July 5, 1982 - NMA Chicago day 1 - Chicago Symphony gala concert
Pauline Oliveros - Linda Montano - Tom Jaremba - Chicago Symphony Orchestra - Alvin Lucier - Muhal Richard Abrams - Wallace McMillan - Frederic Rzewski - John Cage - Steve Reich
Oliveros, Pauline, Linda Montano and Tom Jaremba Children's Music Theatre Workshop
Chicago Symphony Orchestra + Alvin Lucier Crossings for Oscillator + Amplified Orchestra
Chicago Symphony Orchestra with Muhal Richard Abrams and Wallace McMillan Abrams: Variations for Flute and Baritone Sax Solo with Chamber Orchestra
Chicago Symphony Orchestra + Frederic Rzewski - Rzewski: The Silence of Infinite Spaces
Chicago Symphony Orchestra John Cage: "40 Drawings from Thoreau"
Chicago Symphony Orchestra Steve Reich: "Tehillim"
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Prelude, New York Times
On the new-music scene today, within that group of experimental composers who still owe some self-conscious allegiance to the Western art-music tradition, we see any number of composers who have revitalized the Ives-Cowell-Copland Americana by partaking of vernacular energy and diversity. One thinks of John Cage and his exuberant, Ivesian collages; Philip Glass's motoric, insistent music for electronic keyboards, reminiscent in spirit but not in actual practice of the best rock; David Del Tredici and his whooping phantasmagorias of tonal Romanticism, Serialism, pop and Richard Strauss; and Laurie Anderson, with her minimalist art-rock operas, to name only four examples. This American-experimental spirit reborn is celebrated at the annual New Music America festivals, the 1982 installment of which gets under way in Chicago tomorrow.
- John Rockwell, the total extent of his bringing up NMA Chicago in a 1500 word essay that appeared on July 4, 1982 under the title “Has Our Music Attained A New Maturity?”, New York Times
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Afterword three days later.
This year's New Music America festival was originally conceived as a series of concerts in a large, ''circusy'' auditorium at the end of the Navy Pier, which extends several blocks into Lake Michigan from the Chicago lakefront. Eventually, an opening concert Monday night in Orchestra Hall was added, installations and special events were organized all over the city, and funds were found to broadcast the concerts nationwide, in New York, live on WKCR-FM and tape-delayed on WNYC.
- John Rockwell, “Concert: New Music America in Chicago”, NY Times July 7, 1982
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Oliveros, Pauline, Linda Montano and Tom Jaremba
Children's Music Theatre Workshop - Arts Institute, Trading Room
(no information on this event… yet)
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Orchestral Hall, Chicago, gala opening concert event
Chicago Symphony Orchestra with Alvin Lucier
Alvin Lucier: Crossings for Oscillator and Amplified Orchestra
Perhaps the most adventurous work on the program, Crossings combined a slowly rising, electronically generated pure wave (Lucier was solemnly listed in the program as Alvin Lucier: Oscillator) that swept upward from the lowest note the orchestra was capable of producing to the highest. Each instrumentalist cut in at intervals, with sustained notes causing dramatic overtones throughout the 27-minute piece.
- Tina Clarke, "Chicago's new music festival filled with sound and fury" Toronto Globe & Mail, July 17, 1982
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Opening night featured members of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Dennis Russell Davies, performing in Orchestra Hall. Beginning it all was Crossings by Alvin Lucier, written for Oscillator and Chamber Orchestra. Lucier has done important pioneer work in a number of areas, including the use of brain waves in live musical performance and the utilization of room acoustics as a primary compositional parameter. Crossings featured the composer playing the oscillator, a sine-wave signal that rose slowly from around 30 hertz to some seven octaves above that. As it rose almost imperceptibly, members of the orchestra joined in playing long sustained tones at or about its pitch causing beats and difference tones. The effect was subtle and intermittent, perhaps only marginal from a seat two-thirds towards the back of the quite large hall, hence, for this listener, the composer's wish for "ripples of sound to spin in space in continually changing rhythmic patterns" was unfulfilled.
- Carl Stone, "Two Reports" Perspectives of New Music, Autumn 1981
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Linda Montana explains how she came to evaluating six performances at NMA Chicago 1982. "By allowing the Festival sounds and events to work on my body/spirit in this way, I was able to determine which pieces produced effective meditation responses.
Although there were many memorable moments during the Festival, I can analyze only six pieces that prepared the ground for deep meditation experiences. Inside/Outside ... These two approaches were 1. Sounds that allowed the listener to go inside and 2. Sounds that allowed the listener to come out."
