New Ways to Keep ScoreSteve Reich’s Music For Eighteen Musicians

The music of Steve Reich is simple only in that it can be played in one of two ways: it

can be either played well, or, to put it lightly, not so well. The reason for this stark dichotomy in

performance quality is due to the peculiar facets of Reich’s music such as the importance of

pulse and the relative harmonic stasis. The insistence of his music, particularly in works like

Drumming and Music for Eighteen Musicians, leave almost no room for a performer’s

(re)interpretation, resulting in the one good way to play the piece and the many poor ways. What

is ironic about this dichotomy is that one would expect that a piece with little room for

interpretation to have very detailed written directions about how to perform it: a thick score filled

with articulations on each note, and many text directions above the articulations. Instead, many

of Reich’s pieces were conceived and first performed without a formal written score. In the case

of Music for Eighteen Musicians, Reich worked on the piece for the better part of three years and

little by little taught the piece to the musicians in, for the lack of a better word, his band.1

Though the composition was premiered in 1976 and recorded two years later, no full score

existed until the year 1997. Instead, Reich’s musicians would perform the piece with maybe a

couple of pages of hand-written, taped-up cheat sheets.2 Indeed, the original 1978 recording of

Music for Eighteen Musicians on the ECM label was the piece’s score, as the musicians on it had

internalized the music through rote rehearsal and presented what the piece should sound like.

Now that a full score exists, does using the score to learn the piece affect the performance? And

considering the piece was written for a particular group of musicians of particular talents, why

1 K. Robert Schwarz, “Steve Reich: Music as a Gradual Process Part II,” Perspectives of New Music Vol. 20, No. 1/2 (Autumn, 1981 - Summer, 1982), pp. 225-286.2 Interview with Russell Hartenberger by Daniel Tones. Percussive Notes August 2007. http://www.danieltones.com/Publications.html

would someone go through the trouble of making a formal score? The score for Music for

Eighteen Musicians is a product of the piece’s power and success, as many musicians who would

want to perform the piece would have previously been unable to unless they learned it from

Steve Reich himself or from a devoted regimen of listening to the work. In that way, the score is

not all that different than a transcription of a Duke Ellington big band chart: it provides a

framework for new musicians to learn the piece, but a faithful and successful recreation must

refer to the nuances of the original recorded performances that cannot be adequately expressed

with notation. Because of the lack of documentary evidence regarding Music for Eighteen

Musicians, most of my sources here are anecdotal, including interviews with Reich and Russell

Hartenberger, a long-time percussionist in Reich’s ensemble. The particularities of these

anecdotal sources have informed my approach in this paper – contextualizing the composition of

the piece and creation of the score within greater trends in Reich’s music and career.

Much of Steve Reich’s oeuvre can be described as process music, a term he coined in a

1968 manifesto of sorts titled “Music as a Gradual Process.” For Reich, process music is not just

about using an impersonal method of determining pitches, rhythms, and other salient musical

features, but creating a piece in which the compositional method is actually audible to the

listener.3 While J.S. Bach’s crab canon in “A Musical Offering,” Milton Babbit’s manipulation

of a tone row, and John Cage’s I Ching coin-flipping are all impersonal compositional processes

where particular rules dictate the written music rather than composerly taste, no listener can

actually recognize these processes while listening to the music. From a cognitive standpoint,

these patterns require more computing power to understand than the human brain has.4 Reich’s 3 Steve Reich, “Music as a Gradual Process,” in Writings on Music: 1965-2000, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.4 For example, humans can only carry 7+/- 2 bits of information in their short term memory at a given time. Because a tone row has 12 notes in it, it is impossible for a listener to keep track of all the notes at a given time, and therefore cannot recognize when the pattern is inverted or played around with. In terms of Cage’s processes, a simple experiment regarding predictions of coin flipping performed by Benjamin Cosman illustrates that humans are

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own music from this time satisfies these stringent requirements, resulting in austere, yet

stimulating pieces. Reich’s early tape pieces like It’s Gonna’ Rain and Come Out feature the

same short audio clip played at different speeds, creating a spine-tingling build in rhythmic

tension. Four Organs on the other hand is made up of a single dominant chord played repeatedly

for gradually longer amounts of time over a simple maraca pulse. The listening experience can

be sublimely trance-inducing or viscerally painful, depending on the listener.5

However, Reich’s early music is both potent and memorable, not because the listener

recognizes the inner processes in real time, rather because those processes yield novel and

arresting sound worlds. In an interview with Jonathan Cott, Reich notes that the first time he

created phase shifting (by accident while working on the tape for It’s Gonna’ Rain), he had an

intense emotional reaction to the ensuing sound.

