The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Steve Reich · for violin, cello, two clarinets doubling bass clarinet, four women’s voices, four pianos, three marimbas, two xylophones and metallophone, without conductor · Pulses, eleven sections and Pulses, played without a break · the score as performed by Steve Reich and Musicians, the ensemble that established it · about an hour in performance, its length varying as repetitions are cued
Mode
Process music for a mixed ensemble; a cycle of chords unfolded section by section through pulse, canon, resultant patterns and gradual build-up
Mythos
The wheel: a cycle stated, walked once slowly and returned to; the breath as the measure of time
Phase
Pulses, Sections I to XI, Pulses: thirteen spans without a break, each of the opening’s eleven chords held in turn as the ground of one section
Presentation
Concert music; eighteen players moving among violin, cello, clarinets, wordless voices, pianos, marimbas, xylophones and metallophone, cued from within, with no conductor
Register
One bright world throughout: steady eighth notes against swelling pulses the length of a breath; no silence, no grief, no contrast of character
Scale
One harmonic cycle, a society of equal players and an hour of attention
Governing Proposition
Eleven chords are sounded one after another in the first minutes, pulsing, and then each is held for a section while patterns are built, doubled and dissolved over it, until the cycle comes round again. The wager of the work is that one harmonic cycle can be both a moment and an hour, that change too gradual to be an event can still be heard as change, and that eighteen players with no one in front of them can keep one pulse by listening.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The work begins with its whole plan. Pianos and mallets set up a steady pulse of repeated eighth notes, and over it the voices and the clarinets play long tones that swell and fade, each as long as a breath. On that pulse a chord sounds, then another, then another: eleven in all, one after another, each held for a few breaths before the next. This is the opening the score calls Pulses, and it is a few minutes long. It is also the work’s height, the whole ensemble pulsing while the harmony moves under a texture that never stops.
Two times run here at once. The eighth notes of the pianos and mallets are the clock: even, unaccented, continuous for the length of the work. The pulses of the voices and the clarinets are the breath: they last as long as a singer or a player can sustain a tone, and they end because the player must breathe. Neither is made to fit the other. The phrase is measured by the body and the ground by the instrument, and the listener hears both, the steady and the swelling, in one sound.
Then the cycle is over and the work has hardly begun. The eleven chords of the opening are the plan of everything that follows: each in turn becomes the ground of a section, and the sections are eleven. What was stated in a few minutes is about to be unfolded over the better part of an hour. The opening is the whole work compressed, and the whole work will be the opening slowed.
Movement II
At the first change the first chord does not move on. It is held, and the pulse goes on over it, and the work’s slowing of its own opening begins. Section I takes the chord that lasted a few breaths and gives it minutes. The same law that governed the opening governs it: the same pulse at the same speed, the same eighth notes, the same breath. Only the rate of harmonic change is different, and that difference is the form.
So it goes through the cycle. Section after section a chord of the opening becomes a ground, and over it patterns are built, doubled and dissolved; then the next chord, then the next, through Section XI. Low in the texture, the clarinets turned to bass clarinets play their pulses as long as the breath allows, and the swell and fade of each tone is the phrase. The limit of the instrument has become the measure of the music, and the body is in the form.
The sections are not written to fixed lengths. A pattern is repeated until it is changed, and how long it is repeated is decided in performance. Performances differ in length, even by the same players. That is the work’s give. Its plan compels eleven sections, one for each chord, and the return; it does not compel the minutes within them. Several sections work their chord by the same means, and a minute of almost any could go without the loss of a step. The process is required. Its duration is permitted.
Movement III
“Music as a Gradual Process” is the title of an essay Reich published in 1968, and it names the idea that governs this work: the process by which the music is made should be the music heard. Here the techniques of his earlier works are each present. A pattern is built by rhythmic construction, beats substituted for rests one at a time until the figure is whole, and the ear follows it as growth, not as event. Canon is set up between instruments at fixed distances, one pattern against itself.
The most striking of the techniques is the resultant. Two pianos or two marimbas play interlocked patterns, and in their composite a melody is heard that neither plays. Then a voice or a clarinet takes it up and sings or plays it aloud, and the hidden line becomes audible: a figure one did not know one was hearing is suddenly in the open. It is found, not invented by hand, and its placement is exact. It is the work’s recurring lift, and the place where its craft and its height are the same thing.
