Steve Reich

Steve Reich - a few pieces

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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 piece.

When I looked it up,  I found this 2016 article from Pitchfork about Come Out which I highly recommend reading.  In that article (which I hope you've read by now), this appears:

in 1982, it provided the soundtrack for Fase, a dance piece by Belgian choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Michèle Anne De Mey, and Jennifer Everhard that is now considered a cornerstone of contemporary dance

This is another piece by the same dancers but to Clapping Music, a piece which our modern Britannica dates to 1972.

The article mentions that Come Out was a second take on something he'd done earlier called It's Gonna Rain. While it uses the same technology as Come Out, I don't find It's Gonna Rain as satisfying. Nevertheless, that's just my opinion.

In the video below, It's Gonna Rain  is in two parts. There's a break between and Part 2 has different vocals than Part 1. 

The article mentions a more recent piece by Reich - WTC 9/11 about 15 minutes long. It opens this video. The video - apparently a full album - also has two other pieces. Mallet Piece and Dance Pieces. There are silence between each piece. 

I was introduced to Reich by Yves who recommended, or lent me, an LP of Different Trains which I love though I rarely play the other side which is guitar music. 

The LP has explanatory notes. This interview with Steve Reich - a 5 minute monologue really - does a similar job of explaining the piece.

Here's a full video with the music of Different Trains. 0:00 Different Trains - America - Before The War
8:58 Different Trains - Europe - During The War
16:24 Different Trains - After The War
26:55 Electric Counterpoint - Fast
33:47 Electric Counterpoint - Slow
37:06 Electric Counterpoint - Fast

Hope you enjoy Reich. Lots more Reich music out and about and videos with him talkign about his music and videos about Reich out there. But, you've probably got more to do in a different area. Cheers, Cheris.