De afgelopen twee jaar hebben vier groten uit de geschiedenis van Amerikaanse minimal music, Terry Riley, La Monte Young, Steve Reich, en Philip Glass, de leeftijd van tachtig jaar bereikt. Alle vier zijn ze nog actief, ieder op hun eigen wijze binnen het spectrum van deze muziekstroming. Dit is album nummer 24 in Reichs publicaties via Nonesuch sinds 1985. In Pulse, een werk voor blazers, strijkers, piano en elektrische bas, schuiven de patronen als zwermen vogels die door de lucht scheren in een vloeiende bijna bezwerende dans. Quartet, het andere werk, wordt virtuoos uitgevoerd op twee piano's en twee vibrafoons en bestaat uit drie delen: het eerste hard, scherp, hoekig met de piano als drijvende kracht, het tweede straalt rust en verstilling uit en in het derde komt met voortrazende versnelling en haast.
Reich: Pulse/Quartet
International Contemporary Ensemble, Colin Currie Group
Though detailed and accomplished, Steve Reich’s latest work dully reaffirms his place as a centrist in a field of extremists.
During the last two years, each of the United States’ four masters of musical minimalism—Terry Riley, La Monte Young, Steve Reich, and Philip Glass—turned 80. They are all still composing, performing, and proselytizing for their own aesthetic visions. Their bodies of work are reminders that the “scenes” shaped by critics or mere circumstances are rarely cohesive; they are disconnected threads, sewn together by necessity or dumb luck. To this day, for instance, Young remains the philosophical ascetic, the one who told The Guardian in 2015, “I’m only interested in putting out masterpieces” despite having not released a record for nearly two decades. Riley is the imaginative mystic, the avuncular sort whose sense of play and exploded psychedelia has made him a multigenerational pied-piper. Glass is the crossover king, a composer whose twin senses of delicacy and bombast led to exquisite études and (for better and worse) that indelible Koyaanisqatsi score.
Reich has long sat squarely near the middle: A bit like Young, he is perennially devoted to a small clutch of consistent ideas, forever in pursuit of the perfect pulse or pointillist exhibition. But like Glass, his popular appeal owes something to his openness to diverse settings, whether that be the cascade of voices in Tehillim or Pat Metheny’s guitar in Electric Counterpoint. He seems a flexible ideologue, then, a centrist in a field of extremists. But Pulse/Quartet—Reich’s first major release since Radio Rewrite, his pallid exposition on two Radiohead songs—reaffirms that position in the dullest possible way: through technical challenges meant to push his familiar approach to new ends.
Pulse is one of Reich’s works for a large ensemble—four violins, two violas, two flutes, and two clarinets, all undergirded by the persistent plunk of the piano and electric bass. For 15 minutes, Reich weaves interpretations of a single theme above a static pulse, hoping to form a tapestry from a nice melody resurfaced with rich harmony. It is, well, pleasant. Pulse feels like the score for a short film about the heroism of an office worker’s rote existence, where a daily merry-go-round of busy work means nothing significant ever happens.
Reich says, "Pulse, for winds, strings, piano and electric bass, was completed in 2015 and was, in part, a reaction to Quartet, in which I changed keys more frequently than in any previous work. In Pulse I felt the need to stay put harmonically and spin out smoother wind and string melodic lines in canon over a constant pulse in the electric bass and or piano. From time to time this constant pulse is accented differently through changing hand alternation patterns on the piano. All in all, a calmer more contemplative piece."
He continues, "Quartet, when mentioned in the context of concert music, is generally assumed to mean string quartet. In my case, the quartet that has played a central role in many of my pieces (besides the string quartet) is that of two pianos and two percussion. It appears like that or in expanded form with more pianos or more percussion in The Desert Music; Sextet; Three Movements; The Four Sections; The Cave; Dance Patterns; Three Tales; You Are (Variations); Variations for Vibes, Pianos and Strings; Daniel Variations; Double Sextet; and Radio Rewrite. In Quartet, there is just this group alone: two vibes and two pianos.
"The piece is one of the more complex I have composed. It frequently changes key and often breaks off continuity to pause or take up new material. Though the parts are not unduly difficult, it calls for a high level of ensemble virtuosity. The form is one familiar throughout history: fast, slow, fast, played without pause. The slow movement introduces harmonies not usually found in my music."
Steve Reich has been called "our greatest living composer" (New York Times) and "the most original musical thinker of our time" (New Yorker). His path has embraced not only Western Classical music, but the structures, harmonies, and rhythms of non-Western and American vernacular music, particularly jazz. "There's just a handful of living composers who can legitimately claim to have altered the direction of musical history and Steve Reich is one of them," states the Guardian. In April 2009 Steve Reich was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Music for his composition Double Sextet. Nonesuch has released twenty-three Steve Reich albums, beginning in 1985 with The Desert Music and including two box sets; his most recent album was Radio Rewrite (2014).
