Steve Reich : Music for 18 musicians (question)

"Download the track, Music For 18 Musicians, and email us your remix. Steve Reich will pick his favourite of the entries, and it will be released at the end of September on Atlantic Records."

I also did see this live once, and if you ever get the chance, that's the way to hear it

I saw this performed live last week and was absolutely blown away. There were some amazing moments, like when three xylophone players were at one stage playing together on the same instrument; just watching their hands move back and forth was thrilling. I was also taken with the amount of movement on stage, with people popping over to play a different instrument - is this what usually happens?

Great show.

ECM!!!!!

yeah - i saw this performed a couple of years ago for the barbican seventieth thing. aside from being revelatory in figuring out which instruments were responsible for which noises - like clarinets doing those kind of chugging transitions - it was inspirational seeing people forced to treat musicianship with such a workmanlike approach. people were playing the marimbas in shifts.

The only version I've heard is the Grand Valley State University New Music Ensemble version that's available on eMusic and I'm in love with it. Anyone have any opinions on how it compares to the other three versions? I take it the original ECM version is a must-hear.

yes, schlump, I was staggered to find that it was bass clarinets doing the j-j-j-j-j... bass bits.

ha, good, i'm glad it wasn't just me - i've just listened to the new music ensemble version, never clearly having realised that there were different versions, and hearing it anew reminds me how alien it once was. i don't think i'd ever heard anything so technically mechanical and yet organically musical. some bits of it are all the better seeing it live - i have no musical vocabulary, but actually watching the singers make those high, fluctuating, like duo-tone noises - it doesn't, couldn't, seem so angelic on the record.

to digress: i only started enjoying different trains after the season of everything being performed with reich happened, and constantly lament not going. i'm going to try to see a performance in december, and am curious to know how a string quartet perform it.

It was an eye-opener for me to watch the vocalists actually move towards the microphones and back again slowly, instead of just singing louder and quieter.

Anybody going to the Royal Festival Performance at the end of this month?

Sextet, Clapping Music, Electric Counterpoint and MF18M. Really can't wait, like hopping about can't wait.

oooh that sounds so good. I saw "Drumming" performed a few years back and it was incredible.

I'm going to this!

Me too!

i would really like to hear this live, unfortunately it's not happening in my burg

FWIW here is the concerts list for the remainder of 2009.

Oct 31 Clapping Music
Notambu Ensemble
Tonhalle
Dusseldorf, Germany

Nov 3 Vermont/Tokyo Counterpoint
American Modern Ensemble
Galapgos Art Space in 'Dumbo'
Brooklyn, USA

Nov 7 Different Trains
Kronos Quartet
Kimmel Cente
Philadelpihia, PA, USA

Nov 9 Different Trains
Kronos Quartet
Juniata College
Huntingdon, PA, USA

Nov 9 Eight Lines
Lunapark
Eduard Flipse Zaal
Roterdam, Holland

Nov 13 City Life
Choreographed by Liss Fain as Resolved
Yerba Buena Center
San Francisco, CA, USA

Nov 16 Double Sextet
Sonic Generator
Georgia Tech Alumni Hou
Atlanta, GA, USA

Nov 19 Variations for Vibes, Pianos and Strings
Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra/ Kirk Trevor
Tilson Music Hall, IS
Indianapolis, IN, USA

Nov 22 Duet
Vashon-Maury Chamber Orchestra/ Karin Choo
Vashon Methodist Churc
Vashon, WA, USA

Dec 4 Drumming
Percusemble Berlin
Nikolaisaal
Potsdam, Germany

Dec 6 Mallet Quartet (World Premiere)
Amadinda Quartet
Budapest, Hungary

read a well-known blogger talking about how Mf18M sounds the way it does because of the tape loops and i cried a little.

it's in an interview not a piece, but still

So Reich composed this piece called “Music For 18 Musicians” and it starts off with two identical tape decks and they are playing the same note on some kind of mallet instrument. Same identical tape deck, speed, note, everything, by the nature of two things can’t always be the same, 10 seconds into the song, the notes start to separate and it creates this really cool aural stimulus, I’ve never heard anything like this

;_;

huh, that's not right, is it? He's surely just conflating his Reich pieces?

yeah, MfM18 is definitely all live, no tape loop phasing.

