Lorna Irvine reports on the recent event at the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall.
For anyone even remotely interested in music, the name Steve Reich needs no introduction. A pioneer and creator of minimalism in the 1960s alongside John Cage, Terry Riley and Philip Glass, he forever changed the way sonic landscapes were used, with the focus on repeated pulsing rhythmic patterns, vocal experimentalism, layers and field recordings. His ever-evolving sound still pushes boundaries today, and traces of his textures can be heard in newer music as disparate as Battles, Hudson Mohawke and Two Door Cinema Club.
So there is a ripple of excitement this weekend, as the man himself, still robust and ferociously articulate at 75 years old, makes two appearances at the Concert Hall for a celebration of his wide-reaching influence.
Saturday 9th March:
Tonight's programme is something of a marathon. Starting off with a slight technical glitch, where the 1967 experiment My Name Is...cannot go ahead, due to its reliance on sampling the voices of audience members, things pick up with Reich's New York Counterpoint performed by Pete Furniss and Alex Harker, a looped clarinet piece played out live against a backing tape.
The more extreme examples of Reich's influence can be heard in Matthew Fairclough's fantastic composition from last year, The Boom and the Bap, which takes the template from Reich's Drumming with repetition of kick and snare drums, sampling the Winstons' famous Amen Brother, from 1969, played along with live electronics by Powerplant and Joby Burgess and featuring acid house visuals. Even more jarring, yet equally wonderful, is Graham Fitkin's Chain Of Command, again played by Burgess, which has the dubious honour of turning George W Bush and Donald Rumsfeld's speeches on Iraq into a (highly appropriate) Satanic choir, as their voices blend, then distort in a death rattle for around twelve minutes. I find it thrilling, but others are less keen, slumped in their seats.
The rest of the bill is a greatest hits package but for the new world premiere of Radio Rewrite, a new piece by Reich based on Radiohead performed here by the London Sinfonietta. Sadly, it leaves me a little cold as it sounds too conventional within the context of the other pieces. Electric Counterpoint , which is played twice, first as a dubby lullaby by Powerplant with Joby Burgess on his hybrid xylosynth and then solo by guitarist Mats Bergstrom, brought Steve Reich to a new generation in the 90s when providing the backdrop for The Orb's Little Fluffy Clouds. Either way, it's still pure aural sex, trickling like honey. 2x5 brings the funk with its chunky bass line, chimes and stabs of piano and Reich performs1972's Clapping Music with David Hockings as it is intended- live, with two people, one of whom claps in 12/8 time, the other varying timing throughout. For the finale, the London Sinfonietta play the Pulitzer Prize winning Double Sextet. It is simply stunning, a study in both urgency and tranquillity.
Sunday 10th March:
My Name Is... finally gets an outing, with Marion, David and others from the audience getting their names looped and spliced together, tickling cochleae all around the auditorium .The effect is disorientating. Seminal masterpiece Steve Reich's Drumming, performed by The Colin Currie Group and the gorgeous Variations For Vibes, Pianos and Strings performed by the National Youth Orchestra Futures and London Sinfonietta (which gets a literal thumbs up from Reich) end today's programme.
But the main event is the conversation between the organiser of the event, composer Svend Brown, and Steve Reich. It is candid and fascinating, with Reich talking openly about his childhood in New York and his parents' divorce when he was a small child, through to being 'amazed' at the sounds he was creating once he had started his collaborative processes with fellow friends and musicians in the 60s. He became fascinated with how to use the human voice by experimenting with splicing techniques: "How long before the voices combine, two voices become four, and so on.'' He also alludes to the painstaking process of using massive tape recorders, laughing at how long it took to put voices together then when it is so simple to record at home now: "I wanted to capture the sound of a freeze frame in a movie...slow it down, you know like Darth Vader''.
Movingly, he talks of his tribute to friends he lost during 9/11. His recent composition WTC911 deals with just that, sampling the voice of the air traffic controller, sustaining the last syllable as though a snapshot.
As for other musicians, The Kronos Quartet, with whom he has often worked, get a lot of affection from Reich, who speaks of his admiration for founding member David Harrington - but equally, he says he admires the youthful vibrancy of younger musicians, such as the Latvian orchestra he saw on his travels... "I wanted to strangle them,'' he recounts playfully..."They picked it up so quickly…we were still trying to get it right after thirty years!" He admits he doesn't know as much about the modern DJs and dance music producers who are remixing him, but is fascinated by co-existing with them in ''another musical universe.'
When asked by an audience member if he would ever consider making music for orchestras again, he says it would be too ''fat'', and doesn't fit with what he is trying to do. He is interested in ''trying to get lost in it, the ambiguity… who is playing what?'' His music is all about creating '’rhythmic sub-divisions.’ ''I will never be Bach'', he muses, wryly. "I am not a romantic composer.''
The funniest moment comes, however, when a young Spanish composer in the audience asks if Reich believes his music to be transcendental and if drugs were ever involved- Reich simply raises an eyebrow and bats the question back to him. Eventually, though, he admits that making ecstatic or joyous music has always been his remit. When someone else in the audience suggests his composition, the hypnotic It's Gonna Rain, is meditative, it is met with a large raspberry from Reich. Still mischievous, still refusing to play the game on anything other than his own terms...
You just can't keep a good man down.
RSS