Drumming and More

Hallelujah! Steve Reich gets a Pulitzer for his composition, "Double Sextet". About time, please pardon the pun.

As a long-time fan of the kind of music often characterized as "minimalism" and as created by people like Terry Riley, Philip Glass, John Adams, Brian Eno and others, it is the work of Steve Reich that has especially drawn me in, perhaps from my own, but very limited, background in percussion.

The other day I unearthed my beloved 1974 Deutsche Grammophon three-vinyl-disc set of Reich's 1970-1971 Drumming, found it to be in fairly decent condition and set to digitizing it for my FLAC project.

"Drumming" is a monumental piece performed over about ninety minutes with four pairs of tuned bongo drums, three marimbas, three glockenspiels, two female voices, whistling and piccolo. It employs Reich's now-famous technique of players (typically percussionists on the same instrumentation) repeating a pattern in unison, then gradually moving out of sync so that one is a sixteenth note, then a quarter note, etc. away. This kind of thing fades from one group of instruments and players to another, and can include layers and combinations of the differently-phased patterns. Or at least that is my layman's explanation of how it seems to build. Here is a condensed sampling from a relatively recent performance that might give you the idea:



Other Reich pieces in my library include Music for 18 Musicans (tagged as a favorite on my iPod), The Desert Music, Tehillim, Four Organs, Six Pianos, and Different Trains, and maybe more I have overlooked. All of it is fascinating, hypnotic and highly recommended for further exploration. Except for the (Bach-inspired?) Music for 18 Musicians, which I hear fairly often, it has been some time since I have listened to this other stuff, and I need to try to find time to do that -- and maybe acquire some more of Reich's output.

I have not yet heard Reich's Double Sextet, and after reading Newsweek's interview with Reich on the occasion of his Pulitzer, I learn that it has not yet been commercially recorded. And I see that FlypMedia has another multimedia-interview-piece with Reich, along with information on his upcoming rock composition "2x5".

Update: Here is an interesting YouTube finding -- a rather unique one-man performance of Reich's Piano Phase (I heard that this piece was dedicated to Philip Glass, but I haven't confirmed that) on two pianos: