#Steve Reich Composer

[mahgnib]

Happy 88th birthday, pioneering minimalist composer Steve Reich.

[featherfurl]

Testing midi to golgi notation conversion and basic polyphasic functions with golgi.

[gadunkie]

ochestral music is so cool its too bad that a rampant number of very racist people claim it as their own via associating it with "clean" music

[macguffinman]

Heavily inspired by Steve Reich's 'Different Trains', I decided to compose a tribute to William Hartnell's incarnation as the Doctor. After choosing several recordings of dialogue, the music (melodies and chords) in each phrase is built out of the musical tones from Hartnell's performance. When deciding upon which snippets of dialogue to use, I was drawn to Hartnell's many 'fluffs'. Back in the days of recording television, it wasn't an easy task to rerecord or edit out wrong dialogue (it was usually treated the same as live theatre), so any errors were just left in the final cut. This was made more difficult for Hartnell as he suffered from undiagnosed arteriosclerosis - making it difficult for him to remember his lines and caused lapses in concentration.What I admire is how the Doctor Who fandom have incorporated these fluffs as part of the characterisation of the Doctor. My favourite in particular is due to the first incarnation wearing out his body too much, caused more severely by the time destructor (see The Daleks' Master Plan).Hence, not only is this piece a tribute to my love of the show, but also to the actor William Hartnell, who, despite his failing health, became one of the most important components to the show. He helped establish the first principles, fluffs and all, to a character that is universally beloved.The quotes have come from the following episodes: "The Daleks", "The Edge of Destruction", "The Keys of Marinus", "The Sensorites", "The Web Planet", "The Chase", "The War Machines" and "The Three Doctors".

[ourmindonmusicpodcast]

What is Minimalism in Music?

Minimalist music is a genre that typically features: Rhythm: repetitive patterns with gradual changes in these patterns to build tension and release over time. Harmonic structure: typically simple, avoiding complex chord progressions or dissonant harmonies. Prowess-oriented: rather than structured around a traditional narrative. Timbre and Texture: Minimalist composers often uses non-traditional…

[hellocanticle]

Oh Say Can You “C”? Terry Riley’s “In C” Turns 60 Years Old

Terry Riley with a t-shirt displaying the entire score of “In C” (photo from Facebook, copyright unknown) November 4th, 2024 marks the 60th anniversary of the premiere of Terry Riley’s seminal masterpiece, “In C”. After having completed a variety of respectable compositional efforts, Terry Riley (1935- ) was jolted by the Muse to write this defining work that charted a path very different from…

[graph100]

yall i seriously love steve reich

[nonesuchrecords]

Steve Reich’s conversation with BBC Radio 3’s Composer of the Week received an encore broadcast as part of the show’s 80th anniversary celebrations. He shares the personal story behind his seminal 1988 piece Different Trains. The 1989 Nonesuch recording of the piece, performed by Kronos Quartet, won the Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Composition and is among the 200 Best Albums of the 1980s per Pitchfork. You can hear the episode, which also features Meredith Monk, here.

[m-ir-a-nd-a]

My most anticipated chapter.

[seb-the-nerd]

me, listening to a piano piece with my parents: hmm sounds like a steve reich piece

the announcer when it's done: "___ by steve reich"

me: I KNEW IT

[steamedtangerine]

Pendulum Music - Sonic Youth

This is a rendition of a composition written by minimalist/experimental composer Steve Reich in 1968. It is made by suspending a number of microphones directly above amps which they're plugged into, then swinging the mics so that they move in a pendulum motion, and recording the feedback that occurs.

[justforbooks]

Richard Serra, who has died aged 85, was a remarkable cultural figure – a sculptor who belonged to the generation of American minimalists, was associated with process art and made experimental films, yet evoked something of an earlier, more heroic age. The critic Robert Hughes described him as “the last abstract expressionist”.

Although this statement stretches the point, Serra’s interest in the processes of sculpture led him to some extravagant gestural acts that belie the severity of his grand public commissions. Weight and Measure, made in the early 1990s for what is now Tate Britain, exemplified his austere side, with its massive steel forms designed to counter the building’s overbearing classicism. However, some of his other works, such as the twisting, “torqued” structures installed at the Guggenheim in Bilbao in 2005, are positively baroque.

Curled around an existing sculpture, Snake, that was commissioned for the museum’s opening in 1997, these steel works, dominated by ellipses and spirals, articulate spaces in which the gallery visitor can wander. They are monumental enough to take on Frank Gehry’s grandiose architecture, but, with their patinated surfaces and curved forms, also have an intimate, sensual quality. Above all, Serra’s sculptures create a remarkable interaction with the public and a strong experience of gradual discovery – hence the installation’s title, The Matter of Time.

His works have proved popular with curators, but are not confined to museums. They have appeared in settings as diverse as the Tuileries garden in Paris, the Federal Plaza in New York, and the Qatari desert, attracting responses from intense admiration to a public inquiry. One of his sculptures, Fulcrum, was put up in 1987 at Broadgate outside Liverpool Street station in London. It manages to combine monumentality with fragility, made of weathered steel plates that appear to support each other precariously.