I saw this last month at Roskilde, was amazing to see live. Revelatory. Only minus was that Metallica decided they had to do a loud soundcheck on another stage, ten hours before they went on. Bastards.

yet another reason why Metallica should be dropped from a great height

Those two sentences from that blog are just so wrong. It reads like he's never actually heard Reich and is writing that after someone's told him about some Reich pieces and he can't quite remember it all properly.

This thread should've been titled, "Question for 18 Musicians."

this is hilarious to watch people play

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLckHHc25ww

World's slowest punchline.

Colin Currie group absolutely killed it tonight at the Royal Festival Hall, fourth time around for me and I'd never seen it rendered with as much fire before.

I was wondering if it was perhaps because the other three times Reich himself had been either performing or overseeing, this time he was absent.

i love this record so much

It's the best

But also which one do you mean

ECM foreva imo

ECM. Played it at my wedding while the guests were arriving.

With In C, I encourage everyone to try a variety renditions (my collection is at 18), but for Music for 18, there's only the ECM.

NONESUCH

ecm is good too, but it cannot displace what lies deep within my heart

FITE!

ECM forever!

However, was in a shop in Providence last weekend & spotted a copy of this in the "New Arrivals" bin: https://www.forcedexposure.com/Catalog/reich-ensemble-modern-synergy-vocals-steve-tokyo-opera-city-21-5-lp/FOX.019LP.html

Bought it out of duty--guess it's not technically out for a few more days--& it's great although the sound significantly drops out toward the end of side one. Not sure if the original master was fucked or what. Are there any other commercially available versions out there w/ Reich as part of the ensemble aside from the ECM, Nonesuch, & this one?

https://erikhall.bandcamp.com/album/music-for-18-musicians-steve-reich

I’m so lame my copy is the Grand Valley State University New Music something-or-other version

supporting talented young people, that's good

Will def check this out. I listened to Drumming today, so good.

more than one review i've seen has called it 'reverent', and its 'arrangement' choices certainly aren't very adventuresome—it would have been something to hear him try something more with the moog than just mimic a bass clarinet—but it does have this odd quality that comes from the composition, like on other newer versions but more highlighted, where it seems like you just can't get away from it, if you play it in rhythm and with something like the full complement of personnel, so it doesn't sound like a different version, just like you're suddenly hearing bits of the same thing that you never heard that way before. you know it's different to hear it with guitars or a moog or whatever, but at the same time the way the composition activates your memory is so obliterating that you can't really remember what the difference amounts to.

reportedly he added some 'room air' to the parts as he recorded them, it seems like it would be more interesting to hear what a version WITHOUT 'air' sounded like. as is it seems like all versions are rather dependent on that air for some of their more attractive qualities.

This is a really interesting and effective arrangement and it sounds great. Won't replace the live acoustic recordings ofc but does something new.

xps ha

I guess I wasn't expecting a radical reimagining. It's a notated work; idrg what 'reverent' means in that context. I do feel like something is changed pretty significantly by using a drum machine and overdubbing the parts one at a time - there's a level of mechanical precision beyond what you get from live musicians playing together in real time.

it's notated but i guess i think of it as kind of existing within spitting distance of vernacular semi-notated or improvised music for which 'cover versions' of records (not compositions alone exactly) have led us to expect more of re-visitations. so it's hard for it to escape perceptions of reverence.

i hadn't noticed a machine, you mean just that he is tracking/gridding the parts (presumably because it would have been impossible to keep them straight recording one at a time?)?

i don't care that much for the ecm version so maybe this is true of it too, but it seems like one thing he did here unsmooths differences between the sections somewhat.

It does sound gridded, yeah, which is probably the key difference I was hearing. There is a credit for a Roland CR-68 drum machine on the Bandcamp page so I figured at least one of the parts was programmed on that but I couldn't identify which it would be.

There’s only a few sounds that a CR-68 can make

Can you pick it out in the recording?

I admire the devotional aspect but the identical arrangement with simpler timbres makes me feel like I'm listening to a low bitrate MP3 of the ECM recording

I think the CR-68 is used to emulate the maracas/shakers

starting in section VI

how exactly do you define "the world of modern composition" ?? This phrase already seems kinda problematic because obviously it/you don't mean to include all non-improvised music of the 20th century ...

OK I mean the world of modern orchestral/classical/notated music then. (And why do they call is 'dance music'? You can dance to all sorts of music???!!!!)

Hey, Kendrick Lamar won a Pulitzer.

lol in a piece i was writing earlier in the year i used the phrase "composed music and chart pop" and nearly got into a fight with the editor bcz he said "but isn't pop music also composed?"

