Steve Reich – „It’s Gonna Rain, Pt. 1” (1965) – Summer Rain

At first, the piece “It’s Gonna Rain” by Steve Reich from 1965 was hard to listen to for me. The repeatingly played records of a speaker saying that it is going to rain felt like they were almost driving me mad as I had reached about 3:30 minutes. 
But then I came to a certain realization: The sounds that Reich created by repeating the recordings had a connection to the title itself. It almost felt like a very ambivalent eight minutes of rain.    
I imagined me standing at a pavillon-like bus station made out of plastic. Until the next bus arrives, there are 8 minutes to go. Raindrops are very suddenly falling from the sky and as I stand under the plastic roof, I could hear the rhythm of the rain very clearly. The sounds of Reichs piece actually pictured, when deeply letting myself into listening to it, the changing, ambivalent sounds of a quick rain shower during summer. The length and speed of the raindrops are constantly changing, just like their intensity and the sound they make when they hit the plastic roof. The raindrops vary in their sound but they also seem to sound and hit the roof in a very repetitive manner which seems tiring to me. I keep on listening to the rain and the sounds the shower makes and the patterns this rain shower creates within my head. 
As fast as the rain came it also leaves. The sound pattern is abruptly ended when I start to see the bus arriving from the southern end of the street. The dripping sounds only occur scarcely now. The last raindrops fall down from the roof to the curbside of the road and the remaining water runs down to the sides of the roof.         
The bus arrives and splashes the water up one last time, as it drives through the puddles that the eight minutes of rain have created within the car tracks right next to sidewalk. Then, suddenly, there is no sound pattern left to hear, only the unspectacular sound of me getting on the bus and sitting down. What I remain to hear though, is a quiet echo of the sound system that was formed by the raindrops hitting the plastic roof. The echoes in my head blend in with the repetitive sounds of the motor of the bus and the chatting noises of the people sitting around me. As the bus drives towards the next stop, the bus driver takes a right turn and the sun flashes through the disappearing clouds. Without a warning, the several noises and sounds that have mixed and occupied my head all of a sudden stop and are replaced with a warm and gloomy chirping sound that is created by the sun and some birds peacefully flying through the bright sunrays.