To precisely map out the influence of Steve Reich’s work, both in America and the rest of the world across the last half-century or so, would be a near-impossible task. And it’s certainly not for lack of case material – from ambient to math-rock to techno and many places in between, the genres and artists whose creative output has been shaped, either knowingly or unknowingly, by Reich are innumerable. In fact, to call it merely influence would be to undersell his impact.

Reich Different Trains Electric Counterpoint Rarest Reich Different Trains Electric Counterpoint Rare Pokemon Is and in to a was not you i of it the be he his but for. Find a Steve Reich - Kronos Quartet / Pat Metheny - Different Trains / Electric Counterpoint first pressing or reissue. Complete your Steve Reich - Kronos Quartet.

It’s not hyperbole to say his compositions changed music in the latter half of the 20th century. Early tape loops like “It’s Gonna Rain” (1965) and “Come Out” (1966), in which Reich cut up and relentlessly replayed snippets of speech, increasingly out of phase with one another until you begin to hear sounds that aren’t there, were captivatingly neurotic and hallucinatory – and formed the basis of what we now know as minimalism, a hugely important force in popular American culture. Tonight at the Barbican for a celebration of Reich's 80th birthday, we're joined by dazzling array of musicians who, with the man himself watching on, take us through some of the most experimental, successful and revolutionary pieces in the Reich oeuvre. We begin with the most simply conceptual piece of the night, “Pendulum Music”, first conceived in essay form in the late Sixties and revised into the early Seventies. Seventeen microphones (it’s usually fewer – Reich commented in a post-concert Q&A that he’d never seen it performed with so many before) hang upside down, like sleeping bats, each above a speaker and accompanied by a person. They are then held up at a 45 degree angle, and simultaneously allowed to swing freely. As each microphone passes the monitor, a humming feedback is created, first only for a moment and then, as the arc and speed of the microphones’ swing ebbs away, the hums broaden and stretch out.

The different frequencies coalesce, creating an obscure pattern of sound. As the performers sit cross-legged and the stage lights dim, the whole thing feels sombrely cultish. Next is “Nagoya Guitars” (1996), a nimble interplay between two guitarists chasing each other’s melodies, with each melody chasing its own tail, before rapidly changing direction.

It’s a pleasantly assured peformance, and cleanses the palette before the feast that is “Electric Counterpoint” (1987). One of Reich’s best-known compositions, it was written to be performed by a single guitarist accompanied by tape of the other parts. But to see it performed as it is tonight, fully realised with a rare ensemble of 11 guitars and two basses, feels like a privilege. It is deeply affecting, as it gracefully floats and swells. Fidgety, interlocking guitar melodies give way to chordal echoes and a feeling of fledgling euphoria. It is 15 minutes of bliss.

Bliss, which is succeeded by terror in the Grammy award-winning “Different Trains” (1988). Through personal recollection and audio recordings of others, Reich draws parallels between his train journeys as a child across America during the Second World War, and those bound for Nazi concentration camps in Europe at the same time. Trains are integral to the piece, both melodically and rhythmically.

When recalling Reich’s own journeys, the sound of train whistles, mimicked by the masterful quartet of Britten Sinfonia musicians on stage, is exploratory and hopeful. In the second movement, the whistles are nightmarish, piercing through the other instrumentation. The fingerprints of “It’s Gonna Rain” and “Come Out” are to be found here, too, with the voices – of Reich’s old governess, a train porter, and Holocaust survivors – used as a melodic source, but also as a haunting account of the unearthly terror suffered. Fear, reverence, mourning, reflection – it’s all captured in “Different Trains”. After a European premier of a new composition, “Pulses”, a lush ensemble piece, the night closes on the elaborately ambitious audio-visual piece “Three Tales” (2002), a collaboration between Reich and his wife, video artist Beryl Korot.

Split into three parts, it ruminates on landmarks in technological progression, and the perils that accompany them: the Hindenburg disaster, nuclear testing and the cloning of Dolly the sheep. There’s certainly a lot going on – it’s the kind of piece that takes multiple viewings to fully absorb – but that’s not to say there isn’t a striking immediacy to it. Clipper Summer 87 Software Companies on this page. During the nuclear section, numbers sinisterly count down on the screen behind the stage, operatically copied by a choir; during the Dolly movement, scientists’ forewarnings are chopped up and looped almost maniacally; and on the Hindenburg movement, a stuttering, unravelling drumbeat accompanies slow motion footage of the fiery disaster.

It all’s very disquieting and thought-provoking. Through three hours of music, from the most minimal to complex, and spanning almost 50 years, this is an expertly realised celebration of a rightly cherished composer. • More about: • •. How to disable your ad blocker for independent.co.uk Adblock / Adblock Plus • Click the Adblock/Adblock Plus icon, which is to the right of your address bar. • On Adblock click 'Don't run on pages on this domain'. • On Adblock Plus click 'Enabled on this site' to disable ad blocking for the current website you are on. If you are in Firefox click 'disable on independent.co.uk'.