Focus inside: Alvin Lucier Crossings
Crossings, even though played by apparently bored and uninterested members of the Chicago Symphony orchestra, brought me deep inside. It was a study in metaphysical simplicity and produced powerful physiological effects.
Nerve centers on my spinal column opened flower-like as the sound subtly and slowly ascended the continuous sine wave from lower to higher vibrations. Lucier ingeniously allowed traditional instruments to match the oscillator pitches, thereby creating an attentional challenge for the instrumentalists. Video images were fed back to the players so they could follow the score.
The effect on my body was deep and purifying - somewhat like just having received a loving Shiatsu massage.
- Linda Montano, "Moments of Consciousness", Ear Magazine 1982
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Alvin Lucier's Crossings, inspired by the flow of Colorado streams, consisted of an oscillator sine wave sweeping over the frequency range of the orchestra, resulting in beats produced by the crossing of close pitches.
- M. Staff Brandl + Thomas Emil Homerin, "Big Noise from Lake Michigan", Ear Magazine 1982
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In some ways the purest, most telling piece came first. Alvin Lucier's ''Crossings'' consists of a steady, 27-minute upward sweep of electronic tone (the program listed ''Alvin Lucier, oscillator'' in the same typeface it might normally have read, ''Pinchas Zuckerman, violin'') from the lowest to the highest notes of which orchestral instruments are capable. As the curve bent upward, instrumentalists chipped in with sustained notes. The result was persuasive as metaphor (man versus machine, mechanics versus electronics), drama (a climactic steadiness that made Bruckner look postiviely skittery) and sensuous texture (the blend of ''artificial'' and ''real'').
- John Rockwell, “New Music Takes Festival to Chicago”, New York Times, July 7, 1982
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Complete notes on the work appearing at the Dram label website:
https://www.dramonline.org/albums/alvin-lucier-crossings/notes
For the past several years I have been making works for players of Western classical musical instruments. Before then I had devoted most of my creative energy to composing live electronic works and sound installations. In 1982, however, Alene Valkanas of the Institute for Contemporary Art in Chicago invited me to compose an orchestral work for the opening concert of New Music America ’82. Since then, several performers and chamber ensembles have asked for pieces. I have been delighted to accept the challenge of writing music for instrumentalists in the same spirit and with the same poetry as my earlier works.
The three works on this compact disc explore interference phenomena between sound waves. When two or more closely tuned tones are sounded, their oscillations periodically coincide to produce audible beats of sound. The speed of the beating depends upon the distances between the pitches of the sounds. The farther apart, the faster the beating; at unison, no beating occurs. Furthermore, under certain acoustic conditions, the beats may be heard to spin around the room.
…
Crossings is scored for sixteen players: two flutes with piccolos; two oboes, one with English horn; two clarinets in B flat, with bass clarinets in B flat; bassoon; trumpet in C; two horns in F; tuba; two violins; viola; cello; double bass. The players are divided equally on either side of the stage. A single loudspeaker is positioned front center. There is no conductor. The players watch a video monitor which displays numerically, in cycles per second, the rapidly changing frequencies of the ascending wave. Each player reads a part with a series of notated pitches. Each notation is preceded and followed by the number of a specific frequency which, as it is reached and displayed on the monitor, serves as a cue for the player to start and stop his or her sound.
The oscillator sweeps the entire range of the orchestra, from the low C at 32 cycles per second to the high C at 4186 cps. With the exception of a few extremely low notes the orchestra plays all the chromatic notes in ascending order throughout the seven-octave range of the work. Each side of the orchestra plays every other note, overlapping the other side by several seconds, producing double sets of beats as the do so. Each player sustains his or her pitch for sixteen seconds, starting above, that is, several seconds before it is reached by the ascending wave, holding it steady until the wave has passed through it, and stopping several seconds after it has risen above it. As the waves approach the players’ tones, the beating speeds up again. The resultant patterns of deceleration-stasis-acceleration form the basic gestures of the work. The individual players participate in the performance as the ascending wave moves through the ranges of their particular instruments.
Crossings was first performed on July 5, 1982, by members of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Orchestra Hall, Chicago, on the opening concert of New Music America ’82. it was repeated in November of that year at Oberlin College, by the Oberlin Contemporary Ensemble, Daniel Asia, Conductor. It was revised during the summer of 1983 and performed in October of that year at the Eastman School of Music, Rochester, New York, by the Musica Nova Ensemble, Sydney Hodkinson, Conductor. The final version was made in December, 1983, and performed on the “Meet the Moderns” series, January 19 and 20, 1984, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the Cooper Union, new York, by the Brooklyn Philharmonic Orchestra, Lukas Foss, Music Director.
