Music
Eighteen in the Drill Hall, Steve Reich Turns 90 at the Armory
Fifty years after Music for 18 Musicians, three generations of players circle the audience on Park Avenue
The mallets never stop. That is the first thing anyone remembers about Music for 18 Musicians. A steady pulse of marimbas and xylophones runs under everything, hour after hour if you let it, while clarinets and voices swell and fall away on top like weather passing over a city grid at night.
Steve Reich wrote it in New York in the mid 1970s. It premiered in 1976. On Saturday, October 3, the man who wrote it turns 90. And in two weeks the Park Avenue Armory will take the piece apart and put it back together inside its vast Wade Thompson Drill Hall for five nights from October 14 through 18.
The production is called Music for 18 Musicians: Staged Variations. The conductor and director Alan Pierson has built it as a durational event. The whole work is played three times in a row, without a break in the current, for a performance that runs well past three hours. The musicians do not sit politely on a stage. They encircle the audience and move through the room, so the listener ends up in the middle of the machine.
Three Generations, One Pulse
Each cycle belongs to a different set of hands. First come members of the original Steve Reich Ensemble, the players who carried this music around the world in its early decades. According to the Armory's announcement, reported by BroadwayWorld, it is the first time they have reunited in more than ten years.
The second cycle goes to students from the Manhattan School of Music, players who were born decades after the premiere. The third goes to Alarm Will Sound, Pierson's own new music ensemble. The group made its debut in 2001 playing Reich at Miller Theatre uptown and has spent 25 years since then turning electronic music into acoustic music, from Aphex Twin to SOPHIE. Its new album, New Acoustica, arrives October 23.
Between the first two cycles, the composer and violinist Caroline Shaw debuts a new piece for voice and viola commissioned for the Armory. The pianist and composer Timo Andres also joins as a guest. Urs Schönebaum designs the lighting, which shifts across the night to change the mood of the same eleven chords.
Those eleven chords are the spine of the work. Reich lays them out at the start, then builds a long section on each one before the cycle returns to where it began. The ending circles back to the opening. That loop is what gave Pierson the idea to keep it going.
No music has touched and affected me as deeply as Music for 18 Musicians.
That is how Pierson put it when the Armory announced the run in June. He has said he wants to put the listener at the center of what he calls an ecstatic performance ritual.
The Composer at Home
Reich was born in New York in 1936 and still lives outside the city. In a long interview with The Guardian last month, he sounded like a man who would rather keep working than blow out candles. He told the paper he was recovering from a fall that broke a rib and hurt his wrist, which makes composing at the piano painful. He has a few sketches going anyway.
He also walked the interviewer through the two kinds of time inside Music for 18 Musicians. The mallet instruments keep up a constant rapid chug. The clarinets carry what he called human breath, rolling in like waves over the grid. David Bowie once described the piece as a tonetrack into the future, and you can hear why. Strip away the concert hall and it is a long, hypnotic groove built to change you slowly.
That is the quiet thread connecting Reich to the city after dark. His early tape pieces, It's Gonna Rain and Come Out, were built from looped recordings of human voices. Piano Phase grew out of him playing against a tape recorder until the parts drifted apart and locked back in. Decades later, the same logic runs through the DJ booth. Bowie and the Orb sampled him. Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood has recorded his Electric Counterpoint. Anyone who has stood on a dance floor for an hour while a loop slowly turned into something else has felt a little of what Reich was after.
Good music is good music, and most music is not.
He said that to The Guardian with obvious relish. His test is simple. Play it next to Bach. Play it next to Charlie Parker. If it still holds up, you have something.
A Month of Birthday Nights
The Armory run is the loudest of the city's tributes, but it is not the only one. The New York Times, in its October guide, calls the Armory show a maximalist party for a minimalist. The critic Vivien Schweitzer has noted a broader Reich celebration at Carnegie Hall and free lunchtime concerts at Trinity Church. On October 28, So Percussion plays Music for Pieces of Wood at the 92nd Street Y, a piece built from claves and not much else.
Fifty years is a long time for a piece of music to stay this alive. Most of the minimalist canon has hardened into something you admire from a seat. Music for 18 Musicians still asks you to stand up inside it. Putting it in a drill hall, with the original players at one end of the evening and students at the other, is a fair way to ask what it will sound like when Reich is no longer around to supervise.
He is aware of that himself. When he started out, he told The Guardian, he worried that no one but him would take care of his music. Now three generations are lining up to do it on Park Avenue, and the pulse keeps going. The Armory sits a long way from the Bowery clubs, but on these five nights it may be the best place in the city to lose track of time. Downtown, a younger generation is making its own case for the long set, as in our profile of Immanuel Wilkins at the Vanguard.