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Steve Reich: Music as a Gradual Process Part II Author(s): K. Robert Schwarz Source: Perspectives of New Music, Vol. 20, No. 1/2 (Autumn, 1981 - Summer, 1982), pp. 225-286 Published by: Perspectives of New Music Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/942414 Accessed: 03-10-2018 20:45 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms Perspectives of New Music is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Perspectives of New Music This content downloaded from 129.74.250.206 on Wed, 03 Oct 2018 20:45:31 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms STEVE REICH: MUSIC AS A GRADUAL PROCESS PART II K. Robert Schwarz This content downloaded from 129.74.250.206 on Wed, 03 Oct 2018 20:45:31 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms In 1968, Steve Reich codified his compositional aesthetic in the single most important essay he has ever written, "Music as a Gradual Process." This article, which has been reprinted several times,38 must be examined in detail, as it is here that Reich clarifies all the trends that have been developing in his music since 1965, and sets the direction for the future. The terse, inexpressive wording of "Music as a Gradual Process" serves to reinforce four important points in the concisest of manners. First of all, Reich is concerned with clarity of structure, which he feels can only be achieved by creating compositions in which structure ("process") and musical content are identical. He has no use for hidden constructive devices that serve to obscure a musical process. Secondly, musical processes, once set into motion, have a life of their own, and need no further meddling from the composer to progress; they are impersonal and objective procedures. Thirdly, improvisation can play no part in a musical process; on the contrary, one must subvert one's own feelings and allow the inexorable forward thrust of the process to take charge. Lastly, no matter how objective the process, unexpected events will still occur: these are the resulting patterns. To appreciate these concepts in Reich's own distinctive wording, excerpts from "Music as a Gradual Process" are quoted below. One should realize, however, that Reich has since disavowed many of these viewpoints, at least for his own recent compositions. Nevertheless, this essay provides a framework for our understanding of Reich's music through 1971. I do not mean the process of composition, but rather pieces of music that are, literally, processes. The distinctive thing about musical processes is that they determine the note-to-note ... details and the overall form simultaneously. (Think of a round or infinite canon).... One can't improvise in a musical process-the concepts are mutually exclusive.... I am interested in perceptible processes. I want to be able to hear the processes happening throughout the sounding music. To facilitate closely detailed listening, a musical process should happen extremely gradually... so slowly and gradually that listening to it resembles watching the minute hand on a watch -you can perceive it moving after you stay with it a little while....Though I may have the pleasure of discovering musical processes and composing the musical material to run through them, once the process is set up and loaded, it runs by itself.... What I'm interested in is a compositional process and a sounding music that are one and the same thing....The use of hidden structural devices never appealed to me. Even when all the cards are on the table and everyone hears what is gradually happening in This content downloaded from 129.74.250.206 on Wed, 03 Oct 2018 20:45:31 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 227 a musical process, there are still enough mysteries to satisfy all. These mysteries are the impersonal, unintended, psycho-acoustic by-products of the intended process. These might include sub- melodies heard within repeated melodic patterns, stereophonic effects due to listener location, slight irregularities in performance, harmonics, difference tones, etc.... While performing and listening to gradual musical process one can participate in a particularly liberating and impersonal kind of ritual. Focusing in on the musical process makes possible that shift of attention away from he and she and you and me outwards (or inwards) towards it. The years 1968-9 saw a short-lived revival of Reich's interest in employing electronics to perform the phasing process. Pendulum Music, completed in August of 1968, involves allowing four suspended microphones to swing freely over four upturned