Steve Reich turns ninety on Saturday 3 October. There’s a birthday concert at Carnegie Hall and several days given over to him at the Philharmonie de Paris, and “Music For 18 Musicians” is being played this week in New York, Toronto, London, Glasgow and Singapore.
That record came out on ECM in 1978, and the launch concert took place not in a contemporary music hall but at the Bottom Line, a New York rock club. The label takes it as proof that new composition could reach an audience beyond the specialist circuit.
Reich had studied with Luciano Berio, played in the 1964 San Francisco premiere of Terry Riley’s “In C”, and used tape loops and phase shifting on “It’s Gonna Rain” in 1965. The drums of Ghana and Indonesian gamelan followed. He had played jazz drums in his youth, and named Coltrane and Miles Davis as the music he loved.
Manfred Eicher produced his second ECM record in New York and Ludwigsburg in February and March 1980, reviving “Violin Phase”, from 1967, with Shem Guibbory. “Tehillim”, recorded in Ludwigsburg in September and October 1981, grew out of his research into Hebrew cantillation.
Stephen Sondheim, whose “Finishing The Hat” Reich arranged, left this on the record: “Some startlingly original composers are isolated wonders. But the important ones cast long shadows.”
Text by Enric Vilaplana