It'll Be All Reich On The Night

Did you see what I did there? Did you?

So anyway, last night saw rocking up at Birmingham's Town Hall (a lovely venue) to see Steve Reich in person performing his early classic Clapping Music, then a series of his work across the decades culminating in Radio Rewrite, his take on two Radiohead songs performed for the first time ever in London the night before. I posted some videos of most of the pieces yesterday, so go there to hear them.

It was every bit as wonderful as I hoped. Reich wandered on stage dressed in his trademark baggy black clothes and scruffy black baseball cap and launched into Clapping Music without fanfare, alongside David Hockings. The performance was spell-binding and as close to perfect as I've ever heard it. After that, it was Electric Counterpoint, the piece for electric guitar and pre-recorded tracks, performed by Mats Bergström. It's a long, intense piece and it was funny watching Bergström almost throw some rock shapes as he was torn between Classical Training and electric guitar's history. As a performance though: faultless. That was followed by 2x5, another piece scored for rock instruments. I have to say that I felt it drifted a little: too much like Reich by numbers. The dread words 'Tubular Bells' floated through my brain. It wasn't the performance: I've never quite warmed to this piece.

After the interval we got Radio Rewrite, very loosely based on these Radiohead songs:





Never having heard them until two minutes ago, I couldn't tell what Reich had taken from Radiohead during last night's performance, but I do think the new piece is a masterpiece on its own message. It's recognizably Reich, with all the musical tics that identify his practice, but it's also lyrical and jagged in ways he doesn't often employ. It felt much more emotional than much of Reich's work. I suppose a cynic might say that a septaguenarian picking up rock bands could be seen as a little desperate, but in this case I disagree: he's seen something intriguing in Radiohead's work and done something special to it without losing his own unique voice. Radiohead fans shouldn't expect to spot too much of their heroes' tracks: this isn't a cover version or even a set of variations.

Here's a live recording made the night before at the London world premiere:



Watch while it's hot: I suspect the lawyers will take it down soon.

and here's Reich talking about the new piece:



The final piece was Reich's Double Sextet, one of my very favourite pieces, and beautifully, passionately performed by the London Sinfonietta: I found myself rocking back and forth to the motorik rhythms more than once. It was a surprise to see a conductor lead them, I'm so used to Reich's work being performed without one. At the end, Reich (who'd been sitting modestly in the audience throughout) was brought out for long, loud, deserved ovations which he very bashfully tried to direct towards the performers, entirely in keeping with his ethic. Reich's programme notes were interesting too: he pointed out that there are 400 Masses which incorporate a single French folk song (L'Homme Armée) and lists all the composers who incorporated contemporary popular music into their work (no mention of Vaughan Williams though) and suggested that the estrangement between classical and pop was a temporary one occasioned by the ultra-elitist serialists, now largely forgotten. I don't know: I like serialism, but I can see his point and it's a good leftwing one too.

As to the audience: very much as expected. Some older classical concert-goers, some proper 70s prog hippies, acres of hipster spectacles and skinny jeans, intrigued Radiohead obsessives and some school trips thanks to the Town Hall/Symphony Hall's week of Reich-related outreach activity. As we left, we could hear several groups of kids trying out Clapping Music for themselves, which was rather lovely.

The joy of repetition really is in me…

Bonus points if you know where I stole that title from.

Anyway, if you tune in to Radio 3 tonight, you can hear one of my very favourite composers performing a world premier of his new work, live in London. The composer is Steve Reich, and the piece is Radio Rewrite, written after Reich came across Radiohead and liked what he heard. Reich famously doesn't 'get' pop music (he's a jazz fan), so Radiohead must really have impressed him. It's also a sly tribute to pop music's magpie tendencies: The Orb's rather lovely Little Fluffy Clouds is built on a sample of Reich's Electric Counterpoint. Actually, I don't 'get' Radiohead either. I quite liked the album that sounded like Aphex Twin's Ventolin but otherwise they don't do much for me. Although most of my music is pretty gloomy, I tend to side with Cher in Clueless when she teased her over-serious college student stepbrother for his taste in 'complaint rock'.

At the concert, Reich will also perform his early piece Clapping Music, which highlights all the technical aspects of his version of minimalism, Electric Counterpoint, 2 x 5 and Double Sextet. And here's a taste of all of them except Radio Rewrite, which isn't available.

This is the recent live performance of Clapping Music at a music festival, by Steve Reich and David Cossin. Reich's the one on the right.



