Steve Reich - It’s Gonna Rain

This piece attracted me at the beginning because of the African-American voice, which reminded me of other African-American music, such as rap and soul. Considering the time when this piece was composed, I thought it might be potentially related to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s . However, after a short, ambiguous and irritating shout, there was only a loop of the same sentence “It’s Gonna Rain” left. Sometimes he would even divide this small sentence into “It’s Gon” and “Rain”, and along with the loud and discontinuous background noise, it more sounded like a smashed magnetic tape recording to me. To me, I often just heard a composition made up of some repetitive musical patterns or dense layers of sound. 

I found this part of the piece somehow clamorous and unmusical, with the voice sounding quite provoking, aggressive and somewhat desperate. Even though he reiterated the title sentence “It’s Gonna Rain,” I was quite far from any feelings of raindrops or a rainy atmosphere. In fact, I didn’t really grasp the major concept of this piece through the seemingly mechanical repetitive sounds during this part of my initial listening. It had nothing to do with impressive melody, meaningful lyrics, or any conventional sense of music. More likely, it is an experimental musical style, as we all know that Steve Reich is an influential composer when it comes to minimal music, like another American composer we’ve mentioned in class - Philip Glass, who also employs the technique of repetition into his musical composition. Or maybe, the reiteration of small and simple musical fragments implies a more perceptible and aesthetic narrative. 

After having done considerable online research, I gradually managed to comprehend the quintessence of “It’s Gonna Rain,” and in the meantime, gained a deeper knowledge of Reich’s creative process. It turns out that this piece partially connects to some historical events back then, such as the aforementioned Civil Rights Movement and the Cuban missile crisis, an event that some viewed as the potential end of the world. The powerful and intense recorded voice was from a preacher named Brother Walter “who was declaiming a sermon about Noah and The Flood.” Putting the piece into the complex societal framework of its local time, Walter’s repetitive impassioned appeal assumably makes this piece more comprehensible and thought-provoking. To my surprise, after several times of relistening, I gradually detected the musicality of Walter’s voice in the masterful manipulation. 

Moreover, from an aesthetic perspective, some critics states that “It's Gonna Rain” is the first piece ever to use the process of gradually shifting phase relations between two or more identical repeating patterns” (Alburger 2004). I suddenly become conscious of a better appreciation for this compositional technique. The identical melodic sounds were played simultaneously and repeatedly, creating a consequently novel pattern coming out of this concurrence as those same ones go out of phase with each other by changing the lengths. What makes this arrangement more intriguing and memorable is that Reich admits himself that “actually the going out of phase was kind of an accident.” “It’s Gonna Rain” is a magnificent attempt at melodic construction and one of the landmarks in the development of music history.