steve reich - biography


5. Gamelan - Music For 18 Musicians - After 18

Reich's music had begun to evolve from the harsh minimal tendencies and timbres of Piano Phase and Four Organs. With Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices and Organ (1973), Reich began to concern himself as much with creating beautiful sounds as with promoting a structural process that could be easily heard within his music. Gamelan, with its percussion-based strict yet organic rhythms and wide range of tonality (high-pitched bells, medium-pitched drums, and deep, resonating gongs) was the logical next step for a composer concerned with rhythm, the pulse, and unfolding process.

The textures that Reich absorbed from Gamelan are readily apparent in his masterful Music For 18 Musicians (1976). An unusually large (at the time for Reich) ensemble of musicians was required to perform this blend of most everything that had influenced Reich up to the time of its composition. Rigid structure, rhythmic complexity, spontaneity (in the "breath-counts" of the vocalists), and repetition are all apparent; but the emphasis has changed from the static to the dynamic, from the monotonous to the varied. 18 begins with a rapid statement (in pulse form) of a series of eleven chords, which announce the overall structure of the hour-long piece to come. After this pulse statement, the musicians return to the first chord, playing a complex mini-piece over the established chord. This process repeats itself through the cycle of eleven chords, ending up with a re-statement of the original eleven, forming a musical almost-chiasm that can be both readily apparent to the careful listener or disregarded entirely by the casual listener who chooses merely to appreciate the beauty of the melodies presented. 18 marks the beginning of a new period for the composer, free of the restrictions of his closed, stark Minimalist structure (as outlined in his rigid 1968 essay "Music as a Gradual Process").

After 18, Reich composed a series of beautiful pieces which drew upon 18's blueprint of influences and structures. Music For a Large Ensemble (1978), Octet (Eight Lines) (1979), and Variations For Winds, Strings and Keyboards (1979) all benefitted from 18, the piece that Reich described as having "more harmonic movement in [its] first five minutes . . . than in any other complete work of mine to date."