Steve Reich - 70th bday retrospective

[ejp626]

So Nonesuch is releasing a 5 CD retrospective later this month.

CD Universe has a good price, and I am leaning towards ordering, even though I already have roughly half the music already. CD Universe - Reich

There was a remix project previously, which generally got very poor reviews. This time around, the 2006 remixes are a bit better apparently, but either you get 3 on an EP or you can have 4 but only bundled with the original remix album (I think this is called Reich Remixed - Expanded, but currently is only available on amazon.co.uk). So that's a bit annoying.

[Tony Pusey]

I have the 10 cd box that Nonesuch put out a few years ago- records were packaged in slim jewel packs, so I suppose there is nothing new I need here- but this collection seems better focused in the essentials, perhaps making it a bit more user friendly?

[ornette]

£13.99 post free at http://www.powerplaydirect.com/

Search under the title.

[ejp626]

£13.99 post free at http://www.powerplaydirect.com/

Search under the title.

That's a pretty good price, esp. for the UK. Thanks. The CD Universe offer is also good, but comes with a hefty shipping price, especially as I do live in the UK (for now).

I think I saw that one piece is more recent (than the previous box set), but I probably wouldn't buy this if I had that 10 CD box set.

[BruceH]

Wow. Time marches on. I still thought of Reich as being in his late 40's. Which didn't make any sense, but, y'know...

[Tony Pusey]

Yeah, I just looked at wifey and saw myself in the mirror.....

[Guest youmustbe]

I still have my Shandar LP of Four Organs 1070 Steve, Philip Glass, Art Murphy and Steve Chambers with Jon Gibson on Morocas.....FUNKY!!!

[Guest youmustbe]

1970, of course....the original on vinyl ECM 18 Musicians still kick ass, much better than Nonesuch...but Steve says today in NY Times how new groups can really play his shit today!

The remix was awful except the track by Andrea Parker...and the whole idea of remixing minimalism...I mean Hip hop and all that is just the latest version of Minimalism.

[CJ Shearn]

interesting...... I can drive myself crazy with it but I listen to clips of Reich often on CDuniverse and such.

[7/4]

September 29, 2006

Steve Reich, Sunny? Well, It Is His Birthday

By ANNE MIDGETTE, NYT

Steve Reich has moved to the country.

For decades this composer has been a quintessential voice of downtown New York. And to mark his 70th birthday, on Tuesday, the city’s leading cultural institutions are joining forces in an unprecedented celebratory collaboration, Steve Reich@70, offering a month (more or less) of his music at Carnegie Hall, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Lincoln Center and elsewhere.

But Mr. Reich left Lower Manhattan for Westchester earlier this summer. And he is very, very happy about it.

“It’s really a pleasure,” he said by phone last week. “I used to be a composer, but now I’m into home improvement.”

“Sunny” is hardly an adjective most people would have applied to Mr. Reich for most of his life. Words like “intense,” “driven” and “caffeinated” came more readily to mind. But sunny, it seems, he has become, waxing lyrical about his new house (built by the Modernist architect William N. Breger) and as excited about the coming celebrations as, well, a boy waiting for his birthday.

And this new warmth may be reflected in his music.

Mr. Reich has always been a distinctive voice. His classification as a minimalist, grouped with Philip Glass, has come to seem, with the years, increasingly irrelevant. You could say that Mr. Reich stripped music down to its bare essentials in seminal works like “Clapping Music” (1972), written for two performers and their hands, or “Drumming” (1971), an hour-plus piece written entirely for percussion instruments. But even those pieces, spare in means, have their own eloquence.

Elements have steadily been added over the years: more instruments, human voices (with “Tehillim” in 1981), more visuals, more stories. The last have been a particular feature of Mr. Reich’s collaboration with his wife, the video artist Beryl Korot, which has produced ambitious music theater works like “The Cave” (1990-3), an exploration of Jewish and Muslim beliefs, or “Three Tales” (2002), which challenged a range of attitudes among scientists.

Meanwhile the music has gotten not only fuller, but freer.

“There’s a different generosity,” said Jennifer Bilfield, who was president of Mr. Reich’s publishers, Boosey & Hawkes, before moving in August to become artistic and executive director of Stanford Lively Arts in California. “His writing is more expansive. ‘Proverb’ ” — from 1995 — “is a piece that struck me as a very decisive shift. There’s a different intimacy, an inner quiet that’s very moving.”

