A Reich Offering to Honor Health Care Workers

from the Music Never Sleeps NYC home page

At the end of last month, classical music performers based (at least some of the time) in New York City participated in a 24-hour program entitled Music Never Sleeps NYC. Participants connected through real-time video; and the performances were streamed “live” through both Facebook and YouTube. One brief (just short of two minutes) contribution deserves to be singled out for specific recognition. The husband-and-wife couple of conductor David Robertson and pianist Orli Shaham wanted to do something that would explicitly honor (in their words) “the wonderful, brave people working in the health care system, who are caring for all of us.” Those people were given an energetic round of applause through a performance of Steve Reich’s “Clapping Music.”

Reich composed this piece after his early experiments with what he called “phasing.” The earliest of these involved working with tape loops in which, by changing the speed slightly, one recording would go “out of phase” with the other, resulting in fascinatingly complex rhythmic patterns. He later applied the same technique to instrumental performance, which, as one might imagine, required intense concentration by any performer.

“Clapping Music,” on the other hand, is scored for two performers working with an identical rhythmic pattern:

from Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

In this case one performer simply repeats the rhythm. The other, instead of going gradually “out of phase,” displaces the pattern one eighth note at a time. As a result, there is always a sense of a steady pulse; but different complex patterns emerge around that pulse.

The performance by Robertson and Shaham was subsequently posted as a YouTube file, and it makes for a visual experience as informative as the listening. I have had the good fortune to experience this music performed many times, frequently with Reich himself as one of the performers. However, sitting in the audience of a large concert hall, I never had a particularly good view of how this music was being made. On the other hand (so to speak), the Robertson-Shaham video allows one to observe the hands of both performers, making it easier to sort out the different stages of rhythmic complexity arising from each shift.

The result is that, for anyone planning to attend a concert performance of “Clapping Music,” this video provides an excellent “explanation” of how the underlying structure was conceived and realized.