The sensation I had in my head was that the sound moved over to my left ear,

moved down to my left shoulder, down my left arm, down my leg, out across the

floor to the left, and finally began to reverberate and shake.6

Reich’s compositions after “Music as a Gradual Process” were still driven by the development of

simple processes, like phase shifting and augmentation, but were much richer sonically. Reich’s

phasing magnum opus Drumming from 1971 ends with bongos, marimbas, glockenspiels,

piccolo, and voices playing thickly-layered rhythmic canons. 1973’s Music for Mallet

Instruments, Voices and Organ expanded on the sonic palette of Drumming’s finale, replacing

not good at predicting the behavior of a random event – humans predict more heads and tails run than what actually occur. See www.usc.edu/CSSF/History/2006/Projects/J0305.pdf.5 After a performance of the piece with the Boston Symphony in 1971, the divided audience responded with “loud cheers, loud boos, and whistles.” The audience at a later Carnegie Hall performance reacted even more violently, booing during the piece. Strickland, Edward (1993). Minimalism: Origins. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, pp. 221.6 Interview with Steve Reich by Jonathan Cott, http://www.stevereich.com/articles/ Jonathan_Cott_interview.html

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the earlier piece’s total harmonic stasis with a series of lush chord sequences that changed at

specific points throughout the piece.

After completing Music for Mallet Instruments, Reich began work on what would

become Music for Eighteen Musicians, a piece which would consume his compositional energies

for the better part of the next three years. In an interview with the British composer Michael

Nyman around the time of Eighteen’s premiere in 1976, Reich speaks about how the piece

reflects changes in his musical personality. While Reich’s pieces from around the time of

“Music as a Gradual Process” were built on impersonal processes (in contrast to the emphasis on

personal expression and free improvisation in the downtown New York music of the time),

Eighteen is more concerned with expressive effect.7 Reich is no longer opposed to using his

musical biases to shape the direction of a piece and is less concerned with whether the audience

hears the strict processes in it.8 Music for Eighteen Musicians opens and closes with a series of

eleven chords, played in fast quaver pulses by the full ensemble, while the middle sections

expand each of the chords into different mini-pieces featuring some of the same rhythmic

techniques from Drumming and Music for Mallet Instruments. However, while these processes

are simple and certainly audible to a relatively informed listener, they do not draw attention to

themselves. The listener is much more drawn in by the hyper-rich instrumental textures and the

infectious, nearly tropical, groove.

In order for Eighteen to totally envelop the listener, it must be played with a machine-like

consistency. For example, two marimbas play an alternating quaver pulse underneath nearly the

entire piece. If one of the players flubs just one beat, the trance-like groove is broken and the

piece instantly looses momentum. Despite the performance difficulties, Reich could ensure the

7 Michael Nyman, “Steve Reich: Interview by Michael Nyman,” Studio International, 1976, no. 192 (November / December): pp. 300-307.8 Ibid.

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piece’s performance quality because he had over the past several years assembled a dedicated

group of musicians to play his music with him. While composing Drumming in 1970, soon after

a trip to study drumming in Ghana, Reich was introduced to a percussionist named Russell

Hartenberger who was also interested in travelling to Africa.9 Through his conversations with

Reich, Hartenberger was invited to rehearse the incubating Drumming and became the first full-

time percussionist in Reich’s ensemble.10 To meet the eventual playing demands of Drumming

(it requires 9 percussionists), Reich brought in other percussionists, many through James Preiss,

a teacher at the Manhattan School of Music.11 As Reich’s reputation grew within the

underground New York contemporary music scene, he was able to draft even more players into

Steve Reich & Musicians, eventually reaching the core of 17 (plus himself) in the mid 1970s.12

Reich notes in a 2002 interview that most the musicians he was working with at the time of