It was Ms. Bilfield who had the idea of getting Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center and the Brooklyn Academy to collaborate on Mr. Reich’s birthday, an idea nobody else thought would work. The three presenters are, after all, competitors in an increasingly tough market. But Mr. Reich had close relationships with all of them, and Ms. Bilfield was already braced for one of them to call her and ask about doing a festival for his birthday, which would keep the other two out of the picture.

“It was really to pre-empt what would have been a more awkward discussion,” Ms. Bilfield said. “I basically picked up the phone and said, ‘Can you imagine what a great energy it would be, what a great example for the presenting world?’ And each institution had a different relationship with Steve. When the parties came to the table, there was no tug of war, not at all.”

The Brooklyn Academy will focus on dance, including the American premiere of “Variations for Vibes, Piano and Strings,” commissioned for the choreographer Akram Khan, which will open the festival on the actual birthday. Carnegie Hall will concentrate on instrumental music, including a training workshop and the American premiere of Mr. Reich’s latest work, “Daniel Variations,” written in memory of the murdered Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. And Lincoln Center presents vocal works, including three performances of “The Cave.”

“Daniel Variations,” co-commissioned by the Daniel Pearl Foundation, interweaves texts from the Old Testament Book of Daniel and Pearl’s own writings. The Book of Daniel, Mr. Reich pointed out, is set in Babylon — present-day Iraq. The piece blends in a string quartet, which at the words “My name is Daniel Pearl” takes off, Mr. Reich said, in a major key. (Mr. Pearl was a violinist.)

“It’s a very un-Steve Reich-like, expressive piece of music,” Mr. Reich said.

As if to warn his fans not to expect too much more of this baroque phase, he added: “The last few works have been very open, very expressive, very free, very different. Now I’ve kind of got a yen to go medieval.”

But his inner romantic may already have been outed.

For his 70th birthday Nonesuch has released a new box set, “Phases” (Nonesuch 79962-2), with a selection of Mr. Reich’s greatest hits, most of them in the recordings made with the ensemble he founded in 1966, Steve Reich and Musicians, which he refers to as “original instruments.” The performances are very fine. But it’s fascinating to listen to recordings made by another group a generation later.

Mr. Reich’s ensemble focuses on presenting the composition; the younger group, Alarm Will Sound, crack performers all, also focuses on interpreting it. On that band’s CD of “Tehillim” and “The Desert Music” (Cantaloupe Music CA21009), Mr. Reich’s music takes on a whole new dimension of ravishing beauty, beauty that was in there all along.

And Mr. Reich embraces the idea that other people are performing his works, and performing them so well.

“What impresses me,” he said, “is the ease that younger musicians have playing my music, not only right, but idiomatically.” On a recent trip to Latvia he heard a performance of “Music for 18 Musicians” (1974-76). “These people were burning,” he said. “I wasn’t sure where Latvia was, but they knew where I was.”

Sitting in Pound Ridge, still surrounded by packing boxes, in his striking new house (Mr. Breger was also the architect of the Civic Center Synagogue, where Mr. Reich and Ms. Korot were married), he sounded, well, downright expansive. And his goals, for once, seemed perfectly simple.

“What do I want?” he said. “I want people to love the music, not to feel, ‘What, him again?’ It seems that the music is holding up over time. That’s the most gratifying thing.”

[J Larsen]

the original on vinyl ECM 18 Musicians still kick ass, much better than Nonesuch...

I totally agree - the oiginal ECM is a masterpiece... that recent Nonesuch version just kills it... in trying to perhaps warm it up a little, they made it sound like Music for 18 Musicians with saccharine added.

[BruceH]

I still have my Shandar LP of Four Organs 1070 Steve, Philip Glass, Art Murphy and Steve Chambers with Jon Gibson on Morocas.....FUNKY!!!

Love that! I remember getting that record out of the library when I was in high school and just tripping out on it.

[Guest youmustbe]

I'm not saying that Hip Hop in any way was influenced by minimalism...I'm sure they didn't even know it existed.

I'm just saying that it is the same concept for both...loops, repetition etc....2 different cultures arriving at the same thing.

Reich's last stuff is pretty lame, but he's done more than enough to warrant the praise.

[J Larsen]

I'm not saying that Hip Hop in any way was influenced by minimalism...I'm sure they didn't even know it existed.

