Music for 18 Musicians

How Minimalism has come of age since its earliest and most anarchic expression in the silence of John Cage’s 4’33" (1952), in which the performer sits at the keyboard for 4 minutes and 33 seconds and doesn’t play a note. With Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians (1976), we find the Minimalist movement in its maturity. The piece is scored for strings, wind, female voices and percussion, and the musicians are often required to play more than one instrument throughout its hour-long duration. But the steady pulse and rhythmic energy, which Reich first discovered in his early experiments with tape loops, make this work unmistakably his. Structurally, the piece is divided into 14 parts and based on a cycle of 11 chords; each chord is introduced in each of the 11 sections and then repeated at the end. Throughout the piece, we hear the rhythmic pulse of the pianos and mallet instruments. Layered over the top are the long-breathed tones of wind instruments and human voices—performers take a full breath and sing or play pulses of particular notes for as long as they can. Reich has likened the technique of expanding harmonies over an entire movement to the way in which 12th-century composers would stretch out a single note in a plainchant melody. But Music for 18 Musicians also shows the influence of Balinese gamelan music in the way the metallophone performer signifies changes within movements, and from one section to the next; the result is an egalitarian, distinctly non-Western approach to music-making.