Reich - New York Counterpoint
Originally for clarinet, this work has become a favourite for saxophone groups and indeed soloists where performed with backing track. The beauty of the opening movement, which references Reich's 'Music for 18 Musicians', pulls in the listener in a way that sometimes ambient electronic music hypnotises and draws one into quite an altered state of mind. Nearly every entry carefully dovetails into the next and the next and the next with seemlessness. There is a rhythmic ambiguity in the second movement that allows the pulsating chords to drift in and out of existence without unsettling the musical flow. It is only the final movement where we really hear 'New York' as cliched busyness, aggression and taxi horns. So different from the tape-pieces, where extreme dissonances and distortions often emerged during the working out of minimalist processes, here the sound of the piece is always settled in recognisable modes and chords. The hocketting of the lower instruments is desperately exciting. The effect of a recording as opposed to a live performance of this work is quite different.
The pulsating opening movement of this entrancing work by Steve Reich is interesting harmonically creating full and consonant chord structures without managing to sound like a classical or jazz rip-off. It's almost as though minimalism formed its own pseudo-tonal harmonic language. The kind of harmony used has been reused and rehashed and regurgitated in countless BBC drama soundtracks and the like. Nonetheless there is something specially beautiful about this work. The recording by Claude Delangle has the saxophones sounding almost like synthesisers at the beginning. I don't know how many takes it took or what EQ and compression trickery were involved but the end result is impressively ethereal. The opening pulsations interject again later in the second movement before the razzy third movement swaggers into view. The counterpoint here has the illusion of a delay effect and is very cleverly constructed, particularly in the baritone parts. I have no great desire to visit New York, other than to hear the music. I think any trip would need to have this as the soundtrack.
The pulsating opening movement of this entrancing work by Steve Reich is interesting harmonically creating full and consonant chord structures without managing to sound like a classical or jazz rip-off. It's almost as though minimalism formed its own pseudo-tonal harmonic language. The kind of harmony used has been reused and rehashed and regurgitated in countless BBC drama soundtracks and the like. Nonetheless there is something specially beautiful about this work. The recording by Claude Delangle has the saxophones sounding almost like synthesisers at the beginning. I don't know how many takes it took or what EQ and compression trickery were involved but the end result is impressively ethereal. The opening pulsations interject again later in the second movement before the razzy third movement swaggers into view. The counterpoint here has the illusion of a delay effect and is very cleverly constructed, particularly in the baritone parts. I have no great desire to visit New York, other than to hear the music. I think any trip would need to have this as the soundtrack.