brettworks

Steve Reich, “Double Sextet: II. Slow”
The composer Steve Reich is a formalist whose austere works show an artist confident that feeling in music comes from structure in music. From his earliest piece scored for tape loops, “Come Out”, to his percussion opus “Drumming”, to his many chamber pieces for mixed ensembles, Reich designs music that always uses pairs of sounds as a structuring device: two voice loops or marimba sequences going in and out of sync, two violin melodies echoing one another in strict canons, or two harmonies moving together, but at different rates of speed. I hear Reich’s music two ways. The first hears an acoustic recreation of technology-driven processes, as if instrumental parts are forever trying conjure the dub-like, perceptually trippy rhythms of the tape delay effects the composer used in his early electronic pieces. A second way I hear the music is in terms of canons that combine several identical lines, echoing one another. A disciplined use of canonic process drives Reich’s work, and in this regard it evokes both Renaissance counterpoint and the methods of 20th-century conceptual art. As I listen I think about the artist Sol LeWitt who often worked with line drawings and cube forms. LeWitt famously said this about process: “The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.” With LeWitt’s cube works, a viewer’s aesthetic experience happens only within, and through, the structure and constraints of the cube. Conceptualists are formalists: the process is the expression and the expression is the process. Might a cube equivalent in Reich’s music be its steady timeline pulses and the polyrhythmic canons contained within it? Contained is a good descriptor for the somber second slow movement of “Double Sextet”, Reich’s 2008 Pulitzer Prize-winning piece. Each pair of instruments have their roles: pianos and vibraphones play the timelines and harmonies, while the strings (violin and cello) and winds (flute and clarinet) play the melodies. This music generates a great tension by creating a measured musical world and sticking to it.

Boards Of Canada, “Hi Scores”
Without having any idea what it sounded like, I bought Hi Scores in the late 1990s at the now-defunct Manhattan record store Other Music, a place I went to weekly to learn how little I know about music. Signed by Warp Records in 1996, BOC was associated with the so-called “IDM” techno scene and would become popular for their carefully crafted downtempo, lo-fi-ish instrumental sound that sampled, among other things, soundtracks from 1970s Canadian film board documentaries. (And yes, the band’s name references exactly this Canadian Film Board!) Hi-Scores was the duo’s first EP and the title track encapsulates the emerging BOC aesthetic. This is music with straightforward beats, opaquely melancholy melodies, distressed analog timbre worlds (think old synthesizers recorded onto tape), and a minimalist’s sense of repetition and streamlined harmony. Hi Scores mapped its own space, defining itself by what it wasn’t: the music was too slow to be part of the techno continuum, its beats hip-hop but without swag, and its tracks didn’t have vocals besides opaque samples here and there. The title piece attends to groove, to mood, and to an arrangement that makes something out of insistence. (Also: the sound quality and depth of its mix are pristine.) Inspired by this kind of music, I remember trying to use the DAW software Reason. But I never got far with it. I wondered, How do you compose this kind of stuff?