Steve Reich
Music for 18 Musicians

THE REVIEW

Mathematical Perfection Applied to Music.

This is perhaps the most ambitious work of the great Steve Reich, described by Village Voice as the "greatest living American composer," the one that, in 1976, swept away any doubts about the greatness of "minimalism" in the realm of "modern" classical music. An ambitious work, primarily due to the difficulty in executing the complex framework that comprises it. Eighteen musicians engage in a frenzy of instruments, all acoustic: oboe and marimbas, cello and voices, piano and maracas, xylophones, clarinet, vibraphone, and four female voices in a whirl of insights and sonic spasms evolving with truly fantastic naturalness and inspiration, with a momentum that skillfully avoids any danger of mannerism.
The whole is seasoned with an intensity and depth even greater than his brilliantly brilliant past, so much so that Reich himself declared: "There is more harmonic movement in the first five minutes of Music for 18 Musicians than in any of my previous works." Indeed, the effect of listening to the first suite "Pulses" is like poison quickly spreading throughout the body, growing ever more lethally strong. The phasing, the shifting of sound, the peculiarity of Reich's sound, which Stoopid admirably described in the highly praised review of "Drumming," here inevitably reaches its perfection, both in elegance and in the perfection of synchronisms between figures, instruments, sounds, and reverberations. Like slow and sinuous waves towards the beach, in continuous and relentless ecstatic motion yet loaded with tension. Like a controlled atomic explosion in a laboratory: crystallized in an ethereal equilibrium, yet magnificently solid and capable of holding the entire duration of the performance, for 56 minutes.
It's hard to choose a single episode among the many: among the bright sounds of vibraphone, ethereal percussive phases, warm and magical piano trances, every moment of this work is essential, and will serve as a manifesto for much subsequent avant-garde, marking an unrepeatable achievement for Steve Reich himself.