Augmentation lengthens a pattern’s values within the steady pulse. None of these methods is new to Reich in this work. What is new is that they are set inside a harmonic plan: the phase pieces and Drumming (1971) had kept the harmony still, and here harmony is the plan and the pulse is its instrument. The method that had refused richness is turned toward it. The palette stays narrow by choice. Harmony moves by a cycle of chords, not by voice leading, and there is no counterpoint of independent lines beyond the canon of one pattern with itself.
Movement IV
The work was composed between 1974 and 1976 for Reich’s own ensemble, Steve Reich and Musicians, and first performed by them in April 1976. The forces belong to no inherited type: a violin, a cello, two clarinets doubling bass clarinet, four women’s voices, four pianos, three marimbas, two xylophones and a metallophone, a vibraphone without its motor. Several players move from instrument to instrument during the work, which is why the eighteen of the title counts players, not parts. The voices sing without words.
There is no conductor. Changes are cued from inside the ensemble, by a figure on the metallophone and by the players’ nods: one player’s figure moves the whole group on, and every player must hear it. The practice draws, by Reich’s own account, on what he learned of West African drumming, which he studied in Ghana in 1970, and on Balinese gamelan. It enters the work as a way of making, not as a world the work depicts. The ensemble is a society of equals keeping one pulse by listening, and its separate parts make a composite that no one of them plays alone.
The stake was real and bounded. The ensemble was self-organised, the work was long and unpublished, and the concert world’s hostility to music of pulse and repetition was open. But the larger turn had been made before: by Terry Riley’s In C in 1964, and by Reich himself from 1965. This work’s own departure is the turn from static to moving harmony at the scale of an hour, and the departure from the concert inheritance of development, conductor and orchestral type, and both are made in full.
Movement V
After Section XI the cycle comes round. The closing Pulses return to the opening’s eleven chords, the voices and clarinets swelling and fading over the pulse, and the work that slowed its opening to an hour now speeds it back to minutes. Then the sound thins and fades. The large form is a circle walked once, slowly, and the return is what lets the listener hear it as a circle: without it the sections would be a set; with it they are a cycle.
The work became known through a record. Steve Reich and Musicians recorded it for ECM, a label known for jazz, and the record, ECM 1129, was issued in 1978: one continuous piece, divided across two sides of the LP and continuous on CD. It reached listeners who heard no other new concert music. The same ensemble recorded the work again for Nonesuch in 1998. Since then it has passed from its maker’s ensemble to many others, in Europe, America and Asia, each with its own answer to tempo, balance and the length of a section.
Its line is documented. John Adams’s Shaker Loops (1978) and Harmonium (1981) stand in it, and so do the postminimal composers of the next generation, the Bang on a Can composers among them; beyond concert music it is a common reference for electronic, ambient and rock musicians. It turned minimal music from a process for small forces into a harmonic form of an hour’s breadth, and it remains what it was at its first performance: eleven chords, a pulse, eighteen players listening, and the cycle returned.
Act III · The Twelve
The large plan resists the subtractive test. Eleven chords are laid down in the opening Pulses and each becomes a section, so no section can go without leaving a chord of the cycle unrealised, and the closing Pulses answer the opening. Within the sections the test finds give. The number of repetitions is cued in performance, not written, so a section’s length is permitted rather than compelled, and the work is not the same length twice. Several sections work their chord by the same means, a pattern built, a resultant doubled, a fade, and a listener could lose a minute of almost any of them without losing a step. The process is required; its duration is not.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The disclosure through sound is credited in full, and it can be stated: time can be made perceptible as change too gradual to be an event, and a collective without a leader can keep one pulse by listening. The breath-length pulses of voices and clarinets set the body’s measure against the steady eighth notes of the mallets, so that two times run at once, the clock and the breath; and the ensemble, cued by the metallophone and not by a conductor, is a social form shown in sound. What holds the axis well down is the rubric’s line between a mood and a meaning. Most of what the work discloses is a condition of attention, rendered with great precision, and its second truth bears on how music is made more than on how people live.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Elevation is reached often and by one means: radiance, not peaks. The opening Pulses rise at every change of chord, the whole ensemble pulsing, the voices swelling and fading on a breath, the harmony shifting under a texture that never stops; it is the work’s height, and it comes in the first minutes. Within the sections the moment a resultant pattern is taken up by a voice, so that a melody one did not know one was hearing is suddenly sung, is a lift that recurs. The bass clarinets’ pulses deep in the texture, and the cycle’s return at the close, rise again. Held below Low’s 8.8 and Kind of Blue’s 9.1 because the register is narrow by design: no terror, no grief, no silence, and stretches between changes that are sustained brightness more than transport.
