TY - CHAP

T1 - “Moving Forward, Looking Back” Resulting Patterns, Extended Melodies, Eight Lines, and the Influence of the West on Steve Reich

AU - ap Sion, Pwyll

N1 - Pwyll ap Siôn is professor of music at Bangor University, Wales. He publications include The Music of Michael Nyman (2007) and Michael Nyman: Collected Writings. He co-edited The Ashgate Research Companion to Minimalist and Postminimalist Music (2013) with Keith Potter and Kyle Gann, and has also contributed articles and reviews to Contemporary Music Review, Twentieth-Century Music and Performance Practice Review. In 2016, he received a Leverhulme Research Fellowship to focus on the music of Steve Reich. He has also contributed regularly to Gramophone music magazine since 2007.

PY - 2019

Y1 - 2019

N2 - This chapter traces the influence of the Western classical tradition on Steve Reich’s musical language with reference to his important work Octet, composed in 1979 then subsequently reorchestrated and renamed Eight Lines. Previous scholarly accounts of this work have focused on Reich’s use of extended melodic lines, drawing on the composer’s own comments that these were derived from his immersion at the time in Hebrew cantillation. While acknowledging Reich’s debt to Jewish music, this chapter locates Eight Lines within the broader context of the European tours with his ensemble during the early to mid-1970s. The innovative melodic lines in Eight Lines are constructed around largely goal-oriented harmonic (that is to say, “Western”) structures as much as through the composer’s own immersion in cantillation music, suggesting that his style from this point onward can be read more as a synthesis of Western and non-Western influences.

AB - This chapter traces the influence of the Western classical tradition on Steve Reich’s musical language with reference to his important work Octet, composed in 1979 then subsequently reorchestrated and renamed Eight Lines. Previous scholarly accounts of this work have focused on Reich’s use of extended melodic lines, drawing on the composer’s own comments that these were derived from his immersion at the time in Hebrew cantillation. While acknowledging Reich’s debt to Jewish music, this chapter locates Eight Lines within the broader context of the European tours with his ensemble during the early to mid-1970s. The innovative melodic lines in Eight Lines are constructed around largely goal-oriented harmonic (that is to say, “Western”) structures as much as through the composer’s own immersion in cantillation music, suggesting that his style from this point onward can be read more as a synthesis of Western and non-Western influences.

KW - Steve Reich; Western classical tradition; Octet/Eight Lines; extended melodies; resulting patterns; reception history; European influence; tonal and modal regions; goal direction.

M3 - Chapter

SP - tbc

BT - Rethinking Reich

A2 - Gopinath, Sumanth

A2 - ap Siôn, Pwyll

PB - Oxford: OUP

CY - New York

ER -