Beautiful Mechanical

Ivan Hewett's Classic 50 No 16: Steve Reich – Electric Counterpoint, third movement

“His early pieces are more like demonstrations than pieces of music. They focus on tiny repeating patterns, varying them step-by-step with remorseless single-mindedness. Why? Because Reich loves the notion of ‘mystery’ in art, but not as something hidden away. He wants it to be right there, on the surface. Thus his lifelong fondness for dancing patterns which aren’t as simple and hard-edged as they appear. They seem to change their shape in one’s ear, like that well-known psychologist’s drawing which can look like a duck or a rabbit, depending on how you look at it. By subtly layering one pattern above another, Reich found he could magnify that effect, adding his own ‘mystery’ to the one already there.

That was his own self-chosen project. But then, over the following decades, something wonderful and unexpected happened. The repeating patterns and the hammered piano and marimba sounds remained as insistent as ever, but because he now softened them with familiar things like melody and harmonic progressions, Reich’s own kind of ‘mystery’ joined hands with the mysteries classical music had always had.”