Quick Analysis No.3
Steve Reich, City Life - For Large Ensemble and Sampling Keyboards
Listen to City Life HERE
Steve Reich holds a very special place in my heart as a composer. I really started to listen to his work in my early twenties while I was studying. I remember being played an excerpt from his 1979 work Octet in a composition class fairly early in my first year of uni, which eventually made a big impression on me. I didn’t immediately love it, but I found its sound and approach extremely intriguing and more-or-less unlike anything else I’d ever heard: seventeen minutes of ceaseless hammering arpeggios laying the foundation for some gradually morphing surface melodies and harmonic oscillations; a piece that doesn’t so much ‘progress’ as it does ‘rotate’ to show you different angles of the same composition. I really learned to love Octet gradually on repeated listens. Then I discovered his ‘pulse’ music: Music for Eighteen Musicians is, I believe, one of the most astonishing leaps in imagination not only in terms of pure sound but also in terms of how a group of musicians can play together over an hour of constant music. To me it’s impossible to imagine how that piece could have been plucked out of thin air at a time when nothing had ever sounded or operated even remotely like it in the history of western music.
For someone so universally understood as a minimalist, Reich has a lot of different strands to his work, and also a lot of bleed in between categories. I’ve already mentioned his ‘pulse’ music, Music for Eighteen Musicians being the most famous example (other prominent examples in this style include Electric Counterpoint and New York Counterpoint among others) which establishes a bed of pulsating chords that becomes the fabric for foreground elements to overlap and interconnect. Then, there is his ‘phase’ music, which perhaps in its purest form was realised with his early tape works like It’s Gonna Rain (1965) and Come Out (1966) in which two tape loops are played back at slightly different speeds causing interesting rhythmic interference and phasing patterns. These principles were also adapted for instruments with a series of solo instrument and tape pieces like Violin Phase (1967) and Electric Guitar Phase (2000), as well as small and large ensemble pieces that explore these principles of rhythmic phasing in purely live ensemble settings, such as Drumming (1971) and Phase Patterns (1970). And THEN there are the speech-rhythm/concrete-sounds works, which is maybe the messiest and most all-over-the-place category. On the one hand you have masterpieces like Different Trains (1988) and on the other you have near unlistenable garbage like Three Tales (2002). But maybe the best of Reich’s works in this style is 1995’s City Life, an extraordinary work for large ensemble with two sampler keyboards. I’m a bit of a sucker for ensemble works that use samplers as it is, but this piece has a very distinctive and special relationship between the sampled ‘real world’ or musique concréte sounds and the instrumental sounds of the piece.
Unlike other works in this style, which use a continuous tape part for the performers to synchronise themselves to (eliminating any possibility for performative rubato and keeping everything locked to a strict set of timings), City Life uses a cued sampler system for the playback of the ‘real world’ sounds that means there is far more flexibility within the relationship between the instrumental and the concrete. City Life begins with a series of chords which set the scene in a surprisingly mild and rhythmically inert kind of way, until bar twenty-five where the first sample of a door slamming triggers the tight, percussive, arpeggiated instrumental material which will be a major feature of the work’s character going forward. The viola, piano and vibraphone establish the arpeggiated instrumental writing until the next page where we first encounter the opening movement’s namesake ‘Check it Out’, a spoken word sample whose rhythm and upward trajectory is mirrored in the viola, piano and vibraphone. This mirroring is even written into the score to clearly demonstrate the intended parallel between the natural rhythm of the speech and the notated rhythm of the instruments. This is a device used throughout the entirety of City Life.
All through the first movement the driving momentum of the arpeggiated instrumental writing picks up and spreads across the whole ensemble, over which the samplers give us the sounds of air escaping from New York bus and subway pistons, tuned car horn, car motors, wheels clattering over a manhole cover, tannoy subway chimes, tire skids and the movement’s namesake vocal sample recurring periodically to overlap with itself in a distinct rhythmic hook mimicked by the whole ensemble. It’s a beautiful, almost symphonic, ode to the unique cacophony of city living composed with such affection for its source material that it at times feels like a modern romantic idealisation of ‘The City’ as a grand concept, in all its buzzing freneticism.
There is a wonderful moment towards the end of ‘Check it Out’, right at the point of one of Reich’s sudden jump-cut harmonic modulations where the rhythm of the ‘Check it Out’ speech pattern and driving arpeggios, which had previously all been straight semi-quavers. The movement’s rhythm suddenly slows to a triplet quaver meter creating the effect of a sudden stumbling or interruption for the first time in the piece. This rhythmic shift then marks the gradual unfolding into the much slower and moodier second movement ‘Piledrivers/Alarms’.
City Life’s second movement is a much more ominous affair than the first. Gone are the lively, rhythmic arpeggios, and in their place are long-held, densely-voiced chords with more biting harmony that presents a darker overall sound palette. With this established we then hear the central conceit of this movement: a held sample of a piledriver, hammering at regular intervals, creating a pulse to which the ensemble adjusts its tempo to synchronise with.