Here's Electric Counterpoint. It requires the guitarist to pre-record some tracks then play live against (with?) them. You Radiohead fans might enjoy the version by Jonny Greenwood, their guitarist. It's rather good - as is Greenwood's own experimental music, Popcorn Superhet Receiver, a Penderecki tribute.



Here's 2 x 5: not my favourite Reich piece, but it has some thrilling moments. It's another one scored basically for a rock band.



And here's part one of Double Sextet, which is one of my Reich favourites.



Will I be tuning in to this historic live broadcast tonight?

Er… no. Because tomorrow night, I'll be at Birmingham Town Hall where Reich and Co will be doing the whole thing all over again. I would say 'join me' but you can't: it sold out ages ago. Don't worry though: I'll tell you all about it on Thursday. Does that sound smug? Because I'm feeling smug. At least, I think that's what it is. I don't normally have anything to feel smug about so I'm not sure. But it probably is smugness I'm feeling.

Meanwhile, my latest classical purchase is a collection called Mystery Variations on Colombi's Chiacona: in which loads of contemporary composers wrote variations on Colombi's piece for Anssi Karttunen, the cellist. It's really, really good.

Happy Birthday, Steve Reich

Steve Reich, the American composer who with John Adams and Philip Glass defined minimalism is 75 today. He's one of the composers who has filled my aural universe since I was 16. I've played his music when I've been happy, in the depths of misery and in every condition in-between.

Until I was in my late teens, I knew very little about music other than the mainstream classical and religious stuff my parents listened to, mostly on the radio. They had three cassette tapes: The Best of Vaughan Williams, which they shared, and my dad had U2's Greatest Hits and The Best of The Dubliners for the car (can you see a theme emerging?). I still adore Vaughan Williams, but revile the other two. Without pocket money (I know, get out your violins) and with employment difficult out in the countryside, my exposure to music depended on friends.

By sixth-form, I'd heard and liked REM, and I'd acquired a 1950s cabinet stereo from a skip: this one, in fact:

Before I upset the school authorities and got sent to live in a dormitory with the 13 yr-olds (so much for child protection), I had a tiny bedroom-study. Once the stereo was installed, the door would only open wide enough for me to slip in - affording me security and peace, both in short supply at that place. The trusty Grundig provided me with the two constants in my life since: indie lo-fi from John Peel and Mark and Lard's Evening show on Radio 1, and Radio 3's weird late night stuff. Steve Reich appeared on both channels, thanks to the electronica kids getting into Reich's early work with sampling.

The effect was magical: from classical music being painful warbling, I discovered a world of weirdness, experimentation and rigour. I'd always thought classical music meant pretension and prettiness, but this stuff could be harsh, atonal and relevant. I soon got into lots of other composers (Turnage, Matthias, Wilson, Penderecki, Beamish, Maxwell-Davies and many more), but it started with minimalism's paradoxical compression of huge emotion into repetition and tiny changes over long periods. It's music that requires both concentration and relaxation at the same time, if that makes any sense. Either way, playing Reich took me far, far away from where I didn't want to be - and still does.

So Happy Birthday, Steve Reich. Here are some pieces by him. I'd love to post Philip Glass's Two Pages for Steve Reich, but there's no decent version online.



Reich's elegy for the Holocaust, Different Trains:



Family Guy's tribute to the wonderful It's Gonna Rain (which basically invented sampling):



An interesting electronic/video version of Piano Phase.

Keeping the rainforest at bay

A goodly haul of mostly Renaissance literature today, carrying on my Greenblatt enthusiasm: The Stanley Wells/OUP edition of King Lear and the R. A. Foakes Methuen/Arden King Lear (my third and fourth editions of this play), and Susan Bruce's edition of More's Utopia, Bacon's The New Atlantis and Henry Neville's racist dystopia The Isle of Pines. Bringing up the rear is Budge Wilson's Before Green Gables: solely for completist reasons, and because my Anne paper speculates about her origins, I was interested to see what guesses other people have made.

I don't mind having multiple editions of some texts - in the case of Lear, editorial alterations are culturally significant, so it's good to be able to go through the differences in class, exploring how cuts and alterations change one's reading of the play. With Lear, there are major differences between the 1608 quarto edition and the 1623 First Folio version: it's not even clear whether some speeches (e.g. in Act 1, Scene 3) are alternative versions or supplementary. The Arden Lear is pretty good at highlighting the differences. The Oxford Lear is bolder, which I'm not so keen on: declaring that it follows the 1608 Quarto, 'the version closest to the original manuscript and performances'. That raises a lot of question: how plays were performed is very open. Plays were altered to suit new venues, actors and audiences. How does Wells decided which text is the 'ultimate' one? Does the play 'as performed' automatically qualify as superior? What if Shakespeare sat down in quieter moments to refine Lear after its first theatrical run?