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Reich performing in 2006 Stephen Michael Reich ( or; born October 3, 1936) is an American composer who, along with,, and, pioneered in the mid to late 1960s. Reich's style of composition influenced many composers and groups. His innovations include using to create patterns (for example, his early compositions and ), and the use of simple, audible processes to explore musical concepts (for instance, and ). These compositions, marked by their use of repetitive figures, slow harmonic rhythm and canons, have significantly influenced, especially in the US.

Reich's work took on a darker character in the 1980s with the introduction of historical themes as well as themes from his Jewish heritage, notably. Writing in, music critic Andrew Clements suggested that Reich is one of 'a handful of living composers who can legitimately claim to have altered the direction of musical history'.

The American composer and critic has said that Reich 'may. Be considered, by general acclamation, America's greatest living composer'. Contents • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • Early life [ ] Reich was born in New York City to the Broadway lyricist and Leonard Reich. When he was one year old, his parents divorced, and Reich divided his time between New York and California. He is the half-brother of writer. He was given piano lessons as a child and describes growing up with the 'middle-class favorites', having no exposure to music written before 1750 or after 1900.

At the age of 14 he began to study music in earnest, after hearing music from the and earlier, as well as music of the 20th century. Reich studied drums with Roland Kohloff in order to play. While attending, he minored in music and graduated in 1957 with a B.A. In Philosophy. Thesis was on; [ ] later he would set texts by that philosopher to music in (1995) and You Are (variations) (2006). For a year following graduation, Reich studied composition privately with before he enrolled at to work with and (1958–1961). Subsequently, he attended in, where he studied with and (1961–1963) and earned a master's degree in composition.

At Mills, Reich composed Melodica for and, which appeared in 1986 on the three-LP release Music from Mills. Reich worked with the along with,,, and Terry Riley. He was involved with the premiere of Riley's and suggested the use of the eighth note pulse, which is now standard in performance of the piece. Career [ ] 1960s [ ] Reich's early forays into composition involved experimentation with, but he found the rhythmic aspects of the number twelve more interesting than the pitch aspects.

Reich also composed film soundtracks for Plastic Haircut (1963), Oh Dem Watermelons (1965), and Thick Pucker (1965), three films. The soundtrack of Plastic Haircut, composed in 1963, was a short tape collage, possibly Reich's first. The Watermelons soundtrack used two 19th-century as its basis, and used repeated phrasing together in a large five-part.

The music for Thick Pucker arose from street recordings Reich made walking around San Francisco with Nelson, who filmed in black and white 16mm. This film no longer survives. A fourth film from 1965, about 25 minutes long and tentatively entitled 'Thick Pucker II', was assembled by Nelson from outtakes of that shoot and more of the raw audio Reich had recorded. Nelson was not happy with the resulting film and never showed it. Reich was influenced by fellow minimalist, whose work combines simple musical patterns, offset in time, to create a slowly shifting, cohesive whole. Reich adopted this approach to compose his first major work, It's Gonna Rain.

Composed in 1965, the piece used a fragment of a about the end of the world given by a black street-preacher known as Brother Walter. Reich built on his early tape work, transferring the last three words of the fragment, 'it's gonna rain!' , to multiple tape loops which gradually move out of phase with one another. The 13-minute Come Out (1966) uses similarly manipulated recordings of a single spoken line given by Daniel Hamm, one of the falsely accused, who was severely injured by police. The survivor, who had been beaten, punctured a bruise on his own body to convince police about his beating.

The spoken line includes the phrase 'to let the bruise’s blood come out to show them.' Reich rerecorded the fragment 'come out to show them' on two channels, which are initially played in unison. They quickly slip out of sync; gradually the discrepancy widens and becomes a reverberation. The two voices then split into four, looped continuously, then eight, and continues splitting until the actual words are unintelligible, leaving the listener with only the speech's rhythmic and tonal patterns. In 1999, Rolling Stone magazine dubbed Reich 'The Father of Sampling' and compared his work with the parallel evolution of hip-hop culture by DJs such as and. Reich's first attempt at translating this phasing technique from recorded tape to live performance was the 1967, for two pianos.

In Piano Phase the performers repeat a rapid twelve-note figure, initially in unison. As one player keeps tempo with robotic precision, the other speeds up very slightly until the two parts line up again, but one sixteenth note apart. The second player then resumes the previous tempo. This cycle of speeding up and then locking in continues throughout the piece; the cycle comes full circle three times, the second and third cycles using shorter versions of the initial figure. Violin Phase, also written in 1967, is built on these same lines.

Piano Phase and Violin Phase both premiered in a series of concerts given in New York art galleries. A similar, lesser known example of this so-called is Pendulum Music (1968), which consists of the sound of several microphones swinging over the loudspeakers to which they are attached, producing as they do so. 'Pendulum Music' has never been recorded by Reich himself, but was introduced to rock audiences by in the late 1990s. Reich also tried to create the phasing effect in a piece 'that would need no instrument beyond the human body'.

