There was a time when Steve Reich had few champions. Now he wins the Pulitzer Prize, collaborates with Jonny Greenwood, and on various anniversaries of the composer’s birth, concert halls the world over schedule celebrations of his catalog. But in the late ’60s and early ’70s, during his hardcore minimalist period, labels offered only sporadic commitments, including one-and-done relationships with both Columbia and Deutsche Grammophon. Before the American vanguard of minimalism would be canonized in classical circles, someone would have to demonstrate long-term confidence in Reich’s art.
In 1978, Manfred Eicher’s ECM imprint offered the first issue of Music for 18 Musicians, after famously spiriting the tapes away from a tentative Deutsche Grammophon. (The latter had been sitting on the album for years, after paying to record it in 1976.) Eicher’s trend-spotting sense proved keen: The jazz label’s first “classical” release eventually sold over 100,000 copies. ECM followed up this success as soon as they could, with a collection of shorter Reich pieces from his past, one of which was already more than a decade old. After a third LP—the recorded debut of Tehillim—Reich moved with onetime ECM employee Bob Hurwitz to the label Nonesuch, his recording home ever since.
Thanks to the early ECM albums, three twists in the composer’s early development were more widely appreciated. Here you could identify Reich as the stylistic upstart, the composer achieving a breakthrough, and the artist who—in the aftermath of that breakthrough—needed to plot a new course. Instead of moving chronologically by date-of-composition, the reissue works in order of original release, starting with the event that was Music for 18 Musicians.
Though some classical critics of the era objected to what one described as Reich’s “robot or zombie music,” Music for 18 Musicians has always inspired an enthusiastic response. The piece contained the steady pulse of early minimalism—an influence on all manners of electronic subgenres. There are likewise elements from Reich’s pioneering works with “phasing,” though these do not overwhelm the piece. The harmonic movement that keeps each section of Musicians feeling active was a relatively recent development in Reich’s sound, as well. Musicologist Keith Potter describes the overall effect as “on-the-edge” Reich—with the composer delighting in the apotheosis of his prior techniques while at the same time discovering new ones.
It also helped that his band was in fearsome health. Over 59 minutes, they whip through the opening (which introduces the 11 different chords that will be explored), progress through twelve different meditations on those chords (the third chord inspires two “movements”), before quickly revisiting the initial tour through the sequence and then fading away into silence. Every quality performance of Music for 18 Musicians is capable of unearthing some fresh-sounding detail from Reich’s nests of rhythm and harmony. But this inaugural recording excels in two aspects that make for an unlikely pair: it’s one of the fastest renditions ever, and also one of the most tender.
One moment of power-plus-poetry comes in the thirteenth minute of this recording, during the piece’s “IIIA” section. After this movement has established fast, interlocking patterns for violin, piano, marimba and xylophone, there is a dramatic addition of slow-moving pairs of notes for the cello. When set against the antic performance of the other parts, the melancholic feel embedded in the ensemble’s low-string instrument becomes all the more affecting. The constant churn of the work can tempt you to think of its appeal as ethereal, fit for background listening. But then some unexpected change—a complication of the suggested tonal center, or a transmutation of instrumental color—winds up commanding your attention.
This wealth of textural variation rebuts those objections to Reich’s work as being somehow on auto-pilot. Late in the piece, the melodic construction may seem familiar, but changed—reflecting Reich’s metaphor in the liner notes about the relationship between sections being like “resemblances between members of a family.” Each individual entity within this “family” of movements also possesses multiple humors and whims. It’s the consistently malleable quality of this music that has made the capstone to Reich’s purely minimalist period so fiercely loved by separate and overlapping communities of classical and pop artists. In his book The Rest Is Noise, New Yorker critic Alex Ross recalled observing the fast-spreading appeal of this sound, writing that in the ’80s and ’90s, “...you could walk into any hip boutique or hotel lounge and sooner or later hear some distant, burbling cousin of Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians.”
Where to go next? Reich took some time to figure this out—eventually composing a piece called Music for a Large Ensemble two years later. It’s shorter and not as formally impressive as Music for 18 Musicians, though Reich continues his quest to slowly investigate all the instruments of the conventional orchestra (adding double bass, this time around). It wasn’t long enough for a recording on its own, even when combined with 1979’s more inspired Octet (later rearranged and retitled Eight Lines). So ECM paired these compositions with a much older one: “Violin Phase.” Eicher’s production of that late-’60s composition has a luxuriant stereo separation that makes it an ideal way to experience the rhythmic ambiguity of Reich’s electro-acoustic layering.
This spare and resonant production aesthetic carries over to the final Reich recording on ECM, on 1982’s Tehillim. Based on his study of Jewish cantillation, it represents the composer’s next big leap forward to the realm of melody. His settings of biblical psalms are flat-out catchy. The rhythmic play is still complex and engaging, but this is the piece that proved Reich’s career would outlast the burst of minimalism’s first widespread acceptance by popular audiences in the ’70s. The recording released by ECM is the chamber version of Tehillim; a later recording conducted by Alan Pierson for Nonesuch has a more vehement force. But vehemence isn’t the only lens through which to explore Reich’s lovely writing. Produced during Reich’s 80th birthday year, this reissue package includes all of the composer’s original liner notes to those three LPs, as well as several session photos and a new essay. But the principal draw is the same as ever. Better than any other comparably sized collection, this trio of albums offers a crisp overview of 15 dramatic years in the composer’s development.