On the other hand, the Wells edition does have some very useful contextual material, such as the 'Ballad of King Lear', and a fascinating account of the play's critical history.

Also in today's post: Steve Reich's new piece WTC 9/11 and - from a different cultural universe altogether, Credit to the Nation's Take Dis.

Interlude…

Right, I'm off to Manchester to hang with the cool kids. Well, ex-cool kids: there won't be a single person at the Low gig with anything less than a Master's degree.

I should doff my hat to you Facebookers and Tweeters: annoyed by the spam from IDS Ltd., you've linked to my cheeky reply to the bastards in droves: more visitors in the last hour than I usually get in a day.

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I'll leave you with a taste from the CD I got yesterday: Japanese percussionist Kuniko's arrangement of Steve Reich's Electric Counterpoint. If you're an incredible hifi nerd, you can go here to listen in Studio Master 192Khz 24bit quality and a range of other versions before deciding which to buy. I'm in my 30s so my ears are degraded beyond the point of caring.



and her Sound Space Experiment:

Getting some culcha

Hello all? I trust you had a weird and wonderful weekend. I had a very cultural one: a concert of modern classical music, and a trip to see Hamlet. Stoke City beat West Ham in the FA Cup quarter-finals (it was like watching Brazil) and the only wrinkle was Wales beating Ireland in the rugby.

The concert was mostly very good. I'd accidentally managed to get one of the best seats available (on the aisle, front row of the first circle near the centre), so I could see and hear perfectly and had plenty of legroom. The crowd was very mixed: lots of old folk who come to anything classical, and huge groups of music students and other young trendies who see Reich et al. as the originators of ambient, techno and pretty much anything that's interesting in pop. 

On the bill was Thomas Adès's In Seven Days, and Steve Reich's 1970s classic Music for 18 Musicians. In Seven Days sounded absolutely lovely, and I'll definitely buy it when it's available on CD, but I wasn't convinced by it as a cutting-edge piece by one of the world's greatest living composers. It took in a lot of Stravinsky and Debussy (excellent), but it wasn't hugely individual. I also thought that performing it with a massive screen showing mostly abstract images was a mistake. The piece was meant to be about the creation of the world, but once you've got what's essentially a huge TV, the music becomes the accompaniment to the images. As the images were mostly of the screen-saver variety (no marks, I'm afraid, to film-maker Tal Rosner), they diverted my attention from the music without making any profound claims on my intellect. It's possible that the music would have felt a little more weighty without the images.

The Steve Reich was just plain amazing though. It's a long piece in which changes in rhythm and melody sneak in slowly and subtly. On stage were four grand pianos (sometimes played by two people at a time), several glockenspiels and marimbas, four amplified wordless singers, a cellist, a violinist and two clarinettists, plus shakers and various bits. The players move around from instrument to instrument - singer to piano, pianist to marimba - as the piece dictates. At one point, three people were playing the same marimba at huge speed. So it's a performance piece as well as an exercise in pure minimalism, and the players thoroughly deserved their standing ovation.

I posted the opening the other day: here's the thrilling sixth section.



The other trip was to see Hamlet, which I've never seen on stage, by Northern Broadsides. The setting was 1940s: not sure why, but the costumes were utterly ravishing. Wish I had a range of 40s suits…

I was left in two minds about this. Most of it was excellent, but there were problems with pacing and acting style. Hamlet himself was a little too shouty, and there wasn't much light and shade in the last acts, so it felt sometimes like a cruder revenge tragedy than it really is. I did enjoy it, but did feel like they didn't trust us enough to take it more slowly.

The Birmingham Beat

And as clear proof of our total emotional disconnectedness, I move on from writing about the complexities of disaster porn to what I'm going to be doing tonight.

Specifically, I'm going to a great concert in Birmingham's Symphony Hall. It may have the wood and chrome look of a cruise-liner's casino, but it's one of the best venues I've ever been to. Tonight's concert will bring out the hip young gunslingers of contemporary classical: we're getting Thomas Adès conducting his own multimedia collaboration based on the Creation myth, In Seven Days, and Steve Reich's mesmeric, pulsing Music For 18 Musicians.

I can't find any footage of In Seven Days, so here's Adès's Concentric Paths.

Friday conundrum

OK, a nice one for you.

A book or other literature, piece of music and work of art you think I absolutely have to experience.

My recommendations for you:
Book: Walden, by H. D. Thoreau.
Music: Steve Reich's Different Trains.
Artwork: Holbein's The Ambassadors. A complex display of cultural and temporal power shockingly subverted with a skull slashed across it.



