As Bryn foretold earlier, R2, Reich's a composer who splits the membership - sometimes even the same member....
Here's one split member. I've been involved in various Reich performances over the years and remain wildly enthusiastic about certain pieces whilst severely critical about others. Or parts of others. A few observations . . . mostly critical.
1) Let's kill off the fiction that Reich discovered phasing from tape recorders playing at slightly different speeds. He was involved in the first performance of Terry Riley's
In C - indeed it was he who recommended the repeated C pulse to help
prevent players from phasing.
2) Reich has moved slowly from piece to piece, sometimes repeating himself (no irony intended) but having grown really pretty slowly over the last 40 odd years. Some pieces are stronger or more effective than others. Favourites which immediately come to mind are
Come Out, Piano phase, Drumming, Music for pieces of wood, Music for 18 musicians and
Sextet - yes, all earlier works - although some have weak moments (eg.,
Music for 18 musicians still sags badly in section 4, even after Reich shortened it). I still have never managed to listen to a complete version of
Different trains - doesn't the juxtaposition of trains crossing the USA/trains on their ways to death camps make anybody else wince? The speech melodies are an effective idea, but limited in the hands of Reich: far more interesting in the hands of Rob Davidson and his
McLibel piece.
Music for mallet instruments, voices + organ is too sugary and
Clapping music, whilst a useful rhythmic exercise, I find unbelievably weak, not even useful as a lecture-demonstration piece.
3) There are scores which are badly laid out or even wrongly conceived. The score of
Piano phase is frankly useless for those who wish either to perform it (it would be memorised anyway) or who wish to study it: OK, it tells you the pitches, but it's easy to figure those out without a score. I've performed
Music for 18 musicians several times with students from the mid-1980s onwards: I made my own score (on 13 pages of panopus a3) and set of parts which I'm arrogant enough to consider more sensible and user-friendly than Reich's own 234-page score (no, the composer didn't agree - but he was always publicly appreciative and supportive of our performances). The method by which he makes the music available to ensembles outside his own group (for instance, notationally and by using a conductor) seems fundamentally misconceived to me.
4) One important lesson from
Drumming - identical musical material varied only by timbre and register can have a drastically different effect: electrifying on drums, soporific on marimbas and increasingly irritating on glockenspiels. And hear it live if possible (especially by Reich's own group) - Ron is spot on to encourage this! No recording has the same effect. Where I'd disagree with Ron is regarding the last section of
Tehillim: if the tutti last section of
Drumming was a compositional necessity, the analagous section in
Tehillim has always struck me as unacceptably manipulative - "playing to the gallery" (sorry, Ron!).
5) I could bang on about the unfortunate influence that Riley, Reich et al have wielded (not their fault) - think of the hundreds of younger, less discriminating cheap imitators who have churned out acres of junk. But I think I've probably said enough for now. Apologies for the lengthy post. It's intended to stimulate discussion rather than stifle it.
