135. Come Out

Steve Reich / Richard Maxfield / Pauline Oliveros: New Sounds In Electronic Music (Columbia/Odyssey, 1967);
composed by Steve Reich

Composers that get called “minimalist” really hate that term – I once saw Philip Glass shut a questioner down just for using the word – because it is not relevant to their actual objective, which is to use whatever means are most appropriate to bringing out qualities that other musical forms and strategies do not. A lot of it may sound merely repetitious to some, but if you bring full attention to it, you acquire a kind of third (and fourth) ear that zeroes in on the interstitial information that tumbles sideways out of the music. This early piece by Steve Reich is kind of an acid test for that idea, in multiple senses of the term. A fragment from a taped interview with a gentle-voiced victim of a police beating relating how he had obtained medical treatment by making one of his bruises bleed again – to “come out to show them” – which phrase is repeated on multiple tape loops in tandem which gradually – and then rapidly – go out of phase with each other, until the overlapping vocals sound like engines or hundreds of beating wings. It also turns the phrase into a political wake up you can feel in your bones.

Note: Secular essays about individual songs, each one exactly 200 words long, appearing one per day through Advant and at least semi-regularly until Donald goes away.