2013-03-02
6 分钟Howard Goodall and Suzy Klein discuss Steve Reich's Music for 18 musicians
The story of music in 50 pieces.
With Howard Goodall and Susie Klein.
Howard, we've reached the end of our story of music in 50 pieces.
And in a sense, we end at our beginning, because we look at a composer from the 20th century who looks back to composers like Josquin, where we started off.
It's music by Steve Reich.
Why do you think he's so significant?
I don't know who said this, but someone said that Steve Rush is the single most important composer of the 20th century.
Because what he did impacted on both classical and non classical music in such a big way is a huge claim to make for anybody.
I think it's actually pretty much right, because the techniques that Reich both borrowed from the past and then invented newly are ones which seeped through right into music of all genres.
Not many hip hop artists now realize that sampling, which is completely bread and butter to all hip hop you hear around the world, was brought into music by Steve Reich.
Not many people know that the repetitive style of minimalism, whilst he didn't invent minimalism, what he actually did was turn it into something that became a currency that all composers could bear.
And when you listen now to dramas on tv, the music you are hearing, the repetitive sense of regeneration in the music, is based on what Steve Reich did.
There's virtually no composer alive now who's nothing influenced by what he did in terms of taking what he heard was african, particularly african mallet based music.
It seemed like there was just repetition of rhythms going on, a sequence of rhythms on and on.
It twigged to him that it wasn't the same all the time.
It was subtly changing all the time.
And he started to do experimental pieces in which he tried this idea that something that appeared to be repeating itself subtly started to change over a period of time until it became something else.
Almost like watching echoes against a surface and seeing that the echoes started to change depending on the distance you moved away from the surface, etcetera.
And he started doing these experiments and then he thought, well, why can't I introduce this into western music, this idea of this repetition?
And he starts to do this, and he works with electronic instruments and with acoustic instruments.