"yes you're right but also literally everyone will know what i'm getting at here"

(i didn't say this and i changed it to something even more inadequate which didn't seem to bother him so everyone's the loser really)

I like "notated music". It does mean that you include show tunes and exclude electroacoustic music on fixed media, which seems fine to me.

Wuorinen so far was the only person of that generation who somewhat openly admitted to being on the Trump train.

― Boring, Maryland, Wednesday, 9 September 2020 bookmarkflaglink

Lol no way

The person with the downright worst politucs I am mutuals with and tolerate is an avant-garde pianist and teacher whom I've known on a couple of classical internet message boards I've been on. He was pro Change UK (non-Brits wondering as to what that is please don't bother).

Mutuals with on twitter...he is quite good on music, just utter thrash on anything else.

Cancel pianos.

Alexander Hawkins is a comrade ftr

what about rzewski?

Elitist cis white man who appropriated the struggles of POC.

ilx always circles back to cardew to in the end :D

serves imperialism iirc

i guess there's no way getting round the fact that 99% of people in this world (REAL ENGLAND being thisworld) who can afford either
a) a piano b) to be a composer
are going to be tory as fuck.

/from tory as fuck backgrounds and so prone for backsliding

plenty of poor as fuck council house families had a rented Steinway in the living room with a 50p slot on the side!

Yeah wtf

uh, the cost of music school and "being a composer" vastly exceeds the cost of a piano ...

Tell it to a homeschooled composer I know named Mozart.

Eh, it's true enough insofar as there is a cost to any education program and financially uncertain life choice but I don't think it requires 1% level privilege and have not heard of any evidence that people involved with new music composition are more politically conservative on average than the general population. (My anecdotal experience, since that seems to be what we're working with here, is on the contrary.)

xp cf Schoenberg

I love how these threads systematically bring out all the canonical, downright snooty clichés about art music. Not that it didn't have it coming, but still.

*notated art music

I mean, I really don't think most people in 'this world' grew up as wealthy or well-connected as Taylor Swift or Lana del Rey.

If it was just posh people that had pianos in the home the history of bebop would have likely been a whole lot duller perhaps? Just saying like.

yeah we have ridden this ride before, I feel

i generally don't try anymore

xpost

'Still D.R.E.' prominently features the piano as a conspicuous sign of wealth iirc.

I don't think it requires 1% level privilege and have not heard of any evidence that people involved with new music composition are more politically conservative on average than the general population. (My anecdotal experience, since that seems to be what we're working with here, is on the contrary.)

Considering these composers come from a variety of different countries with diverse economic systems, it's not easy to generalize. Coming from America, most of the new music composers I am familiar with do come from privileged backgrounds. They are mostly cis white men. Most of them are baby boomers or older. Compared to other cis white baby boomer men, they tend to be more politically progressive. However, considering this type of music is highly connected to academia and avant-garde arts, which tend to be way more politically to the left than average, these nice liberal white men are conservative by comparison.

In other words a reet bunch of melts, lol

As an American, I am not clear on what a "melt" is -- but you probably are otm

Cancel pianos.

― The nexus of the crisis and the origin of storms (Sund4r), Wednesday, 9 September 2020 bookmarkflaglink

I haven't attended a concert by him since. Happy to keep things at a distance as I can't be arsed paying money to see good music played by bigots lol.

lol all concerts have been cancelled for the past 6 months here and nothing is scheduled for the next 6 months at least so ...

Xp

I hope that isn't Howard Riley you are talking about, he's the only avant garde jazz pianist hero we have from Hudds!

Nope he isn't from the jazz scene.

Sarah - encountered his awful twitter about two years ago. Probably started going to his recitals ten years ago.

wait who? i am confused. Rzewski?

Luckily in the UK and I assume lots of other countries oiks still get access to free or at least heavily subsidised music lessons. Give our gov a bit more time tho

Haha so am I! sorry got our wires crossed (just checked whether Rzewski had twitter) xp

MEV invented twitter iirc

Free music lessons ended a long time ago and I think most local authorities no longer even subsidise them either - although as with most things in the UK it depends upon your postcode.

fwiw, somewhat of a response on his Twitter today

Steve Reich’s response to last week’s article in The Guardian by Philip Clark: pic.twitter.com/5Kek546yxE

— Steve Reich (@SteveReich) September 16, 2020

Was listening to Inside Music at the weekend on Radio 3 and Tai Murray played a selection from Drumming, which I thought was kinda interesting.