Beethoven Piano Sonata Study Centre

Steve Reich - a few pieces Note: Links open in new windows.   I was reading this review  (of  Everything Is Now: The 1960s New York Avant-Garde—Primal Happenings, Underground Movies, Radical Pop   by  J. Hoberman)   on the Los Angeles Review of Books that I was alerted to by Lapham's Quarterly's The Rest is History and found this: In April 1966... Steve Reich would play a benefit concert, with proceeds going toward the Harlem Six, a group of young Black men wrongfully arrested for the murder of a store owner. Reich took seven words—“bruise blood come out to show them”—and stretched them into a 12-minute tape loop, mutating the sentence into percussive jutting syllables. In the original context, Daniel Hamm, one of the boys, used it to express the police brutality against him, but in Reich’s machine, the phrase expresses the long passage of time, the long fight toward freedom. Reich’s piece, titled  Come Out... And I recalled how much I enjoyed the piec...

  18 “La plus belle Africaine”  (Ellington) 11:07 (edited)  Coventry Cathedral, Coventry, England, February 21, 1966. Duke Ellington in Coventry (Storyville [2018]) Cat Anderson, Cootie Williams, Mercer Ellington, Herbie Jones tp; Lawrence Brown, Buster Cooper, Chuck Connors tb; Johnny Hodges, Russell Procope, Jimmy Hamilton, Paul Gonsalves, Harry Carney reeds; Duke Ellington p; John Lamb b; Sam Woodyard d. Solos: Hamilton, Lamb, Carney, Hamilton. “La plus belle Africaine” is propelled throughout by an eight-bar ostinato, carried principally by the bass player, and then covered by the piano player when the bassist solos, and it is parroted rhythmically by the drummer all through. The clarinet plays a simple melody over the ostinato, and is abruptly interrupted by the cascading brass in a twelve-bar shout that recurs as if demarcating movements. The ostinato is then taken up by the piano while the bassist solos with the bow. After the brass shout marks the end of the bas...