Steve Reich's Drumming, once described by the New York Times as a piece that "inhabits our bones and viscera," makes novelist Kim Echlin's playlist in the Times blog Paper Cuts. "It is gorgeous process music," she writes, "lasts about an hour ... and you feel surprised, as if suddenly waking from a brief dream, when it is over." So Percussion performs the piece in an all-Reich program at Stanford in January, at which the composer joins on his Clapping Music.
Steve Reich's Drumming was once described by the New York Times music critic Bernard Holland as a piece that "inhabits our bones and viscera." It's a sentiment the novelist Kim Echlin might find fitting. The author of the forthcoming novel The Disappeared, Echlin includes Reich's 1974 piece on her playlist in the New York Times book blog Paper Cuts.
"It is gorgeous process music," writes Echlin, "lasts about an hour (the original recording was 1 hour, 20 minutes) and you feel surprised, as if suddenly waking from a brief dream, when it is over."
She had heard the piece in a concert by young performers at the Banff Centre for the Arts this summer. "Steve Reich was in the audience," she reports, "and as I watched him after the concert I could see what pleasure it gave him to witness this complex piece of music being performed by another generation of musicians."
Read more from Echlin's Paper Cuts playlist at nytimes.com.
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The generations meet again in January, when So Percussion is due to perform the first part of Drumming on an all-Reich program at Stanford University's Dinkelspiel Auditorium. The composer will not only be in the audience; he'll also join the ensemble on stage to perform his 1972 piece Clapping Music. Also featured on the program is the US premiere of Reich's latest work, Mallet Quartet, along with Four Organs (1970) and Nagoya Marimbas (1994). For more tickets and information, visit livelyarts.stanford.edu.
A rather different performance of Drumming is scheduled for December 4 at the Nikolaisaal's Great Hall in Potsdam, Germany. The Percusemble Berlin will perform parts two through four of the piece set to photos from outer space for a multimedia, interdisciplinary event celebrating the International Year of Astronomy. Information is available, in German, at nikolaisaal.de.
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To hear clips from the original 1987 Nonesuch recording of Drumming, performed by Steve Reich and Musicians, click here.
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