Performance Practice in the Music of Steve Reich

Performance Practice in the Music of Steve Reich PDF Author: Russell Hartenberger
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 131677676X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 293

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Book Description
Performance Practice in the Music of Steve Reich provides a performer's perspective on Steve Reich's compositions from his iconic minimalist work, Drumming, to his masterpiece, Music for 18 Musicians. It addresses performance issues encountered by the musicians in Reich's original ensemble and the techniques they developed to bring his compositions to life. Drawing comparisons with West African drumming and other non-Western music, the book highlights ideas that are helpful in the understanding and performance of rhythm in all pulse-based music. Through conversations and interviews with the author, Reich discusses his percussion background and his thoughts about rhythm in relation to the music of Ghana, Bali, India, and jazz. He explains how he used rhythm in his early compositions, the time feel he wants in his music, the kind of performer who seems to be drawn to his music, and the way perceptual and metrical ambiguity create interest in repetitive music.

Performance Practice in the Music of Steve Reich

Performance Practice in the Music of Steve Reich PDF Author: Russell Hartenberger
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 131677676X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 293

Get Book Here

Book Description
Performance Practice in the Music of Steve Reich provides a performer's perspective on Steve Reich's compositions from his iconic minimalist work, Drumming, to his masterpiece, Music for 18 Musicians. It addresses performance issues encountered by the musicians in Reich's original ensemble and the techniques they developed to bring his compositions to life. Drawing comparisons with West African drumming and other non-Western music, the book highlights ideas that are helpful in the understanding and performance of rhythm in all pulse-based music. Through conversations and interviews with the author, Reich discusses his percussion background and his thoughts about rhythm in relation to the music of Ghana, Bali, India, and jazz. He explains how he used rhythm in his early compositions, the time feel he wants in his music, the kind of performer who seems to be drawn to his music, and the way perceptual and metrical ambiguity create interest in repetitive music.

Writings on Music, 1965-2000

Writings on Music, 1965-2000 PDF Author: Steve Reich
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199880484
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
In the mid-1960s, Steve Reich radically renewed the musical landscape with a back-to-basics sound that came to be called Minimalism. These early works, characterized by a relentless pulse and static harmony, focused single-mindedly on the process of gradual rhythmic change. Throughout his career, Reich has continued to reinvigorate the music world, drawing from a wide array of classical, popular, sacred, and non-western idioms. His works reflect the steady evolution of an original musical mind. Writings on Music documents the creative journey of this thoughtful, groundbreaking composer. These 64 short pieces include Reich's 1968 essay "Music as a Gradual Process," widely considered one of the most influential pieces of music theory in the second half of the 20th century. Subsequent essays, articles, and interviews treat Reich's early work with tape and phase shifting, showing its development into more recent work with speech melody and instrumental music. Other essays recount his exposure to non-western music -- African drumming, Balinese gamelan, Hebrew cantillation -- and the influence of these musics as structures and not as sounds. The writings include Reich's reactions to and appreciations of the works of his contemporaries (John Cage, Luciano Berio, Morton Feldman, Gyorgy Ligeti) and older influences (Kurt Weill, Schoenberg). Each major work of the composer's career is also explored through notes written for performances and recordings. Paul Hillier, himself a respected figure in the early music and new music worlds, has revisited these texts, working with the author to clarify their central narrative: the aesthetic and intellectual development of an influential composer. For long-time listeners and young musicians recently introduced to his work, this book provides an opportunity to get to know Reich's music in greater depth and perspective.

