Steve Reich’s artistic residency at the Palau de la Música Catalana kicks off.
The American minimalist composer Steve Reich is one of the two guest composers-in-residence at the Palau de la Música Catalana for the 2024-2025 season, which will consist of a total of three concerts. The first of the concerts dedicated to his work will take place this Tuesday, 5 November, and can be considered an event, as it is the Spanish premiere of Reich/Richter, one of his most recent works (it was composed in 2019 for the inauguration of the New York cultural centre The Shed), as well as three other pieces from his early experimental minimalist works (although not as early as It’s Gonna Rain, from 1965, or Come Out, from 1966), dated between 1967 and 1968: My Name Is…, Pendulum Music and Violin Phase. The concert will be performed by the Spanish orchestra GIO Symphonia and will be conducted by its artistic director, Francesc Prat.
The programme will begin with My Name Is…, one of his lesser-known early works. Originally constructed on cassette tape, more recent versions have replaced tape with computer processing, created by recording and then editing the responses of audience members who are asked at the entrance to the concert simply ‘What is your name? The response is quickly treated with the kind of time lag or phasing that is usual in Reich’s early compositions.
The second piece, Pendulum Music, is described by its author as an ‘audible sculpture’. It is a conceptual and chance musical composition generated by three or four microphones hooked to the ceiling and an equal number of loudspeakers resting on the floor, each one positioned below the vertical of the corresponding microphone. The instrumentalists simply raise the microphones to waist height and drop them alternately, then leave the stage. The sound emitted is generated by the feedback, and Reich says that ‘the best way to play it is on small, cheap speakers, where you get a series of “bird songs”, which I prefer to the screeching of hi-fi’.
As for Violin Phase, we could define it as a sequel to Piano Phase, the first work in which Reich worked on the phasing of a short pattern of notes played by two or more instruments out of phase. Reich explains that Violin Phase can be played by one violin and a tape on which the same score has been previously recorded, or by four violins. Since all four violins play the same repetitive out-of-phase pattern with each other, ‘it is the attention of the listener that will largely determine which particular resulting pattern he or she will hear at any one moment,’ says Reich, who adds that ‘these patterns can be understood as psychoacoustic by-products of the repetition and phase-shifting. When I say there is more in my music than what I put there, I primarily mean these resulting patterns’.
The programme – which also includes Bach’s Prelude and Fugue XI, from The Well-Tempered Clavier, arranged by Igor Stravinsky, and Fratres, by the minimalist Estonian composer Arvo Pärt – will be repeated on 10 November at the Auditori de Girona, as part of the Temporada Alta festival, and ends with Reich/Richter, a work in which Reich explores the sensorial language of the German painter Gerhard Richter and transforms it into a similar musical language.
Reich’s artistic residency continues in 2025.
The other two concerts will take place on 16 January and 12 June 2025. The first, a Reich monographic, will consist of Drumming (1970-1971) and Clapping Music (1972), and will be performed by the ensembles Frames Percussion and Synergy Vocals. The second of these will feature the Frames Percussion ensemble, pianist Lluïsa Espigolé, saxophonist Helena Otero Correa and solo singers to be determined, and the programme will alternate works by Reich and the other composer in residence at the Palau de la Música this season, Spaniard Raquel García-Tomás –Shadja, for marimba and vibraphone; Pictures of the floating world (duo for percussion, saxophone, electronics and video) and Tangible, for piano, electronics and video. Reich’s works will be Music for Pieces of Wood (1973), Nagoya Marimbas (1994) and Proverb (1995), for three sopranos, two tenors, two vibraphones and two electronic organs.