - little easier on the ears.

I don't know if there's anything of Reich's that I don't like.

[wtmusic]

1. Ever play 'Clapping Music'?

[Rabrrrrrr]

2. Yes, I've performed it a few times

(though without permission, so please don't tell, but never for money anyway)

That's a fun one! I even sang it once - friend and I that were performing it just made up sounds and pitches to go with the beats, instead of clapping. That was also fun.

[wtmusic]

3. It gets very funky with 5+ people

would be fun to try with a 'rhythm circle'

[Rabrrrrrr]

4. Never tried it with more than two!

With that many people, you could shift on the sixteenth notes, or even smaller!

[Ellen Forradalom]

5. I'm partial to Violin Phase

I heard it performed once when I was a kid.

[Rabrrrrrr]

6. Another good one!

As well as pendulum music. I have two recordings of that one.

But Reich really is best when heard live.

[Squeech]

7. Prefer the marimbas

But then, I love mallet instruments in general, to the point where I bought myself a cheap marimba. (I'm a horrible dilletante!)

There are Reich pieces I don't like. I've never warmed to Desert Music, and I think Octet is just too frothy, and The Four Sections didn't float my boat either. And it certainly requires heroic measures to sit through Four Organs!

My favorites are probably Music for 18 Musicians, Tehillim, and Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices and Organ. They all groove (in a way that Desert Music does not, IMHO) and their harmonic language, while sometimes arbitrarily complex (viz. Tehillim, part 3), seems to me to embody quite well the idea of ornamentation around a stable center. Kinda like the musical equivalent of a mandala, an intricate design that simultaneously offers you a riot of variation and a calm center upon which to meditate.

I like the early tape pieces too, Come Out as well as Violin Phase. I once read that Brian Eno had made a tape piece (never released) kinda like Come Out backwards, where the text started out as a phase-shifted blur and came into better focus as the piece progressed and the phases merged. So, back when I had a bunch of tape recorders at my disposal, I tried it myself. Didn't work well enough. There was one rough version of that scheme on a psychedelic rock record called The American Metaphysical Circus, by Joe Byrd and the Field Hippies: the intro to the song "You Can Never Come Down" performs just such a reverse phase shift on the first line of the song. (This is the same Joe Byrd who ran the early electronic rock group United States of America, and arranged and treated Phil Ochs' "Crucifixion.")

While I'm tooting my own minimalist horn, once upon a time I got a dozen people together to play Terry Riley's "In C," and it was great! (And we did Eno's "Here Come the Warm Jets" for an encore.) I'd like to do it again soon.

[Rabrrrrrr]

8. Tehillim is beautiful, as is Music for 18 Musicians

These are perhaps my two favorite. I've seen Tehillim performed live a couple times, and its always fan-fricking-tantastic, and fun to watch. Also got to see the Eastman school music ensemble perform Music for 18 Musicians, along with some of Reich's own peoplem (along with a lot of other Reich music) at Columbia two or three years when Columbia gave Reich a $50,000 composer's award and then had a slew of concerts over the course of the year.

Went to a performance at the 92nd street Y a couple years ago, which included a live mix tape/music by Laurie Anderson, but also Mark Morris (I think it was him - he performed that night, and I might be confused now) doing a dance to "It's Gonna Rain". I was there with a seminary class, and for the most part, the class hated that piece. I thought it was totally cool - but then I knew it. And the dance was really exciting.

I've long wanted to get a group together and perform In C, but haven't managed it yet.

[Squeech]

9. Never saw Tehillim live

I've seen Music for 18 Musicians a couple times. Reich was composer in residence at MIT, maybe ten years ago, and I think I remember the MIT student orchestra playing it. They also did a piece for eleven clarinets (Professor Evan Ziporyn is a clarinetist, and a third-generation minimalist composer, and runs the MIT student gamelan)-- was it City Life?-- and Music for Pieces of Wood, which I thought was lovely (I'd never heard it before). And I think I remember an open rehearsal where four string players grappled with Different Trains.

Before that I remember he and his ensemble played a concert at Harvard, and did 18 and Octet and (I think) Violin Phase with a tape.

And I've already told you my Music for Mallet Instruments story.

How I got my In C performance together was, I asked entire bands to chime in. I got two of the Birdsongs of the Mesozoic (since they'd already performed the piece as a band), and members of other local avant-garde bands Cul de Sac, Debris, Urban Ambience, and a bunch of other guys you've probably never heard of :-) Another friend of mine wangled a residency (like a grant, except without funding) at the Boston Center for the Arts, so we had a space to perform it in, and we just got up and did it. It was a double bill with some multimedia piece, poetry accompanying a slide show. I think everybody had fun, but I also think I'm the only guy who's really chomping at the bit to do it again. I think my circle of friends doesn't really like playing other people's notes.

