Steve Reich, who just turned eighty-seven, is not resting on his laurels, so let's see what he has been up to lately. I first became aware of his music around 1976 when I stumbled across the Deutsche Gramophon recording of Drumming in the McGill School of Music listening library. To say that it stood out radically from the other discs I was exploring (Stockhausen, Takemitsu, Ligeti and others) is an understatement. Almost no serious composers were doing pulse back then. Just Steve Reich and Philip Glass (to a lesser extent). Other works that I became familiar with over the next decade or so were Eight Lines and Music for 18 Musicians. I've put up the latter before, so here is Eight Lines:
I'm going to skip over a lot of pieces and jump to more recent ones. In 2020 Traveler's Prayer, using texts from the Hebrew Bible, appeared using no pulse but Medieval contrapuntal techniques.
You may or may not like his music, but it seems clear that Steve Reich is the most important American composer of the last fifty years and one with a world-wide influence.
2 comments:
Steve Reich is 87? Wow. I was listening to him way before I got into classical music -- the minimalists were quite fashionable. Reich's music for some reason has an uncommonly broad appeal. But I haven't listened to him much in the last several years. My favourite work was City Life, which I found a spectacular exciting work.
I hadn't heard Traveler's Prayer -- not sure of it, but it is interestingly different. In fact, browsing Reich's oeuvre just now I'm struck by how it is more diverse than I remembered.
Steve Reich has managed both to develop a new (old) idiom very thoroughly and to expand its possibilities quite widely--just like every good composer!
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