A Night At The Opera
Saw Steve Reich and Musicians at the Sydney Opera House last night. Being completely ignorant of musical terminology, I will now make a pig’s ear of trying to describe it.
The thing that’s always appealed to me about Reich’s music is the sense of simplicity at the heart of it - which, having seen it being performed, turns out to be a complete illusion. While the elements that make up Reich’s music are simple - Drumming Part One, which is four musicians playing 8 drums or Music For Pieces Of Wood, which is five musicians hitting, er, pieces of wood - the complex arrangement of these elements builds and evolves into quite beautiful, mesmerising musical pieces which rely more on rhythm than harmony for their drive. (My own sneaking suspicion that if I banged enough biscuit tins long enough I could come up with my own Reich composition has gone for a burton, unfortunately). Stripping music back to these simple, individual sounds lets the complexity of the overall sound come through more clearly, something emerging over and above what is being played, especially within the rarified atmosphere of the concert hall, where you can do nothing but listen (and indeed, have paid for the privilege of not being distracted by anything else). It’s easy to take the piss out of classical trained musicians thumping bits of wood together for a living, but it misses the point that the real work isn’t in the instrument, it’s in the combination of the whole collection of sounds, wherever they come from.
Piano Phase / Video Phase is a variation on this where the musician plays against a video projection and audio soundtrack of himself playing the piece, moving in and out of phase with his recorded counterpart. Again, the simplicity of the concept is what makes it work - some might think it monotonous and repetitious, which it is, but those terms shouldn’t be seen as automatically pejorative. Similarly, the longest piece of the evening, Sextet, has five simple movements, fast,moderate,slow,moderate,fast, combining an array of marimbas and sustained keyboard notes into something that moves rapidly back and forth between dissonance and melody. Trying to say anything else useful about Sextet is difficult because it functions conceptually on a similar basis to the other pieces, yet sonically they all sound completely different.
The closing piece was Different Trains, one of Reich’s more self-consciously conceptual compositions. As a child during the early 40s, Reich used to ride the train between New York and Los Angeles - as a Jew, he realised that if he had been born in Europe, he would be riding a very different train. Using voice samples of his governess Victoria describing their journeys together, as well as recordings of Holocaust survivors depicting their train journies to the camps, Reich uses the rhythm of the voices themselves as the basis for a string quartet’s aggressive and dissonant play. Unfortunately during the performance the voices were loud but indistinct, so unless you’d read the programme you’d have no idea what they were saying. It’s difficult to pinpoint where the concept of Different Trains stops and the music starts i.e. how well you need to know the history of the piece in order to enjoy it.
Music historians can point to Reich’s assimilation of jazz and Eastern music into the structure of his own, but I’m not sure how useful a pointer that is to the music itself. I think that because Reich is a “modern composer”, his music often gets hidden behind intellectual discussion, to be talked about rather than listened to, where the discussion of the concept becoms more important than the enjoyment of the work. (I think there’s a lot of authors that suffer the same fate too). Steve Reich’s music is not a dry, academic exercise but, it seems to me, an attempt to really listen to and experience rhythm - and you can’t really get more primal than that.
As an aside, the Opera House is a truly strange venue in which to see a concert - on the one hand you have the undeniable grandeur of its soaring architecture and location, which looks particularly dramatic at twilight, especially when clutching a G&T on the balcony, but on the other hand you have the god-awful interior design of the concert hall itself, which looks like something from a Communist rally. There’s plans afoot to bring back original Danish architect Joern Utzon in order to renovate the interior - let’s hope they get on with it.
Other Splinters posts of interest:
- A soft totalitarianism
- Music Is My Hot Hot Sex
- Pat Metheny Eviserates Kenny G
- Shostakovich Comes To London
- Philosophy and music
