Wednesday, November 21, 7.30pm. Corn Exchange. Tickets here
Music for percussion by Steve Reich, the legendary avant-garde composer who has been pushing boundaries and genres since the 1960s, is to be performed at this year’s Cambridge Music Festival, it has been announced.
Now in his 80s, the Reich has been described by The New York Times as America’s “greatest living composer”. To many he is also a living embodiment of why classical music remains impossible to define, and performances of his work often have the flavour of gigs more than they do classical concerts.
Reich, whose works for percussion are being performed by the Colin Currie Group at this year’s Festival, emerged as part of the minimalist movement of the 1960s. His music soaks up inspiration from a huge variety of sources, including Bach, Ella Fitzgerald, Ghanaian and Indonesian music, and the cantillation of his own Jewish heritage.
In turn, his restless reinvention of sound and his experimentation with feedback, samples and loops has left its mark on everything from prog rock to house music. In the 70s, Brian Eno’s post-Roxy Music sonic inventions were heavily influenced by his discovery of Reich’s, It’s Gonna Rain, in which the composer cut and spliced together bits of a tape recording of a young Pentecostal preacher in full sermonic flow. David Bowie attended the European premiere of Reich’s Music For 18 Musicians in Berlin in 1976, and was so impressed that he paid homage to it on his acclaimed album Low.
Reich has similarly influenced artists like The Velvet Underground, Kraftwerk and Sonic Youth. The latter, themselves darlings of the New York avant-garde, have even covered his 1968 piece, Pendulum Music, in which Reich created whirring, squealing feedback by swinging microphones pendulum-like above a set of speakers. Perhaps most famously The Orb sampled his work, Electric Counterpoint, on their 1990 dancefloor hit, Little Fluffy Clouds. Today, his work still resonates with newer artists like M83 and Bayonne.
Reich has stressed that his work is not trance music, and should be listened to for its nuance and detail. Nonetheless, the Colin Currie Group’s performances of percussive works like Drumming and Music For Pieces Of Wood at this year’s Cambridge Music Festival promise to fill the city’s Corn Exchange with intoxicating sonic patterns and rhythmic layers. The fact that a single, misplaced beat could bring the entire, intricate creation crashing down, lends an extra level of edge-of-your-seat tension to the live experience. Reich himself has described Currie’s performances as “the best I’ve ever heard”.
Image: The Colin Currie Group will be performing Steve Reich’s works for percussion at this year’s festival