Score: 8.7 / 10
With no words, figures or story, the archetypal is built by the music or not at all, and one figure is built: the wheel. The cycle of eleven chords is stated, unfolded one chord at a time over an hour, and returned to, so that the large form is a circle walked once, slowly. The breath is a second figure, old and bodily: voices and clarinets end each pulse because they must breathe. Both bear weight in the structure. What holds the axis here, below the Universal Minimum, is the particular, which the work keeps hardly at all: no place, person, rite or act is named or figured, and the rituals behind the method stay in the method. Myth is shaped as pattern, and pattern is credited only in part.
Score: 7.4 / 10
Two departures are made together. From the concert tradition: no development, no conductor, a steady pulse for nearly an hour, harmony that changes by spans of minutes, and an ensemble of mallets, pianos, voices and winds that belongs to no orchestral or chamber type. From the composer’s own path: the phase pieces and Drumming (1971) had held harmony still; this work makes harmony the plan and the pulse its instrument, and turns the method toward a richness his earlier music refused. The stake was real and bounded: a self-organised ensemble, a long unpublished work, open hostility to the idiom. But the larger swerve, to pulse and repetition, had been made by Riley’s In C (1964) and by Reich himself from 1965, and the axis meets its gate exactly, with no room.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Change the form and the work stops knowing what it knows: that one harmonic cycle can be both a moment and an hour. The form is the instrument of that knowledge. The eleven chords are heard first as the opening, a few minutes long, and then each is held for a section, so the opening is the whole work compressed and the whole work is the opening slowed. The pulse the length of a breath makes the body the measure of the phrase, which a written phrase length would lose; the cueing makes the players’ listening the form’s joints. Recast as eleven separate pieces, the cycle and its return would go; with fixed lengths, the work would stop being a process its players enact. The joint is inside the sections, where some build-ups are containers the chord fills.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Evidence, not promise, over fifty years. The work has been returned to by its own ensemble, recorded in 1978 and again in 1998, and taken up by ensembles that did not make it, in Europe, America and Asia, each with its own answer to tempo, balance and the length of a section; because repetitions are cued, every account is a reconsideration of proportion. It has a scholarly literature and a long listening life outside the concert hall. Held below the top by its own design: the process is meant to be audible, and the work hides less than a work of equal standing elsewhere. What yields on return is perception, a different resultant heard, a different line followed, more than a meaning that keeps unfolding, and the evidence is decades, not centuries.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Published and performed, and so scored on force and reach together; the field is concert music of its decade, chiefly American, with its reach beyond. The force is the work’s own: it reorganised minimal music from a process for small forces into a harmonic form an hour broad, and showed that pulse and repetition could carry harmonic motion and radiance without development. It is the hinge between early minimalism and what came after. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: John Adams’s Shaker Loops (1978) and Harmonium (1981) and the postminimal generation, the Bang on a Can composers among them, stand in its line, the line credited, not each link; beyond concert music it is a common reference for electronic, ambient and rock musicians. Held below Low and Kind of Blue, at 9.1 each, because part of the redirection belongs to minimalism as a whole and to Reich’s earlier works.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Survival is weighed in form, presence and fabric, over fifty years from the first performance. The form survives whole, and it has passed from its maker’s ensemble to many others, which is the strongest evidence a score can give that it lives apart from the players it was made with. Presence is continuous and, for a concert work of its years, wide: it is among the most performed and recorded concert works of the 1970s. It is not the widest presence of its age, being heard by a smaller public than the records and films of the same decades that have survived best. The fabric carries little of its date: acoustic instruments and voices, with nothing electronic beyond amplification. For fifty years the evidence is strong, and the figure stands at the foot of what fifty years can show.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The making is load-bearing. The scoring is exact: four pianos and the mallets make a field of pulse dense enough to hold the voices and winds, and the metallophone’s cue cuts through it without breaking it. The resultant patterns are found in the composite of interlocked parts, not invented by hand, and then doubled by voice or clarinet with a precision of placement that makes a hidden line audible; the build-ups, beats put in place of rests one at a time, are timed to the ear. The pulse writing turns a limit of the instrument, the breath, into the phrase. The demand on players is real, an hour of steady pulse cued by ear. Held below Goldberg’s 9.7 and Winterreise’s 9.5 by a palette narrow by choice: harmony moves by a cycle of chords, not by voice leading, and canon is of one pattern with itself.