He was born in San Francisco into a family that provided a foundation for his later career as a sculptor in metal. His father, Tony, who was from Majorca, was a pipe-fitter in a naval shipyard. His mother, Gladys (nee Fineberg), who was the daughter of Jewish immigrants from Odessa, used to introduce her son as “Richard, the artist” and was, later, touchingly enthusiastic when he began to make his way in New York. Serra himself laboured in steel mills during his time as a student and subsequently, in 1979, made a compelling film, Steelmill/Stahlwerk, about German workers in the industry.

Serra began his studies in 1957 at the University of California in Berkeley, graduating from the institution’s Santa Barbara campus with a degree in English literature. He followed this in 1961 with a three-year course in painting at Yale University, New Haven – a period in which he also worked as a teaching assistant and as a proof-reader for Joseph Albers’s book Interaction of Color (1963). At Yale he encountered such luminaries as Philip Guston, Robert Rauschenberg, Ad Reinhardt and Frank Stella, before winning a fellowship that took him to Europe in 1964.

In Paris, Serra was profoundly impressed by the sculpture of Constantin Brâncuși, but in Florence the following year he continued to paint, producing coloured grids in timed conditions controlled by a stopwatch. It was only with his first exhibition, at the Galleria La Salita in Rome in 1966, that he made a definitive move away from painting, filling cages with live and stuffed animals.

After moving to New York in the same year, Serra initially survived by setting himself up as a furniture remover, together with his friends, the composers Philip Glass and Steve Reich. Serra’s artistic development at this time was rapid, moving from experiments with rubber, fibreglass and neon tubing to the metal sculpture for which he became renowned. He soon began his long-term association with the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York, in whose Warehouse annex he was photographed in 1969 throwing molten lead at the wall with a ladle.

In the same year Serra refined this procedure by splashing the metal against a small steel plate stuck into the corner of Jasper Johns’s studio. The “castings” produced when the lead cooled down were rough, expressive forms, but this project also inspired Serra to create more impersonal pieces, in which metal sheets were wedged into the angles of rooms, leaned against each other or pinned to the wall by lead pipes. His emphasis on objective phenomena – mass, gravity and other physical forces – can also be seen in his remarkable experimental films.

In Hand Catching Lead (1968), the hand is in fact the artist’s but it is shown disembodied, trying to grasp rather than cast pieces of falling lead, which it drops or misses altogether. The repetition of this fundamentally pointless act gives the film a serial quality, akin to the celluloid process itself.

Serra’s engagement with the cutting edge also led him to work with the land artists Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt. In 1970 he assisted them with Spiral Jetty at the Great Salt Lake in Utah and, after Smithson’s death in 1973, Serra helped to complete Amarillo Ramp in an artificial lake in Texas. His own site-specific sculptures included Spin Out: For Bob Smithson (1972-73), in the park-like surroundings of the Kröller-Müller Museum at Otterlo in the Netherlands. Here the three converging steel plates interacted with each other and their environment, exemplifying Serra’s aim that “the entire space becomes a manifestation of sculpture”.

The 1970s was a difficult decade in Serra’s life. In 1971 a worker was killed in an accident during the installation of one of Serra’s sculptures outside the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. His five-year marriage to the artist Nancy Graves ended in 1970, and his mother’s suicide in 1977 was followed two years later by the death of his father. However, in that decade he also met his future wife, the art historian Clara Weyergraf, with whom he collaborated on Steelmill/Stahlwerk. Clara was also to play a vital role in shaping his sculpture, as well as giving her name to Clara-Clara, a powerful, curvilinear work that was installed in the Tuileries garden in 1983. The history of this piece exemplifies Serra’s problems in making site-specific art, since it was originally intended to feature in a show at the Pompidou Centre, but at a late stage was deemed to be too heavy.

Clara-Clara’s travails were minor in comparison to the controversies surrounding Tilted Arc, a sculpture 36 metres long, set up at the Federal Plaza in Manhattan in 1981. Condemned for being intrusive, a magnet for graffiti artists and even a security risk, it was eventually removed in 1989, four years after a public hearing in which a majority of witnesses had advocated its preservation.

Despite this setback, Serra’s career continued to flourish. He had two retrospectives, in 1986 and 2007, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which also devoted a permanent room to his monumental work Equal (2015), as well as major exhibitions at home and abroad. He showed frequently with his gallery, Gagosian, in London, New York and Paris, most recently in 2021.

In 2001 he received a Golden Lion for lifetime achievement at the Venice Biennale, in 2015 the Légion d’honneur in France and, three years later, the J Paul Getty Medal.

During his latter years, Serra became heavily involved with public projects in Qatar, above all the four steel plates, rising to over 14 metres and spanning more than a kilometre, erected west of Doha in 2014. Known as East-West/West-East, the work engages spectacularly with its surroundings, the gypsum plateaux of the Brouq nature reserve in the Dukhan desert. Serra himself described it as “the most fulfilling thing I’ve ever done”.

