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4/12: Steve Reich’s Sonic Balm
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
CONCERT REVIEW Steve Reich Festival. Sunday at Eyedrum; Tuesday and Wednesday at the Rialto Center for the Arts.
First came the drum. Thump. Thump. Thump.
Then two drums thumping together. Then two drums thumping together but a millisecond apart. Thump-p. Thump-p. Thump-p.
As the space between the two thumps gradually widened over several minutes — thump-ump, thump-ump — we started hearing what composer Steve Reich calls “phasing” or “music of gradual process.” Thump-thump. Thump-ump-ump.
As a basis for “Drumming,” written in 1971, it’s a simple, flexible concept of radiant genius. Palestrina had his vocal polyphony; Bach his fugue; Reich has his phase music, the basis for one the most remarkable bodies of classical music of the past half century.
Now 70, Steve Reich — who pronounces his name with a soft “sh” ending, rather than a hard “rike” — is being celebrated around the country, from club DJs to classical chamber groups to percussionists everywhere. Why not? Reich writes music people love.
Atlanta hosted its own Reich Festival, a three-concert deal that covered many of his most compelling and influential works.
It opened Sunday at Eyedrum art space, highlighted by short films by Robert Nelson, with music by Reich, who had yet to develop his distinct sound world. For reasons never made clear, Reich and his agents tried to block the screenings. So Eyedrum’s Andy Ditzler announced to the crowd that the films were not officially part of the Reich festival … and showed them as planned.
Tuesday’s performance, at the Rialto Center for the Arts, held the 75-minute “Drumming,” performed by So Percussion, an extraordinarily disciplined quartet from Brooklyn, and augmented by a few Georgia State University students.
“Drumming” distills Reich’s style. Like the Pompidou Center in Paris, the modern-art temple with the colorful pipes and elevators on the outside for all to see, Reich’s music is all out there. The listener feels the guts of the piece, hears the obvious changes in harmony.
The performance wasn’t ideal, though. The musicians raced through the music, diminishing the power of glacial change. And while the So players kept a properly ritualistic attitude, several of the students felt inclined to rock out with the music: they sounded sloppy (and looked like they were auditioning for Led Zeppelin).
The festival’s final show, Wednesday at the Rialto, included members of Atlanta’s Bent Frequency and assorted GSU musicians.
The evening opened with a joyous and virtuosic reading of “Nagoya Marimbas,” from 1994. The “phase” concept was by now familiar: two guys stationed at their instruments, tinkling a bouncy rhythm that slips in and out of alignment, creating canons and mysterious, floating inner sounds. (“Row, Row, Row Your Boat,” in contrast, is canon with a fixed alignment.)
Clarinetist Ted Gurch gave a yearningly beautiful performance of “New York Counterpoint” (1985) backed by an array of pre-recorded clarinets. The middle movement, marked “Slow,” is perhaps the loveliest thing Reich has ever written.
Just as “Drumming” reinvents the massive Mahler-sized symphony, while stripping music down to its essentials, “New York Counterpoint” is a sort of technologized and modernized concerto, where the “heroic” action soloist is accompanied by many voices. What’s more, the haunting wail of the clarinet, associated with klezmer, the bittersweet folk music of Eastern European Jews, served as foreshadowing of what lay ahead on the program.
Laura Gordy and Lisa Leong, at two Steinways, played “Piano Phase” (1967), Reich’s lightening strike of genius, where he first applied his discovery of the phase process to live performers.
In the early 1970s, Reich took his new-found concept to a logical extreme, looking for the most elemental aspects of music and performance, down to the level of Paleolithic man around the campfire.
“Clapping Music” (1972) is just that: it starts with eight musicians clapping, soon smearing into out-of-alignment rhythms.
Reich followed our evolutionary progress with “Music for Pieces of Wood” (1973), where mallets strike small cylinders, each at a different pitch. Again, music at once so fundamental and sophisticated plays with your head, stirring euphoria in the listener.
The festival concluded with “Different Trains” (1988), where a live string quartet, pre-recorded string quartets and snatches of speech overlap, complement and blend into each other. (At the Rialto, it was hard to hear the words, which blunted the overall effect.)
It’s more than just Reich’s masterpiece. “Different Trains” is the most thoughtful and subtle (and thus unbearably powerful) Holocaust memorial yet to come out of classical music.
It works on so many levels, and is so tragically beautiful, so emotionally clear yet elusive, that it’s likely the best piece of music by anyone from the last decades of the 20th century — and ensures that Steve Reich’s music, like that of the great masters in history, will be with us permanently.
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