The most interesting aspect of Music for 18 Musicians by Steve Reich is the distribution of acoustical musical instruments. These include a cello, a violin, 4 women's voices, 2 clarinets doubling bass clarinet, 4 pianos, metallophone, 2 xylophones and 3 marimbas. This combination and distribution of musical instruments enriches the acoustics of the song’s harmonic movements. For instance, Section V (28:55) onwards the harmony moves to a darker session marking the entry of the four pianos reaching climax at 31:45 (Firth, 2010). What is more, the resulting rhythmic pulse of mallet instruments and the four pianos is evident throughout the piece. All these voices and acoustic musical instruments sing or play pulsating notes of each of the 11 chords that make up the cycle of the song.
As a result of this creativity, Reich develops a pan-historical music inspired by gamelan and African drumming hence re-imagining classical music while at the same time projecting the future of the music industry. For example, Section VI (35:44) is reminiscent of blistering dance rhythms common in jazz music (Hartenberger, 2018). Reich’s description of the work as an attempt to create “beautiful music” is indeed justifiable through the effort accompanying creativity and innovation portrayed in the piece. Moreover, the fact that Reich took time to study different forms of music enhancement says it all. This also demonstrated by the uniqueness of the melody the song that reduces predictability of the next sort of notes. By all means, this cannot be considered disorienting but rather an endeavor to depict creativity through a combination of many music production tools and techniques ((Mellits, 2009). Having read the article, I was able to understand the music better. The approach used to produce the music is indeed an inspiration to learn more about music production strategies.
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References
Firth, V. (2010, March 8). Music for 18 Musicians, by Steve Reich . Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-HNgIqKDC4Q
Hartenberger, R. (2018). Performance Practice in the music of Steve Reich . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Mellits, M. A. (2009). Music for 18 musicians, by Steve Reich: A complete score with analysis .