Recording of Crossings (top of page) posted on y2b by user “Architectureaboutdancing”
– not sure whether this is the Chicago Symphony version, though - gd
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Tim Page’s 2021 obituary of Alvin Lucier in the Washington Post:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2021/12/01/alvin-lucier-composer-dead/
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Chicago Symphony Orchestra
with Muhal Richard Abrams and Wallace McMillan, soloist
Variations for Flute and Baritone Sax Solo with Chamber Orchestra
The debt owed by the creative musician to the forces that inspire extra sensitive perception can be somewhat approximated in the restless self-disciplined activity of the composer-performer-improviser.
- Muhal Richard Abrams program note
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Muhal Richard Abrams' Variations for Saxophone/Flute and Chamber Orchestra was next. Abrams, one of the founding fathers of Chicago's important musical institution, the AACM (which stands for the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians), is a composer/pianist/ historian working with both compositional and improvisational methods and forms. Seeking to blend European classical music of a distinctly post-Webernian bent with Black American music, Variations featured soloist Wallace McMillan, who seemed considerably more adept at the twin idioms than his accompanists from the orchestra (a saxophone/ tympani duet was particularly telling).
- Carl Stone, "Two Reports" Perspectives of New Music, Autumn 1981
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The subtlety of these fluttering beats [from Alvin Lucier's Crossings] was markedly different from the dynamic atonal improvisations of Muhal Richard Abrams' Variations for Saxophone / Flute and Chamber Orchestra, impressively performed by soloist Wallace McMillan on baritone saxophone and flute. Muhal, founder of the Experimental Band (forerunner of the AACM), exemplifies the highly creative talent involved in Chicago's experimental jazz scene.
The city's critical establishment, which had long been indifferent to Muhal and other AACM members, appeared to celebrate their contributions during the festival, which also featured worked by AACM alumni Roscoe Mitchell and Douglas Ewart.
- M. Staff Brandl + Thomas Emil Homerin, "Big Noise from Lake Michigan", Ear Magazine 1982
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The other two pieces on the long program were less convincing. Muhal Richard Abrams founded Chicago's most significant new-music organization in 1965, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. Most of its accomplishments fall under the heading of ''jazz,'' however, and Mr. Abrams's Variations for Saxophone/Flute and Chamber Orchestra sounded overly constrained, like so many ''third stream'' efforts.
- John Rockwell, “New Music Takes Festival to Chicago”, NY Times, July 7, 1982
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Chicago Symphony Orchestra with Frederic Rzewski
The Silence of Infinite Spaces (Les Silences des Espaces Infinis)
for amplified chorus
Archival recording of the performance, saved on cassette for decades by Kyle Gann who was at the 1982 New Music America Chicago festival in many capacities, saved long enough to pass on through Georges Dupuis to forward to the New Music America Archives at the University of Houston Library where all NMA things will come to rest...
The Silence of the Infinite Spaces is a sort of musical meditation on the universe as imagined by Blaise Pascal, from whose Pensées the two texts of the chorus are taken. These texts, somewhat atypical for Pascal, were chosen in order to suggest the possibility of a “down-to-earth” context in which his thought, beyond the historically determined limits of cosmological and religious speculation, may be relevant today.
It should be explained that a certain cosmological metaphor underlies the structure of the music, although it is not really important for the music’s interpretation. The seven orchestras are supposed to be the seven moving heavenly bodies of the medieval cosmos: Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. The chorus sings the song of the fixed stars. The tape is the Earth and its earthly events. The soloist is the moi dans l’histoire, the single individual, whose subjective improvised reactions may bring an element of disorder into an otherwise quite rigidly structured design.
- Frederic Rzewski’s program notes
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Rzewski's work, performed on this evening by chamber orchestra, women's chorus, Rzewski on piano and prerecorded tape, suffered as a result of acoustical problems inherent in Orchestra Hall's structure.
Sounds of pouring steel (recorded at Cockrill steel mill in Seraing, Belgium) came forth as instrumentalists joined in Rzewski's design for improvisation and the chorus sang text illustrating the relationship between slave and master excerpted from Blaise Pascal's Pensées.
The audience, however, found themselves as slaves to the acoustical problem; the volume of the entire work was too low and balance between parts was unevenly dispensed.
One strained to hear any of the French text and only watched Rzewski's hands fly across the keyboard.
- Deborah Campana "Two Reports" Perspectives of New Music, Autumn 1981
***
The evening also included Frederic Rzewski's The Silence of Infinite Spaces, which juxtaposed the human condition with the broad structure of the solar system.