Rethinking Reich

Rethinking Reich PDF Author: Sumanth S. Gopinath
Publisher:
ISBN: 0190605286
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 417

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Book Description
Described by music critic Alex Ross as "the most original musical thinker of our time" and having received innumerable accolades in a career spanning over fifty years, composer Steve Reich is considered by many to be America's greatest contemporary composer. His music, however, remains largely underresearched. Rethinking Reich redresses this imbalance, providing a space for prominent and emerging scholars to reassess the composer's contribution to music in the twentieth century. Featuring fourteen tightly focused and multifarious essays on various aspects of Reich's work--ranging from analytical, aesthetic, and archival studies to sociocultural, philosophical, and ethnomusicological reflections--this edited volume reveals new insights, including those enabled by access to the growing Steve Reich Collection at the Paul Sacher Foundation archive, the premier institution for primary research on twentieth-century and contemporary classical music. This volume takes on the timely task of challenging the hegemony of Reich's own articulate and convincing discourses on his music, as found in his Writings on Music (OUP, 2002), and breaks new ground in the broader field of minimalism studies.

Four Musical Minimalists

Four Musical Minimalists PDF Author: Keith Potter
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521015011
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 412

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Book Description
Offers the most detailed account yet of the early works of these four minimalist composers.

Repeating Ourselves

Repeating Ourselves PDF Author: Robert Fink
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520938941
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
Where did musical minimalism come from—and what does it mean? In this significant revisionist account of minimalist music, Robert Fink connects repetitive music to the postwar evolution of an American mass consumer society. Abandoning the ingrained formalism of minimalist aesthetics, Repeating Ourselves considers the cultural significance of American repetitive music exemplified by composers such as Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and Philip Glass. Fink juxtaposes repetitive minimal music with 1970s disco; assesses it in relation to the selling structure of mass-media advertising campaigns; traces it back to the innovations in hi-fi technology that turned baroque concertos into ambient "easy listening"; and appraises its meditative kinship to the spiritual path of musical mastery offered by Japan's Suzuki Method of Talent Education.

The Rest Is Noise

The Rest Is Noise PDF Author: Alex Ross
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1429932880
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 706

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Book Description
Winner of the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism A New York Times Book Review Top Ten Book of the Year Time magazine Top Ten Nonfiction Book of 2007 Newsweek Favorite Books of 2007 A Washington Post Book World Best Book of 2007 In this sweeping and dramatic narrative, Alex Ross, music critic for The New Yorker, weaves together the histories of the twentieth century and its music, from Vienna before the First World War to Paris in the twenties; from Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia to downtown New York in the sixties and seventies up to the present. Taking readers into the labyrinth of modern style, Ross draws revelatory connections between the century's most influential composers and the wider culture. The Rest Is Noise is an astonishing history of the twentieth century as told through its music.

The Cambridge Companion to Rhythm

The Cambridge Companion to Rhythm PDF Author: Russell Hartenberger
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108492924
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 371

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Book Description
An exploration of rhythm and the richness of musical time from the perspective of performers, composers, analysts, and listeners.

Performance Practice in the Music of Steve Reich

Performance Practice in the Music of Steve Reich PDF Author: Russell Hartenberger
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781316584965
Category : Performance practice (Music)
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
Performance Practice in the Music of Steve Reich provides a performer's perspective on Steve Reich's compositions from his iconic minimalist work, Drumming, to his masterpiece, Music for 18 Musicians. It addresses performance issues encountered by the musicians in Reich's original ensemble and the techniques they developed to bring his compositions to life. Drawing comparisons with West African drumming and other non-Western music, the book highlights ideas that are helpful in the understanding and performance of rhythm in all pulse-based music. Through conversations and interviews with the author, Reich discusses his percussion background and his thoughts about rhythm in relation to the music of Ghana, Bali, India, and jazz. He explains how he used rhythm in his early compositions, the time feel he wants in his music, the kind of performer who seems to be drawn to his music, and the way perceptual and metrical ambiguity create interest in repetitive music.

Musical Witness and Holocaust Representation

Musical Witness and Holocaust Representation PDF Author: Amy Lynn Wlodarski
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107116473
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 255

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Book Description
The first comprehensive study of musical Holocaust representations in the Western tradition to examine both musical language and cultural value.

Early Recordings and Musical Style

Early Recordings and Musical Style PDF Author: Robert Philip
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521235286
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
In this fascinating study, Robert Philip argues that recordings of the early twentieth-century provide an important, and hitherto neglected, resource in the history of musical performance.