Shoshanna Sidell

Alyssa Mehnert
FAM3000 Final Paper
11 December 2015

Steve Reichs Nagoya Marimbas (for two marimbas)

Performed by Colin Currie and Sam Walton

Having earned the title of the Greatest Living Composer by the New York Times,
Steve Reich has been a pioneer in minimalist and electronic music since the 1960s. Reich was
born in New York City in 1936 to a Broadway lyricist mother and a lawyer father who ultimately
divorced when Reich was a baby. His mother was remarried to a screenwriter and Reich began
splitting his time between New York and California until he began college at Cornell University.
From a young age Reich showed interest in music, recalling that Stravinskys Rite of Spring was
monumental (Rowes). While at Cornell, Reich earned a degree in philosophy and then went
on to attend the Juilliard School as well as Mills College where he earned a masters degree in
music (Rowes). Throughout the years Reich has explored different genres of music such as phase
work, percussion, Balinese music, and West African music (Mehnert). In 1966 Reich founded
Steve Reich and Musicians, a group of musicians that began as three and quickly grew to
eighteen membersmost of who still play today. When performing, the musicians carry out not
only the song, but also the narrative and emotion that accompanies it through their instruments
(Ross).
Although Reich is now celebrated as a composer and considered a pioneer in electronic
music and composition, that wasnt always the case. During the height of his career in the 1960s
and 70s his native city of New York wasnt particularly accepting of his new style of music. A
riot broke out during the performance of his Four Organs at Carnegie Hall in 1973, but after his
continual output of music and the acceptance of his Its Gonna Rain (1965) he gained more
praise from the music community (Ross).
Reichs fascination with voice recordings began when he drove a cab after leaving Mills
College, where he would place microphones inside his cab to secretly record peoples
conversations (Ieraci). Later he crafted these conversations into a piece of music titled

Livelihood (1964), which also began his journey into discovering phasing, a technique where two
tape segments move in and out of synchronization (Ieraci). Starting with his Its Gonna Rain
piece in 1965, Reich began to produce music that featured repetition and manipulation of similar
instruments playing similar notes. With the inception of Its Gonna Rain, and later Different
Trains in 1988, came a new compositional form of music where voice recordings take
prominence in the piece and are the influence for what musical accompaniment goes with it
(Steve Reich). Reich then furthered his interest in West African drumming when he visited Ghana
and later composed Drumming (1970/71), which turned his focus more on rhythm and repetition
(Ieraci).
With many of his pieces, and with most of those mentioned above, Steve Reich addresses
politically and emotionally charged events of the time, giving voices to the less heard. He also
takes inspiration from his own Jewish heritage and life growing up, which can be linked to his
work Different Trains (1988) where he explores the injustice of the Nazi regime and the definite
segregation Reich would have had to endure in Europe during that time (Ross).
In 1994 Steve Reich received a commission for a piece of music commemorating the
opening of the Shirakawa Hall in Nagoya, Japan. It has since been played at many concerts; most
recently at the Guggenheim Museum for their Works & Process program featuring three of
Steve Reichs compositions (Lentjes).
In his post-Nagoya Marimbas career, Steve Reich began working on digital documentary
operas as well as music theater video pieces, all of which have been praised highly and even
considered the new direction for opera (Steve Reich). Although not producing as much work as
he was during the height of his career, Steve Reich still receives numerous awards and
commissions as well as commemorative concerts in his honor.

Leading up to the 1994 release of Nagoya Marimbas for the opening of the Shirakawa
Hall in Nagoya, Japan, there werent any major world events that contributed to its final
composition, but rather it was Steve Reichs whole life up to that point that created Nagoya
Marimbas. With a total of two weeks to complete the piece and a requirement of the use of
marimbas (Lentjes), it is not a huge surprise that Reich would choose to evolve a style he was
already familiar with, his self-described Music as a Gradual Process (Reich), into something
further than constricting himself to the style he used in the 1960s.
The feature of phasing and repeating patterns in his Its Gonna Rain can be heard in
Nagoya Marimbas, as well as in his following works Piano Phase (1967) and Violin Phase
(1967), which utilize phasing and repeating patterns without the use of the electronic medium. In
another one of his most praised pieces, Drumming, the use of rhythm rather than melody and
harmony and repetition as a structural device (Ieraci) both of which are employed in Nagoya
Marimbas. Reich himself has said that Nagoya Marimbas is somewhat similar to my pieces
from the 1960s and 70s in that there are repeating patterns played on both marimbas, one or more
beats out of phase (Los Angeles).
Through the manipulation of the beginning motif repeated by the two marimbas, in
Nagoya Marimbas, Steve Reich exhibits the two most important musical styles of his career,
phasing and music as a gradual process, all the while paying homage to his previous works.
The basic musical characteristics of Nagoya Marimbas first, and most obviously, are that
it is a 4 minute and 55 second song played by Colin Currie and Sam Walton and composed by
Steve Reich. The work, although it appears to be in a minor key, has a breezy yet hectic feel to it,
most likely due to the fact that it is played by marimbas and the repeating manipulated motif is
staccato and short. As stated earlier, the piece uses many of Steve Reichs most famous musical