[Rabrrrrrr]

10. I would think the toughest part of putting together an In C performance

is finding someone willing to hammer away at the piano for 45 mniutes. I just couldn't bring myself to ask someone to do that. :-)

And one can't perform it with recorded piano, since one never knows how long it will go...

have you heard The Cave? Saw a performance of it here, and was blown away by it as well. The recording is really good, but it's just not the same wihtout the visuals and watching the singers sing that impossible music from memory.

[Squeech]

15. We cheated on the pulse

I saved the high C's in a stomp box and set it for infinite loop :-)

Subsequently we did a radio performance (the Tufts college station) and I couldn't get the stomp box to work, and the station's piano was hopelessly trashed, so I did the pulse on the marimba. Before we did it, we were talking about the tedium of the pulse part, and somebody convinced me that the pulse player should seize the reins and go for dramatic variation, so I did: I sped up and slowed down, got louder and softer, at what seemed to me to be useful points. Never got to hear a tape of that performance, so I don't know how effective it was.

What I'd really like to do is finagle a regular "Open In C" event, in the same room every month, where people can show up and either play along or listen as they choose. I envision something in between a Messiah sing at Xmastime and when the Knitting Factory, in their capacity as the John Zorn Marching and Chowder Society, did "Cobra" one night a month for a couple years. What I don't know how to do is communicate the idea to an amateur musician who'd be interested in the idea if (s)he only knew about it. But then, that's the central problem of marketing in general, innit?

I have a whole rant about how In C trains you to improvise as well as it can be taught: that where non-improvisors are terrified of the idea that they have to think up their own notes, that in fact that's the least part of successful improv, that it's much more important to perceive your space within the ensemble. So here Riley gives you some notes, and you define your musical role using them, and you'll learn by doing whether your contribution helps the music sound good or not.

[Rabrrrrrr]

16. Damn, too bad you're not in NYC

I love the idea of an "Open In C" night!

[Squeech]

18. My long term plan

is to move to NYC, but it's gonna take about five more years at least. (More if the Pukes continue to mismanage the economy.) So keep the faith; I'll be there! And see if you can gather some like-minded musicians :-)

And thanks for the vote of confidence O8)

[Rabrrrrrr]

23. I hope you make it here!

This is the best place to be for music, in my opinion.

Also the best place to be to starve to death, but that's the price of paradise.

[Squeech]

17. Oh yeah, The Cave

They also did The Cave at MIT, without the visuals. Reich gave a lecture where he described the process he went through in composing it, emphasizing problems like when he found out that Islam forbids musical settings of Koranic texts, which meant he had to drop his original concept of a more elaborate polyglot Tehillim :-) Then he and the MIT student orchestra played the piece. It was lovely.

I got to talk to him some too. He mentioned that he found that writing for a full orchestra didn't suit him-- he said something like "I don't want to hear a dozen violins, I want to hear one amplified violin." So The Desert Music and Variations and The Four Sections represented a line of development that he didn't really want to pursue any more (and I think the implication was, he did it as long as he did because he kept getting commissions, but eventually he decided it wasn't worth it). Anyway, I also prefer his small ensemble work-- "small" being defined as "up to 18," which would of course count as "big" in the jazz world :-)

[Rabrrrrrr]

19. That makes sense

His music requires a real clarity of line and precision, and slinging together a whole mess of one instrument on the same line makes a mush. hadn't thought of it that way, but that could be why desert music was so much better with the small ensemble than with the big orchestra.

His music really does treat each intrument (and voice) as a solo instrument. So even the second violins and altos get interesting parts. :-)

[Squeech]

27. Reminds me of something else he said

As you know, many of the instrumental parts in Different Trains imitate the pitch contours of the spoken parts (on the tape). Most of the voices, especially the men's voices, were in viola range, so-- as opposed to most of the string quartet literature in the history of Western art music-- the viola has the most intricate part. The way Reich put it was, "There are no viola jokes in Different Trains!" I'm sure it was a line he'd saved up for situations like this, but nonetheless I thought it was cool :-)

Yeah, he's a nice guy, very approachable. And the wonderful thing is, his music makes him happy. That's where I want to be when I grow up-- somewhere (in New York?), playing my own music and grinning :-)

[Rabrrrrrr]

20. There's also a DVD of his last piece he did with Beryl

You can find it in the CD section at your record store - it's the one with the three pieces: Hindenberg, Bikini, and Dolly. And it cinludes the video.