I'm not so sure about that. I've known a couple producers/djs, and the breadth of knowledge of these particular individuals is staggering... from Ayler to Subotnick to Mark E Smith to crazy obscure delta blues, these guys talk knowledgably. (I ran into one of these guys about a year or two ago on my way to a Mission of Burma reunion shows; when I told him where I was going he scrunched up his face and asked "Man, you still on that 80s shit?"). These guys comb *every* corner of record stores looking for ideas and samples that haven't been used before .

[Guest youmustbe]

You're talking about 25 years after the fact.

I'm saying that I don't believe that Kurtis Blow or DST was aware, in say 1978, that Steve Reich had just put out on ECM Music for 18 Musicians or that they knew what a stir Glass' Einstein On The Beach had caused.

But that 'sound' and that 'idea' was in the air here in NY and it has always awed me how the same thing but in a different context sprung up at the same time in gentified lower Manhattan and in the projects in the Bronx.

[J Larsen]

Fair enough, but there were guys like Basquiat who sort of bridged the gap between those two communities, and I wouldn't be so quick to assume what Kurtis Blow was following 30 years ago. In any event, I'm sure that Reich and Glass were well aware of the sensation Kurtis Blow and Bambaataa were causing back in the 70s.

Edited October 15, 2006 by J Larsen

[Guest youmustbe]

Just to add:

It strikes me as funny, I work with DJs, currently with Pete Rock, Easy Mo Bee, Nicolay, Rob Swift, a/o and although they have tons of records, they are not always aware of what they have. Or they might have a Roy Ayers LP but they don't know anything say about Dennis Davis' drumming or even that he's on the record, and definately not the history of what they are listening to.

Not that they should, it's part of the charm. But, if it was a 'Jazz' collector, he would know everything about everything including have the liner notes memorized.

[J Larsen]

Just to add:

It strikes me as funny, I work with DJs, currently with Pete Rock, Easy Mo Bee, Nicolay, Rob Swift, a/o and although they have tons of records, they are not always aware of what they have. Or they might have a Roy Ayers LP but they don't know anything say about Dennis Davis' drumming or even that he's on the record, and definately not the history of what they are listening to.

Not that they should, it's part of the charm. But, if it was a 'Jazz' collector, he would know everything about everything including have the liner notes memorized.

I can easily believe that. I'd guess that the guys who are really making $$$ buy up their records much faster than they can really process them.

[Guest youmustbe]

Yes...when someone tells me they have 10000 vinyl and they keep sampling the same 4-5 samples, which you can find on the sample collection lps...you gotta wonder!!!

[Guest youmustbe]

Pete Rock, 'Chocolate Boy Wonder'!!!

[BruceH]

But that 'sound' and that 'idea' was in the air here in NY and it has always awed me how the same thing but in a different context sprung up at the same time in gentified lower Manhattan and in the projects in the Bronx.

Indeed, the group Television always struck me as very much minimalism as applied to rock 'n' roll. Also working in New York, also at the right time... Then of course, there's the Ramones.

[J Larsen]

I get where you're coming from clem, and I think you thought I was making a stronger case than I really was. I certainly agree that you don't need glass, reich, et al. to have the history of hip hop as we know it; I was originally only questioning the assumption that no one in hip hop was even aware of that movement back in the day. That's just more than I'm willing to assume. That's all.

Edited October 15, 2006 by J Larsen

[Guest youmustbe]

Yeah, aside from the fact that On The Corner is a total piece of shit as music/recording, it exists as an 'influence' totally based on Lester Bangs' ravings...another example of how White nerds are always ready to discover 'Black' music that Blacks never even knew existed, much less cared for. Like 'Underground Hip Hop'.

[BruceH]

"In the air" is the key phrase here, clem, "in the air." No direct influence. But if "Marqee Moon" and Wire's "Pink Flag" aren't minimalistic rock, I don't know what is. And sure, the Ramones were of course a pop band...and minimal as heck on their eponymous first album.

Edited October 15, 2006 by BruceH

[J Larsen]

Yeah, aside from the fact that On The Corner is a total piece of shit as music/recording, it exists as an 'influence' totally based on Lester Bangs' ravings...another example of how White nerds are always ready to discover 'Black' music that Blacks never even knew existed, much less cared for. Like 'Underground Hip Hop'.

In that case, where do I get my membership card for the white nerd club?