I first fell in love with Steve Reich's music about a half dozen or so years ago. I woke up in a Wal-mart parking lot just outside of D.C. at about 5:45am half frozen so I collected myself and proceeded immediately to the bathroom to do mandatory morning activities including using some ultra low grade toilet paper..Not the best choice for a day of 10+ hours of driving but those were the options that free and clean would allow. I then warmed up the car and prepared for my trip see the "Big Man" at the Hirshhorn. While driving I decided to put Steve Reich's "Music for 18 Musicians" in just to give one more chance before it was discarded. The sun was just peeking over the horizon but morning rush hour had already started. Somehow while driving 80mph wizzing through traffic this cd which I had tried multiple times before finally made sense and it hit me so profoundly that my eyes welled, the hair on my arms stood on end and I spent the next hour in tears dodging taxis, dump trucks, and people droning about in their freshly pressed suits to their well paid jobs. I missed my exits several times over, and I couldn't have cared less it felt like I was listening to pure inspiration and it was like nothing I had heard before. When the cd stopped and the album was over, I pulled to a spot on the Mall and parked and waited for the Hirshhorn to open. To keep from freezing I left the car on and listened to the entire album again. I can't explain why his music is so amazing and how it's as much a spiritual experience as it is music. Driving through a sea of traffic let me in to his world, it is music that pulses and repeats, it beeps and honks, it yawns and sighs, it turns percussion into Sine waves, has beats without drums and it's pace is unlike any other album on earth. It's full monotonous rhythms that shift as the songs progress, it sounds repetitive but on closer inspection it isn't. Its simultaneously really really fast with pulsating clarinets, xylophone, and voice, yet throws in stillness, silence and slow mournful gut wrenching cellos burst through the mix. This is the closest music can come to audibly describe our world today, and it's all played by hand with instruments centuries old and many completely foreign to urban landscapes. This music is it's own language, and it was created by a man that started by putting vowels and consonants together by overlapping tape loops, four hands clapping off pace, and by questioning what singing really is. After almost 20 years of stringing together his letters and making words, "Music for Eighteen Musicians" was his declaration of independence.............................................
It's Gonna Rain (1965 Early Phase Music)
Clapping Music (1972 early Phase Music)
Piano Phase (One musician Two Pianos)
Piano Phase (with Video Phase)
Different Trains:
Different Trains:
Electric Counter Point-(Looped Guitar by Pat Metheny)
Music for Eighteen Musicians:
Music for Eighteen Musicians
Music for Mallets, Instruments and Strings
To end, if the Schermerhorn Symphony Center doesn't bring Steve Reich by the summer of 2010, I will personally back two dump trucks full of the most fowl Bonnaroo Port-O-Potty filth up to the front doors and commence unloading the most toxic psychedelic mushroom eating hippy shit all over the front of that beautiful, under realized venue. Just because Nashville is honky-tonk doesn't mean that it's Classical venue should be full of honkies playing dead honky music. -Randall Green President,Founder Hackberry South(December 9 2008)*,**
*Hackberry South nor it's employees are responsible for the idiotic statements that come out of the mouth of its founder. Hackberry South can not promise the color, consistency or drug content of said Bonnaroo Excretions(though there is a 92.5% chance that Magic Mushrooms will be included in the psychotropic sludge.)** If Steve Reich should refuse, or fear being sludged(I'd never do that Steve) we(I) will accept Nico Muhly, Arvo Part, or an Avant Garde classical festival instead.
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