Eighteen were still finishing up graduate school, so it was not difficult to bring everyone in for a

rehearsal every 2-3 weeks.13

Reich’s working band not only allowed the composer to more tightly control the

performance quality of his pieces, it also had a profound effect on Reich’s compositional process

as well. In Drumming, for instance, the human phasing techniques had never been employed in

any piece of music before and so it required that Reich learn how to do it himself (phasing

against a tape loop) and then teach the technique to his players.14 Notation alone would not have

been able to adequately express the sound of the piece. This rote method of learning Drumming

carried over to Eighteen as well. Throughout 1974-1976, Reich would work on a particular

9 Interview with Russell Hartenberger by Daniel Tones.10 Ibid.11 Ibid.12 Gabrielle Zuckerman, Interview with Steve Reich, July 2002, http://musicmavericks.publicradio.org/ features/interview_reich.html.13 Ibid.14 Hartenberger Interview.

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segment of the piece in his manuscript notebook (see the “pulses” example below), and then

would transcribe it out in a shorthand notation on small slips of paper for each player.15 Most of

the details of the piece were worked out during the rehearsals themselves.16 Russell Hartenberger

notes that each part was like a cliffnotes version of the piece, with very personalized directions

(i.e. “wait for Jay to sing that pattern, cue Steve.”).17 At each rehearsal, Reich would bring in

corrections and take suggestions from the players.18 In this way, the composition of the piece and

the learning of the piece were one process, much more akin to the members of a rock band

composing and learning a song together. In both instances, the piece or song is composed into

the muscle memory of the players, making a written score unnecessary.

15 Steve Reich, Music for Eighteen Musicians, performance note, London: Boosey & Hawkes, 2000.16 Ibid.17 Hartenberger Interview.18 Ibid.

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Perhaps Music for Eighteen Musicians would have stayed in its oral form if not for the

piece’s instant popularity. Its premiere at Town Hall in New York on April 24, 1976 created a

critical stir. New York Times critic John Rockwell called it a “remarkable piece of work” and

hoped that the premiere recording would the win the piece a larger audience.19 Even the so-

called “Dean of American Rock Critics,” Robert Christgau, gave the piece a very favorable

review, speaking to its genre-transcending potency.20 While Eighteen was recorded formally in

the studio soon after the premiere, Reich’s label at the time, Deutsch Gramophone, sat on the

recording and eventually declined to release it.21 However, Reich eventually got a letter from the

German jazz label ECM (who at the time was producing best-selling albums by the likes of Keith

Jarrett and Pat Metheny) saying that they wanted to pick up the recording.22 Upon release of the

album in 1978, Eighteen received airplay on college and public radio stations alongside avant-

rock artists like David Bowie and Brian Eno.23 Within 2 years of release, ECM sold over 100,000

copies of the record. Reich’s music was busting out of downtown New York art galleries and

capturing the attention of listeners and fellow musicians throughout the world.

In the wake of the popular success of Music for Eighteen Musicians, Reich came across

the predicament of other musicians wanting to play his pieces. Because of the particular manner

in which Eighteen was written down and learned, the existing parts would make very little sense

to any musician who had not learned the piece in Reich’s group. If other musicians wished to

perform Eighteen, they had to learn it from scratch by listening to the recording numerous times

and then using the familiarity of the piece to decipher the shorthand directions on the written

19 John Rockwell, “The Pop Life,” The New York Times, 17 November 1978, page C12.20 Robert Christgau, “American Consumer Guide Reviews: Steve Reich,” http://www.robertchristgau.com/ get_artist.php?name=steve+reich21 Zuckerman Interview with Reich.22 Ibid.23 Ibid.

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parts. Because the task of learning and rehearsing the piece would take months and was rather

unfeasible economically for most professional musicians, only two outside groups took the piece

on within the two decades after the original album’s release.24 One of the performances,

organized by the Amadinda percussion group in Hungary, was recorded live on May 18, 1990

and later released on CD in 2004.25 Because the group virtually learned the piece by rote over the

course of several months, they play it as convincingly as Reich’s band. The performance is

louder and more insistent than the original recording. The tempo is a couple of metronome ticks

faster and stays ruthlessly consistent throughout the piece, compared to the slight tempo

fluctuations that the Reich ensemble settled into. It is clear that the performers in the 1990

recording have physically internalized the piece much in the same way Reich’s musicians did.

