Music Composition DUMmIES

Steve Reich, 1936–present ..........................................................................

Steve Reich could easily be considered the father of all industrial music, and

his influence can be felt in the music of bands as wide ranging as Einstürzende

Neubauten to Nine Inch Nails. Way back in the 1960s, Reich was using tape

loops of people speaking as rhythmic devices in his compositions, created at

the San Francisco Tape Music Center. These tape pieces, such as “It’s Gonna

Rain” (1965) and “Come Out” (1966), are the earliest examples of phasing,

one of Reich’s most used and most well known techniques. In phasing,

two tape loops are set into motion at two slightly different speeds, so that

the tapes begin in unison and slowly shift out of phase, creating a new set of

harmonies and rhythms. It’s like music concrète, or “found” music, but taken

one step further, creating controlled and fully realized compositions out of

random chaos.

This process was later incorporated into several pieces for traditional acoustic

instruments (or instruments and tape), such as in “Piano Phase” and “Violin

Phase.” In addition to the initial process of phasing, Reich also introduces

into “Violin Phase” the notion of “found” or “resulting” patterns (new melodic

figures created from the overlapping voices of the original “theme”). In 1970,

Reich set out on an intensive study of Ghanaian drumming, which is the tribal

drumming of the indigenous peoples of Bali in which a single “song” can last

all day long. His highly influential percussive recording, “Drumming,” came

directly out of this experience. This piece is an enormous, hour-long elabora-

tion of a single rhythmic cell, developed and re-orchestrated through four

distinct sections.

Reich’s 1988 piece, the Grammy award-winning “Different Trains,” marked a

new compositional method in which speech recordings were used as the per-

cussive instrument and accompanied by a live string quartet. In this piece,

Reich compared and contrasted his childhood memories of his train journeys

between New York and California in 1939-1941 with the very different trains

being used to transport contemporaneous European children to their deaths

under Nazi rule.

Eric Whitacre, 1970–present .......................................................................

While many of the composers on this list have made their mark because

they wrote music that broke through the musical conventions of the day,

Eric Whitacre had been making waves by digging deep into the history of

Western music and revitalizing the relatively ancient genres of a capella

music and polyphonic chant. His compositions draw their lyrical inspiration

Chapter 20: Ten Composers You Should Know About 263