See you next week.

Music Maze 3

Today's aural pleasure is a compilation of minimalist music from the 70s and 80s simply titled Minimalist, and featuring works by John Adams, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, and David Heath - most of whom no longer use the term 'minimalism'.

My collection of minimalist/post-minimalist music has expanded massively since I acquired this CD sometime in the 1990s. However, this was my first exposure to post-classical music: I loved (and still love) Vaughan Williams and all the other forms of classical music, but until a guy at school played me this and some Penderecki (of which more in a later post), I'd never heard anything which wasn't pretty and tuneful. The idea that serious music could and should reflect the complexities, joys and horrors of contemporary life was a revelation. This was music not to be consumed or hummed, but music which required both an emotional and an intellectual response and engagement.

The first pieces are the four movements of John Adam's 1978 Shaker Loops. Shakers were a small American Protestant sect from the 18th/19th century who used to tremble in ecstasy while praying and singing, and are more famous now for their beautiful, plain furniture - so there's a double reference in the tremolo and oscillation which characterises this music. The individualistic nature of Shaker prayer must have something to do with Adams' intentions too: minimalism privileges the tiniest changes over the course of long, repetitive pieces, creating a claustrophobic relationship between the music and the listener. Shaker Loops is meditative, thrilling, and the perfect introduction to minimalism as a uniquely American and post-modern music, mixing the Classical with jazz, rock, electronica, African and Indian music.

Here's an orchestral version (it was written as a septet then adapted) with a General Motors video - perhaps making a link between industry and repetition.

Next up is Philip Glass's Façades, originally composed for the film Koyaanisqatsi, a minimalist take on filming the human environment. Façades is again highly repetitive, with a haunting oboe line interacting with looping strings.

After that, it's Steve Reich's Eight Lines. Reich was always the most technical of the minimalists, and the most outgoing: he used sampling and tape looping in the 60s, before popular music got anywhere near it, and spent a lot of time in Ghana learning new rhythmical techniques. Eight Lines is a magnificent example of the paradoxically liberating effect of close repetition allied to subtle time shifts - listen to it for a long time and new sounds and rhythms emerge mysteriously. I love the flute part floating over the strings and woodwind.

After that comes Glass's doomy Company and then an extract from John Adams's amazing opera Nixon in China: the first time an opera dealt with current politics, in this case Nixon's bold visit to that country to seek detente with Mao, another wily, murderous weirdo. The final Adams piece on the CD is Short Ride in a Fast Machine, infamously dumped from the Proms after Diana's death. The CD finished with Heath's The Frontier, which mixes minimalism with the shock-horror of atonal modernist music to thrilling effect (not on the web, disappointingly).

(Sorry about the chopped up words at the end/beginning of lines - bloody Blogger's useless formatting that I can't fix).

The last word on Steve Reich

I've been going on about him all week, I know. So I thought I'd post The Orb's Little Fluffy Clouds, which samples Reich's Electric Counterpoint and is generally constructed along the lines of his method and that of other minimalists: loads of electronic music derives from his sampling techniques (e.g. Aphex Twin, Radiohead's later work and lots of others).

Reich was highly amused by the sample, and told his record company not to sue, which was rather sweet of him.

All Reich Now

As I said a couple of days ago, Saturday would be spent at Birmingham Town Hall, at a performance of Steve Reich's Drumming, along with his Clapping Music, Nagoya Marimbas and Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices and Organ.

The joy of them is partly the sheer skill involved in phasing together between 2 and 15 people playing similar lines often on the very same instruments, and partly the revelation that rhythm at its purest can be transcendentally emotional. Clapping Music is a virtuoso show piece: two people, a microphone and five minutes of clapping, occasionally resolving into synched sound, often 'out of phase'. Nagoya Marimbas is all glockenspiel and marimbas and Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices and Organ uses the voices and organ as filler between the mallet instruments rather than, as you'd expect, carriers of melody.

Drumming isn't just drums - it's all the other percussion too, and it's hugely intense. Given that it lasts over an hour, it's hard work for the players and for some of the audience too. You can take it in two ways: zone out in some areas and let it wash over you, or listen intently for every tiny change - I mixed both methods. Letting it wash over you is a weird experience. There's so much going on that you start to hear instruments that aren't there: I heard clarinets, bar alarms and cellos, despite the fact that every instrument on stage was something to hit, other than a whistle!

I was a bit spaced out by the end. Luckily, next day saw me go home for my grandmother's 97th, which culminated in a mass family and friends snowball fight, as there's 5 inches of the stuff up there.

