“This is not Europe, this is America. This is John Coltrane playing at the jazz workshop, there are hamburgers being sold, there is Motown on the radio. How can you pretend in a world like that, that you are living in the dark brown angst of Vienna at the turn of the century?”
What Steve Reich and contemporaries like Philip Glass, Arvo Part and Terry Riley attempted, was to break down the structure of their music to its core, to in a way start afresh. Hence the tag minimalism. Minimalists generally instilled originality by allowing their idiosyncrasies to propagate through use of repetition and experimentation. This exercise in simplicity was attempted to lucidly distill their musical ideas. Both Philip Glass and Arvo Part explored the relationship between arpeggios and harmony by varying chord structure. Steve Reich differed in approach, in that his repetitious touches were a way for his music to discover it's own possibilities in resolving itself before changing and moving on. He explored how a set of notes can produce infinite melodies and complex harmonies simply by having the placement of these notes rearranged. This rearrangement was first achieved through phasing in his early works such as 'Come out' and 'It's Gonna Rain', where two identical tapes would interact between each other and go through a whole spectrum of dissonance and resonances.
Music for 18 Musicians is a departure from phasing, this time structuring it so that each of the 18 musicians also individually play an unique organic narrative. When these 18 narratives cross path with each other, the listener is greeted with an eclectic and visceral set of infinite nuances. It is why every spin of Music for 18 Musicians is subjectively different and it is why you’ll never listen to this and have the same experience twice. I've heard this over a hundred times and I am still discovering more. Despite this, its acoustic complexities are anchored as every player is unified in steady evolution. Thematic changes are respectively divided from Sections I to XI and conductorial changes are dictated by the players themselves. Phasing is not as apparent in this piece, that is, especially until Section V and later in Section IX which gloriously presents themselves as passages reminiscent of 'Piano Phase'.
Though there are hundreds of albums that can claim equal or greater precedence, not many have been thought of as pioneering. Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians is one of the most important, influential and groundbreaking recordings of all time. Music for 18 Musicians is a recording that produces no such considerations of the cultural zeitgeist from which it comes from. It seemed to have come out of nowhere and still to this day gestures musicians into new directions. While its genre has been termed minimalism but its shatteringly alive sound continues to questions this. Of Steve Reich, the Guardian has described him as being "a handful of living composers who can legitimately claim to have altered the direction of musical history".
I would describe the beauty of each section as simmering, a beauty that does not instantly reveal itself because you have to commit yourself to the piece. I realised that I was subconsiously placing my own context into the piece, and that it's sections had evolved into a demonstration of my own condition. Thoughts that passed in my head whilst I was experiencing the piece were reflected back to me on return listens and revealed itself to be woven into my consiousness of Music For 18 Musicians. Of early Steve Reich, Brian Eno said "...take advantage of the fact that your brain is very creative, sort of transferring the job of being the composer into the brain of the listener. So it's saying to the listener; your brain is actually making this piece of music because you knew what the ingredient were, there's nothing mysterious about how this piece works."
Though there are hundreds of albums that can claim equal or greater precedence, not many have been thought of as pioneering. Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians is one of the most important, influential and groundbreaking recordings of all time. Music for 18 Musicians is a recording that produces no such considerations of the cultural zeitgeist from which it comes from. It seemed to have come out of nowhere and still to this day gestures musicians into new directions. While its genre has been termed minimalism but its shatteringly alive sound continues to questions this. Of Steve Reich, the Guardian has described him as being "a handful of living composers who can legitimately claim to have altered the direction of musical history".
I would describe the beauty of each section as simmering, a beauty that does not instantly reveal itself because you have to commit yourself to the piece. I realised that I was subconsiously placing my own context into the piece, and that it's sections had evolved into a demonstration of my own condition. Thoughts that passed in my head whilst I was experiencing the piece were reflected back to me on return listens and revealed itself to be woven into my consiousness of Music For 18 Musicians. Of early Steve Reich, Brian Eno said "...take advantage of the fact that your brain is very creative, sort of transferring the job of being the composer into the brain of the listener. So it's saying to the listener; your brain is actually making this piece of music because you knew what the ingredient were, there's nothing mysterious about how this piece works."
10/10
Top notch, dog.
ReplyDeleteGreat reading.
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