The follow­ing is a liner note I wrote for the new Steve Reich Album “Pulse / Quartet,” out today on Nonesuch Records.

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Every composer has a distinct working process, but one way of under­stand­ing them is to divide them into two groups: planning composers, and intu­itive composers. Steve Reich began his career writing music as rigor­ously system­atic as any: early on, the plan was the piece. Some of his earliest, most severely minimal “process pieces,” Pendulum Music (1968) and Four Organs (1970), made pulse both the topic and struc­tural heart of the music: a regular rhythm grad­u­ally slowed to the point of imper­cep­ti­bil­ity. What thrilled in this music was the feeling of hearing an immense object move through time and space, even while antic­i­pat­ing exactly where it would end up.

As he expanded his compo­si­tional toolbox, his harmonies, which had been resolutely static, began to move and develop, artic­u­lat­ing new forms. Music For 18 Musi­cians (1976) stretches a sequence of 11 chords across an ecstatic hour. The two outer sections of the piece, in which the chords are heard in quick sequence, are titled “Pulses”. Pulse and harmony had become the two struc­tural poles of his style.

Over the decades, he’s moved in an increas­ingly intu­itive direc­tion. Typical Reich-ian struc­tural plans—setting up harmonic struc­ture around an ambigu­ously func­tional chord, putting canons in motion on top of it, then modu­lat­ing upwards, increas­ing tension—all but guar­an­tee a sense of musical form: begin­ning, depar­ture, and arrival. The two pieces on this album stretch that template in increas­ingly non-system­atic ways.

First there’s Pulse, whose emblem­atic title hints at a retro­spec­tive of the 40 years. But it is not the piece one might initially expect. The opening moments are pure American lyricism, the sustained timbres of violins, flutes and clar­inets. When the “pulse” does arrive, it’s gentle, easy, intimate, the pulse of a person at rest: open, ringing piano chords, warm electric bass rounding out the low end (Reich prefers electric to acoustic bass, for its crisp artic­u­la­tion). This two-instru­ment rhythm section serves as a core around which the opening melody spirals and evolves. And it’s within that evolu­tion that we find the music’s retro­spec­tive element: those same harmonies from the opening of Music For 18 Musi­cians.

It’s diffi­cult to over­state how inte­grated the instru­men­ta­tion is to the musical concept of Pulse, and vice versa. The unlikely band comprises 11 treble (high) instru­ments (counting the piano, which here never ventures below middle C) set against one very low one. The yawning regis­tral chasm between the bass and the rest of the ensemble creates a sense of physical space in which the melodic pere­gri­na­tions can rever­ber­ate freely. The overall effect is that Pulse is the most vocal of Reich’s instru­men­tal pieces.

Never one to over-annotate a score, it’s nonethe­less striking that the written dynamics of Pulse never rise above mezzo-forte—that simul­ta­ne­ously non-commit­tal and enig­matic volume, right in the middle of the dial. Given this narrow compass, its mono-thematic quality, and its constant tempo, Pulse’s 15-minute struc­ture is paced, there­fore, by harmony (of course) and by contin­u­ous vari­a­tion of that single theme. It can be diffi­cult to deduce sections within music that’s this contin­u­ous, but differ­ent treat­ments of the melody provide clues. Material that might at first seem like a new theme actually proves to be that same melody, but stretched out into long sustained notes, or chopped up into short repeated sections to form a tense canon. It’s a slightly sneaky feat of compo­si­tional virtu­os­ity which lends that neces­sary sense of depar­ture and return while never actually leaving the station.

The musical jumping-off point for Quartet began with a friendly game of composer one-upsman­ship. Reich had been debating the merits of key signa­tures with Nico Muhly (who subscribes to the modernist tradi­tion of forgoing them). Muhly, in turn, ribbed Reich (who uses them frequently) with an emailed photo of a locksmith’s window sign—“keys made fast and accurate”. So Reich decided to write an entire piece in response, one that would change keys more often—and more ambiguously—than anything he’d written yet. 

After the conti­nu­ity of Pulse, the opening of Quartet feels like a bracing jump into a cold pool. Where Pulse is cohesive, even textu­rally static, Quartet is all rambunc­tious energy and hyper­ac­tive change. The piece is clearly in the lineage of 2x5, Radio Rewrite, and Double Sextet—music propelled by strong beats, driving synco­pa­tion, layered bits of those Ghanaian drumming patterns he studied in the 70’s. But here, Reich has chopped these influ­ences into smaller chunks than ever before. The effect is somewhat dizzying. Grooves start and stop without warning, the ensemble comes to halt after screech­ing halt, instru­ments spiral off in differ­ent direc­tions that lead nowhere. It’s all very unlike typical process of setting up a steady groove over which a series of canons play out. The effect is not unlike one of those “Reich remixed” albums, but this time the DJ is Reich himself. 

In fact, listen­ing to the first and third move­ments of Quartet, one begins to realize how close the breaking down of a sample is to the clas­si­cal practice of “devel­op­ing vari­a­tion” (a term coined by Schön­berg, no less, to describe how composers would struc­ture a large work by spinning out small bits of musical material). Even the title “quartet” puts the piece in a Clas­si­cal frame of refer­ence. Just as the string quartet lies at the root of the clas­si­cal orches­tra, keyboards, vibra­phones, and marimbas frequently form the core of Reich’s instru­men­tal combi­na­tions. Which makes perfect sense given his musical language: these instru­ments have clear, defined attacks and pure timbres, making harmonic change and contra­pun­tal inter­play all the more apparent. Like almost all of Reich’s ensem­bles, Quartet (two vibra­phones, two pianos) divides in half stereo­phon­i­cally, allowing material to seam­lessly mirror and layer over itself; there are few Reich pieces in which this kind of canonic coun­ter­point is not an integral technique.

For all the jostling activity of the outer move­ments, the slow center of Quartet leaves the strongest impres­sion. The pulse is still there, but obscured, slowed down to the point where it’s hardly felt at all; the music feels daringly spare, even haunted. One begins to imagine Quartet as a symbolic inverse of, or coun­ter­point to, Pulse, called “Harmony.” Lapidary chords are passed between the instru­ments, cohering into diffuse melodies, which are spiked here and there with evap­o­rat­ing canonic frag­ments. But every­thing is blurred, stretched, and over­lapped. The texture evokes Reich’s rever­ence for the French tradi­tion, the effect not unlike Debussy’s tone-painting piano Préludes; intox­i­cat­ing, even dramatic, but at a remove. This feels like a new addition in Reich’s ever-expand­ing toolbox: music with a protag­o­nist, a private space surrounded by but protected from the world’s bustle. Here, moments of change are less struc­tural signage, more changes of color, shifts of light. Those old obses­sions with pulse and harmony have led us into new territory.

–Timo Andres, November 2017