REICH Steve
Four Organs / Phase Patterns

RDC 5018


Newtone Records
USA Stati Uniti

 

This is the Cd release of Four Organs / Phase Patterns by STEVE REICH, originally issued on Shandar Records.
With this new title we continues the print/reprint serie of historical works of the last thirty years of music, that includes the world premiere of the first two parts of Music for 18 Musicians (Nt 6707), Music for Pieces of Wood (Nt 6714) by Steve Reich; Terry Riley's Persian Surgery Dervishes (Nt 6715) and Peter Gordon & Lolo's Geneva & Extended Niceties (Nt 6706).
This is a important and peculiar recording. Important because is the first available recording of a live performance of Steve Reich's music played by real musicians and moreover by an Ensemble. Up to then his main work It's Gonna Rain and Come Out for magnetic tape and the various "phase" (violin phase, piano phase, reed phase) for solo / duo instruments.
Toghether with Steve REICH we find here Philip GLASS (today very well-known American composer) on keyboard, Jon GIBSON, composer and saxophone player with the P. Glass Ensemble, on keyboard and maracas, Art MURPHY, keyboard, also with P. Glass Ensemble during the '70s, and Steve CHAMBERS, composer and keyboardist, first with the P. Glass Ensemble, then in solo.
Peculiar recording both for the instrumentation: electric organs and that for the music. Reich has used very rarely electric instruments in his music. The choice of four electric organs, here, gives a "strange" sound to the music, very different from other pieces of the same composer.
At a superficial level it resembles very much to certain recordings Philip Glass in the seventies. Last but not least the music is very special. In Four Organs (and maracas) it is presented, for the first time, the "slow motion music": the basic chord becomes longer and longer, resembling the movement of the pendulum that slowly reaches the quietness, the same for the composition that at the end acquires the ecstatic quality of Indian mantras.
Phase Patterns, as from the title, is based on the phasing process, here more complicated by the presence of four performers and anticipated the results of the following Reich's masterpiece Drumming.