I let my grandmother win. It was her birthday, after all.

Weekend release

Well, that's another week over. I've just been to the first-year English lecture: The Renaissance in 60 Minutes - fascinating as always.

On the menu this weekend is another trip to Stoke. My grandmother has reached her 97th birthday, though I'm not sure how much she knows about it. I'm fully convinced that she's immortal.

I'm also off to an all-Steve Reich concert in Birmingham (here's his Myspace page). It's my Third Reich concert (sorry, couldn't resist). He's a brilliant minimalist/post-minimalist composer, a very early adopter of sampling (twenty years before pop music caught up) and of African rhythms, particularly in the centrepiece of this weekend's gig, Drumming. Minimalism's brilliant: it hypothesises that within an overarching framework of repetition, tiny changes in pace, pitch and tone will take on huge significance.

Here's Drumming (part 1) and some of Piano Phase, one of my favourites. I'd also recommend his stunning tape loop voice-and-quartet piece about the Holocaust, Different Trains and the electric guitar piece Electric Counterpoint.

Mid-christmas minimalism

One of the most hypnotic pieces ever composed. Electric Counterpoint by Steve Reich. Parts II and III by the same performer are also available on Youtube.

To Live and Die in LA

John Adams has written a new symphony, City Noir, based on Los Angeles in the 40s and 50s: the glamour but also the seedy, dangerous underbelly. Hear a clip of this edgy, tense, vibrant piece here - the US premiere is soon but the UK one isn't for ages, and a CD won't be available for ages after that. Very annoying: I' and others are still waiting for the release of Reich's Double Sextet (2011!), which is meant to be a massive return to form.

Here's the only bit of it in the public domain:

This is da bomb!

Good morning (or evening or afternoon for my far-flung readers). How are you all today? Here the sun's breaking through the clouds, a Test match is being played 19 miles away (weather permitting), and I've received a pile of CDs in the post (I have a new card, but no PIN, so can only shop online for now).

What has Postman Pat brought me today? John Adams' Doctor Atomic Symphony and three CDs of Vaughan Williams: 'Sancta Civitas' and 'Dona nobis pacem' (VW was a cheerful agnostic or atheist and liberal to left - 'Sancta Civitas' is an interesting exploration of the fate of the soul while 'Dona Nobis Pacem' is a warning against war), Folksong Arrangements and Choral Folksong Arrangements (which also has some Holst). Normally my tastes are a little more modernist, but I've a soft spot for VW, and he's on the classical wing of the peace and socialism movement - folk songs were (like the 1960s) a way to demonstrated solidarity and to reconnect with culture unadulterated by bourgeois atomisation - though not always successfully. The Adams is a symphonic version of his latest opera, which follows Robert Oppenheimer as he builds the first nuclear weapon - I can't afford the actual opera recording yet, but it'll come.

Meanwhile, Steve Reich, when's Double Sextet being released? It won prizes ages ago and it still isn't commercially available. Boo!

A musical interlude

It's work, work, work today, following an extra-long swim and an extra-long breakfast. Neal's moved into my office to write his MSc, and everyone thinks he works here. To aid concentration, we're having a Minimalist Marathon, mostly Steve Reich stuff with some Andriessen, Glass, Adams, Feldman and Riley thrown in. Mmmmm… hypnotic. Make a difference from singing Devo's Mongoloid and Sir Mix-A-Lot's 'Baby Got Back' all the time.

Talking of Devo…

The Silence of Sound

For a change in the summer months, I'm not alone in the office. It's rather pleasant - we're all quite relaxed, the place is in turmoil as offices are moved, and there's an end of term atmosphere, though term ended weeks ago. Our least favourite student, a serial cheat, has finally been defenestrated and it's raining - all in all, a perfect day.

One difference is the silence. I usually have music playing, but one of my office colleagues is a punk rocker (he's been in The Prefects and then The Nightingales for 30 years, and the other is an early music fan (Monteverdi for preference). I swing both ways in the this regard, but can't please both of them, so I've opted for silence. Perhaps it's a good thing - over-familiarity may breed contempt for everything other than the absolute best (e.g. The Field Mice - how do you like them apples, Cynical?, Reich, Tallis and Gorky's Zygotic Mynci), so perhaps playing less but paying more attention would be a useful exercise. I listened to Let's Active before they turned up this morning and was highly impressed. They're Mitch Easter's early-80s band, while he was producing seminal REM albums. Imagine indiepop mixed with Southern Gothic.

Sarah's just come into the office and presented me with another book! Hurrah! Archie Brown's The Rise and Fall of Communism, which was on my list.