Steve
Reich

Steve Reich’s three-month residency in Berlin in fall 1974, for which György Ligeti had been an especially strong advocate, added to the American composer’s international reputation and above all his standing in Europe. By the end of 1971, Reich’s major work Drumming, in which he transferred his tape experiments with micro-variations of phase-shifted sequences to percussion instruments and a flute, had become a notable success for the composer, who was born in New York in 1936. This work was followed by his first European tour in 1972.

An important event during Reich’s stay in Berlin, where he also gave talks at various universities, was a portrait concert the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program (BKP) dedicated to him on October 15, 1974, during the first Metamusik Festival. The concert was held not at the Neue Nationalgalerie, but as a special event in RIAS radio’s Studio 10. Incidentally, at the Metamusik Festival, concert organizer and radio director Walter Bachauer presented not only the American and European avant-garde, but also Renaissance dances and traditional music from the Orient, Asia, and Africa.

Clapping Music, performed at the beginning of the concert, simply yet effectively demonstratedan important fundamental concept of Reich’s music: successive phase shifts through gradual increases and decreases in tempo, experienced here in a composition that did not even require instruments—just two clapping performers.

The trained percussionist had already focused on music’s rhythmic and physical aspects in summer 1970 during a stay in Ghana, where he studied with master drummer Gideon Alorwoyie. And at the Center for World Music in Berkeley, California, in the summer of 1974 (shortly before the start of his Berlin fellowship), Reich studied the percussive pattern structures of Balinese gamelan; its influence can be felt in the two compositions from 1973 that were performed at the end of his portrait concert: Six Pianos, a work that was later also arranged for six marimbas, and above all Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices and Organ.

Both compositions were released on one LP and had previously been included in a three-LP box set produced by Deutsche Grammophon in Hamburg in January 1974, prior to Reich’s BKP fellowship in Berlin. Once again, it was the Metamusik Festival director and enterprising cultural producer Walter Bachauer who provided the initiative for this record release, which enhanced the composer’s reputation and came out in the fall of the same year; Bachauer had not only witnessed the world premiere of Drumming in New York on December 3, 1971, he had also presented this piece at the Akademie der Künste (West) in July 1972 as part of Woche der Avantgardistischen Musik Berlin, which he curated. Bachauer later also invited Steve Reich to participate in the second edition of the Metamusik Festival. In 1976 Reich gave the European premiere of his Music for 18 Musicians in Berlin, which received acclaim from critics and audiences alike.

Text: Thomas Groetz

Translation: Erik Smith