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134

Steve reich on
music as a gradual process

Steve Reich (b. 1936) wrote this now-famous essay in October 1968, and it was published as his biographical statement for an exhibition at the Whitney Museum of
American Art in 1969 titled Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials. (The exhibition
included works by minimalist artists, among them Lynda Benglis, Eva Hesse, Robert
Ryman, and Richard Serra.) Here, Reich rejects serial music and indeterminacy (as
practiced by Babbitt and Cage) as processes which cannot be heard and therefore
exist only as theoretical rather than experiential musical constructs. Reich helped to
launch a new musical movement which critics eventually called minimalism, because of its shared aesthetic afnities with artists like those in the Whitney show.
Despite resistance to the term minimalism from Reich and some of his contemporaries, among them Philip Glass and Terry Riley, the branding has stuck. Other
names for this new music at the time included trance music and pulse music.
Reich reprinted Music as a Gradual Process in several places, including Source
magazine in 1971 and then as liner notes for the album Drumminghis most important music from his rst stylistic period. Each version of the essay differs slightly.
For Drumming, he added some additional remarks about his ensemble, which are
included here as well.
By 1976, Reich had moved beyond his self-imposed limitations of compositional
transparency in a more complex work of extended lengthMusic for 18 Instruments,
699
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which is now regarded as a late twentieth-century masterpiece. Despite its relatively
greater complexity, Reichs reliance on phase shifting, evolving canons, and pulse
still relate to the aesthetic dened so austerely and so powerfully here.

do not mean the process of composition, but rather pieces of music that are, literally, processes.
The distinctive thing about musical processes is that they determine the note-to-note
(sound-to-sound) details and the overall formal morphology simultaneously. (Think of a round
or an innite canon in traditional music.)
I am interested in perceptible processes. I want to be able to hear the process happening throughout the sounding music.
To facilitate closely detailed listening, a musical process should happen very gradually.
Performing and listening to a gradual musical process resembles:

turning over an hourglass and watching the sand slowly run through to the
bottom; pulling back a swing, releasing it, and observing it gradually come
to rest;
placing your feet in the sand by the oceans edge and watching, feeling, and
listening to the waves gradually bury them.
Though I may have the pleasure of discovering musical processes and composing the musical
material to run through them, once the process is set up and loaded, it runs by itself.
Material may suggest what sort of process it should be run through (content suggests
form), and processes may suggest what sort of material should be run through them (form suggests content). If the shoe ts, wear it.
Whether a musical process is realized through live human performance, or through
some electro-mechanical means is not nally very important. One of the most beautiful concerts
I ever heard consisted of four composers playing their tapes in a dark hall. (A tape is interesting
when its an interesting tape.)
Its quite natural to think about musical processes if one is frequently working with
electro-mechanical sound equipment. (All music turns out to be ethnic music.)
Musical processes can give one a direct contact with the impersonal and also a kind of
complete control, and one doesnt always think of the impersonal and complete control as going
together. By a kind of complete control I mean: by running this material through this process
I completely control all that results, but also I accept all that results without changes.
John Cage has used processes and has certainly accepted their results, but the processes
he used were more compositional ones that could not be heard when the piece was performed.
The process of using the I Ching or imperfections in a sheet of paper to determine musical parameters cant be heard when listening to music composed that way. The compositional processes and the sounding music have no audible connection. Similarly, in serial music, the series
itself is seldom audible. (This is a basic difference between serial [basically European] music and
serial [basically American] art, where, in the latter, the perceived series is usually the focal point
of the work.)
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steve reich on music as a gradual process

