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Ruby2
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« on: 18:24:11, 20-05-2008 » |
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I ordered his "Music for 18 musicians" on a whim from a recommendation that promised "stunning harmonies" (not by anyone on here), and also after reading a description of something else he did by swinging two microphones over amplifiers and recording the feedback - I thought that sounded interesting. Any opinions?  |
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"Two wrongs don't make a right. But three rights do make a left." - Rohan Candappa
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Turfan Fragment
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« Reply #1 on: 18:30:12, 20-05-2008 » |
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That other piece is called Pendulum Music, and I think it's a great concept for a piece.
I'm surprised there's no SR thread, so thanks for starting one.
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Ron Dough
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« Reply #2 on: 18:38:56, 20-05-2008 » |
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I'm definitely a fan of much of his music; and yes, he has a talent for producing scrunchy chords which for me have the apparent effect of reorganising every molecule of my emotional fibre.
First came across his music in a broadcast performance of his Drumming in November 1972, which had me so mesmerised that I almost missed my train to London for the night's performance. Am still possessed by the experience of seeing it performed live by Colin Currie and friends at Perth Concert Hall just a few weeks ago, absolutely astonishing. I'm also besotted with Tehilim, his setting of psalms in Hebrew, which affect me far more strongly than Bernstein's Chichester Psalms. If you do enjoy your introduction to him, then I'd rather guess that the Triple Quartet and Different Trains will rather please you, too
Warning: Ron's musical passions are particularly dangerous for other members' wallets.
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Bryn
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« Reply #3 on: 18:47:04, 20-05-2008 » |
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R2 (though not D2), Steve Reich is likely to divide opinions quite starkly here. I took to his music from the start, with works such as Come Out, Piano Phase and It's Gonna Rain in the late '60s. However, it did take me a long time to appreciate his use of samplers, (as against tape loops). I still prefer the earlier stuff, (Drumming and Music for 18 Musicians in particular), but am gradually modifying my negative reaction to the more recent work. I think Three Tales particularly effective. Still not so sure about works like the Daniel Variations though.
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martle
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« Reply #4 on: 18:54:45, 20-05-2008 » |
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I'm a fan too, especially of his work up to and including Music for 18 Musicians. After that I always get the feeling he rather lost his focus and drive (Tehilim excepted) until he produced Different Trains in the late 80s. That was the first of his so-called 'music documentaries' and is just such a creative bullseye that the genre promised a great deal for his future work. I wasn't so fond of The Cave, though. Any way you look at him though, he's an important and fascinating figure.
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Green. Always green.
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ahh
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« Reply #5 on: 19:21:20, 20-05-2008 » |
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Hi Ruby2
I'm with Martle. I really like the early work - especially the tape loops (and 'drumming'). However, as a sucker for the instrument I also like 'Nagoya Marimbas'. I saw 'The Cave' excited by the prospect of video art/music and was very underwhelmed.
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insert favoured witticism here
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richard barrett
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« Reply #6 on: 20:25:11, 20-05-2008 » |
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I found Steve Reich's music fascinating from the first time I heard it and followed it avidly up to and including Music for 18 Musicians but for me hardly anything he's done since then has really lived up to it (Eight Lines, the first movement of Tehillim maybe, but certainly not the last). For me at the point (as with Philip Glass after his first opera Einstein on the Beach) when he started working with more conventional ideas of structure, the "minimal" material ceases to be interesting and just seems impoverished, now that it's expected to do the work of more conventional material instead of "being itself". That's my two cents' worth anyway. I think of minimal music a bit like Debussy thought of Wagner.
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Ian Pace
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« Reply #7 on: 21:07:52, 20-05-2008 » |
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Reich had some interesting initial ideas, some of which could be set into motion without much further effort and produce a few worthwhile pieces (Drumming, Music for 18 Musicians, etc.). Other than that, there's not a great deal to say in his favour.
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'These acts of keeping politics out of music, however, do not prevent musicology from being a political act . . .they assure that every apolitical act assumes a greater political immediacy' - Philip Bohlman, 'Musicology as a Political Act'
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Reiner Torheit
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« Reply #8 on: 21:08:45, 20-05-2008 » |
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I think of minimal music a bit like Debussy thought of Wagner.
You mean you subconsciously include it in your own work?  |
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"I was, for several months, mutely in love with a coloratura soprano, who seemed to me to have wafted straight from Paradise to the stage of the Odessa Opera-House"
- Leon Trotsky, "My Life"
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richard barrett
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« Reply #9 on: 21:44:42, 20-05-2008 » |
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I think of minimal music a bit like Debussy thought of Wagner.
You mean you subconsciously include it in your own work? Kind of. (Though I was thinking more of the sunsets and dawns thing.) |
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martle
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« Reply #10 on: 22:44:48, 20-05-2008 » |
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But it's more complicated than that, isn't it? Riech to me sits in the centre of the minimalist 'dawn' - if only because he seems so much more aacomplished than his contemporaries in expressing the essence of and staying with the 'movement'. So if you think now of Glass, Adams, Andriessen, Young, Riley, Nyman (?) - have any of them stayed as true as Reich, despite the manifold 'sunsets'.
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Green. Always green.
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thompson1780
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« Reply #11 on: 23:13:21, 20-05-2008 » |
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I think of minimal music a bit like Debussy thought of Wagner.
You mean you subconsciously include it in your own work? Kind of. (Though I was thinking more of the sunsets and dawns thing.) Richard, this does beg the question whether you have composed a cakewalk with a p***-take of glass.... Tommo |
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Made by Thompson & son, at the Violin & c. the West end of St. Paul's Churchyard, LONDON
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richard barrett
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« Reply #12 on: 23:34:11, 20-05-2008 » |
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have any of them stayed as true as Reich, despite the manifold 'sunsets'.
Purity Of Essence, Mandrake!  I suppose Reich has a bit more of it than the others, but I still think the vision of his early pieces has been seriously diluted in the more recent ones. |
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Turfan Fragment
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« Reply #13 on: 00:17:09, 21-05-2008 » |
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It all makes me think that Reich was somewhere always already ambivalent about 'pure' minimalism, seeing it as I do as nothing more than a REALLY REALLY COOL arsenal of effects which though he may not have employed such a term lacked a satisfying dose of dialectical thinking. How this manifests itself one can indeed quibble about, but I'd venture that finishing Music for 18 Musicians must have made a rather onticeable change of style/priorities more or less inevitable. I don't ascribe my inability to imagine Reich continuing 'in that vein' to a lack of my own imagination but to a lack of possibilities to remain quite so detached seeing as how one only has one life to live.
I don't much care for the last mvt of Tehillim either but find it hard to imagine a world in which that piece wasn't written; it fills a niche, though perhaps not my favorite one.
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Ian Pace
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« Reply #14 on: 00:31:56, 21-05-2008 » |
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But it's more complicated than that, isn't it? Riech to me sits in the centre of the minimalist 'dawn' - if only because he seems so much more aacomplished than his contemporaries in expressing the essence of and staying with the 'movement'. So if you think now of Glass, Adams, Andriessen, Young, Riley, Nyman (?) - have any of them stayed as true as Reich, despite the manifold 'sunsets'.
But is it perhaps too easy to assign value on the basis of simple historical originality and influence? |
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'These acts of keeping politics out of music, however, do not prevent musicology from being a political act . . .they assure that every apolitical act assumes a greater political immediacy' - Philip Bohlman, 'Musicology as a Political Act'
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