Stephen Michael Reich is an American composer who is known for his contribution to the development of minimal music in the mid to late 1960s. Reich's work is marked by its use of repetitive figures, slow harmonic rhythm, and canons. Reich describes this concept in his essay, "Music as a Gradual Process", by stating, "I am interested in perceptible processes. I want to be able to hear the process happening throughout the sounding music." For example, his early works experiment with phase shifting, in which one or more repeated phrases plays slower or faster than the others, causing it to go "out of phase." This creates new musical patterns in a perceptible flow.
Music for a Large Ensemble is a piece of music written by Steve Reich in 1978. It is scored for violin 1, violin 2, cellos, 2 flutes, 2 clarinets, 2 soprano saxophones, 4 trumpets, 4 pianos, 2 marimbas, vibraphone, 2 xylophones and two female voices.
In C is a musical piece composed by Terry Riley in 1964 for an indefinite number of performers. He suggests "a group of about 35 is desired if possible but smaller or larger groups will work". A series of short melodic fragments that can be repeated at the discretion of musicians, In C is often cited as the first minimalist composition to make a significant impact on the public consciousness.
In music, tape loops are loops of magnetic tape used to create repetitive, rhythmic musical patterns or dense layers of sound when played on a tape recorder. Originating in the 1940s with the work of Pierre Schaeffer, they were used among contemporary composers of 1950s and 1960s, such as Éliane Radigue, Steve Reich, Terry Riley, and Karlheinz Stockhausen, who used them to create phase patterns, rhythms, textures, and timbres. Popular music authors of 1960s and 1970s, particularly in psychedelic, progressive and ambient genres, used tape loops to accompany their music with innovative sound effects. In the 1980s, analog audio and tape loops with it gave way to digital audio and application of computers to generate and process sound.
Music for 18 Musicians is a work of minimalist music composed by Steve Reich during 1974–1976. Its world premiere was on April 24, 1976, at The Town Hall in the Midtown Manhattan Theater District. Following this, a recording of the piece was released on the ECM New Series in 1978.
Violin Phase is a musical work written by minimalist composer Steve Reich in October 1967.
Minimal music is a form of art music or other compositional practice that employs limited or minimal musical materials. Prominent features of minimalist music include repetitive patterns or pulses, steady drones, consonant harmony, and reiteration of musical phrases or smaller units. It may include features such as phase shifting, resulting in what is termed phase music, or process techniques that follow strict rules, usually described as process music. The approach is marked by a non-narrative, non-teleological, and non-representational approach, and calls attention to the activity of listening by focusing on the internal processes of the music.
Six Pianos is a minimalist piece for six pianos by the American composer Steve Reich. It was completed in March 1973. He also composed a variation for six marimbas, called Six Marimbas, in 1986. The world première performance of Six Pianos was in May 1973 at the John Weber Gallery in New York City. The European première took place in January the next year in Stuttgart, Germany.
Sextet is a composition by American composer Steve Reich. The piece was written and first performed in 1984, and slightly revised in 1985.
Come Out is a 1966 piece by American composer Steve Reich. Reich was asked to edit down tape footage into a form of collage for a benefit for the Harlem Six and Come Out was a byproduct of the collage's production. The Harlem Six were six black youths arrested for a murder of Margit Sugar, a Hungarian refugee, in Harlem in the weeks following the Little Fruit Stand Riot of 1964. Only one of the six was responsible while the lead witness is generally considered the actual perpetrator. Truman Nelson, a civil rights activist and New Yorker who had asked Reich to compose a sound collage that was separate from Come Out, gave him a collection of tapes with recorded voices to use as source material. Nelson agreed to give Reich creative freedom with the tapes that he presented him for the sound collage. Come Out was a loop of four seconds from the more than 70 hours of tapes Nelson presented to Reich.
Steve Reich and Musicians, sometimes credited as the Steve Reich Ensemble, is a musical ensemble founded and led by the American composer Steve Reich. The group has premiered and performed many of Reich's works both nationally and internationally. In 1999, Reich received a Grammy Award for "Best Small Ensemble Performance " for the ensemble's performance of Music for 18 Musicians.
The Nocturnes, Op. 15 are a set of three nocturnes for solo piano written by Frédéric Chopin between 1830 and 1833. The work was published in January 1834, and was dedicated to Ferdinand Hiller. These nocturnes display a more personal approach to the nocturne form than that of the earlier Opus 9. The melodies and emotional depth of these nocturnes have thus been thought of as more "Chopinesque."
Clapping Music is a minimalist piece written by Steve Reich in 1972. It is written for two performers and is performed entirely by clapping.
The Klavierstücke constitute a series of nineteen compositions by German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen.
Arthur "Art" Bixler Murphy was a classical and jazz musician, pianist and composer. He was born in Princeton, New Jersey. He grew up in Oberlin, OH, where his father was a member of the Oberlin College faculty.
Drumming is a piece by minimalist composer Steve Reich, dating from 1970–1971. Reich began composition of the work after a short visit to Ghana and observing music and musical ensembles there, especially under the Anlo Ewe master drummer Gideon Alorwoyie. His visit was cut short after contracting malaria. Classical music critic K. Robert Schwarz describes the work as "minimalism's first masterpiece".
Eight Lines is a work by American minimalist composer Steve Reich which was originally titled Octet.
Phase music is a form of music that uses phasing as a primary compositional process. It is an approach to musical composition that is often associated with minimal music, as it shares similar characteristics, but some commentators prefer to treat phase music as a separate category. Phasing is a compositional technique in which the same part is played on two musical instruments, in steady but not identical tempi. Thus, the two instruments gradually shift out of unison, creating first a slight echo as one instrument plays a little behind the other, then a doubling effect with each note heard twice, then a complex ringing effect, and eventually coming back through doubling and echo into unison.
Reed Phase, also called Three Reeds, is an early work by the American minimalist composer Steve Reich. It was written originally in 1966 for soprano saxophone and two soprano saxophones recorded on magnetic tape, titled at that time Saxophone Phase, and was later published in two versions: one for any reed instrument and tape, the other for three reed instruments of exactly the same kind. It was Reich's first attempt at applying his "phasing" technique, which he had previously used in the tape pieces It's Gonna Rain (1965) and Come Out (1966), to live performance.
New York Counterpoint for amplified clarinet and tape, or 9 clarinets and 3 bass clarinets, is a 1985 minimalist composition written by American composer Steve Reich. The piece, intended to capture the throbbing vibrancy of Manhattan, is notable for its ability to imitate electronic sounds through acoustic instrumentation.