Throughout this movement the chords build in intensity, modulating and churning around this rhythmic bed of musique concréte pildriving, which also expands to incorporate car alarm samples triggered to fit the trudging pulse. Towards the movement’s end we again find a moment where the rhythm abruptly switches from a straight to a triplet meter, injecting a little more pace and energy into the music inpreparation for the third movement and one of City Life’s most striking sections.
Movement three ‘It’s Been a Honeymoon/Can’t Take No Mo’ is one of the reasons I fell in love with City Life years ago. I think it’s one of the most sonically and rhythmically exuberant stretches of music that Reich has ever written and I’m always in awe of its conception and construction. Preempting the third movement is a declamatory chord on both pianos and vibraphone, which gives way to a spoken word vocal sample of a voice saying ‘It’s been a honeymoon!’. We are then thrust straight into the third movement proper with the vocal sample being chopped at the word ‘honey’ and being retriggered over and over again in a syncopated three/four pattern. The notated rhythm here doesn’t tell the full story of what the listener hears since the sample has an accented semiquaver nature to it inherently due to the syllables in ‘honey’ and the pace of the speech rhythm. In other words, what is written is: long, long, short, long, long, long, short - but what we hear is: honey, honey, ho, honey, honey, homey, ho. This gives a syncopated accent to a constant string of semiquaver syllables. Very quickly this is joined by the second sampler playing the same rhythm on the same sample but displaces one quaver later in the bar. This is reminiscent of Reich’s ‘phase’ music and is a rhythmic device directly seen in pieces like Clapping Music which use the principles of rhythmic phasing to create complex syncopations out of relatively simple repeating rhythms. It’s also very reminiscent of the sound of his early tape-phase pieces which turn a speech sample into a self-syncopating set of rhythms as they desync and begin to lose their syntax and start to be heard as purely musical sounds when presented in this way.
The speech-rhythms on the samples are accompanied first by a drone chord on the strings and then by the pianos and vibraphones parroting the notated rhythms on the samples with gradually building chords. Reich then adds little two-note ostinati, again parroting the rhythm from the samples on the oboes and clarinets, which builds and is then cut sharply back to just the two samplers playing a compound seven/sixteen truncation of the original rhythm. Quickly this reverts back to the original three/four rhythm but with a new clip from the ‘honeymoon’ sample building into the texture; this time ‘been a’ and ‘oo’ from ‘moon’ begin to oscillate within the syncopated rhythm. This, once again, builds up in the same way adding held chords in the strings, rhythmic doublings and ostinati in the pianos, vibraphones and winds, until again there is a seven/sixteen break which introduces another vocal sample to thin the texture and build back up from. For the third build the sample introduces a spoken speech sample of a voice saying ‘Can’t take no mo’ from which ‘take’ ‘more’ become the new syncopated oscillation, before building in the same way for a final time and leading into the piece’s fourth movement.
‘Heartbeats/Boats and Buoys’, City Life’s fourth movement mirrors the form and construction of the second movement. Somewhat more dark and ominous chords and ostinati are propped up by a rhythmically pulsating sample of a heartbeat to which the ensemble synchronises their tempo. This rolls on and builds in alternating six/eight and nine/eight meters, accompanied by more samples of boat horns and buoy bells, giving a sense of New york’s nautical city biome before transitioning into the final movement ‘Heavy Smoke’.
‘Heavy Smoke’ primarily takes its samples from sounds of the New York emergency services, in particular the fire brigade, lots of sounds of sirens are combined with speech samples recorded with static from the emergency services comms radios. The emergency transmissions of ‘Heavy Smoke’, ‘Urgent!’, ‘It’s full’a smoke’ and ‘Stand by, stand by’ are triggered as samples and mimicked by instruments in the ensemble, like in ‘Check it out’. The fire brigade emergency transmissions then suddenly become samples of police questioning: ‘Guns, knives or weapons on you?’, ‘Wha’ were you doing?’, ‘Where you go?’. This links back to some of Reich’s earliest work using speech samples of victims of the NYPD’s brutality during the civil rights riots in New York in the 1960s. As the speech samples get a little longer with this final group the triplet groupings of natural speech patterns are brought out and the instruments in the ensemble follow this with their rhythmic mimickary. The final movement, to me, presents the character of ‘The City’ in a much harsher light under the violent and corrupt watch of the police alongside the harrowing scenes from an urgent fire department callout. The romanticism of the first movement has collapsed into a more stark representation of a kind of brutal urban reality.
City Life is a beautiful, thoughtful and poignant representation of ‘The City’ in music that seems to conflate many of Reich’s musical innovations into one pseudo-symphonic work for large ensemble and sampling keyboards, with an extremely singular, innovative and personal approach to the fusion of musique concréte with his own instrumental language.
- Jocelyn Campbell, 2024
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