(1978) Music for 18 Musicians

Steve Reich and Musicians

ReleasedApril 1978

LabelECM (ECM 1129)

RecordedApril–December 1976

ProducerRudolph Werner

StudioStudio des Dames, Paris

Genres

Primary

Minimalism

Secondary

Process musicAmerican gamelan

ListenRYM·Apple Music·Spotify

58:55

Side one26:55

Pulse – Sections I–IV

26:55

Side two32:00

Sections V–XI – Pulse

32:00

At a London lecture in 2010, an interviewer asked Steve Reich to tell the room how Music for 18 Musicians came to be, and he declined: “Can’t tell you a damn thing, let’s put it on.” He cued up the recording, offered his score to anyone who wanted to follow along, and played the opening.¹ The refusal was fair, because the piece explains itself in its first minute: a rapid pulse in four pianos and a battery of mallet instruments, and over it a cycle of eleven chords surfacing one at a time, sung and played in swells that last exactly as long as a breath. It runs nearly an hour without a break, and when the eleven chords return at the end, the whole span feels like one long exhale. Released in April 1978 on ECM, a jazz label, it became the recording that, in the critic Tim Rutherford-Johnson’s words, “catapulted Reich and minimalism from the galleries and lofts of New York City into the wider consciousness.”²

Musical and production context

Reich composed the piece between May 1974 and March 1976.³ The score is built on “a cycle of 11 chords played at the very beginning of the piece and repeated at the end,” functioning, in his program note, as a “pulsing cantus for the entire piece.” The opening Pulses state the chords one at a time. Each chord then receives a section of its own, built either in “arch (ABCDCBA)” form or by a musical process “like that of substituting beats for rests,” and the closing Pulses restate the cycle.⁴ Two clocks run at once. The pianos and mallet instruments keep “a regular rhythmic pulse” from first bar to last, while the voices and winds move on “the rhythm of the human breath”: those musicians “take a full breath and sing or play pulses of particular notes for as long as their breath will comfortably sustain them,” so the harmony arrives “one breath after another, gradually washing up like waves against the constant rhythm of the pianos and mallet instruments.”⁵

The ensemble Reich specified is eighteen players strong: violin, cello, two clarinets doubling bass clarinet, four women’s voices, four pianos, three marimbas, two xylophones, and a vibraphone with its motor removed.⁶ Nobody conducts. The vibraphonist cues every transition with patterns “played once only to call for movements to the next bar,” a role Reich compared to the drummer who “will audibly call for changes of pattern” in Balinese gamelan and to the master drummer filling the same office in West African music.⁶ Both comparisons were earned in the field, since Reich had spent five weeks in the summer of 1970 studying Ewe drumming at the University of Ghana with the master drummer Gideon Alorwoyie, and had studied Balinese gamelan over the summers of 1973 and 1974.⁷ The jazz debt was just as direct: Eric Dolphy, Reich told the same London audience, “was responsible for the bass clarinets in Music For 18 Musicians.”⁸

The ensemble had been rehearsing sections since early 1975, and the finished piece premiered on April 24, 1976, at The Town Hall in New York.⁹ The Village Voice’s Tom Johnson opened his review with the house’s verdict: “There was an immediate standing ovation following the premiere of Steve Reich’s ‘Music for 18 Musicians’ at Town Hall on April 24, and very few people remained in their seats.” The playing impressed him as much as the ovation — “few people have ever even heard a large ensemble deliver a long intricate work with such impeccable precision. Certainly no symphony orchestra can afford the kind of rehearsal time that this sort of playing requires… And Reich’s musicians did it without a conductor.” He heard warmth in it too, calling the piece “much warmer than his all-percussion works” and recalling that at a preview a year earlier he had been “surprised that it sounded so lush.” And he kept his reservations, closing on the worry that other avant-garde genres, “equally good,” were being “over-shadowed by Reich’s sleek, well-marketed product.”¹⁰

The recording nearly didn’t come out. Deutsche Grammophon taped the piece in 1976 at the Studio des Dames in Paris — “still in a pop studio in Paris, on probably a 16-track Studer,” as Reich remembered it — with Rudolph Werner producing and Klaus Hiemann engineering, then left the tape in its archive.¹¹ It took Manfred Eicher, the founder of ECM, to rescue it: in Paul Griffiths’s account, when Eicher heard the shelved recording, “It spoke to the time.” He released it in April 1978 as ECM 1129, its sleeve carrying “Weaver’s Notation,” a drawing by the video artist Beryl Korot, Reich’s wife, whose woven grid is a fair picture of the music inside.¹² Because Reich “would not authorize performance and recordings of his work by others until 1990,” the ensemble’s own recording stood alone for over a decade, the document every later account of the piece starts from.¹³