loudspeakers. The result is a series of loosely phased feedback pulses, which gain in intensity as the microphones swing closer to their respective loudspeakers. As the precise phasing of the pulses produced by the swaying microphones is largely uncontrollable, this work has strong overtones of random elements-chance-making it atypical of Reich's output as a whole, surrounded as it is by rigorously structured musical process compositions.39 At the same time that Reich was working on Pendulum Music, he began to become fascinated with the idea of developing and constructing an electronic device that would be designed specifically to carry out the phasing process, a device that could be "played" in a performance situation to simulate a particular variety of phasing activity. The phasing process desired here was not the earlier type which had involved changing the rhythmic relationship between two identical melodic patterns. Instead, Reich was now interested in starting with a chord, and then very gradually shifting individual tones from within the sonority out of phase one at a time, so that what began as a vertical harmonic entity would eventually end up as a series of infinitely changing horizontal melodic patterns (Example 5). Between February 1968 and early 1969, with the assistance of electronic engineers from New Jersey Bell Laboratories, Reich constructed a device that would be capable of such a musical process. The finished product, grandly called "The Phase Shifting Pulse Gate", is described in great detail by Reich,40 and will not be discussed from a technical viewpoint here. Reich unveiled his new invention on May 27, 1969 when, as part of an artistic and musical exhibition entitled Anti-Illusion, he performed using the "Pulse Gate" at New York's Whitney Museum. Despite a year and a half of devoting all his energies to working with This content downloaded from 129.74.250.206 on Wed, 03 Oct 2018 20:45:31 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms ' .) "" ~tf(,) (W) ( (Dl( (s O lt en O) {}L>} b n.^ f, n ? v tfs > nJ1^ n ^^ g./7fi(f-B-^-^41J i (~ (n (?KtO(azl) o1) $18 {(u(xi(:)) t) ( ??w (*t f A () IJJ01W > -.IL,T J ] ? \ ,.~_,~.,.~, f,T,:_-r-- 1,7,7, 7Y'l 0 . Tf2I-Pr.'T S7: ..,-" [n v ' 7 g ( &? ^^ ^:^ ^-7 J) tl O1 I (U t ). Cw ^4krLUjtJJYl (^ luSrfl m S (?<w) 41 )lrA co J3(F P? P? t *L J - X-._n n njq- 7} r,'',. n r.,-- (F-^--tp n 7 - p p U7{ - - - - - 7 ) -- { 7 ) ) j L1 {1 (Wf r (SB ( ) C 1O Mt ()t? Clt ) (? (* ^ C su (? hM hM o 4 os w _..._.. (S,_ttl.-.c...a. " - J.m ^ - ro f tl 4 it t) f t) p l) (w) ?;) Example 5. Steve Reich, Pulse Music (1969) for Phase Shifting Pulse Gate. Copyright 1969 by Steve Reich. Used by permission. This content downloaded from 129.74.250.206 on Wed, 03 Oct 2018 20:45:31 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 229 electronics, Reich returned home from the Whitney Museum sorely disap- pointed by the results. He stated then: The "perfection" of rhythmic execution of the Gate... was stiff and unmusical. In any music which depends on a steady pulse, as my music does, it is actually tiny micro-variations of that pulse created by human beings, playing instruments or singing, that gives life to the music.41 Reich's conclusion was: "I felt very clearly then that I did not wish to have any involvement with electronic music again."42 However, as was noted earlier, Reich has continued to have ambivalent feelings towards electronic techniques. Nevertheless, it was not until 1980 that Reich overcame his old resolve and again turned to electronic music; the result was a work in progress, My Name Is: Ensemble Portrait (q.v.). It is most significant, though, that Reich chose to return to a verbally based tape piece with My Name Is- not to electronically produced musical sounds. One can state that it is unlikely that music based on electronically generated sonorities will ever interest him again. Though he probably did not realize it in 1969, the energy invested in the "Phase Shifting Pulse Gate" had not been wasted. A concept derived from the "Gate" soon inspired Reich to return to live instrumental composition, and the resulting work, Four Organs, was completed in January 1970. In Reich's "Pulse Gate" compositions, individual notes had been phased out of an opening simultaneity to produce melodic patterns. Four Organs, however, would capitalize on the "variable pulse-width aspect of the Gate",43 which had not been employed in any of his electronic compositions (i.e., the aspect of the Gate that controlled the duration of individual pulses), and apply it to live performance.
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