K. Robert Schwarz - Minimalists

In the autumn of 1964 Reich had brought his tape recorder to San Francisco's Union Square, where he recorded a young black preacher named Brother Walter warning of an impending apocalyptic Flood. He knew that Brother Walter's inherently melodious voice offered ideal material for a speech-based tape piece, but he was unsure how to use it. At first he attempted a collage-like work along the lines of Livelihood. But In C suggested a new approach.
Reich made two identical tape loops of Brother Walter intoning 'It's gonna rain!', and placed them on two different tape recorders. Perhaps because of mechanical imperfections in his inexpensive equipment, he noticed that as the two machines continuously repeated the same phrase, they fell gradually out of sync (or, as he called it, out of 'phase') with each other.
And so unfolds It's Gonna Rain (1965), Reich's first mature composition. Two loops of Brother Walter's speech start at unison, and one very slowly slips out of phase with the other. Eventually, as Reich layers up to eight tape loops of the same fragment of speech, all sorts of unforeseen rhythmic combinations arise; finally, the texture is so dense that the speech has been stripped of meaning. 'As I listened to this gradual phase-shifting process, I began to realize that it was an extraordinary form of musical structure,' he said. 'This process struck me as a way of going through a number of relationships between two identities without every having any transitions. It was a seamless, continuous, uninterrupted musical process.'
It was also a landmark of musical minimalism, for the entire seventeen-minute composition is based on that single, melodious, three-word fragment. From 1965 until the early 1970s, the technique that Reich called 'phasing' - a structure that was at once extremely rigorous and readily audible - would become his primary compositional tool.

Další kniha o hudbě v krátkém čase, ale váže ji ke včerejšku spousta dobrých okolností, návštěva a tak vůbec, taky na ní dnes testuju nový knižní držák, který výše zmíněná návštěva dovezla jako dar pro nešikovné bloggerky. Vyfotím vám ho jako březnový bonus. Ke knize - je skvělá, krásně vám přiblíží minimalismus v kontextu ostatní hudby, všeobecných dějin, výtvarného umění (spousta fotek!), je v ní kromě Reicha taky Reilly, Glass, Young, Adams, Monk, Nyman, Pärt.. Poslechněte si ukázku It's gonna rain.