Steve Reich's greatest contribution to Minimalism is a process known as phasing, continuing some of the processes that Riley had used in his tape works, such as Music for the Gift. Edward Strickland writes that "Reich was to systematize the phenomenon, whereas Riley in characteristic fashion had been playing the tape-loops in reverse, changing their speed randomly and so on." 20 What Reich did was to create, in his own words, a "new canonic procedure" out of the effect that Riley touched upon. 21 The first piece in which Reich's "phase process" became truly evident was his 1965 tape piece It's Gonna Rain, in which he manipulated 13 seconds of a sermon by the minister Brother Walter. Like most of Reich's early works, the body and interest of the piece lies in the process the voice of Brother Walter undergoes. In Paul Griffith's look at the avant-garde since 1945, he quotes Reich's description of this "process" piece:
Two tape loops are lined up in unison and then gradually move out of phase with each other, and then back into unison. The experience of the musical process is, above all else, impersonal: it just goes its way. Another aspect is its precision; there is nothing left to chance whatsoever. Once the process has been set up it inexorably works itself out. 22Come Out (1966) is another work in which Reich applies the phasing process to recorded voice, but soon afterwards he began to apply the same phasing process to acoustic instruments in Piano Phase (1967) and Violin Phase (1967), which can be performed either with one violin and electronic tape or with four violins. Piano Phase can likewise be performed with tape or with two pianists. In both cases, the canonic effect brought about by phasing is the focus of the work. Reich continued his experiments in phasing, expanding both the length of the works and the number of instruments. While Violin Phase can use up to for violins, the 1971 work Drumming is scored for four pairs of bongos, three marimbas, three glockenspiels, and voices. 23 ( A result of Reich's travels to Ghana to study (where contracted a mild case of Malaria and had to leave after five months!), Drumming consists of four parts, the first three employing varying combinations of the instruments, the fourth using all of them. African hocketing, extended harmonic and tamberal ranges, and the Pulse evident both in African drumming and Reich's earlier music all work in conjunction to form a unique sound in Drumming that is uniquely Reich's. 24
Also from the same period are works in which Reich employs simple instrumentation: Music for Pieces of Wood (1973) and Clapping Music (1972). The performance forces used in both pieces proved to be the exception, as Reich continued to use larger chamber-ensemble combinations in works such as Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices and Organ (1973) and Music for 18 Musicians (1978), written for his amorphous group Steve Reich and Musicians.
Reich has a large body of works that utilitize the phasing process that gives most of his works continuity. A notable exception is Pendulum Music, another kind of process piece in which feedback is created by microphones swinging over a speaker, finally coming to rest above the speaker, creating a "drone of feedback." 25 Although this work does not employ phase process, it does have the same sense of an inevitabile conclusion implied at the onset. Another inevitable process heard in Four Organs (1970) is the continual augmentation of a chord until it slows down to drone-length; it can be seen as an extension of Reich's earlier conceptual work Slow Motion Sound (1967), which reads "very gradually slow down a recorded sound to many times its original length without changing its pitch or timbre at all." 26 ; the central aspect of the music is the working out of the process over time.
A very important aspect of Reich's approach to Minimalism is his strict adherence to a process, be it phasing, augmentation or anything else. Unlike Riley, who relies to a large extent on improvisation or Young who employs controlled improvisation in his Theatre of Eternal Music works and The Well-Tuned Piano, Reich's processes for the most part define the shape of the music. Without excessive manipulation, a process such a phasing is able to create an interesting musical form.
Last updated on 95/07/26 22:01:04 EDT.