1. Proverb
2. Nagoya Marimbas
3. City Life I (Check It Out)
4. City Life II (Pile Driver - Alarms)
5. City Life III (It's Been a Honeymoon - Can't Take No Mo')
6. City Life IV (Heartbeats - Boats and Buoys)
7. City Life V (Heavy Smoke)
The Steve Reich Ensemble
AMG:
"'How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life!' These words supply the entire text of Steve Reich's Proverb (1995), and in doing so reaffirm their own truthfulness: in Proverb, a single kernel of an idea serves as the basis for an entire musical composition. In this regard, Proverb is the ultimate expression of a compositional ideal that has marked much of Reich's music: the creation of complex works from relatively simple and few components.
In Proverb, Reich brings together seemingly disparate elements: organum from the twelfth-century school of Leonin and Perotin, the ideas (and text) of Viennese philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, and the harmonic and metric intensity of American minimalism. The idea for the work was originally suggested to Reich by Paul Hillier, the noted singer and conductor of medieval music; indeed, Proverb takes advantage of the crystalline vocal style most closely associated with the performance of early music. A soprano begins the work a cappella with a plaintive, descending melody; she is gradually joined by two other sopranos, two tenors, and an instrumental ensemble consisting of two electric organs and two vibraphones. This eclectic group continues to express the central theme in word and musical gesture, repeating the same text while inverting the original downward line into a melodic ascent or stretching it into a larger structural element by drastically augmenting the note values.
The influence of Leonin's and Perotin's Notre Dame polyphony is evident in the soprano's syllabic declamation of the text as well as in the tenors' occasional melismatic excursions. Other medieval echoes are present in the use of augmentation canon (in which one voice is accompanied by a second voice singing the same line at half or double the speed). All the while, the organs double the voices, while the vibraphones emphasize the sudden and frequent metric shifts and provide a rhythmic drive and unique timbre that decidely pull the listener out of the twelfth century and into the twentieth.
Although a late piece, this 1994 composition revives some aspects of the works of the 1960s and 1970s that made Reich famous, namely repeating patterns on both instruments, one or more beats out of phase. However, in older works Reich's system would have been to continue playing these, with the phase relationship of them shifting one beat-unit each repetition, until their snapped back into exact unison. In this work, though, the patterns change through a process of development, and usually don't repeat more than three times. The parts for the two instruments are through-composed, both of them requiring virtuoso quality players. It was commissioned by the Nagoya Conservatory in Japan for the inauguration of a new auditorium, Shirakawa Hall.
As early as It's Gonna Rain in 1965 and Come Out in 1966, Steve Reich was experimenting with the sound of the spoken word as music. Later, in Different Trains (1988), the melodies played by the violins mimic the melodic rise and fall of words and phrases heard on tape. In City Life, the sounds of speech are combined with acoustic and electronic instruments, as well as 'environmental' sounds gathered from various noisy venues in New York City. Two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two pianos, and percussion are joined by two electronic samplers. Often, these sounds are treated as if they were instruments - screeching brakes and foghorns harmonize with the woodwinds, while the sounds of machinery join the percussion section.
The work is in five movements. The first, third, and fifth are based largely on speech samples: a street vendor saying 'Check it out,' a vocal activist at a rally hollering 'It's been a honeymoon - can't take no mo'!,' and, eerily, a series of messages taken from actual fire department communications after the 1993 World Trade Center bombings, starting with 'heavy smoke.' The second and fourth movements contain no speech; each is underpinned with a rhythmic sound effect. Movement two features pile drivers and car alarms, while the sound of a human heart beating begins movement four.
City Life marks an important step in the performance of music that utilizes 'nonmusical' sound sources. In Reich's earlier works that contained speech and other sound effects, the sounds were recorded onto a tape, with which the performers had to play along in performance. In City Life sound effects are instead produced by sampling keyboards. This allows the sounds of speech and of the city to become fully integrated into the performance of the music. This integration represents the culmination of the 'found sound' techniques that Reich developed over a span of thirty years."
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