I don't remember when I first heard Music for 18 Musicians by Steve Reich, but I vividly remember the first time — about 15 years ago — I ever saw the piece performed. It was at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) in Ft. Greene, Brooklyn — where the piece was just performed again last night as part of the BAM Next Wave Festival, which this year is also a celebration of Nonesuch Records.
At the time I was a year or two out of college, working for Steve Reich's music publisher, Boosey & Hawkes. Everybody from our office — not to mention everybody else in the art music community — was there. A bunch of people from Boosey sat up in the balcony, which, for this particular performance, was the right place to sit. The sound up there was great and I could watch any of the 18 players easily.
I know I had listened to the piece (or at least part of it), which lasts about an hour, but it wasn't until those 18 musicians started playing that night that I really heard it — or, I should say, that I really experienced it. You experience Reich's music as much as you hear it. It can have a bodily effect. I emerged from the theater feeling like I was in a dream-state. It wasn't even that I felt "relaxed" exactly; I felt like the music had physically entered my body and had hammered everything into stillness. It's funny that so much repetitive movement can wind up giving the impression of stillness.
I remember watching different players at different times throughout the performance that night. The work is scored for violin, cello, two clarinets (who also play bass clarinet), four pianists, four women vocalists, three marimbas, two xylophones, and a metallophone (a vibraphone without a motor). It was written between 1974 and 1976 and premiered in April of 1976. It's amazing to think that the piece is completely acoustic; the sum of all those parts makes it sound somehow electronic.
Of all the mesmerizing aspects of the piece, it's perhaps most mesmerizing to watch the mallet players in performance, since you can so clearly match what their hands are doing to the sound. Their patterns don't just sound beautiful; they look beautiful. Sometimes when I've seen the piece live (I've now seen it live three or four times) I watch the marimba and xylophone players as a group rather than individually, and then I'm amazed at the flurry of sticks moving in and out of sync with each other like one of those Newton's Cradle desk toys.
It's fun to watch the pianists, too, though often their hands are blocked by the rest of what's on stage. I remember going into a meditative state while watching the vocalists that first night, too. There are sections in the piece where the four women are singing the "pulses" that fill especially the beginning and ending sections, but recur elsewhere in the piece as well. As they sing those short pulses, they move their heads from one side of the microphone to the other, so they are passing the microphone, slowly fading in and then slowly fading out. The effect is incredible: like listening to cicadas, or the white noise of a freeway.
But, after all that watching during a live performance — which does indeed put me into an otherworldly state, as though I'd just received a massage — I still sometimes close my eyes and just listen.
I also listen to recordings of the piece at home, and those pulse sections that begin and end the piece (lasting for about the first and final five minutes) are definitely my favorite sections. It's the bass clarinets that get me every time. The world can be closing in on all sides, seem much too harsh and bright and sharp. But when I first hear those bass clarinets pulsing, the same way the vocalists pulse back and forth — softer, louder, softer again — I am transported somewhere warm and soft.
Music for 18 Musicians is a marathon of a piece for the performers. Once, years ago, I experienced it on a marathon drive. I was driving across the country (both ways). I put the piece on while driving in Utah's desert at sunset. It was probably as close to a religious experience as I have ever come, or ever will. Sometimes when I listen to the piece now, I still think about all those buttes, the soft light, the thousands of colors surrounding us.
Reich's masterpiece is not just a piece of music; it's something to bask in, like a sun-drenched beach chair after jumping into a cold ocean. I love how as the piece ends, it seems to fade ever more into the high and low pitches. The middle drops out and we're left with something so delicate. The music simultaneously takes me away and brings me back. You can't ask for more than that in a piece of music.
Jessie Rothwell is a writer and music geek who curates performances in people's living rooms. She's currently based in Washington, D.C..
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