Tonight I watched a live performance of Steve Reich’s Drumming, performed by The Colin Currie Group with Synergy Vocals. I looked at this work for both the World Music project and in the Minimalism section of part two, but this is the first time I have seen it performed live.

The work is written in four parts of repeating rhythms with parts joining canonically throughout. The opening section is bongo drums, which is the longest section for an individual part (four drum parts in all), as this section fades, Marimbas take over and during this segment they are joined by female voices before the third section is lead by the glockenspiel.   To imitate the higher pitches of the glockenspiel one of the female voices plays a whistle and then a piccolo joins in to imitate the highest parts. The voices are not singing words but imitating the instruments. The final section all the parts play together building to rousing climax of the combined sounds and the vocal/piccolo imitations of the percussion sounds. This performance of Drumming lasts about 70 minutes.

Steve Reich visited Africa before writing this work (which is how I first came across it whilst researching African music) and in the programme he writes: “I am often asked what influence my visit of Africa in summer of 1970 had on Drumming. The answer is confirmation. It confirmed my intuition that acoustic instruments could be used to produce music that was genuinely richer in sound than that produced with electronic instruments, as well as confirming my natural inclination towards percussion (I became a drummer at the age of 14)”. This statement say a lot about this work for me. The texture of the sound produced is wonderful. Before I started this course I would not have listened to a work of pure percussion out of choice, but from the first time I heard this work I was converted to it. It is a true masterpiece and the culmination of the minimalist movement in music.

This was a fine performance by an excellent group of percussionists and vocalists (plus Sandra Skipper on piccolo) and was well received by the St David’s Hall audience. A most enjoyable concert that was well worth the wait, as I had been looking forward to this concert for some time.

Following the performance I decided to watch a documentary I recorded in June about Steve Reich called Steve Reich – Phase to Face. This excellent programme had some interesting comments on Drumming. Reich further elaborated his preference for the acoustic qualities of the percussion instruments used over electronics and talked of acoustic music being a way into electronics for Stockhausen and a way out of electronics for himself.

Reich also explained how he came to use women’s voices over the marimba part. He had recorded a phase of marimba music which he was playing back and playing another phase over the tape, when he heard in his mind women’s voices imitating the sound, the pitch of a woman’s voice being similar to that of the marimba. This was the first time that Reich used the human voice in his music.

Another comment of interest in the programme, away from Drumming, was the influence of the music of John Coltrane on minimalism in general. This got me thinking about Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, and the similarity that has with minimalist works. Coltrane uses repeated patterns during this work in a similar way to Reich and the other minimalists, although A Love Supreme is a not a minimalist work.

References:

Reich (2012), Steve Reich – Phase to Face, [television programme], broadcast on Sky Arts Two, June 27th 2012

Reich (2012), The Colin Currie Group with Synergy Vocals, [programme notes], St David’s Hall, October 24th 2012