New York Classical Review

Steve Reich turned 90 on October 3 but we are the ones getting the gifts this month with performances of some of his greatest music in New York City.

It’s always easy to honor a notable figure on their birthday, but Reich is more than that. He is one of the canonic composers of our time, and a great and essential artist in the long history of classical music, on equal footing with all the big names of the past. He and his peer and colleague Philip Glass changed the course of 20th-century classical music by hauling the common practice period into the present and transforming it with a new language.

His most famous work, Music for 18 Musicians, is the prime example. As he wrote in his important statement “Music as a Gradual Process,” “What I’m interested in is a compositional process and a sounding music that are one and

the same thing … We all listen to the process together since it’s quite audible, and one of the reasons it’s quite audible is, because it’s happening extremely gradually.” In other words, hearing the music also means hearing how music is made and how it works.

The appeal of Music for 18 Musicians is easy to hear, the tonality and syncopated rhythms and propulsive repetition are pleasing to the ear, and hearing the music constructed in front of you is a gripping, powerful, even transformative experience. There are no bad performances of the piece, because if musicians have the chops to play it, the genius of the work takes care of the rest.

That genius is filling the enormous Drill Hall space in the Park Avenue Armory this week, with the extraordinary “Music for 18 Musicians: Stage Variations.” The event was created and organized by conductor Alan Pierson—whose own part in a 1999 student performance of the piece at the Eastman School of Music spawned both Sō Percussion and Pierson’s Alarm Will Sound. 

Opening Wednesday night, the production presents three consecutive performances of the work, played by three different ensembles: the Steve Reich Ensemble, Tactus (a student ensemble from the Manhattan School of Music), and Alarm Will Sound. Befitting the energy in the music, this is a physically and visually dynamic event, musicians moving through and making use of the vast space, directed by John Heginbotham, and with smart lighting design from Urs Schönebaum (with superb sound design by Mark Grey, acoustic and reinforced sound perfectly balanced).

Musically, the sense of this is that, as Pierson pointed out in a recent interview with the Brooklyn Rail, the piece is a loop, with the opening sequence of eleven chords returning as the finale, so why not put it end to end? This is more than a concert though, and as a performance piece it’s defined by where the musicians are and what they’re doing. “Musicians at the Center” has the Reich Ensemble in the middle of the in-the-round seating (there are seats in tiers and also some on the floor in close proximity to the performers), then Tactus has “Musicians Moving,” with “Listeners at the Center” in the end.

Fifty years after its full premiere, there are still some of the original performers in the Reich Ensemble (the composer no longer plays), including percussionists Bob Becker and Russell Hartenberger. The current group includes musicians like Caroline Shaw, Timo Andres, Lisa Moore, and Bang on a Can All-Stars members David Cossin and Ken Thomson. 

In the center and fairly static, this was a classic sounding performance, with a crisp, light touch that reflected the experience and assurance of the ensemble. This is a truly timeless work, outside of one’s knowledge of music history it has no qualities that connect to any era except, through counterpoint and harmony and rhythm, to the enduring means of making music. Witnessing this group of musicians, one felt nothing but vivid freshness, that there was no established proper way to play the music because each performance assembles it anew.

Nor was this totally static. A fundamental feature of Music for 18 Musicians is that there’s constant interaction inside it. Two marimba players maintain the constant eighth-note pulse with one playing on the downbeat and the other the upbeat, pianists and percussionists spell each other, and two traded off the exhausting eight-minute maracas part. Transitions between sections are cued by the vibraphonist. Music for 18 Musicians isn’t just played, it is made in front of the audience, and it’s powerful to see the social activity of making music upfront in performance.

There was a lovely entr’acte from Shaw, who, using looped voice and viola, crated a miniature work out of one of the key phrases in the piece. This was a theatrical intermezzo , with performers draping her in multicolored shawls, and practical as the stage crew was moving several of the instruments from the center to the periphery of the space, opening up the middle for Tactus. These students strode in, in street clothes, and delivered an astonishing performance.

They moved, constantly. The “breath” group of singers, clarinetists, and string players, moved like dancers with each other as they played the sequence of chords, and wandered through the space throughout the performance. The percussionists moved from one station to another in the concentric circle inside the seating. There was a fantastic personal quality to their playing, the feeling that this was music that was an integral part of their lives. Their movement had it coming out of their bodies, like in a Meredith Monk performance, and in a way seemed more like a stage play than a concert, notes and rhythms rather than words the material of dialogue. This got at the basic humanity of music and was often deeply moving. And thrilling, not least with percussionist Jonathan Collazo not only playing the entire maracas part, but doing half of it while jogging inside the circle, in one stretch at double-time, without missing a beat.

The joyful beauty of this middle performance threatened to set up an anticlimax. But Alarm Will Sound built on the previous sets. With some percussionists at the center, others moving through the circle of stations, the breath group taking different positions inside, they started with a tempo appreciably faster than the previous too. 

They also played with real heft, somehow taking the same instruments as before and producing greater mass and force with them. This was beautiful in a sonically rich way, and the lighting isolated individuals and small groups who, with capes and shawls, came off as a great prog-rock band in action. 

For a while, the audience was not actually inside the music, until around Section X the players in the breath group gradually made their way up into the audience, climbing the stairs in the tiers to surround listeners in an evening that turned out to be an incredible, once-in-a-lifetime experience.

“Music for 18 Musicians: Staged Variations” will be repeated 7 p.m. Thursday, Friday and Saturday, and 3 p.m. Sunday. armoryonpark.org