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Pulse Music – Steve Reich: Piano Phase (1967)

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by Ben Hogwood

After Come Out was over, I remember thinking, “What is this? Am I gonna be a mad scientist trapped in a loft with a tape recorder? So, I immediately thought, “I’ve got to return to live music.” – Steve Reich, talking to Michael Tilson Thomas (from Steve Reich: Conversations)

Background

Having vowed to return to live music, Reich encountered difficulties. “Unfortunately, it seemed to me at the time impossible for two human beings to perform that gradual phase shifting process, since the process was discovered with, and was indigenous to, machines.”, he says in Writings on Music.

Yet he was in for a welcome surprise, realising that having recorded a short loop on the piano, he could indeed play against it as though he were a second tape recorder. “Doing it is really incredible”, he recounted to MTT, “because the only way I can do it is to close my eyes and listen as closely as possible so that I don’t move two sixteenths ahead, or just get stuck in unison.”

The rhythmic interval of a sixteenth is critical, for while the two musicians begin in unison, the second starts to gradually increase their tempo so that the phase shifting begins, and eventually they move one beat (one sixteenth) ahead. This continues until both align back in unison, at which point a new melodic pattern is introduced, and the shifts begin from scratch. The home key is B minor, and the piano notes are largely mid-range.

Listen

Thoughts

Piano Phase is one of Reich’s most hypnotic works, and once again it rewards the active listener with a dazzling array of riffs that can be picked out of the crowded textures seemingly at will. The shifts of rhythmic emphasis are thrilling, and as the second pianist moves ahead of the first there are moments of euphoria when torrents of notes are unleashed like a waterfall, then reassuring blocks where everything falls metrically into line.

There are dancing figurations created by the constant movements, the left hand acting as the ‘legs’ to support the movement in the right hand’s ‘upper body’ figurations. These shapes constantly shift in the listener’s imagination.

Halfway through, when you might expect the piece to drag, it regenerates, fresh energy added as the rhythms bounce off each other, while fifteen minutes in and what seemed to be a simple, single line is now a dazzling wall to well ringing of bells, with very little bass

By the end the melodic elements are almost done, bouncing between two notes a tone apart and seemingly trapped in a vacuum. This feels like exactly the right point for the piece to stop, which it does in unison. As always, the quiet at the end of a minimalist piece feels like the loudest part of all, until things subside to silence – yet the effect lingers, the musical equivalent of a double espresso.

Quotes / Legacy

“It’s one pattern, but it’s a completely different way of playing the piano…it requires a completely different skill set. You’re playing the piano like a percussionist. You were asking the performers to do something that up until that point people had not been asking performers to do.” – composer Michael Gordon on discovering Piano Phase (from Steve Reich: Conversations)

Is it too fanciful to suggest modern pop songs such as Alex Warren’s Fever Dream have been indirectly influenced by Reich’s workings?

Recordings

There are several. Reich’s first recording, made with Double Edge (pianists Edmund Niemann and Nurit Tilles, clocks in at just over 20 minutes. Ensemble Avantgarde on Wergo are 18’40”, while Vincent Corver and Keith Ford are a nippy 13’40” with their account for CPO. All are enjoyable, but Reich’s is more authoritative. You can compare on this Tidal playlist

Also written / released in 1967 The Beatles Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band; The Jimi Hendrix Experience Are You Experienced; Shostakovich Seven Romances on Poems by Alexander Blok; Stockhausen Hymnen

Next up: Violin Phase (1967)

Published post no.3,059 – Monday 26 October 2026

Pulse Music – Steve Reich: Melodica (1966)

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by Ben Hogwood Photo credit Jeffrey Herman

Background

Reich’s short but dazzling group of pieces for tape signs off with Melodica. The composer lays out clear instructions in the score, an image of which appears in his Writings On Music compendium. He describes its genesis in typically concise fashion:

“Melodica is composed of one tape loop gradually going out of phase with itself, first in two voices and then in four. The original loop is of myself playing the four-note pattern on the melodica, a toy instrument. I dreamed the melodic pattern, woke up on May 22nd, 1966, and realized the piece with the melodica and tape loops in one day. Melodica was composed of musical pitches, as opposed to the speech fragments used in my two earlier tape pieces, It’s Gonna Rain (1965) and Come Out (1966). It proved to be both a transition phase shifting process, and the last tape piece I ever made.”

Listen

Thoughts

For the first time, Reich’s music does away with speech, applying the development of phase patterns to pitched music played on an instrument. This is a simple, jerky four note motif played on the melodica – whose repetitions can be jarring to start with. The key moment is just before two minutes in, where the phase shifting becomes noticeable to the untrained ear, and the echo effects start off those now-familiar sensations where the ear starts to pick out fleeting movements between the parts.

