i. Fast

ii. Slow

iii. Fast

 

Steve Reich is one of the first generation of the American Minimalist composers. Along with figures like Philip Glass and La Monte Young, he reacted against the modernist style of composers like Luciano Berio (with whom he studied), Pierre Boulez, and John Cage, to embrace tonality and pulse. Indeed, the fundamental insight of these composers was to take up repetition as a crucial aesthetic principle, in direct response to the European Avant-Garde which rejected repetition at all costs. Reich’s early music takes a hardcore approach to this, often setting up a single process in a piece which then plays it out. As his practice has developed, he has moved away from this fundamentalist approach into a more complex and composed-out style, whilst still retaining those major elements of the earlier aesthetic.

 

Double Sextet was written in 2007 and quickly garnered attention as one of Reich’s most important pieces, winning the Pulitzer Prize in 2009. As is common with Reich’s music, he attaches no illustrative or programmatic meaning to the music but is instead fascinated by the contrapuntal interplay of the various parts. It is written for two identical sextets, as the title suggests; in performance this is achieved either with twelve players or six musicians playing against a recording of themselves. The two ensembles interlock extensively with each other, a classic technique of Reich’s. The repetition of nearly identical material was a crucial approach in his early phase-shifting music, which often featured one musician playing against a recording of themself. Double Sextet is therefore a natural expansion of this idea, which Reich describes as providing more ‘timbral variety’. This approach creates extensive resultant patterns, particularly from the pianos and vibraphones which often drive the music forward in a fast, rhythmic manner. 

 

The work is in three movements which run without a break and form a symmetrical arch form, another favourite strategy of Reich’s. The opening fast movement alternates between energetic sections driven by the keyboards over which the other players sing out long melodies or join the percussion in their lively rhythms, and more static, bell-like passages. The middle movement, meanwhile, is darker. Structured in four ‘verses’, each demarcated by a change of harmony, the two ensembles weave haunting melodies between themselves. With the return of the fast tempo, Reich retakes the material of the first movement, before the piece concludes with a vigorous, dazzling, coda.

​

Joshua Ballance