The music of American composer Steve Reich has propelled Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s trajectory as a choreographer since her second choreography Fase, Four Movements to the Music of Steve Reich (1982) and has been a common thread running through her work ever since. In that long relationship with Reich’s music, Rain (2001) occupies a crucial place. Reich’s early music was dominated by systematic musical processes that unfolded with tight precision in the music and therefore demanded a dance language that could embody such musical ‘processes that are almost like algorithms!’, according to De Keersmaeker.*

Music for 18 Musicians (1976) was an important step for Steve Reich towards a more sensual musical approach, in which harmonic and melodic principles become more prominent than the systematic aspect. In Conversations (2022), the book in which Steve Reich compiles a series of conversations with artist friends, De Keersmaeker describes the parallel between her and Reich’s evolution as progressively more ‘fluent’: ‘We have reached multiplicity and heterogeneity. But for my part, I feel that I accomplished this by expanding polyphony: more layers, more voices, more superimposed constraints, like in Rain.’ Although this describes her choreography, it reads like a perfect summary of the pivotal point Reich reaches in his style in Music for 18 Musicians.

Icon of minimal music

Steve Reich’s early works, with which he would establish his reputation as one of the pivotal figures of American minimal music, are characterised by the presence of a rigorous, extremely gradual and systematic musical process, taking place audibly on the surface of the music, as Reich summarises it in his manifesto-like essay Music as a Gradual Process. After Drumming (1971), Reich reaches a turning point in which he does retain his sense of systematics and symmetry, but combines it with a larger scale, diversity in instrumentation and harmonic variation. This leads to the major work he developed between 1974 and 1976, which would eventually be premiered under the title Music for 18 Musicians. Two years later, Manfred Eicher released the LP recording on his label ECM and it promptly became a sales success (for contemporary music). Reich’s name was established among the wider public as an icon of minimal music.

By the late 1960s, Reich had gathered around him a group of musicians who became his regular ensemble as ‘Steve Reich and Musicians’. As his music evolved, so did the ensemble, with a core of percussionists (including Reich himself), pianists and singers, to which two clarinets, a violin and a cello were also added for the new work. Remarkably, the ensemble spent almost a year rehearsing the work-in-progress of Music for 18 Musicians. For Reich, it afforded him the luxurious but unusual situation of being able to try things out and adjust them during the composition process, but more importantly, to look for an alternative way of making music, where such a large group of musicians played the work by heart and the musical construction in it can unfold in performance in an almost organic way. The best trace of this is the part of the vibraphone, whose short melodic interludes simultaneously serve as signals for the other musicians to switch to the next element. Listening to each other and embedding signals in the musical material itself makes a conductor superfluous in this work, but for ‘Reich and Musicians’ it did mean a year of fortnightly rehearsals on Sunday evenings to get the music completely into their system.

'Music for 18 Musicians' was an important step for Steve Reich towards a more sensual musical approach, in which harmonic and melodic principles become more prominent than the systematic aspect

Harmony as a structural element

The main novelty in Music for 18 Musicians is the great importance of harmony as a structural element. The work begins with a movement entitled ‘Pulses’, which introduces a series of 11 pulsating chords that swell and die out in waves. The last chord is identical to the first so that beginning and end connect cyclically. Then each of those chords is stretched into a pulsating base layer of about five minutes that forms the harmonic core of eleven Sections in which, each time in slightly different ways, melodic-rhythmic motifs are built up and down. At the end of Section XI, this flows seamlessly back into a resumption of ‘Pulses’.

Some Sections are longer than others. For instance, the third chord provides not one but two fully-fledged Sections (IIIA and IIIB), and Section X is so concise that it seems more like a transition to Section XI. Harmonically, Reich opts for complex chords that do not unambiguously offer a tonal orientation point. Similarly, the whole work oscillates between the keys of F sharp minor and A major, with all sorts of modal variations, and it is mainly the low instruments – the bass clarinets in ‘Pulses’ or the sustained notes in the strings and (occasionally) singing voices in the Sections – that suggest a fleeting sense of harmonic stability. Some transitions happen subtly, with many common notes (e.g. Sections I-II, or IX-X-XI) while other transitions introduce abrupt harmonic changes (e.g. Sections IV-V or VIII-IX).

Waves

For the stretching out of chords in the Sections, Reich likes to refer to inspiration from the medieval organum such as used by Perotinus (c. 1200), where a melody appears in (very) long note values in one part and the other voices sing much faster, angular rhythmic motifs above it. Music for 18 Musicians also shows a preference for spirited rhythmic motifs. These may be melodically elaborate and gradually transpose to an increasingly higher position and back again (e.g. Section IIIA) in an arch form (ABCBA) or they may carry a second part in canon that is built up note by note (e.g. Section IIIB, on the same basic pattern as IIIA). Most motifs in this work are the same basic rhythmic motif as in Clapping Music (1972): groups of 3+2+1+2 eighth notes, each separated by an eighth rest, bringing motivic unity to a work that lasts about an hour. In Section V, Reich surprises by recycling there not just the pattern but the entire note material of Violin Phase (1967), but assigned to the pianos and transposed a perfect fourth lower.

Although the motifs, the pulsation and the gradualness with which elements are built up and symmetrically built down again are a constant throughout the work, it is striking how much Music for 18 Musicians offers a wide variation in how that material is worked with, in harmonic movement and in the blending of instrumental and vocal colours. Thus, this work becomes noticeably more fluent than Reich’s previous – more rigidly process-oriented – minimalist compositions and opens the way for the freer post-minimalist style he would subsequently adopt. In a way, the large form of the work also introduces a (limited) aspect of dramatic construction and climax, for instance, exactly halfway through, Reich has the pulse abruptly set by toneless maracas instead of the xylophones and marimbas. It is most beautiful when in Section IX and X, first voices, strings and bass clarinets, and then pianos and percussion project waves of pulsing chords as an additional layer over the motifs. Section XI then first focuses again on the motivic material, but in its second half the pulsing chords swell again before building up to the resumption of ‘Pulses’, whose great in-and-out breathing motion lays down the harmonic (and emotional) cycle of the piece as it began.

* Quotations by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker from: Steve Reich, Conversations, Hanover Square Press, Toronto, 2022. Translations by the author.

Photo top: © Phile Deprez