characteristics, including phasing, music as a gradual process, and the structure of the piece
being based off of rhythm rather than melody and harmony.
When listening to Nagoya Marimbas in an unconscious way, such as playing it in the
background, it is hard to pick up on the slight note changes that are featured every ten to twenty
seconds, and when the piece reaches its lively end it seems as if that was the way the song had
always sounded. Steve Reich expertly crafts the slight variations in notes and sound throughout
the piece, using his theory on the gradual process of a song and how it should mirror turning
over an hour glass and watching the sand slowly run out through the bottom (Reich). By
listening for this gradual process closely in the piece, the song itself seems to break itself up into
sections based on its musical characteristics. During the first quarter of the song it is easiest to
hear this division from 0:00 to 0:55. There is the introduction of the main motif from 0:00 to
0:09 that changes as the song progresses, but throughout the first fifty-five seconds the piece
changes with the use of new note emphasis and the beginning notes tone being changed. The
first dramatic change in the motif begins at 0:55, and then the next major one occurs at 1:12. At
0:55 the second marimba, the more harmonic one of the two, becomes the only one still playing
the original motif, while the first marimba takes on a new version of it, emphasizing the notes
with a different tone at the beginning rather than the end. During the change at 1:12 the more
melodic marimba takes on a new version of the main motif by adding higher notes at the
beginning and then descends into the tonal center, while the more harmonic marimba continues
the same set of notes. This process of tone and note shifts of the main marimba continues
throughout the piece, while the supporting marimba begins to shift out of the main motif after
1:12 and changes notes with the change in the main marimba. Towards the last quarter of the
work, the piece sounds completely different than the first quarter, yet experiences the same type

of shifts and the two marimbas sound as if they are becoming one extremely fast paced marimba
rather than separate ones.
Nagoya Marimbas, similar to many past Steve Reich pieces, features an exceptional
rhythmic structure that can be seen in Six Pianos (1973) and Music for Pieces of Wood (1973) to
name a few (Ieraci). Similar to the techniques used to express the gradual process of the work,
the basic rhythmic structure relies on the changing beats of the canons throughout the piece. The
use of rhythmic displacement is continuous throughout the piece, but most obviously it can be
heard from 1:08 to 1:18 where the major marimba takes over at 1:12, separating this section into
two separate parts. There is a shift from the major marimba in a collaborative rhythm with the
minor marimba, where their tones are equal, to a more displaced set of notes for both of the
marimbas, where the major marimbas notes are more emphasized and higher, sending the minor
marimbas notes to the background. The interesting element about the use of rhythmic
displacement in this piece is the scale at which the two marimbas rhythm shifts. The minor
marimbas rhythm is dependent upon the rhythm of the major marimba, but it keeps the same set
of notes and tones throughout the whole piece. Between 1:45 to 2:04 the major marimba
experiences three shifts in its rhythm and sets of notes, but the minor marimba is consistent and
only changes by dropping notes as it transitions into the third section at 2:01.
Phasing is also utilized, which essentially creates a diverse set of canons, where the first
solo is introduced and then the same motif is introduced later. However, instead of the
continuous repetition of the same few notes, the major marimba that played the first solo
manipulates its tone or note slightly creating more variation each time it is played. This process
can be heard most prominently at the beginning of the piece from 0:00 to 0:55. The lines
between phasing and rhythmic displacement in Nagoya Marimbas can be blurred at times, with

the two working in unison. Both techniques are employed throughout the piece and can be heard
pulling the marimbas apart as well as blending them together. They diverge from one another
creating two distinct sounds, which can be found at 3:09 to 3:25 where there is a clear major and
minor marimba. In contrast, though, there are also times throughout the piece that the marimbas
have a similar musical structure that makes them sound like on continuous marimba, found
between 2:05 and 2:09 of Nagoya Marimbas.
This piece can be mentally split up into different parts of the song based on their
rhythmic structure and tone of the section. During multiple sections of the song, a call and
response can be heard. Specifically at 2:15 the major marimba has a series of more aggressive,
higher pitched notes, which are then reciprocated with just a few notes from the minor marimba
in a moderately high tone compared to the tonal center. During the call and response and the
rising notes portions of the song there seems to be a slow growing crescendo, making it a more
exciting part of the song. The culmination of the rising crescendo, phasing, and rhythmic
displacement can be heard during the last section of the song from 4:29 to 4:47 where it ends
suddenly like the snap of a hypnotist.
Using past techniques in creating something isnt a new practice, and in Steve Reichs
case he builds upon each of his works, each piece exploring a new way of doing something. But
the way that Nagoya Marimbas is crafted by using phasing, rhythmic displacement, and music as
a gradual process, all the while modernizing the minimalist techniques he is famous for makes it
one of his most complete, full circle pieces.

Bibliography

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Reich's "Nagoya Marimbas". Part Two. Original Composition Portfolio: "the Book of Thoth",
"Evolution", and "Midnight Frost"." Order No. 3199838 University of California, Santa Barbara,
2005. Ann Arbor: ProQuest. Web. 5 Dec. 2015.

Lentjes, Rebecca. Steve Reich on writing, rewriting in Works & Process at the
Guggenheim. Bachtrack. Bachtrack Ltd., 19 June 2013. Web. 5 Dec. 2015.

Los Angeles Philharmonic. Nagoya Marimbas. La Phil. Los Angeles Philharmonic

Association, n.d. Web. 5 Dec. 2015. < http://www.laphil.com/philpedia/music/nagoya-marimbassteve-reich>

Mehnert, Alyssa. Postwar Styles. 28 Oct. 2015. PowerPoint presentation.

Reich, Steve. 2002. "Music as a Gradual Process (1968).". In his Writings about Music,
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Ross, Alex. Fascinating Rhythm. The New Yorker. Cond Nast., 13 Nov. 2006. Web. 5
Dec 2015.

Rowes, Barbara. Master Minimalist Steve Reich Proves That Even in Serious Music
Less Can Be More. People. Time Inc., 12 Nov. 1984. Web. 5 Dec. 2015.

Steve Reich. Web. 5 Dec. 2015 < http://www.stevereich.com/bio.html >