He is survived by Clara.

🔔 Richard Serra, artist, born 2 November 1938; died 26 March 2024

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at Just for Books…?

[jardaworksgallery]

Music I like - from my vinyl collection

PHILIP GLASS - SONGS FROM THE TRILOGY

(The minimalist beauty of contemporary opera)

Philip Morris Glass - born January 31, 1937 - Baltimore

Along with Steve Reich, Terry Riley, John Adams and Michael Nyman, he is one of the minimalist composers. However, he himself prefers the term music with repetitive structures to the term minimalism.

He is the last of the "classical" representatives of the American minimalist school. Since the 1970s, he has been using elements in his compositions, such as ostinato repetition of simultaneously sounding motifs of different lengths, creating a polyrhythmic structure or the additive principle – the gradual lengthening or shortening of phrases, changing the rhythmic and melodic content.

Early period compositions include Music in Fifths, Music in Similar Motion, Music With Changing Parts, Music In Twelve Parts, Northstar, the opera Einstein on the Beach, etc. His later works include chamber music, orchestral music, vocal music, opera, stage music and film music.

Source: Czech Wikipedia

[burlveneer-music]

SUN - I Can See Our House From Here

A home, a house, has countless frequencies. Each room, each corner feels different. Swings differently. And as you grow older, you realize which corner is yours. But yeah, it takes time… It certainly marks the end of an era when the house one called home as a kid no longer exists. This home, it was the starting point of so many journeys. Of one big, ongoing journey. And so it feels good, soothing, reassuring to at least return to a spot nearby – to that (proverbial) hill from where you can see it. Feel the vibe that made you. Andi Haberl’s debut solo album as Sun is sort of dedicated to that house. It’s a journey leading to that hill overlooking everything that made him. It’s not about nostalgia, not about actually returning to a specific place. Instead, it’s about finding a personal frequency, an overlapping of sounds and samples, an open space that mirrors and extends whatever frequencies felt right at different points in time. “To me, the results feel like Gold Panda/Four Tet meets Steve Reich meets Krautrock meets film scores. I just really wanted to create moods that touch me – and ideally others, too.” Berlin-based drummer/composer Andi Haberl aka SUN is known as a long-time member of The Notwist and various other bands/projects (Alien Ensemble, AMEO, jersey, Ditty etc.). He has also worked with My Brightest Diamond, Till Brönner, Owen Pallet, and Kurt Rosenwinkel, to name a few. 

[mikrokosmos]

Alexandre Desplat - Main Theme to Asteroid City (2023)

Last night I went out to the movies with friends and we saw the new Wes Anderson picture, Asteroid City. This is the first time in a long time that I've seen a film in a theater and I do have a lot to say about the movie and the unique way that it shows the kind of crisis and anxiety that artists have in the creative process. But from the first moment I fell in love with the score by the acclaimed film composer Alexandre Desplat. Just as Anderson uses picturesque scenes and stock characters of Atomic-Age Americana to evoke a nostalgia for this idealized past we can only experience as artificial recreations, So Desplat turn to post-war American music to capture not only an atmosphere of the era but also of the American Sublime. There are only a few moments that his score comes through mixed with retro country western tracks. The opening of this “suite” holds us with a high-pitched note held over a melody in the lower register of the piano. This distinct “Americana” sound feels that way because it is reminiscent of Copland’s orchestral writing. But then the oscillating xylophone and bells brings in a pulse that makes me think of American minimalism with the likes of Steve Reich and Philip Glass. Little wind arpeggios come in to heavily emphasize Philip Glass' style of “minimalism”, which can be heard throughout his scores. And this nod to Glass ends with a long held organ pedal point in the bass, reminding us of his iconic score for Koyaanisqatsi (1982). Then, unexpectedly, the held note which opened the score is revealed to be the opening to the serene and otherworldly prelude to Wagner’s Lohengrin (or at least a short pastiche). Why reference Wagner here? I'm going to guess that this is related to the Wagnerian sound of heroism, triumph, and the sublime all being paired with the reminiscent love for the cowboys of the Old West. And these long held notes, and evoking the repetitive and potentially endless sounds of looping American minimalism come together to create a musical depiction of the American Sublime of endless Horizons and expansive nature and the quiet beauty that places like the Southwest has. I might be reading a lot into it and I don't want to argue that this is what Alexander Desplat had in mind when he decided to write in an American musical style for matching aesthetics, but I think this adds a nice little cherry of a detail on top of an already complicated and multi-layered film.

[hellocanticle]

Howard Hersh in Isolation

The COVID epidemic imposed unanticipated stresses on pretty much everyone. These stresses resulted in much pain and suffering but also prompted a variety of creative responses. This one, by the composer/producer/broadcaster Howard Hersh, consists of four pieces for solo instruments (flute, marimba, piccolo, and violin). The first piece, “Solo” (2006) for flute (Tod Brody) and the second,…