NAGOYA MARIMBAS
by Steve Reich (b. 1936)

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RHYTHM AND HARMONY, sound and silence, pitch and proportion.  All have long been among the basic building blocks of music, with composers of different stripes emphasizing more of one, less of another, or everything at once.  Raised on Schubert and Beethoven, American composer Steve Reich took a sudden turn of interest at hearing Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring at the age of 14.  Reich — btw, he pronounces his family surname with a soft “sh” sound, as in “rysh” — later studied at Juilliard and Cornell, met Philip Glass and Meredith Monk, and was tutored by Luciano Berio.  Yet, amidst all the musical noise and experiementation of the 1950s and '60s, he was having trouble finding his own voice.

       Around 1965, he found himself fascinated with a new-ish idea involving recorded tape loops, and purposefully moving them out of “phase.” In order words, having one phrase or pattern, and then shifting that identical material so that it's not quite in sync.  A little echo, a little fuzz.  This kind of shifting soundscape — often shifting incrementally slowly in harmonic aspects, while the phasing increases or decreases — gave him his first identifiable voice as a composer, and resulted in a series of “process” works. At the time, he felt audiences should see the process of how the music is built or conceived, and not just be enthralled by the sound.

       To this Reich slowly added more ideas in the ensuring decades, including music patterns from around the world, such as Indonesian gamelan and Hebrew chant.  Continuing to stir the pot (sometimes quite consciously and slowly) while adding new ingredients, his brand of Minimalism came more and more clearly into shape, in clear contrast and difference to Philip Glass and, later, John Adams.  Eventually, Reich even added speech patterns, often blended into live performance via pre-edited tapetracks.

       His Nagoya Marimbas, though written in 1994, harkens back to his earlier process works, and offering a clear challenge to musicians in live performance —to play and stay ever so slightly out of phase with one another through an evolving cascade of numbingly similar note patterns.

—program note by Eric Sellen © 2020

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The composer wrote the following comments about this piece for two marimbas at the time of its premiere:

"Nagoya Marimbas is somewhat similar to some of my earlier pieces, which I wrote in the 1960s and ‘70s, in that there are repeating patterns played on both marimbas, one or more beats out of phase, creating a series of two-part unison canons. However, these patterns are more melodically developed than my earlier work. They change frequently and each is usually repeated no more than three times, which is more similar to my more recent work. The piece is also considerably more difficult to play than my earlier ones, and requires two virtuosic performers.

      —Steve Reich, 1994

Performed by members of The Cleveland Orchestra:

Marc Damoulakis, percussion
Thomas Sherwood, percussion

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