Steve Reich - The ECM Recordings (3 CDs)

Steve Reich - 

The ECM recordings (2016)

Music for 18 Musicians

Octec, Music for Large Ensemble, Violin Phase

Tehillim

Various Artists and Ensembles

This collection serves as a strong starting point, allowing you the chance to experience the vastness of Reich’s artistic reach and the unspeakable beauty of his music.

Steve Reich turned 80 just a few days after this latest repackaging of his first three ECM albums arrived in the marketplace. One hopes that the composer feels as young and vibrant as these recordings sound today. Reich was no novice composer when the first of these releases, Music for 18 Musicians, arrived in the heart of the 1970s. He’d been through his 12-tone phase, and his tape experiments had announced him as a vibrant and exciting voice in the music world.

By 1966, he’d composed one of his most haunting works, Come Out. Thirteen minutes of a voice moving out of sync with itself, intelligibility replaced by a rhythm and some notion of pitch. It is a piece constructed from an interview with a man who’d suffered a beating by police and was forced to puncture his own wound to show the damage that had been done, saying, “”I had to, like, open the bruise up, and let some of the bruise blood come out to show them.” He experimented with tapes and phasing through the remainder of the decade, and then pursued an interest in African rhythms during the next.

In 1974, he began working on the piece Music for 18 Musicians. Divided into 18 parts that included sections for violin, cello, female vocal and piano, the piece draws perhaps its greatest strength from human breath, which propels that pulses that the work offers, giving the listener a sense that they are listening to a living, evolving work. The music swells and contracts and hypnotizes over the course of its 56-minute cycle, a time that, once you’ve fully immersed yourself in the piece, feels too short.

There are a variety of Reich hallmarks here, including his tendency to slowly add new notes in the sequence, frequently in unexpected ways. This gives the piece a sense of freshness at exactly the moment it could otherwise fall into mere deadening repetition. If one can embrace the repetitions fully, the music becomes transcendent and there’s a newness in each moment, a quiet calmness to it all, even when the music builds to its boldest strokes.

Reich’s ability to weave these lines together and create something rich and complex out of something that initially seems simple, even childish, would escape the confines of the musical world he occupied. By the start of the following decade, Robert Fripp and Adrian Belew would weave similar ideas together with their guitars in the then newly-reactivated King Crimson. Fripp’s friend and sometime collaborator Brian Eno, as well as Talking Heads, would take great inspiration from Reich’s techniques as well. Today, the hypnotic pulses of Reich’s 1976 composition can be heard in a range of works from artists such as Tim Hecker and Björk.

His next work for ECM, Octet (later Eight Lines), spotlights three different pieces: “Music for a Large Ensemble” (1978) performed with violins, clarinets, saxophones, trumpets, marimbas, vibraphones and xylophones working beside other instruments, including female voice. One might view it as a more hurried, manic take than the music presented in Music for 18 Musicians. In some ways it is; in others, its repetitions and unexpected melodic turns provide the listener with a greater sense of calm despite the flurry of notes surrounding them.

Reich also revisits the 1967 piece “Violin Phase,” written for either a violin quartet or violin and tape. It’s pure Reich and indicative of the transition he found himself as the 1960s were moving to a close and he was bent on making something new. Taken with the closing “Octet,” we see a contrast between the composer’s sparer tendencies in orchestration and his more realized ones. Of anything presented in this collection, “Octet” is probably the most appealing to a commercial audience, sounding at times like a minimalist’s idea of funk-inflected pop though retaining its pure orchestral charms.

As beautiful as that work and the others mentioned can be, it’s 1981’s Tehillim that speaks volumes about Reich’s diversity. It is a work informed by spirituality (“tehillim” is Hebrew for “psalms”) and the Old World. The rhythms are at times primitive and folklike, while the vocals (for female voice) straddle the line between childlike optimism and world-weary resignation. Among everything presented in this new package, it doesn’t shock or challenge in quite the same way that its predecessors do. There is a deep reverence for the music which the piece references over the course of its four parts.

It doesn’t abandon the minimalistic tendencies of, say, “Octet” (to do so would mean that it wasn’t Reich in the composer’s chair) but it seamlessly marries them to tradition, such that we are certain that folk music had always been the way listeners were hearing it on Tehillim, a slowly evolving work influenced by both the beat of the human heart and capabilities and quirks of musical machines.

Well over 30 years after the last of these works appeared, there’s still plenty for us to learn from in the music of Reich—the patience to listen with anticipation and deep attention but also the wisdom to know when to let the music take over and allow itself to be absorbed deep into our pores so that we feel it pulse within. If you’ve never explored Steve Reich before, this collection serves as a strong starting point, allowing you the chance to experience the vastness of his artistic reach and the unspeakable beauty of his music.