Steve Reich: The ECM Recordings

The ECM Recordings collects some of the minimalist composer´s finest works, including the definitive recording of his undisputed masterpiece Music for 18 Musicians. (…) 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. (…) The 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. (…) 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. (…) Better than any other comparably sized collection, this trio of albums offers a crisp overview of 15 dramatic years in the composer´s development.

 

Unbelievably, there was an age before Steve Reich was the minimalist, a time when his canny amlgam of rock dynamism and non-western tropes unsettled a classical community caught between the competing structures of atonalism and tradition. Only with the stewardship of ECM´s head honcho Manfred Eicher, a particularly single-minded visionary who´d previously devoted himself to issuing jazz slides, was Reich able to establish a firm base from which to flourish. His shimmering, oscillating clusters chimed with the optimism of a post-Vietnam age and his impact on pop, jazz, classical, electronica, techno and rock would subsequently grow to a point where his indelible influence can now almost be taken for granted by those accustomed to the continual refinement of his core ideas. This valuable collection, like a historical kick in the pants, warns us against such complacency.

 

Der amerikanische Komponist feiert seinen 80. Geburtstag, weshalb das Label ECM ältere Aufnahmen noch mal gebündelt vorlegt. Darunter auch „Violin Phase“, die violinistische Entsprechung zu „Piano Phase“, in der der junge Reich mit der Wiederholung eines einzigen Pattern spielte. Die radikale neue Einfachheit war nicht nur für betuliche Klassikfans ein Schock, sondern auch für die hyperkomplexe Avantgarde. Dass es Reich um mehr als eine Spielerei ging, hört man in der Sammlung spätestens bei der späteren Psalmenvertonung „Tehillim“. Über die Wiederholungsstrukturen kreist die Musik in sich selbst, entwickelt dabei aber einen enormen Sog. So entsteht nicht weniger als ein Abbild des Himmels, in dem die Wiederholung des immer Gleichen ja hoffentlich auch nicht langweilig ist.

 

From ECM, in turn, comes a 3-CD set, Steve Reich: The ECM Recordings, (…)  complete with a superb essay by Paul Griffiths, and original notes by Reich. The ECM box begins with a recording that the label's producer, Manfred Eicher, rescued from the DG archives, Music for 18 Musicians (1974–1976). Another disc contains three shorter works: Octet (completed in 1979 and later recast for 14 musicians as Eight Lines), Music for a Large Ensemble (1978), and a work from his early "phase music" period, Violin Phase (1967). The third disc contains the final ECM Reich recording, the Jewish-influenced Tehillim (1981). Note that Violin Phase has never been re-recorded.