If you haven't seen those, this was a new step in the direction he'd been going with Differetnt Trains, then The Cave, et. al., in which he takes spoken voice and matches instruments to the pitches, etc. Except in this one, he finally had the technology to change the pitch of the speach without screwing it up, so that he could write music to go with it but that would stay in one key. Before he pretty much had to change key of the instruments whenever he changed recorded speach, which was really difficult to do. Now he can change the key of the spoken stuff, and give the instruments a better time (and make the music more interesting by allowing key changes when it makes sense, instead of forcing them every couple measures).

I saw all three performed at BAM last year, and they were very cool (and with a Reich lecture before the show, which is where I picked up the info I just gave you).

[Rabrrrrrr]

14. Also wanted to say two other things:

And forgot them.

I'm with you about the Desert Music - I luike it, but it doesn't groove me like the others. But it was also my first introduction to Reich (around the same time I was also introduced to Glass), and had a profound impact on my own musical authority - I was finally exposed to a kind of music I had imagined and thought possible. I was simultaneously excited that my ideas were "legitimate", but also saddened that someone had been there first...

During the concert series at Columbia, I had a chance to hear Desert Music performed by the Eastman school. Instead of using full choir they used only soloists (12 or 14, I think it comes out to) to cover the vocal parts, and the orchestra was toned down to chamber size. THAT was cool! Sounded better than the full orchestra sized score, but I did miss the lushness that one gets with a full choir. Also quite impressive to see those 18-20 year olds, especially the singers, tackle that extremely difficult music, and NAIL it!

Secondly, loved your analogy to the mandala.

[NashVegas]

11. Reich Question

I'm not very familiar with his music, but what I have heard makes me ask this question: from 2001-2002 there was a particular piece of piano music you'd hear on every other film trailer and still hear on some financial institution's commercial (name escapes me). Starts out with a solo piano and then incorporates other instuments in a punchy rhythm. By any chance, is that Reich and if so, what is the name of the piece?

[Rabrrrrrr]

12. I have no idea

Doesn't sound like Reich, though.

Could have been Philip Glass - his music has been in a number of commercials. But it could also have been any number of other people.

[NashVegas]

13. No, I Don't Think It's Glass

Although it is repetitive enough to be Glass, the arrangement/instruments sound too traditional, lacks that ethereal quality. I don't have the musical vocabulary to describe the bit accurately, can only say it kinda goes "daaa da da da DA-da (repeats)."

[Character Assassin]

21. Hmmmm.... Mostly financial services commercials, right?

I have the tune in my head, and am almost certain it's not Reich.

[NashVegas]

28. Yeah, I Think So

*sigh*

bummer. it's been driving me batty.

[Character Assassin]

22. One of my faves. Saw him live at UCLA/Veteran's Hall in 1997

And it was a brilliant, brilliant performance.

Evern better, he gave about a 30 minute Q&A before the show, just sitting by himself at the edge of the stage.

Great guy.

[Rabrrrrrr]

24. Yes, he's amazingly nice and approachable

And he always wears that baseball cap. In the first concert of his series at Columbia (mentioned in another post) he and a couple f his ensemble members did Part I of Drumming - from MEMORY! for god's sake. I was sitting right in front of him. He had such a look of complete joy on his face, and also wore his baseball cap through the whole thing, which took that very serious piece of music into the realm of not so serious (but not in a bad way). (I was kind of dismayed that he had such a look of ease on his face, but I'm sure he's performed Drumming hundreds of times - but I was kind of hoping for the look of intense panic that I'd have if I were doing it).

In the lecture and question time, he was very easy-going. After the show, he was also very willing to speak with people and seemed quite natural and friendly.

What did you see performed?

[Character Assassin]

25. Nagoya Marimbas, Music for 18 musicians, Proverb, other stuff

that I don't remember.

I recall always being fascinated not only by the sheer beauty of MF18M, but how it predated and basically set the entire stage for ambient/house/etc... and did so with all acoustic instruments.

I could never figure out how he got those low, crescending drone sounds until I saw it performed and I was like, "Ohhhhhhhhhhhhh....... I get it!"

[Rabrrrrrr]

26. I was also surprised with the drone sounds :-)

And the poor guy playing the shikka shikka things - maraccas? damn, can't think of the name - tat's a long time to hold and play those things, and he was shikka shikka-ing for all he was worth to stay on tempo, but was moving his arms all over, supporting his hand with his other hand.... and looked SO relieved when his part was over! That's like 15-20 minutes of continuous shikka shikka-ing. I'd be tired!