Octet/Music for a Large Ensemble/Violin Phase by Steve Reich

Full-length release by Steve Reich.

Released 1980 by ECM Records.

grain of salt
Everything by Steve Reich is definitely worth a listen. Reich has a harmonic language that is unmatched by most contemporary composers. Next to Reich, Hans Zimmer and John Williams make seemingly arbitrary harmonic choices in their own music. And on top of that, Reich is an order of magnitude cooler because he's a minimalist (or post-minimalist now, I suppose).

Music for a Large Ensemble is one of the bigger works you'll be able to find by Reich, not in length but in instrumentation and orchestration. And while it's probably not insanely difficult to perform, the ensemble plays the hell out of it. In a world where finding a large and expensive orchestra to champion your work is becoming increasingly difficult, this is a nice gem of new music, something that is hard to come by.

Though the piece is good, it lacks much of a dynamic range. In fact, a good deal of Reich's music is like that. A more classically-inclined listener might dismiss this as a flaw in Reich's writing, but it sort of does go along with the minimalist ethos, doesn't it?

It certainly doesn't lack pacing, though. As far as macrostructure is concerned, Reich lines his music's pacing up with the passage of movements. You might hear the same idea, modified simply by its pacing, across several or all movements. Signature elements like these seem so simple as to render the music boring, but that certainly isn't the case in Reich's music. There is perhaps less material to play with in his music, but his changes, though small, are more than satisfying.

Going back to his harmonic language, he uses it differently in each piece. In Violin Phase, for instance, there isn't much change in harmonic direction. Violin Phase focuses more on the phasing of its parts, which is an idea that Reich has been exploring for some time. And I suppose a pieces that focuses on the technique of phasing could get really muddy if the harmonic progression was elaborate and snaky.