Reich, Steve (*1936)
"Systems Music" is a term which has been used to describe the work of composers who concern themselves with sound continuums which evolve gradually, often over very long periods of time. The most well-known of these composers are Steve Reich, Philip Glass, and La Monte Young. The most striking feature of their work is repetitiveness or stasis. Their works contain little or no variation of pitch, tempo, dynamics or timbre. Certainly, their work exhibits virtually none of the characteristic concerns of traditional Western music, such as harmonic movement, key modulation or thematic development.
The listener is invited, not to follow a complex musical "argument", but to concentrate upon a slowly changing sound and focus with microscopic awareness on different aspects of it. For such listeners such intense concentration has produced pyschological states comparable to drug-induced euphoria or meditative trance. However, Young is probably the only composer for whom such effects are of primary importance. Significantly, he is also the only composer whose music is entirely devoid of rhythmic pulse, consisting mostly of combinations of drones. Reich, by contrast, has explored the different ways in which a rhythmic figure can move out of phase with itself, while Glass has used rhythmic figures which increase or decrease in length as the piece progresses. Common to all three is the fact that their music avoids any sense of climax, development or directionality. Their pieces are either cyclical in form or static. A typical Reich piece will commence with two or more musicians playing a rhythmic pattern in unison. Gradually, they move out of phase with each other - initially by, say, a quarter note - and secondary rhythms are generated by the way in which the off-parallel rhythms intermesh. The process is continued until the players are again in unison - a cyclical rather than a developmental form. Alternatively, a piece may involve a process of expansion which is theoretically limitless, as is the case with Reich's Four Organs where a single chord is gradually stretched out to a duration of several minutes.
— Roger Sutherland
"The process of using the I Ching or observing the imperfections in manuscript paper cannot be heard when listening to music composed that way. The compositional process and the sounding music have no audible connection."
"Musical processes can give one a direct control with the impersonal and also a kind of complete control ... by this I mean: by running this material through that process I completely control all that results but I also accept all that results without changes."
— Steve Reich: "Music as a Gradual Process", included in "Writings About Music", Universal Edition, London, 1974.
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Resources
John Cage
Joseph Beuys
Pierre Boulez
Luc Ferrari
Egberto Gismonti
Charles Edward Ives: Central Park in the Dark
Gyorgy Ligeti
Olivier Messiaen
Steve Reich
Ad Reinhardt
Terry Riley
Jean-Claude Risset
David Tudor
Ludwig Wittgenstein
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[11] · Piano drone #1 [04:40]
[10] · Piano minimal #2 inspired by quaggy [13:06]
[09] · Piano minimal #1 [04:46]
[08] · Train Sonor: Piano NYC Subway #4 [10:17]
[07] · Cluster medicine [pianodrone #2] [18:54]
[06] · Flute stream [09:54]
[05] · Supernatural drone [guitardrone reverse] [17:02]
[04] · Piano minimal #3 [simultaneous] [08:50]
[03] · For Marjan K. [excerpt three] [05:44]
[02] · For Marjan K. [excerpt two] [05:40]
[01] · For Marjan K. [excerpt one] [06:21]
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