VA - Steve Reich: Six Pianos; Terry Riley: Keyboard Study #1 (2016)

The 1970s was Steve Reich’s decade; although he had already completed groundbreaking phase pieces It’s Gonna Rain, Come Out, and Violin Phase by the end of the ‘60s, the ten-year run that followed was something else entirely. Starting with Drumming in 1971, moving through the epochal Music for 18 Musicians and passing into the early ’80s with the beautiful Tehillim, Reich married his early structural innovations to a singular, aqueous melodicism that rocketed him out of the downtown NY avant-garde into as close to the mainstream as it is possible for a modern composer to be.

Six Pianos—written in between Drumming and 18 Musicians and released to accompany the show-stealing Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices and Organ—is a solid fan favorite, a lovely piece of music that fits perfectly between the larger, more definitive works. Once you know what to expect from the composer, Reich’s work from this era does exactly what it says on the box: there are six pianos, playing overlapping developments and variations on deceptively simple melodic figures for the piece's duration. Development will happen, but in a such a supple fashion you will be hard pressed to remember what was different between the start of the piece and its conclusion. Everything has shifted, yet nothing has changed.

Something similar can be said for the various recordings of Reich’s work. One sinks into the music so easily that different iterations can seem only incrementally distinct from each other. This new LP issued by Berlin’s FILM Recordings reprises a recent performance by an ensemble featuring, among others, members of chamber-techno upstarts Brandt Brauer Frick and promises “Six Pianos the way it should be looked at in 2016.” To achieve this, each player recorded their individual part alone, in separate studios, later combining the layers into a unified whole. The result offers a distinct perspective on Pianos, though perhaps not an improvement.

Reich’s music is quintessentially New York, with precise, percolating rhythms and a subtle melancholy evoking nothing more than the simple pleasures of darting through a hectic Manhattan on a crisp autumn afternoon. Part of the joy of his larger ensemble works is the lush crowding of instruments, with different voices smearing together, suddenly poking out before receding back into the mix. On this recording, however, each line is rendered with stunning clarity and separation. It’s a move that’s in line with the times, with ensembles like So Percussion and Alarm Will Sound offering virtuosic updates of classic pieces, and makes for an intriguing listen. The clockwork qualities of Reich’s music are brought to the front, and you can focus immediately on any part you like, letting the rest move around you.

However, some of the richness and emotion that make this work so enduring are dulled in favor of a tidy tastefulness. In their youth, minimalist composers had to fight hard against lazy attempts to classify their work as New Age, and the players here seem determined to emphasize the elemental rigor of the piece. But although Reich was never utopian in his goals, he was also unafraid of drawing human pathos out from his looping melodies.

The B-side is a rendition of Terry Riley’s Keyboard Study #1 that goes further in its modern updates. Riley’s original score is written in billowing, hippie chicken scratch and reads more like a brain teaser than a piece of music: “The two kinds of figures interlock and are repeated in this fashion until one of the hands selects another figure… combine any figure from lines 2-6 with continuum figure 1… if any figure from lines 8-10 is played in the alignment of continuum figure 7… it may be combined with other figures from lines 8-10.” And so on. Ensemble member Gregor Schwellenbach performed the piece solo and put together the final mix with assistance from engineer Lukas Vogel, who added delays and reverbs. The work, open to interpretation, here becomes a series of tight, consonant piano runs that double over each other in dizzying spirals. An early work of Riley’s, Study #1 laid the groundwork for his iconic A Rainbow in Curved Air and subsequent masterpieces like Persian Surgery Dervishes. Intuitive, often darkly psychedelic explorations of textures and loops performed during druggy “all night flights,” these pieces presaged techno by over a decade. Now an ensemble with roots in modern club music has returned to the source material, and though you would never confuse this record for a DJ tool, you can hear a familial bond.

Back in 1999, Nonesuch released the Reich Remixed compilation, where a splashy array of electronic producers were invited to explore his back catalogue. A case has always been made for Reich’s relationship to minimal dance music, but aside from the obvious use of repetition that both share, I’ve never seen it, and the compilation struck me as a ham-fisted attempt to gussy up his image for a new generation. This LP is something else entirely. As electronic production has become the new normal and generations upon generations of producers continue to stretch the possibilities of dance music, techno has itself become an elder statesman's genre. Festivals like CTM and Unsound have made their name juxtaposing DIY electronics, touring DJs, loner ambient composers and new music ensembles, and left-of-center artists like Andy Stott, Demdike Stare, and Lee Gamble regularly shuttle between the club and the art world. This LP serves as a worthy and timely addition to the composers’ catalogues, but after finishing this version of Six Pianos, I found myself reaching for my beat up copy of Reich’s 1986 re-orchestration for marimbas. And when it was done, I reached for it again.

Review by Daniel Martin-McCormick, Pitchfork.com