450 PART 4 | SINCE WORLD WAR II
just the ordinary music that was going on, music was also able to transport us
suddenly out of one reality into another.” In C was premiered in November 1964
at the San Francisco Tape Music Center by an ensemble of thirteen, including
Riley and Steve Reich playing keyboards and the experimentalist composer Pau-
line Oliveros on accordion.
Reich’s role in the premiere also belongs to the story of minimalism’s begin-
nings. Though not a jazz musician himself, Reich has paid tribute to the impact
on his music of trumpeter Miles Davis, drummer Kenny Clarke, and saxophon-
ist John Coltrane. “The jazz infl uence that’s all over my work is not so specifi c,” he
said in 1987, “but without the rhythmic and melodic gestures of jazz, its fl exibility
and nuance, my work is unthinkable.” His study of West African drumming and
Balinese gamelan proved infl uential as well. He also remembered learning “a
tremendous amount from putting [In C] together, and I think it had a very strong
infl uence on me.”
Reich has described how he stumbled onto the process behind his own musi-
cal breakthrough. In 1965 he made tape loops from a short passage of a street
preacher’s sermon he had recorded in San Francisco. The loops were intended
as a way of superimposing one phrase upon another for musical effect, with the
help of two tape machines. The unintended result of his experiment was a new
type of music he called phase music, in which two or more identical parts are
played in slightly different tempos.
Come Out (1966) is based on Reich’s new concept of phase music. From an
interview with a victim of a police beating in Harlem, who had been told he could
receive hospital care only if he were bleeding, Reich chose a single sentence: “I had
to, like, let some of the bruise blood come out to show them.” Then he tape-looped
the last fi ve words. Repeated for more than twelve minutes, and very slowly pulled
out of phase on several channels, the words are gradually transformed into a new
kind of sound material: short, blurred melodic gestures impossible to recognize
as human speech. Reich has likened “performing and listening to a gradual musi-
cal process” such as this one to “pulling back a swing, releasing it, and observing it
gradually come to rest.” And he adds: “While performing and listening to gradual
musical processes, one can participate in a particularly liberating and impersonal
kind of ritual. Focusing in on the musical process makes possible that shift of
attention away from he and she and you and me outwards towards it.”
Reich has also explained that while fond of the possibilities of taped speech, he
prefers live instrumental performance. Early in 1967 he organized a pair of con-
certs at the Park Place Gallery in New York, a cooperative associated with the geo-
metric, nondecorative “minimal” art of such painters and sculptors as Ellsworth
Kelly, Sol LeWitt, and Richard Serra. The concerts were part of an effort by the gal-
lery to promote interchange among experimental artists in different media. The
featured new work was a version of Piano Phase for four electric pianos, played by
Reich and three colleagues, an outcome of the composer’s experiment with play-
ing live against a tape loop. From that time forward, several of Reich’s pieces have
involved either multiple performers on the same instrument or a soloist perform-
ing with a multitracked recording of his or her own playing, as in Violin Phase, writ-
ten to be played by four violinists or one violinist with tape.
After one of these concerts, Reich crossed paths with Philip Glass, who in
the 1970s would emerge as the most widely recognized minimalist composer,
famous for his 1976 opera Einstein on the Beach and a series of fi lm scores such
as Koyaanisqatsi (1982). Along with Riley and Reich, Glass would demonstrateK Composer Steve Reich
(b. 1936) at the piano
around 1970.Steve Reichphase music172028_18_440-467_r3_sd.indd 450 23/01/13 11:02 AM