In 2009, David Harrington asked Steve Reich to come up with a piece for Harrington’s Kronos Quartet that would also involve electronics. The combination had worked to wondrous effect 20 years earlier with Reich’s Different Trains (Elektra/Nonesuch), on which the quartet played against prerecorded reminiscences of“witnesses” to the roles of trains earlier in the 20th century, transporting passengers around the U.S. as well as Jews to concentration camps in Europe. Reich also embedded the sound of train whistles in that effort to present what he called “both a documentary and a musical reality.” In an interview in January 2010, Reich told SFCV that, “since 2002, I’ve been writing exclusively for musical instruments and voices and nothing else, and I now feel like the cupboard is dry. I don’t think I could write another instrumental piece that would be worth listening to, without doing something else.” So he decided to return himself and Kronos to prerecorded resources and make of them another musical documentary, or perhaps a musical memorial about the destruction of Manhattan’s World Trade Center in 2001.
The result, WTC 9/11, is all the more compelling to Reich because for 25 years he’d lived just four blocks from Ground Zero. He scored the 15½-minute, three-movement piece for three string quartets, one live and two prerecorded; for this recording, all three are Kronos. The prerecorded voices of the “witnesses” in this case include air traffic controllers, alarmed that American Airlines Flight 11 had deviated from its flight plan and was unreachable; firefighters describing the chaos on the ground after impact; and the recollections of an ambulance driver and nearby residents, recorded in 2010.
As in his deployments of prerecorded voice ever since It’s Gonna Rain in 1965, Reich elicits the musical elements of human speech, creating rhythmic figures through repetition and by having the strings, as he describes the process, “double and harmonize the speech melodies and prolonged vowels or consonants,” in some instances prefiguring what will be spoken. At the beginning and end of the piece, the first violin doubles a fast-beeping F, the sound of a phone left off its hook. There’s an irresistible drama to these interrelationships of strings and speech; the work seems to compel you to listen more carefully, perhaps repeatedly. Kronos’ instrumental precision and its emotive subtlety and power are invaluable here.
Although Reich states an intention of keeping a uniform tempo throughout the piece, each of the three brief movements works toward the overarching purpose with different acoustic densities and emotional affects, a refreshing rethinking of sonata form. Evoking Reich’s Daniel Variations (2006), the third movement includes recordings of women who sat with the bodies of victims, and a cantor, speaking and singing in Hebrew.
The mood in which WTC 9/11 finishes, both sad and transcendent, is changed by the piece that follows it here, the debut recording of Mallet Quartet, performed by Sō Percussion, the ensemble that presented the piece’s American premiere at Stanford at the beginning of last year. This is the joyous side of Reich, remembered from his early pieces for marimba and other percussion in the 1960s and ’70s, inspired in part by his studies of African drumming and Balinese gamelan.
Reich described what for him were some “new aspects” of composition while discussing Mallet Quartet in his SFCV interview last year: “The marimba has been extended down to a five-octave instrument with low cello C as the bottom note. You got a real bass to it now, and that was good news, ’cause it’s real disappointing when you don’t have a bass in a piece.” Sō Percussion’s Adam Sliwinski added some details about the role of his ensemble here, in a phone conversation with SFCV: “For most of the piece, the [two] marimbas are creating a bed of groove-and-rhythm, and the [two] vibraphones are playing these very tight canons. There’s no electronics or tape or any other [such] elements.”
The first of the Quartet’s three brief movements (designated “Fast,” “Slow,” and “Fast”) is the most melodic, built on chords in the vibraphones and grounded by the marimbas, and evocative of the syncopated dances of Latin jazz. This segues without break to the quieter, more meditative second movement, in which the syncopation has been slowed down, as in some of the trance-inducing sections of gamelan ceremonies.The final movement returns to perky but delicate structures.
Dance Patterns, composed for the Belgian filmmaker Thierry de Mey and recorded by Steve Reich and Musicians in 2004, is a delightful display of what Reich has been exploring with that ensemble since the groundbreaking, hour-long Music for 18 Musicians (1976). Compacted to a few moments of voicings for vibraphones, xylophones, and pianos are the familiar interlocking patterns and change-ups of tempo, interspersed with brief sustains. This release neatly encompasses Reich’s different strains, and also serves to commemorate his upcoming 75th birthday, on Oct. 3.