As the parts double from two to four, the melodic shapes dance in the mind’s eye, the rhythms bouncing off the walls – a dazzling effect for something so apparently simple! Then, almost without warning, the music stops, like switching off a radio – but continues to reverberate in the listener’s ears long after the sounds have died.

A postcard of minimalism, Melodica is a critical stage in Reich’s development as the emphasis shifts to instrumental music.

Recordings

Melodica – to my surprise – does not appear anywhere in Reich’s recorded oeuvre, though as you see above is easily accessed on YouTube.

Also written / released in 1966 Marvin Gaye Moods of Marvin Gaye; Frank Sinatra Strangers in the Night; Ligeti Lux Aeterna

Next up: Piano Phase (1967)

Published post no.3,050– Saturday 17 October 2026

Pulse Music – Steve Reich: Come Out (1966)

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by Ben Hogwood

“I had never heard anyone deal with music or language in that way, turning language into music that had political content. I was completely floored by it” – sculptor and artist Richard Serra on hearing Come Out for the first time (from Steve Reich: Conversations)

Background

“I had to like open the bruise up and let some of the bruise blood come out to show them.”

As Reich details in his Writings on Music, this is the voice of Daniel Hamm…one of the six boys arrested for murder during the Harlem riots of 1964. After a beating taken in Harlem’s 28th precinct police station, Hamm and the boys were about to be “cleaned up” – but the police were only taking those with visible bleeding. Since Hamm had no open bleeding, he proceeded to open a bruise on his leg to ensure he was taken to hospital. This article on Pitchfork provides valuable political background to the piece.

Reich took a loop of the words quoted above, “recorded on both channels. First the loop is heard in unison with itself. As it begins to go out of phrase, a slowly increasing reverberation is heard. This gradually passes into a canon or round for two voices, then four voices and finally eight.”

Listen

Thoughts

After an eye-opening encounter with It’s Gonna Rain, there is less of a surprise element when listening to Come Out. And yet its impact is even more profound, sinister even, within a piece that once again stands as a blueprint for future sonic innovations. The protest made by Reich’s treatment of the musical speech elements is unswerving, and uncomfortable, with an urgency to the work demanding immediate action.

After an exposition of Hamm’s material, the speech works its way into the tight canon Reich describes, the process anticipating the work of acts such as Cabaret Voltaire a decade or two later. Looking further ahead, as the canons get more complicated, the breakdowns of big, euphoric rave numbers from the late 1980s onwards are clearly set out. Landmark tracks such as M|A|R|R|S’ Pump Up The Volume are also anticipated. If you put Reich’s manipulations to a techno beat now, few people would be any the wiser!

Yet considering the original music made in 1966, how stark this is – and what a powerful statement it makes, its relevance running all the way through to Black Lives Matter and beyond.

Quotes / Legacy

Stephen Sondheim, from Conversations… “What you do quite often, particularly with the speech pieces, is that by looping them and working with them, sounds come out of them that aren’t part of the actual language. And what happens is the listener’s ear mixes the sound. That’s exactly, of course, what (Georges) Seurat was doing with colour. He was making the eye mix the colour instead of making it on the palette. I thought that’s another thing you and I have in common, is that you have the ear-mix and Seurat has the eye-mix.”

Recordings

Again, just the one – part of the 1987 collection Early Works (Nonesuch)

Also written / released in 1966 Ennio Morricone The Good, the Bad and the Ugly; Stravinsky Requiem Canticles; The Beach Boys Pet Sounds

Next up: Melodica (1966)

Published post no.3,048 – Thursday 15 October 2026

Pulse Music – Steve Reich: It’s Gonna Rain (1965)

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by Ben Hogwood

“It was, I have to say, one of the three to four really life-changing musical events of my life” – Brian Eno on hearing Steve Reich‘s It’s Gonna Rain for the first time (from Steve Reich: Conversations)

Background

Reich’s recording of preacher Brother Walter was made in Union Square, San Francisco, in 1964. The preacher was referring to Noah’s Flood, and the forty days of continuous rain in the Bible, but the contemporary significance – with the Cuban missile crisis gripping the Western world – gripped the composer.

Once recorded, Reich took to the studio, and with two recordings of the preacher playing side by side, he observed during playback how one tape was slowly going out of phase with the other. The resultant sounds were bringing some extraordinary effects to the speech and its resultant melody and rhythm, which Reich honed in on for the final edited tape piece.

The piece is effectively in two movements – the first hones in on the words “It’s Gonna Rain”, looping them relentlessly, while the second takes on snippets of the scene in the ark: “But Noah couldn’t open the door; it had been sealed by the hand of God!”

Listen

Part 1:

Part 2:

Thoughts

Nothing quite prepares you for your first encounter with Brother Walter. The impassioned message is powerful enough, given extra perspective by the street sounds, but when it starts to go through Reich’s phrasing process all sorts of weird and wonderful musical tricks are created.