The subtle differences in performance are due to idiosyncrasies in personal time feel rather than

overall familiarity with the piece.

Because of the difficulties associated with performing Eighteen as such, a new

decipherable score and parts set was necessary in order for the piece to have a life of its own

outside the original recording and periodic performances. Luckily, this development would

eventually become a reality due to the enduring success of both Eighteen and Reich’s subsequent

works. Though Music for Eighteen Musicians was Reich’s most popular piece to date, it did not

turn him into a one-hit wonder. Later pieces like Music for Large Ensemble and Tehillim were

also critical successes and helped cement Reich as one of the most well regarded American

composers – he was soon receiving many commissions from major performers throughout the

United States.26 At that time, Reich’s music was growing more conventional in that it could be

24 Zuckerman interview with Reich.25 Amadinda & Musicians, Steve Reich: Music for Eighteen Musicians, http://www.amadinda.com/ html/Afelv_10.html26 The San Francisco Symphony soon commissioned Variations for Winds, Strings and Keyboards, and Reich later composed popular pieces for the Kronos Quartet (Different Trains) and guitarist Pat Metheny (Electric

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(and in some cases had to be) expressed in traditional western notation. Tehillim, for instance,

features a regular pulse, but near constant time signature shifts. Because of this rhythmic

complexity, it could not be taught by rote in the same way as Eighteen and so was written down

in a more complete fashion.27 In the middle of these developments in the mid-1980s, the British

publishing house Boosey and Hawkes began to publish Reich’s music. With its worldwide

distribution, Boosey was able to bring Reich’s music to new places and allow different

ensembles to learn and perform it. However, even with the backing of one of the world’s largest

music publishing firms, it would take the enthusiasm of American PhD student to create a usable

score for Music for Eighteen Musicians.

In 1995, a music composition PhD student at Cornell University named Marc Mellits

wanted to write his dissertation about Music for Eighteen Musicians. When Mellits contacted

Reich and Boosey about getting a copy of the score, they told him about how the score did not

exist.28 However, because Mellits had worked as a music copyist, Boosey suggested that Mellits

create an Eighteen score for his dissertation, for which he would also be compensated.29 Mellits

first completed a full transcription of the original recording, note for note.30 However, this full

transcription was impractical for performance use, so Mellits also prepared a new score and parts

set using techniques such as floating bar lines to allow the flexibility inherent in the piece as

originally performed.31

Counterpoint).27 Steve Reich, Tehillim, London: Boosey & Hawkes, 1981.28 Zuckerman interview with Steve Reich.29 Ibid.30 Reich, Music for Eighteen Musicians, preface note.31 Ibid.

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A page from the new Eighteen score. Note the floating bar lines in the clarinet and string parts, which denote entrances during the indefinite pulsing of marimbas and pianos as well as the “clapping music” pattern sung and played on piano.

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Mellits completed the score in 1997, and later that year, the European contemporary

music group Ensemble Modern used the new score and parts to perform and record the piece.32

Although Reich ensemble stalwarts Russell Hartenberger and Bob Becker played on the

recording, it is hardly a duplication of the original.33 To ensure the clarity of transitions, the

group was led by conductor Brad Lubman, as opposed to relying on the clarinets and vibraphone

for aural cues. The fact that the ensemble required a conductor for the performance is perhaps

symptomatic of the larger issues that plague the recording. Right from the first few notes, the

performance sounds much more on edge than either the Reich ensemble recording or the

Amadinda one. Many of the opening pulse figures by the bass clarinets and voices jump on each

others’ tails, rather than mysteriously entering and exiting the thick sound world. Whenever an

instrument enters with a new gesture it pops out as opposed to joining the mix, creating an

uncomfortable feeling of aural ping-pong that disrupts the piece’s trance-like aspects. Overall,

the performance is just more ragged than the others, sounding as if the musicians are merely

reading the piece rather than living it.

Are the issues in Ensemble Modern’s recording indicative of the inherent problems of

using a score that was not actually used by the piece’s experts? Are there just too many aspects

of Music for Eighteen Musicians that cannot be adequately expressed in western notation and

make the score impractical for performance? If the score was completely impractical, then it

would be impossible for any group using it to have a successful performance. However, in the

time since Ensemble Modern’s recording in 1997, many other groups have used the score to

successfully learn and perform the piece, including many American collegiate groups.34 One

ensemble from Grand Valley State University (GVSU) in Michigan even went through the

32 Ibid.33 http://allmusic.com/album/music-for-Eighteen-musicians-ensemble-modern-w60415/credits34 Steve Reich Concert listings, http://www.stevereich.com/concerts.