Score: 9.0 / 10
One physics governs the whole, and it is plain: the pulse, the cycle of chords and the gradual process. Take the two most distant elements: the opening Pulses, where the chord changes every few breaths, and a long section where one chord is held for minutes while a pattern is built note by note. Both obey the same law, the same pulse at the same speed, and the second is the first slowed. That is a strong coherence, and the rubric’s warning applies to it: narrowness is not coherence. The range the law holds is narrow by design, one tempo, one world of dynamics, one mode of brightness, no silence and no contrast of character, and so the law is tested less than in a work that holds grief and a joke on one bass.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Judged on what the work holds, with no allowance for the form. The body is held, in the breath as the measure of the phrase. The group is held, and that is the work’s achievement: a society of equals without a leader, cued by listening, whose separate parts make a composite that no one of them plays. Time is held as experience. The ritual music of Ghana and Bali enters through the method, as a model of collective making, not as a world. Consciousness is held only as attention, not as a person’s inner life. What holds the axis here is absence: the family, labour, the state, history, the natural order and the sacred named as such do not appear. A wordless work of an hour holds what it holds, and the figure describes the form.
Score: 6.6 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.3 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Living Form and The Made at 9.0, then Pressure on Tradition at 8.9. A form in which the opening is the whole work compressed and the whole work is the opening slowed; a scoring that makes a hidden line audible and a cue cut through a field of pulse without breaking it; and the hinge on which minimal music turned from small processes to an hour of harmonic motion.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 6.6: the body, the group and time are held, but consciousness only as attention, and the family, labour, the state, history, the natural order and the sacred named as such do not appear. Next above it, The Archetypal Deep at 7.4 and The Unconcealment at 7.8, which share a cause: the work builds a wheel with no particular to inhabit it, and discloses a condition of attention more than a human condition.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.3 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.0, The Made at 9.0, The Inner Law at 8.6, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: Pressure on Tradition at 8.9 and The Imperishable at 8.7 clear the bar of 8.5, and The Swerve meets it exactly at 8.5, with no room, but The Unconcealment at 7.8 and The Archetypal Deep at 7.4 fall short. The Universal Minimum is unmet at The Archetypal Deep, 7.4, below 7.5; The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 6.6. Three of the five summit conditions are met, and with the Epochal Gate and the Universal Minimum unmet and an aggregate of 8.3 the work stands in Tier IV.
Basis · the score of Music for 18 Musicians as performed by the composer’s ensemble, Steve Reich and Musicians, in the performing version that ensemble established, scored as one work: Pulses, Sections I to XI and Pulses, played without a break; read from knowledge under the desk’s convention for concert music. No score, recording or text was in hand, and data/texts holds nothing for this work. The ECM recording of 1978 (ECM 1129) is the principal evidence and the version through which the work became known, but it is not the object; the ensemble’s second recording, for Nonesuch in 1998, and the accounts of other ensembles are evidence for The Made, The Bottomless Well and The Imperishable only. The work has no words; the voices sing without text, and its disclosure through sound is credited in full. The aggregate was checked by script. Details that could not be verified, among them the venue and day of the first performance, the plan of doubling among the players, which instruments lead which section, the length of each section, the running times of the two recordings, the credits of the ECM record and its history in print, the names of other ensembles that have recorded the work, the dates of the composer’s study of gamelan and the titles of studies of the work, are not given; the running time is a range across performance, not a measurement. The sound of the work as heard is beyond this reading and is neither credited nor charged.