Before the performance, the lobby was enveloped in an atmosphere of feverish excitement. It was as if we were at the opening reception for a major artist\u2019s exhibition at a contemporary art museum, an unusual mood that was quite different from that you typically get at a classical concert hall. This atmosphere was clearly the product of the great anticipation and passion of the audience, who were eager to experience with their own eyes and ears the live performance of New York-born composer Steve Reich\u2019s \u201cMusic for 18 Musicians\u201d (1974\u201376).<\/p>\n
Those expectations were not betrayed. The first half of the concert featured \u201cDouble Sextet\u201d (2007), played by 12 performers, and the Japan premiere of \u201cTraveler\u2019s Prayer\u201d (2020), a new piece co-commissioned by the Tokyo Opera City Cultural Foundation and completed, in Reich\u2019s own words, with a new compositional approach he had never tried before. The two pieces in the first half made for a unique opportunity to experience Reich\u2019s recent work. Especially the premiere of the new piece, \u201cTraveler’s Prayer,\u201d demonstrated the composer\u2019s deep understanding of tone and sound, including vocals; harmony and tonality, which are major characteristics of his music; and pulse and rhythm, which are the elements that make music what it is. The performance was outstanding, proving once again that Reich possesses a highly subtle and perceptive sense of all these aspects.<\/p>\n
The second half of the concert featured the evening\u2019s main attraction, \u201cMusic for 18 Musicians.\u201d At the back of the stage stood four concert grand pianos. In front of them were placed marimbas, xylophones, and a vibraphone, and in front of these two female vocalists sat on each side, with a violin and cello on the left and two clarinets on the right completing the irregular arrangement. (One might add that maracas were also used in the latter half of the piece.) Indeed, this instrumental and vocal arrangement is the key to the stunningly original musical experience of \u201cMusic for 18 Musicians,\u201d which, once heard, is unforgettable.<\/p>\n
For Steve Reich, who began his career in the 1960s as an experimental musician, \u201cMusic for 18 Musicians\u201d was a milestone of sorts, one arrived at by pursuing his musical interests and honing his approach together with his friends and creative partners. Of course, Reich had been creating masterpieces since early in his creative career. Prior to \u201cMusic for 18 Musicians\u201d and another important work, \u201cDrumming\u201d (1970\u20131971), written a few years earlier, these include experimental works on tape such as \u201cIt\u2019s Gonna Rain\u201d and \u201cCome Out,\u201d as well as numerous highly acclaimed pieces such as \u201cPiano Phase,\u201d \u201cFour Organs,\u201d and \u201cSix Pianos.\u201d Of course, the \u201cMusic for 18 Musicians\u201d performed on this day is a collection of sustained pulses and rhythmic energy found in many of his early works, and its musical worldview is common to all of them. However, as Reich has said himself, \u201cMusic for 18 Musicians\u201d was his first attempt at writing music for a large orchestra of 18 (or more) musicians, as well as his first foray into more complex harmonic structures and musical compositions. In particular, the composer\u2019s characteristic technique of phasing, or gradual change of tempo across two different time frames, gets its finest expression in this work, and Reich himself has recognized that \u201cMusic for 18 Musicians\u201d was also a turning point for him as a composer, one that came to form the foundation for his later works.<\/p>\n
Reich was originally an avid student of percussion instruments, and between 1970 and 1971 composed \u201cDrumming\u201d (which premiered at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in December 1971), a work for percussion instruments and voices that imitate their sound. Over the next few years, Reich presented \u201cSix Pianos\u201d and \u201cMusic for Mallet Instruments, Voices and Organ\u201d (1973). Both works were a prelude of sorts to \u201cMusic for 18 Musicians\u201d in that they experimented with the simultaneous progression of different rhythmic processes.<\/p>\n
After \u201cDrumming,\u201d \u201cSix Pianos,\u201d and \u201cMusic for Mallets, Voices and Organ,\u201d Reich eventually began sketching \u201cMusic for 18 Musicians\u201d in 1974. He employed a variety of percussion instruments that could play the scales he excelled at and that he perhaps was the fondest of in terms of sound, including the marimba, xylophone, and vibraphone, and four pianos were brought in as the base instruments that would form the rhythmic foundation of the piece. To that foundation he added strings (violin and cello), woodwinds (clarinet and bass clarinet), and (female) vocals. A dizzying \u201cpolyphonic universe\u201d of unique musical tones, incomparably more complex than anything that had come before, was finally born.<\/p>\n
Several other aspects also characterize \u201cMusic for 18 Musicians.\u201d First, this twentieth-century masterpiece, with its countermelodic and polyphonic structure, echoes the music of the Middle Ages, including Gregorian chant, which Reich admires. One may also sense in it the sublimity of religious music, one of the composer\u2019s major sources of influence. However, in my opinion, Reich\u2019s main concern is not so much with achieving the sublimity or exaltation of religious music, but rather pivots toward the \u201cnon-centeredness\u201d of medieval music and the nature of the musical ensemble itself.<\/p>\n
The performance of \u201c18 Musicians\u201d ended with a gentle fade-out, followed by a silence that enveloped the audience. Then, thunderous applause. On the stage, Colin Currie, who had led the performance, repeatedly pointed to Reich\u2019s score as if to say, \u201cReserve the biggest applause for the composer, who couldn\u2019t be here with us today!\u201d<\/p>\n
And I remembered what Reich had told me about this work when we had invited musicians led by him to rehearse \u201cMusic for 18 Musicians.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cKeizo, \u2018Music for 18 Musicians\u2019 doesn\u2019t have a conductor,\u201d he said. \u201cYou know, the way this piece was born was similar to a band composing a new song. I\u2019m not a big fan of hierarchical music played under the direction of a conductor. I prefer an autonomous form of performance (like that of jazz or rock) that\u2019s made possible only when each musician plays while paying attention to each other and listening carefully without missing a beat of what the others are doing. That\u2019s right\u2014music has to be democratic.\u201d<\/p>\n
With a smile, Reich recalled having been visited by Brian Eno at his London concert in 1974 and by David Bowie at his Berlin show in 1976. The secret of the popularity of his music may lie in the idea of poetic justice, rooted in the democratic spirit that underpins his works, overcoming all sorts of barriers while moving freely in and out of the world.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Before the performance, the lobby was enveloped in an atmosphere of feverish excitement. It was as if we were […]","protected":false},"author":115,"featured_media":7904,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[103],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/realtokyo.co.jp\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7902"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/realtokyo.co.jp\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/realtokyo.co.jp\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/realtokyo.co.jp\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/115"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/realtokyo.co.jp\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7902"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/realtokyo.co.jp\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7902\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7912,"href":"https:\/\/realtokyo.co.jp\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7902\/revisions\/7912"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/realtokyo.co.jp\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7904"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/realtokyo.co.jp\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7902"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/realtokyo.co.jp\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7902"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/realtokyo.co.jp\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7902"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}