Registrado: 05 Oct 2005 20:42 Mensajes: 2907
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Steve Reich (*1936) He was born in New York. When he was one year old his parents divorced, and Reich divided his time between New York and California. He was given piano lessons as a child and describes growing up with the "middle-class favorites", having no exposure to music written before 1750 or after 1900. At the age of 14 he began to study music in earnest, after hearing music from the Baroque period and earlier, as well as music of the 20th century, and he began studying drums with Roland Kohloff in order to play jazz. He attended Cornell University; he took some music courses there, but graduated in 1957 with a B.A. in philosophy. Reich's B.A. thesis was on Ludwig Wittgenstein; later he would set texts by that philosopher to music in Proverb (1995) and You Are (2004).
For a year following graduation he studied composition privately with Hall Overton before he enrolled at Juilliard to work with William Bergsma and Vincent Persichetti (1958 to 1961). Subsequently he attended Mills College in Oakland where he studied with Luciano Berio (Reich composed a student piece for string orchestra) and Darius Milhaud (1961–63) and earned a master's degree in composition. Reich worked with the San Francisco Tape Music Center along with Pauline Oliveros, Ramon Sender, Morton Subotnick and Terry Riley (he was involved with the premiere of Riley's In C and suggested the use of the eighth note pulse which is now standard in performance of the piece). During the summer of 1970, with the help of a grant from the Institute for International Education, Mr. Reich studied drumming at the Institute for African Studies at the University of Ghana in Accra. In 1973 and 1974 he studied Balinese Gamelan Semar Pegulingan and Gamelan Gambang at the American Society for Eastern Arts in Seattle and Berkeley, California. From 1976 to 1977 he studied the traditional forms of cantillation (chanting) of the Hebrew scriptures in New York and Jerusalem. In 1966 Steve Reich founded his own ensemble of three musicians, which rapidly grew to 18 members or more.
His music is characterized by a strong, steady pulse and strictly diatonic and tonal harmonies. He is typically grouped together with other "first generation" minimalist composers such as Phillip Glass and La Monte Young, and more recently with younger composers such as John Adams. The music is deeply "American" in its roots, with an unrelenting pulse and short, repeating melodic figures often compared to rock-and-roll and be-bop. However, like other minimalist composers, Reich’s music is also largely influenced by extra-European forms and techniques, generally viewed as a response to the largely academic, elitist climate of new music in the 1950's and 60's.
Reich’s early works were created in the early 1960’s 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 this process, 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. This process was later incorporated into several pieces for traditional acoustic instruments (or instruments and tape), such as in Piano Phase (1967) and Violin Phase (1967). 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"). This technique was further explored in the largely popular and influential Drumming of 1971. In 1970, Reich set out on an intensive study of Ghanaian drumming that, either directly or indirectly, led to many of the procedures used not only in Drumming but also throughout the remainder of his career. This piece is an enormous, hour-long elaboration of a single rhythmic cell, developed and re-orchestrated through four distinct sections. The piece begins with a slow, additive process of introducing the initial rhythmic pattern. Through phasing procedures and further "build-up and reduction," new melodic and harmonic patterns are created – these are brought to the fore by doublings, first by female voice, then by whistling, and finally by piccolo.
Reich’s later music is characterized by a considerably faster harmonic rate of change, and by a more diverse (though still strictly diatonic) harmonic language. In the mid to late 1970’s, a series of commissions from ensembles other than his own (up until this point, Reich’s ensemble was the sole performing group for his music) led to several non-percussion works; Music for 18 Musicians (1976), Music for a Large Ensemble (1978) and Octet (1979) all came in this period. Recently, Reich has returned to the ideas first seen in Violin Phase in a series of pieces for solo instruments and tape. Vermont Counterpoint, for flute, New York Counterpoint, for clarinet, and Electric Counterpoint for electric guitar, build upon the original processes of the early phasing music. The complexity, however, is far deeper than the early phasing pieces: In Vermont Counterpoint, for example, a total of 10 layers are prerecorded, with the final 11th flute layer played live.
Reich has also recently returned to the voice, as in Tehillim (1981), a setting of Psalm texts in Hebrew, Different Trains (1988) for string quartet and tape, and in Reich’s hugely successful venture into the theater, The Cave (1990-3). Each of these works explores the pitch of taped and sequenced voices, and then uses those pitches as melodic material in the accompanying instrumental ensemble. Reich’s combination of repetition and process creates a music full of vitality and energy. His strict, tonal melodic style has brought Reich much critical acclaim, even in a general public that often is distrustful of "new music." As such, Reich has, in many ways, led a charge toward establishing the accessible and almost "anti-academic" diatribe of the newest developments in contemporary music.
Wikipedia/Boosey/Aaron M. Cassidy
The Cave a multimedia opera for four voices, ensemble and video in three acts (1990-1993). Fragmento del acto primero.
net/music/comp
Última edición por Zelenka el 23 May 2014 13:31, editado 1 vez en total
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