What it inherits and what it introduces

The piece stands on a decade of stricter systems. Reich’s reputation rested on process music — tape loops drifting out of phase, percussion ensembles locked into interlocking patterns — and on the constant downtown pulse that Terry Riley’s In C had set running in 1964. The pulse itself had been Reich’s suggestion, made in Riley’s rehearsals so the ensemble could stay together.¹⁴ What changed here was harmony. “Starting with Music for 18 Musicians,” Reich said, “I said, ‘Well, what if I sat down and worked things out harmonically?’ So I sat at the piano and worked out a series of chords, the way composers would, jazz musicians might, Paul McCartney might.”¹⁵ He measured the result himself in the program note: “more harmonic movement in the first five minutes of Music for 18 Musicians than in any other work of mine prior to 1976.”¹⁶

What it introduced was sensuous surface. The process pieces had been proudly austere; this one is warm and almost luxurious. Composing it settled Reich’s method for good — the chords “really worked in that piece,” he said, “and that was encouraging to continue starting with a harmonic superstructure. Very basic, very basic, just take up maybe half a page of the notebook.”¹⁵ Half a page of chords, an hour of music: proof that a music of gradual process could hold an audience that had never heard the word minimalism.

Reception

For downtown concert music, the record moved like a rock release. Billboard and Rolling Stone both reviewed it, Rolling Stone finding that “the harmony seems static, yet one’s interest is held by the pungency of the aural color.” It sold more than ten thousand copies, and a 1978 performance sold out the Bottom Line, a New York rock club.¹⁷ In his Consumer Guide, a franchise built for rock records, Robert Christgau graded it A−, hearing “pulsing modules of high-register acoustic sound” — “Very mathematical, yet also very, well, organic” — whose effect ran “uplifting at best, calming at normal, and Muzaky at worst.”¹⁸ In the Voice’s year-end Pazz & Jop critics’ poll the album tied for 38th among the year’s rock records, with Jon Pareles giving it ten points on his ballot and Christgau, in the poll essay, “rooting for Steve Reich’s (rather Muzaky) Music for 18 Musicians.”¹⁹

Its standing has only climbed. AllMusic’s retrospective judged that “when this recording was released in 1978, the impact on the new music scene was immediate and overwhelming. Anyone who saw potential in minimalism and had hoped for a major breakthrough piece found it here,” and the Guardian’s Andrew Clements gave a reissue five stars under the headline “tremendous, unstoppable energy.” In 2016, Pitchfork’s Seth Colter Walls awarded a rare 10.0 to the box collecting Reich’s ECM recordings, with this album at its head.²⁰ RYM’s voters rank it the best album of 1978 outright.²¹ The ensemble’s 1997 re-recording for Nonesuch won a Grammy for small-ensemble performance. The scholarship matched the crowd: the critic K. Robert Schwarz called it “perhaps Reich’s greatest composition,” and a 2001 survey judged it “one of a handful of late 20th-century works that can rightly claim to have altered the course of Western music.”²² For Joseph Horowitz, whose Classical Music in America closes by handing the American story to the minimalists, it “has got to be one of the most important concert works ever composed by an American, period.”²³

Influence and legacy

The most consequential listener came early. In 1976, David Bowie attended the piece’s European premiere in Berlin while at work on Low, and Rutherford-Johnson hears “the pulsing marimbas and vibraphones” of that album’s “Weeping Wall” as “an unmistakable homage.”²⁴ Bowie kept the record for life: naming it among his twenty-five favorite albums in 2003, he described it as “Balinese gamelan music cross-dressing as minimalism… Astonishing.”²⁵

The record keeps recruiting. When Nonesuch handed Reich’s catalog to a generation of DJs for the 1999 remix album Reich Remixed, this piece opened it, recut by the British sampling duo Coldcut.²⁶ Asked at a 2007 literary event for his five favorite albums, Sufjan Stevens named only one: Music for 18 Musicians.²⁷ Reich’s London refusal still holds as the best account of the album: it can’t be told; put it on.

rhapsode

Explorer

Music for 18 Musicians

Musical and production context

What it inherits and what it introduces

Reception

Influence and legacy

See also

Sources drawn on

rhapsode

Explorer

Music for 18 Musicians

Musical and production context

What it inherits and what it introduces

Reception

Influence and legacy

See also

Footnotes

Sources drawn on