Steve Reich: Music Analysis

Before listening to the music of Steve Reich, I assumed that all music had to have a definite form and path, with a distinguishable climax and resolution. I believed that the only thing that distinguished music from sound was the deliberate motion and phrasing of the melodies. Having never encountered minimalism, I had never considered a piece of music absent of these things and prematurely dismissed the movement as simply noise. Yet upon hearing Reich’s pieces, I was enthralled by the almost ethereal nature of his very simple repeated patterns and amazed that it actually triggered any emotions at all. Steve Reich’s fascination with repetition began when he studied at the San Francisco Tape Music Center. He began experimentation with tape …show more content…
Reich himself once said, “Inventing my own ensemble becomes, in a sense, the inspiration, if you will, for the beginning of the piece” (Reich, 2012). His compositions, in the tradition of other classical composers, begins with a harmonic framework Reich draws inspiration from Bartok and Stravinski, and his self-proclaimed favorite keys are D major and B minor, both of which have two sharps. He writes in mostly dominants and subdominants in order to draw from the “energy from the tonal system” (Reich, 2012). So far, excluding the construction of unique ensembles, these concepts seem familiar from traditional classical music. According to Reich himself, the harmony used in minimalist music, “…because of its durational nature, is radically different” (Reich, 2012). The return of harmony separates Reich from recent composers like Cage and Stockhausen, but the length of the harmony, and the tension created by lengthening the harmonies, is what separates Reich from past classical …show more content…
The piece opens with two marimbas playing identical eighth note harmonies, which become the basis for the rest of the movement. The two marimbas phase the eighth notes, a slight element of Reich’s previous experimentation with phasing, until they are exactly one sixteenth note apart from each other. This lays out the characteristic pulsing line that the other musicians later follow. The harmonies modulate over time, leading to each new movement. The piece is driven forward as the mallet players add new snippets of melody and the other musicians respond by picking up and repeating that idea until the old melody has faded away completely. In traditional classical music, there is almost always a moving line above several chords to move the piece forward. With the repetition of a short idea, and the assimilation of new ideas amongst each member of the ensemble, the momentum is now generated by the gradual resolution of the harmony. In Music for 18 Musicians, instead of completely resolving the harmonies, Reich adds a new idea to drive the piece into the next