Steve Reich, “It’s Gonna Rain”

Minimalist music.  What a sad term for the likes of Steve Reich. I really prefer the savvier term pulse music.  Electronics and humans have pulse and pattern.   Brian Eno’s term generative is also fitting since Reich’s methodology, the process of composition, is not only the concept of inspiration but the music. Because Reich’s compositions draw on the repetition of sounds, not a lot of “composing” supposedly takes place, so the word minimal has stuck. From his early taped loops to live performance, I would say Reich’s work is atomic, not minimal. He concentrates on the  game changing energy of the in-between. Emersed in listening to pieces like “It’s Gonna Rain” or “Pendulum Music”, one at first may find a simplicity in the repetition, but there are sudden explosions of something new alternating with the repetition.

 

His fascination of a someone pouring their heart out into a narrative, repeating, rebutting playing the parts. The story from the bible--“It’s Gonna Rain”--how many times has that been told and in what ways.  The street preacher has pulse, phrase, process and performance. It was the story of a madman Noah.  Reich records the urban sounds first as if creating his own scales of different instruments.  Revising the talking man further into a trance-like and frantic sound, experimentation through creating the loops of loops which ended up not syncing (not sinking, like Noah). Something new emerged, that time in 1965 that is still fresh with the rhythm, and surprising harmonies overlayered of African, Appalachian, Haight Ashbury trance dance music from a 2000-year-old-tale.

In “Pendulum Music” Reich pushes his experimentation of sound technology further with a recording that sounds like the songs of humpback whales, but naturally--not.  By installing microphones swinging through the air, like a pendulum, their own sounds defy gravity to the last movement. It is so radical. It is like a performance of the metal sticks screeching out to each other, but after hearing hours of whales in the last months, I appreciate the whoofy whining of the microphone tonality.

 

Reich later in life returns to creating scores with live instruments combined with snippets of voice and the mechanical sound of a train, such as in Different Trains.  The work is biographical, as he wanted to create a musical process of his thoughts in retrospect of him as a child travelling across the US in a train at the same time as millions of Jews during the Holocaust were transported via train to their death. The string quartet plays rhythm speeding and slowing like a loop of repetition which, surprisingly slips out of sync, like the skipping of a record, changing course, shocking then continuing. Surviving. 

(I found listening to this work better not as a video live performance.  The juxtaposition of the quartet and the train-like vortexes together were over dramatic.)

 

If Gloria Anzaldua’s book “Borderland/ La Frontera. The New Mestiza, 1987 had been written 20 years earlier, and needed a musical counterpart, maybe the works of Steve Reich could have been that counterpart.  He has an openness to processes the movement of contradictory sounds from one place to another and in doing so creating new voices in the in-between or in transition, like the enriching aspects of what borderlands could be that the writer describes.

 

 

Celina Lunsford, March, 2022