Music for 18 Musicians

The pulsations of Steve Reich's landmark Music for 18 Musicians signify a New Music precipice. Where so much music after World War II explored extremes of tone, time, and register, Reich--and some of his colleagues in the 1960s and after--gravitated towards immersion in repetitions and telescoped focus on tonal areas. The combination of piano, vibraphone, marimba, xylophone, clarinets, violin, cello, and female voices is intoxicating in Reich's hands. Reich creates a middle-register, ringing vamp with burnished reed palpitations and, eventually, quick, rolling piano figures emerge in tandem with the percussion. This recording is the second-best known, next to the ECM Records version of the piece, and is warm and colorfully tingling. --Andrew Bartlett Amazon.com essential recording

Shimmering & luminous!

What can I add to so many insightful 5-star reviews?

Just that this work has an astonishing, subtle, hypnotic beauty that remains fresh & revelatory after countless listens. Its deceptive simplicity constantly reveals new touches, and carries the enraptured listener to some transcendant place ... except that the word "listener" falls woefully short. This music isn't simply listened to, it's experienced at a very deep & dreamlike level, like a nebula of pure white light shot through with golden mist. And when I stop to contemplate the virtuosity of the musicians, I'm astonished all over again.

This might not be for every taste, but for those who are open to a visionary mode of being, this music is both gateway & voyage. Highly recommended! May 19, 2008

Does it Expand or Contract?

This is no ordinary piece of music. It is hypnotic and beautiful, as most other reviewers point out. It can put all other music out of your mind for periods of time; you only want to stay in the trance.

There are light and dark energies at play in this music. The elements of light are held in the beautiful syntax of rhythm and melody. You might find yourself singing or whistling along very intensely, and even creating new layers to the music with your voice. The elements of darkness are represented as a sense of neurotic insanity, or obsessive particularity.

To be hyptotized for its own sake is dangerous. What is behind this hypnosis? What energy is being expressed here? As you move into your third and fourth listen, ask yourself whether you feel expansion or contraction.

For those who are interested in trance states and deep inward gazing, this recording is definitely an experience worth having. If nothing else, it can remind us that music is awesomely powerful. April 17, 2007

majestic

This recording is a perfect example of how Reich has influenced instrumental/classical music. Its seems as if every movie released in the last ten years has soundtrack recordings that try to imitate Reich, like the movie American Beauty. While people buy these soundtrack recordings, they often do not even know who Steve Reich is or where there imitation music came from. This is one of the best recordings for anyone knew to this music, and should not be considered as minimalist. I agree with Philip Glass, who believes the word minimalist is not an adequate term.
The term minimalist seems to indicate simplicity or shallowness, but this music is neither. This is in fact very deep and moving music, full of emotion and dynamic ideas. December 9, 2006

one of my favorite pieces of music ever composed

Composed in 1976 by Reich, this is a piece that goes down as a classic in my view. Although some of his earlier work with tape manipulations now sounds a bit dated and simply doesn't hold up as well, the beauty of Music For 18 Musicians still sounds as fresh to me now as anything that I've heard lately. This particular release on Nonesuch, recorded in 1996 is actually about 11 minutes longer than the original composition, but that length really only adds to the bliss of the piece. At 14 tracks and almost 67 minutes of music, it's just over an hourlong excursion into what feels like a safer place.

Performed by musicians, just as the title states, it actually might fall into what many would consider 'trance' music. It's highly repetitive, and while it bears no relation to the crap being pedalled as trance music these days, it's nearly as hypnotic as any music you'll find. With vocals, stringed instruments, lots of percussive elements (vibraphone, gamelan, marimba, maracas), pianos, and clarinets, it's one of those pieces of music that you can trace back to as a starting point for not only individual artists, but genres as well. It blends non-western, classical, and even a touch of jazz for something that was original at the time, and still stands solidly on that ground.

With all this praise I'm heaping on this piece, I must warn that if you don't enjoy repetitive music, you probably won't appreciate this release quite as much. While it is repetitive, though, it's far from minimal (although it's grouped into that category often). Unfurling over the course of 11 different parts, as well as phasing pieces that lead into and end the overall composition, it breathes like something real and organic as each instrument and voice take their place with the harmony and again blend back down into the mix. It's constantly moving and shifting, and while there are moments of quieter transition, there are also ones of breathtaking splendor as melodies overlap and change speed while different instruments come into and out of focus. It's like taking several different minimal paintings printed on transparencies and subtely shifting them over one another to create new pieces as you see colors blend into one another and fold into something new each time.

Considering that the piece is one that's performed by actual people, the juxtaposition of the different elements is quite amazing (of course, imagining how you would program something like this electronically also staggers the mind), and as mentioned before, you can hear little bits of everyone from Tortoise to different electronic artists like Vladislav Delay and Gas (Mike Ink) having developed parts from it. While their were groundbreaking pieces both before and after it, it's one of those recordings that will envelope you if you allow it to. So, if you're a fan of modern electronic music or even post rock, you should probably hunt down this release and hear it at least once. If you can, simply stop doing everything else, pop it in the CD player and relax with it on a pair of headphones for the entirety of the release. You'll come to just under 70 minutes later when the CD stops spinning, and chances are you'll want to do it again sometime. I certainly do.

(from almost cool music reviews) November 28, 2005

Steve Reich's Music

If you have ever heard of Steve Reich, you probably first heard about him in a Music Appreciation class in college. His genre is minimalism, considered by some to be "America's classical music." If you have never heard this kind of music before, it could really bother you. This music has a whole different philosophy underlying it. What is music supposed to do for you? Popular classical music typically has strong form, and seeks to provide the listener with many types of variety in melody and chord-progression. Minimalism intentionally does away with a lot of that. In Steve Reich's music, rhythm is very important, and in 18, continuous pulses, melodic patterns, crescendos and decrescendos all swirl and dovetail. Repetition is used to create a tonal "picture" for you to soak in as subtle variations are introduced and eventually fade out. The result is colorfully impressionistic, and at times jazzy. September 15, 2005

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