The baton is quickly passed to the listener, and the ear zooms in on unexpected micro details, with fragments of words and music taking on new effects and meanings. On headphones the effect is overwhelming; on a home stereo it is still incredibly powerful. My two live encounters with this piece have generated a headache through the overstimulation!

What Reich is also doing here, unexpectedly, is preparing the way for rap music. Brother Walter’s speech is so melodic, and so rhythmic, that it creates a profile all of its own, a dance only enlivened by the phased repetitions.

The stereo picture shifts, an unsettling experience but also a wholly stimulating one. The melodic properties of the speech of “It’s Gonna Rain” hit home in a kind of microtone key, between D and E flat major. When the two tapes reach the maximum distance apart the effect is that of an aural eclipse, with intense kinetic energy generated at the expense of all other noise.

With the second part we know a little more what to expect, but here the effect is that of a sonic whirlpool. As Reich’s process works through the manic intensity grows, the perspective of the voice changing as it gets chewed up by the machine. The vortex takes hold so that halfway through the words inaudible, and then the effect – to this listener at least – becomes that of a sonic plane coming into land, the pitch of the tape sinking towards the ground before disappearing slowly into the distance. A quite extraordinary piece!

Quotes / Legacy

Brian Eno again, from Conversations… “Everything I thought I understood about music needed to be revised. It had a very, very big impact on me. it really set me thinking again about what music could be, and what the act of listening consisted of, because it made me realise that listening was a very creative activity”

Recordings

Just the one – part of the 1987 collection Early Works (Nonesuch)

Also written / released in 1965: John Coltrane A Love Supreme; John Barry Thunderball

Next up: Come Out (1966)

Published post no.3,045 – Monday 12 October 2026

On Paper – People Always Surprise You: Intriguing Tales of Fact and Fiction by Victor S Jones

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People Always Surprise You: Intriguing Tales of Fact & Fiction
by Victor S. Jones
Vanguard Press [80pp, softback, illustrated, ISBN 978-1-83671-183-4, £6.99]

by Richard Whitehouse

What’s the story?

Victor Jones here publishes his first book, a collection of short stories whose compactness belie the depth of their observations on and insights into what might reasonably be termed the ‘human condition’, informed by an outlook such as never becomes cynical or negatory.

What are the stories like?

Having worked as advertising copywriter then manager of his own business, Jones is well placed to explore the myriad nooks and crannies of everyday existence that, in reality, are anything but normal – a loaded adjective if ever there was one. The eight stories contained herein underline this tenet to varying degrees, with a common factor being that moment of epiphany which comes about through even the most mundane of circumstances. Several of these stories might well be considered as moralities for what is a decidedly post-moral era.

The shortest if certainly not the lightest of these stories, All that glitters… is an instance of flash fiction at its acutest in that revelation such as emanates from above rather than below. With its scenario of spiritual riches being played off – knowingly – against financial wealth, The Violin equates most directly to those Tales of the Unexpected with which Roald Dahl entertained and provoked earlier generations, notwithstanding the appreciable difference in Jones’s literary manner. Outwardly the most realistic story, A Night at the Opera relates an occasion that almost everyone finds themself in sooner or later. Its snatching hilarity out of the jaws of embarrassment is in pointed contrast with V1 & V2 Nazi Rockets, when Hitler’s weapons of mass destruction facilitated an existential circumstance pertinent to this author.

The longest and most descriptive among these stories, Back From the Dead centres on two children in the ‘Baltic Alps’ whose actions during one severe winter enshrine that fusion of innocence with experience so often envisaged but so rarely encountered. Something rather more humorous is conveyed by Chinese Meals, a situation-comedy where customs culinary and interpersonal are related with tangible authenticity. If hardly the deepest story, Concord is arguably the most subtly realized given its conflating historical overview with that ‘lived through’ immediacy as galvanizes a cautionary tale of technical triumph and human failure. Missing Peaks affords a more ironic perspective, its ‘get rich quick’ message now seeming   as typical of its time as almost any other and hence an ideal way to round off this collection.

Does it all work?

It does, not least for that skill and evident enjoyment with which Jones elides between fact and fiction across the course of what is an expertly crafted while always arresting sequence. Throughout, he evinces an eye for detail and an ear for nuance which are hallmarks of any worthwhile short stories, so making them seem anything but literary exercises. More than that, however, these stories merge into a cohesive and enlightening composite – but whether of the author himself or of an imagined ‘everyman’ needs be left for each reader to decide.

Is it recommended?

It is. Stylishly presented with its scene-setting sketches (by the author?) as frontispiece to each story, this collection is short enough to be read at a single sitting if substantial enough for repeated readings. The follow-up volume is planned and should be worth waiting for.

Buy

Click here to explore purchase options from the author’s website

Published post no.2,790 – Friday 6 February 2026