Columbia
MS 7265
MASTERWORKS
VIOLIN PHASE/PAUL ZUKOFSKY
IT'S GONNA RAIN
Steve Reich: Live / Electric Music
Produced by David Behrman
MOT FOR SALE
MS 7265
Columbia
MASTERWORKS
STEVE REICH: LIVE/ELECTRIC MUSIC
Side 1
VIOLIN PHASE
Paul Zukofsky
Side 2
IT'S GONNA RAIN
It's Gonna Rain was composed in San Francisco
in January of 1965. The voice belongs to a young
black Pentecostal preacher who called himself
Brother Walter. I recorded him along with the
pigeons one Sunday afternoon in Union Square in
downtown San Francisco. Later at home I started
playing with tape loops of his voice and, by acci¬
dent, discovered the process of letting two identi¬
cal loops go gradually in and out of phase with
each other.
Violin Phase was composed in New York in
October 1967. Here the process discovered with
tape recorders is applied to a human being play¬
ing against several pre-recorded tapes of himself.
In two sections of the piece the performer gives
a sort of auditory "chalk talk" by simply playing
one of the pre-existent inner voices in the tape
a bit louder and then gradually fading out, leav¬
ing the listener momentarily more aware of that
particular figure. The choice of these figures
(there are many of them) is largely up to the
performer, and I want to thank Paul Zukofsky
for bringing out several very interesting ones I
never would have thought of without him.
IPs Gonna Rain is the first and Violin Phase
the last of a series of pieces all dealing with the
process of gradually shifting phase relations be¬
tween two or more identical repeating figures.
This process determines both the note-to-note
(sound-to-sound) detail and the over-all form as
well. It is a process we can all hear.
—Steve Reich
Steve Reich, one of today's strong musical innovators,
has been exploring a part of the musical experience that
has been very little visited before. If we want to see
the hidden beauties of a material, we can look at it through
a microscope, but the microscope can only enlarge a tiny
fragment of it at a time. In somewhat the same way,
Steve Reich subjects small bits of sound to a kind of
magnification in time in order to give us the chance to
hear things that ordinarily escape us. Both these pieces
are spun out of material lasting only a few seconds— It's
Gonna Rain out of a few spoken phrases recorded out¬
doors, and Violin Phase out of a 12-beat solo violin figure.
In both pieces, the concern is with something gradu¬
ally changing (a process going on) over an extended time
period. In both, the material is superimposed on itself,
and the relation of the overlapping sound is constantly
and gradually shifting. The process seems so simple and
so direct an outgrowth of its source material that the
hearing of it approaches an awareness of natural phe¬
nomena. The composer puts it this way: "While perform¬
ing and listening to gradual musical processes one can
participate in a particularly liberating and impersonal
kind of ritual. Focusing in on the musical process makes
possible that shift of attention away from he and she
and you and me outwards towards it."
Recording Violin Phase involved, first, a preliminary
session in which Paul Zukofsky, following instructions
in the score, recorded interlocking trains of the ten-note,
twelve-beat figure on three tracks of a tape recorder. He
placed the figure on track 1 four beats behind the one on
channel 2 and eight behind the one on channel 3. A tape
loop was made from the combination of these three tracks.
Next came the recording sessions themselves in which
Zukofsky played against the three-channel loop. All the
gradual changes of phase were played live by Paul. The
way it works out on the finished recording is this: He
begins (at 30") in unison with channel 1 of the loop, very
gradually speeds up, phases across four beats and lands
(at 4:55) where channel 2 of the loop lies. Channel 2 of
the loop fades up as Paul fades out. Paul then plays
combination figures he hears resulting from the two
loops together (what the composer describes above as
"chalk talk"). Then (at 9:00) he starts the twelve-beat
figure again, in unison with channel 2 this time, and
gradually phases ahead four more beats, landing (at
14:35) where channel 3 of the loop is. Now channel 3
fades up as Paul fades down, and he brings out combina¬
tion figures a second time (until 22:55), this time phasing
them as well. From here to the end, the loops are heard
alone to allow the listener to hear all the figures available
to him. In listening, one can bring out these and other
combination figures by concentrating on them—a little
like those puzzle drawings of geometric three-dimensional
figures that can be flipped back and forth in space by an
effort of will.
It's Gonna Rain is in two parts, the first taking the
phrase "It's Gonna Rain" from unison through a com¬
plete shift of phase and back to unison. The second part
is made of a considerably longer loop that starts in two
voices and moves gradually out of phase through four
and, finally, eight voices in a potentially infinite process.
Along the way, we experience some ordinary and extraor¬
dinary sounds (cooing of pigeons, rumble of traffic, flap¬
ping of pigeons' wings, high frequencies in consonants
and sibilants, melodies in vowels and diphthongs and the
rich rhythms of this one amazing voice) more vividly than
we would ever have imagined possible.
* * *
Steve Reich was born October 3,1936, in New York City.
He studied philosophy at Cornell and music at Juilliard
and Mills College, where he worked with Berio and
Milhaud. During 1964-65, he appeared frequently as
composer/performer at the San Francisco Tape Music
Center. More recently, his music has been performed at
Yale, the Orchestral Space Festival in Tokyo and the
Whitney Museum in New York, and has been published
in Source , Notations and the Anti-Illusion catalog of the
Whitney. His recent works include Come Out (recorded
on Odyssey 32 16 0160), Piano Phase (recorded on Victor
of Japan) and Pendulum Music. He is currently working
on a series of live electronic works utilizing his own phase
shifting pulse gate.
Paul Zukofsky was born in Brooklyn in 1943, studied
at Juilliard, and has won many violin prizes and fellow¬
ships. He has taught and performed at Princeton, New
England Conservatory, Swarthmore, Rutgers and other
colleges, and has presented numerous solo recitals. Rec¬
ognized as one of the foremost young interpreters of
violin music of the 20th century, he has recorded music
by Sessions, Penderecki, Ives, Sahl and other composers.
The watercolor cover was made for this record by
William T. Wiley, who was born in Indiana in 1937 and
educated on the West Coast. His paintings and sculpture
have been shown in New York, California and Europe
and are included in the permanent collection of the
Whitney Museum. He and Steve Reich have collaborated
on such theatrical and film projects as Ubu Roz, The
Plastic Haircut and Over Evident Falls.
—David Behrman
Engineering: George Engfer
Library of Congress catalog card number 73-750052 applies to MS 7265.
Other albums of contemporary music:
Terry Riley in C.MS 7178
Electronics and Percussion—Five Realizations by Max Neuhaus
. . .MS 7139
New Electronic Music from Leaders of the Avant-garde: John Cage:
Variations II; Milton Babbitt: Ensembles for Synthesizer; Henri
Pousseur: Trois Visages de Liege.MS 7051
A
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