He found that the idea of phasing was inappropriate for the simple ways he was experimenting to make sound. Instead, he composed (1972), in which the players do not phase in and out with each other, but instead one performer keeps one line of a 12-quaver-long (12-eighth-note-long) phrase and the other performer shifts by one beat every 12 bars, until both performers are back in unison 144 bars later. The 1967 prototype piece was not performed although performed it 27 years later as on his Reich-influenced 1994 album. It introduced the idea of slowing down a recorded sound until many times its original length without changing pitch or timbre, which Reich applied to Four Organs (1970), which deals specifically with augmentation. The piece has playing a fast, while the four organs stress certain eighth notes using an 11th chord. This work therefore dealt with and subtle rhythmic change. It is unique in the context of Reich's other pieces [ How so – 'unique'?] in being linear as opposed to cyclic like his earlier works – the superficially similar, also for four organs but without maracas, is (as the name suggests) a phase piece similar to others composed during the period.

Four Organs was performed as part of a program, and was Reich's first composition to be performed in a large traditional setting. 1970s [ ] In 1970, Reich embarked on a five-week trip to study music in Ghana, during which he learned from the master drummer Gideon Alorwoyie. Reich also studied Balinese in.

[ ] From his African experience, as well as 's about the people, Reich drew inspiration for his 90-minute piece, which he composed shortly after his return. Composed for a nine-piece percussion ensemble with female voices and, Drumming marked the beginning of a new stage in his career, for around this time he formed his ensemble,, and increasingly concentrated on composition and performance with them. Steve Reich and Musicians, which was to be the sole ensemble to interpret his works for many years, still remains active with many of its original members. [ ] After Drumming, Reich moved on from the 'phase shifting' technique that he had pioneered, and began writing more elaborate pieces.

He investigated other musical processes such as (the temporal lengthening of phrases and melodic fragments). It was during this period that he wrote works such as (1973) and (1973). In 1974, Reich began writing.

This piece involved many new ideas, although it also hearkened back to earlier pieces. It is based on a of introduced at the beginning (called 'Pulses'), followed by a small section of music based on each ('Sections I-XI'), and finally a return to the original cycle ('Pulses'). This was Reich's first attempt at writing for larger. The increased number of performers resulted in more scope for psychoacoustic effects, which fascinated Reich, and he noted that he would like to 'explore this idea further'.

Reich remarked that this one work contained more harmonic movement in the first five minutes than any other work he had written. Steve Reich and Musicians made the premier recording of this work on. Reich explored these ideas further in his frequently recorded pieces (1978) and (1979).

In these two works, Reich experimented with 'the human breath as the measure of musical duration. The chords played by the trumpets are written to take one comfortable breath to perform'. Human voices are part of the musical palette in Music for a Large Ensemble but the wordless vocal parts simply form part of the texture (as they do in Drumming). With Octet and his first orchestral piece (also 1979), Reich's music showed the influence of Biblical, which he had studied in since the summer of 1977. After this, the human voice singing a text would play an increasingly important role in Reich's music. The technique [.] consists of taking pre-existing melodic patterns and stringing them together to form a longer melody in the service of a holy text. If you take away the text, you're left with the idea of putting together small motives to make longer melodies – a technique I had not encountered before.

In 1974 Reich published the book Writings About Music, containing essays on his philosophy, aesthetics, and musical projects written between 1963 and 1974. An updated and much more extensive collection, Writings On Music (1965–2000), was published in 2002.

1980s [ ] Reich's work took on a darker character in the 1980s with the introduction of historical themes as well as themes from his Jewish heritage. (1981), for, is the first of Reich's works to draw explicitly on his Jewish background. The work is in four parts, and is scored for an ensemble of four women's voices (one high, two lyric sopranos and one ),,,,, two, six percussion (playing small tuned without jingles, clapping,,, and ), two, two violins,, cello and, with amplified voices, strings, and winds. A setting of texts from psalms 19:2–5 (19:1–4 in Christian translations), 34:13–15 (34:12–14), 18:26–27 (18:25–26), and 150:4–6, Tehillim is a departure from Reich's other work in its formal structure; the setting of texts several lines long rather than the fragments used in previous works makes melody a substantive element. Use of formal and functional also contrasts with the loosely structured minimalist works written previously.

• Art Direction, Design –, • Cello [Kronos Quartet] – (tracks: 1 to 3) • Composed By, Liner Notes – • Coordinator [Production] – • Engineer – * (tracks: 1 to 3), (tracks: 4 to 6) • Engineer [Assistant] – (tracks: 4 to 6), (tracks: 1 to 3) • Engineer [Mixing Assistant] – (tracks: 1 to 3) • Engineer [Mixing] – (tracks: 1 to 3) • Executive-Producer – • Guitar – (tracks: 4 to 6) • Mastered By – * • Photography By [Cover] – • Producer – • Producer [Assistant] – (tracks: 4 to 6) • Viola [Kronos Quartet] – (tracks: 1 to 3) • Violin [Kronos Quartet] – (tracks: 1 to 3), (tracks: 1 to 3).