701

What Im interested in is a compositional process and a sounding music that are one
and the same thing.
James Tenney said in conversation, then the composer isnt privy to anything. I dont
know any secrets of structure that you cant hear. We all listen to the process together, since its
quite audible, and one of the reasons its quite audible, is because its happening extremely
gradually.
The use of hidden structural devices in music never appealed to me. Even when all the
cards are on the table and everyone hears what is gradually happening in a musical process,
there are still enough mysteries to satisfy all. These mysteries are the impersonal, unintended,
psycho-acoustic by-products of the intended process. These might include sub-melodies heard
within repeated melodic patterns, stereophonic effects due to loudspeaker or listener location,
slight irregularities in performance etc.
I begin to perceive these minute details when I can sustain close attention, and a gradual process invites my sustained attention. By gradual I mean extremely gradual; a process
happening so slowly and gradually that listening to it resembles watching the minute hand on
a watchyou can perceive it moving after you stay with it a little while.
Many modal musics, such as Indian Classical, John Coltranes during the early 1960s,
some recent rock and roll and other new musics may make us aware of minute sound details;
because in being modal (constant key center, hypnotically droning) they naturally focus on these
details rather than on key modulation, counterpoint, and other peculiarly western devices. Nevertheless, these modal musics remain more or less strict frameworks for improvisation and/or for
expression. They are not processes.
While performing 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.
SOURCE: Steve Reich, Music as a Gradual Process, in Anti-Illusion: Procedures/
Materials, ed. James Monte and Marcia Tucker (catalog for exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, May 19July 6, 1969) (New York: Whitney Museum of
American Art, 1969): 5657. Reprinted in Source: Music of the Avant-Garde 2, no. 10
(1971): 30.

A slightly modied version of the above essay appears as liner notes in Steve Reichs
Drumming, Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices and Organ, Six Pianos. It includes the following new material.

notes on the ensemble 12/73

ince 1966 I have been rehearsing and performing my music with my own ensemble. A few
years earlier I decided that despite my limitations as a performer I had to play in all my compositions. It seemed clear that a healthy musical situation would only result when the functions

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of composer and performer were united. This ensemble began in 1966 with three musicians,
grew in 1970 to ve, and in 1971, with the composition of DRUMMING, grew to twelve musicians and singers. This is a repertory ensemble. Each new composition is added to the repertoire
and our concerts present a selection of new and/or older works.
The question often arises as to what contribution the performers make to the music?
The answer is that they select the resulting patterns in all compositions that have resulting patterns, and that certain details of the music are worked out by members of the ensemble during
rehearsals. Resulting patterns are melodic patterns that result from the combination of two or
more identical instruments playing the same repeating pattern one or more beats out of phase
with each other. During the selection of resulting patterns to be sung in the second part of
DRUMMING, Joan La Barbara, Jay Clayton and myself all contributed various patterns we heard
resulting from the combination of three marimbas. These patterns were selected, and an order
for singing them worked out, with the help of tape loops of the various marimba combinations
played over and over again at my studio in New York during rehearsals held throughout the
summer of 1971. The resulting patterns in MUSIC FOR MALLET INSTRUMENTS, VOICES
AND ORGAN were selected by Jay Clayton and myself in a similar way, two years later. In SIX
PIANOS, Steve Chambers, James Preiss and myself worked out the resulting patterns and the
order in which to play them during evening rehearsals at the Baldwin Piano store in New York
during the fall and winter of 197273.
Selecting resulting patterns is not improvising; it is actually lling in the details of the
composition itself. It offers the performer the opportunity to listen to minute details and to sing
or play the ones he or she nds most musical.
Theres a certain idea thats been in the air, particularly since the 1960s, and I think it
is an extremely misleading idea. It is that the only pleasure a performer can get while performing is to improvise, or in some way be free to express his or her momentary state of mind. If a
composer gives them a xed musical score, or specic instructions to work with this is equated
with political control and it means the performer is going to be unhappy about it. But if you work
with musicians you will see that what gives them joy is playing music they love, and whether
that music is improvised or completely worked out is really not the main issue. The main issue
is whats happening musically; is this beautiful, is this sending chills up and down my spine, or
isnt it?
The musicians play in this ensemble, usually for periods of three to ve years or more,
because, presumably, they like playing the music, or at least because they nd it of some musical interest. They do not make all their income from playing in this ensemble. Some are Doctoral
candidates in the study of African, Indonesian and Indian music, some teach percussion, and all
perform professionally in a variety of musical ensembles including orchestras, chamber groups,
Medieval music ensembles, South Indian, African and Indonesian classical ensembles, free improvisation and jazz groups. It is precisely the sort of musician who starts with a strong Western
classical background and then later gravitates towards these other types of music that I nd ideally suited for this ensemble.
SOURCE: Steve Reich, liner notes for Drumming, Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices and
Organ, Six Pianos (Hamburg: Deutscher Grammophon; Polydor, 1974).

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