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trouble of making a new studio recording, the first ever in surround sound.35 GVSU certainly is

not known as a hotbed for new American music, but in 2006, the college’s contemporary music

director Bill Ryan ambitiously booked his group of students to perform the piece at New York’s

Bang on a Can Festival in the spring of 2007.36 Ryan and his group learned the piece over the

course nearly an entire year, immersing themselves in Reich’s music. Ryan and some of his

students even travelled to New York in the spring of 2006 for a series of Reich concerts at

Carnegie Hall where they met Reich, Mellits, and other Eighteen experts, receiving important

performance insights.37

Both the Bang on a Can performance and the eventual studio recording were unqualified

successes. The GVSU recording feels a little bit slower at the outset, but not in a bad way – it

actually gives the opening a bit of luxuriousness, albeit with less drive. This slight bit of

relaxation allows for more clarity in transitions, as well as a more infectious groove once the

maracas enter. It seems that the use of the new score lends itself to snappier transitions, which

were both apparent in the Ensemble Modern and GVSU recordings, rather than the looser and

intuitive ones as performed by Reich’s musicians. However, the crucial difference between the

GVSU and Ensemble Modern performances is the amount of preparation time the GVSU players

put in, time that was unfeasible for a professional group. If a group uses the new score to learn

Music for Eighteen Musicians, they still must spend a significant amount of time with the piece,

growing comfortable with the awkward pulse figures and knowing the sequence of events as if it

were second nature. In many respects, performing Eighteen is much closer to playing in a jazz

35 Grand Valley State University New Music Ensemble, Steve Reich Music for Eighteen Musicians, Innova 2007.36 “Steve Reich: ‘Music for Eighteen (Cornfed) Musicians,’” http://www.npr.org/templates/ story/story.php?storyId=Eighteen58Eighteen9137 Steve Smith, “A Daunting Composition, Approached with Daring,” The New York Times, 18 October 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/Eighteen/arts/music/Eighteenreic.html?scp=2&sq. =music%20for%20Eighteen%20musicians&st=cse.

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band or rock group, which requires extreme awareness, listening attention, and adaptability. To

play Music for Eighteen Musicians well, you have to put together a real band.

So what can one expect from future performances of Music for Eighteen Musicians?

Firstly, there are already many performances each year, whether by college and conservatory

groups or professional ensembles like the London Sinfonietta.38 Because of this growing ubiquity

of performance, Eighteen has become part of the 20th century classical canon, especially for

percussionists. In the wake of the original recording’s success, percussionists who grew up

during the 1980s were exposed to the piece as students and so were already be intimately

familiar with how it sounds when asked to perform it. Younger groups like Alarm Will Sound

and So Percussion, whose members are in their late twenties and early thirties, have recorded

some of Reich’s large-scale pieces (Tehillim/Desert Music and Drumming, respectively),

communicating a familiarity of Reich’s music that belie their youth. In addition, young classical

players are more musically omnivorous than before. It’s common now for a classically trained

percussionist to rock out on drum kit, lay down a conga tumbao, or solo on steel pans.39 With

these skills come the experiences necessary to play pulse-intensive pieces like Music for

Eighteen Musicians. Because the piece itself and the skills necessary to perform it are

increasingly commonplace, good performances of the piece will proliferate. Music for Eighteen

Musicians has a life of its own outside its original version. The fact that this new life was born

out of the dedicated work of those far removed from Steve Reich and his musicians is a

testament to the piece’s enduring sonic power.

38 The Sinfonietta has performed the work recently in London on April 28, 2008 and October 31, 2009. They will perform the work again in Glasgow on February 13, 2011.39 Jason Treuting of So Percussion is known to play drum kit in folk rock band QQQ, as well as in free improv duos with guitarists Grey McMurray and Steve Mackey. His So bandmate Josh Quillen is an accomplished steel pan player. This information comes from my working with So Percussion in 2009-10.

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