Steve Reich
Drumming

I periodically listen to "Drumming," like a therapy.

It comforts me to know it's always there, just a "play" away. Every time that uniform mist falls, and the thought seems about to bog down among daily trifles, well, then it seems the right time to shuffle the cards. And to dive into a 56-minute long kaleidoscope, never knowing the figure that will come to me to contemplate.

Discussions about Steve Reich generally happen in academic contexts. There's an avalanche of cultured things to tell about minimalism, repetitionism, about '68 (Reich was born in 1936, and still lives). And John Cage, the first to unlearn, to play water jugs. And down it goes, through the algid sinuosity of Philip Glass, or Terry Riley's random generation processes. There's enough to fill shelves. These musicians, all Americans, have markedly characterized the past century, outlined pathways of sonic deconstruction with multiform and still absolutely not exhausted outcomes in any music district. Reich, in particular, managed to produce transversal influences, becoming a cult author for particularly daring DJ remixers. But back to us.

"Drumming" consists of four long tracks. More precisely, a single breath. The time is unspecified, the place is a vast and primordial wasteland, invaded by all sorts of percussion. Drums of every kind, xylophones, glockenspiels, marimbas, whistles, brass, into which faint flutes, and arcane voices, are inlaid. More precisely, an arcane orgiastic rite, or the singing of angels, take your pick.

Reich's germinal idea is summarized in "phasing." "I discovered that the most interesting music is simply to align loops in unison and let them slowly come out of phase with each other" (Steve Reich)

And so, a thousand beats in sync. A flock of birds, a choral breath that invades the mind, right from the first track, "Drumming Part 1," a tribal pandemonium. The listening experience is totalizing, the urgency of abandonment is absolute. And when the hypnotic process is already irreversible, the loops phase out, and those thousand beats slide over each other, almost imperceptibly. The flock is up there, at its peak, and exactly then the elements combine to generate new figures. It all happens with inexorable slowness. An intense poetic experience, two lovers meeting, crossing, renewing, the fetus separating from the body that generated it, yet remaining fatally attached. The moments when the "phasing" unfolds seem to me the paradigm of creation.

The sound fragments lose their usual identity. "Drumming Part 2" is traversed by a succession of sounds that lightly settle on the percussive substrate. They are voices, but so ethereal that they have lost their human origin, when they intone a subdued phrasing, when they mimic the sound of percussion. The fever rises, solemnly. Reich's idea, based on rhythm variation, the substitution of beats with pauses, on timbral mutation, becomes increasingly clear. What is figure turns into the background, it's the diabolic mechanism found in an Escher painting: here it’s up to the ear to return the transmigration of reference points to the brain. Everything is fleeting and transient, yet damnably deep.

"Drumming Part 3." There it is, the glockenspiel, an endless tinkling, still hinged on the progressive desynchronization of the loops. If I've managed so far to convey something of Reich's thought, you are already able to imagine much more than I could tell you about this track. A long mantra made up of whistles grafts into the interstices of the tin-tin, and a couple of rhythmic landslides make you fear that our dear Earth is starting to spin in reverse. The vertigo is now no longer an impression, but an existential state.

The very long foreplay is over. The brain has laid down its weapons, now it offers itself defenseless to the concluding, sweetest martyrdom. "Drumming Part 4" is the sublimation, a fierce orgasm that at a certain point seems to want to transcend the flesh. The furious search for out-of-body experience is entrusted to a true percussive bacchanal, carved by sharper sounds. As if all the animals in the jungle were making their cries, none excluded, even the tiny, exotic insects. The track ends with a sudden syncope, cut off by its own frenzy. A trauma, and a relief. Certainly, a profound and inebriated disorientation, and a delightfully human halo of incompletion.

Like all deeply unconventional expressions, this work uses an elementary language, free from constraints. Despite the refined, manic compositional engineering, "Drumming" speaks directly to man: it's the music of the beating heart, the seed that germinates, the fear, the joy. But the essential element undoubtedly lies in the subversion of the canonical rhythm (1, 2, 3, 4/ 1, 2, 3, 4). "My idea is that when you write material with a large number of repetitions, then you have to build in a certain rhythmic indeterminacy that should make you ask, 'where is the one'. . . A rhythm generated this way produces instability, but above all, allows the ear to reconstruct perceived music in different ways." (Steve Reich)

Well then, Reich transfigures rhythm, creates a new entity, fluid and indeterminate, and injects it intravenously. Slowly. Those who set foot in Drummingland learn that everything can become other. The accents, the priorities, the path. It's a new system, the Sun is no longer an immobile hub, but it roams among the planets and illuminates them one by one, in the expanses, in the cracks. And the whirl of meteors and satellites. Every body can be the center. It's a perpetual wonder, "the tremendous rowing toward God". It's the abjuration of rhythm, the denial of Our Lady Habit.

I periodically listen to "Drumming," like a liturgy.