The Silence of Infinite Spaces combined teh sounds of a steel mill with orchestral "music of the spheres"; a chorus sang a text by Pascal on slavery and war.
The successful realization of "The Silence..." revealed the inherent religiosity of the piece...
- M. Staff Brandl + Thomas Emil Homerin, "Big Noise from Lake Michigan", Ear Magazine 1982
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Frederic Rzewski's The Silence of Infinite Spaces was a kitchen-sink piece, mysticism, cosmology, politics, motoric minimalism, cantata scope and tape all in one rather unfocused melange.
- John Rockwell, “New Music Takes Festival to Chicago” NY Times, July 7, 1982
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Chicago Symphony Orchestra
John Cage: Score: 40 Drawings from Thoreau
and 23 Parts (for any instrument and/or voices)
and 12 Haiku, followed by
a Recording of the Dawn at Stony Point, N.Y., Aug. 6, 1974
Screencap of photocopy of score from program
Since 2020, I’ve had a New Music America Facebook page (facebook.com/newmusicamerica) that’s been left behind a bit since this Substack series started. I might wind it down, as this seems to be a better upgrade, and best yet, no mandatory signing up for access. Better yet, no Facebook.
One of my thrills was to make the digital acquaintance of Kyle Gann who was not only happy to see someone finally picking up the torch of the festivals in some honorable manner. As well, upon learning that there was an official archive that got set up (in part by Michael Galbreth) at the University of Houston Library, Gann sent me audio from cassettes he had kept safe since 1982. - gd
This is one of those recordings:
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The opening concert held at Orchestra Hall was a gesture to the avant garde establishment, with a performance by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra of works by John Cage - Score (40 Drawings by Thoreau) and 23 Parts (for any instrument and/or voices) and 12 Haiku followed by a Recording of the Dawn at Stony Point, N.Y., Aug. 6, 1974, a nice musical summary of Cage's fascination with sound vs silence; Steve Reich's Tehillim, a joyously lyrical work and a departure from Reich's primarily percussive style; Muhal Richard Abrams' Variations for Saxophone/Flute and Chamber Orchestra, a jazz-inspired piece from one of the founders of Chicago's most influential New Music organizations, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians; Frederic Rzewski's The Silence of Infinite Spaces, a blend of pre-recorded factory and ocean sounds with a live chorus, and Alvin Lucier's Crossings.
- Tina Clarke, "Chicago's new music festival filled with sound and fury" Toronto Globe & Mail, July 17, 1982
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Established vanguard trends opened NMA '82 as Dennis Russell Davies led members of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra ... Unfortunately high expectations for the evening's special programming were not fulfilled in the performance.
For instance, in Cage's Score, musicians appeared to be stiff and unyielding, inexperienced improvisors refusing to give way to sound.
Instead of carefully pacing the transposition of shade, shape and color of each drawing (taken by Cage from Thoreau's journals as directed by the I Ching), all players jumped in at once, unaware of what others were simultaneously contributing in the attempt to fill the "evil void" - silence.
The result was mechanical blasts of instrumental color without definition or distinction.
- Deborah Campana "Two Reports" Perspectives of New Music, Autumn 1981
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I arrived in Chicago hoping to see and hear the spectacular results of dozens of people devoting their lives to breaking down boundaries and redefining concepts of music.
I was very happy to learn that the New Music Alliance was able to hire the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, as cost considerations in the past have prohibited such ambitious programming.
I enjoyed all of it and my only criticism is aimed at those musicians who worked and played as if obviously bored. I resented them for not throwing themselves into the performance.
Other players, of course, were clearly having a ball. No real boundaries being dissolved, even stretched, and so it went for the rest of the week; people not throwing themselves into performances, not pushing.
- Chris Merrick, KOPN Columbia, Missouri Music Director in Ear Magazine, Report from "Middle Ear"
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The Symphony's performance of Cage's Score: 40 Drawings from Thoreau was also well received, though performed only passably.
It was hard to believe that only six years earlier, his Renga/Apartment House 1776 was booed in Chicago.
Cage's status as a celebrity has clearly made his work more acceptable - if not more understandable.
- M. Staff Brandl + Thomas Emil Homerin, "Big Noise from Lake Michigan", Ear Magazine 1982
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Mr. Cage's Score (40 Drawings by Thoreau) and 23 Parts (for any instrument and/or voices), 12 Haiku followed by a Recording of the Dawn at Stony Point, N.Y. Aug. 6, 1974 offered eight minutes of abrupt, pleasing instrumental burbles separated by silence, and then eight minutes of silence, bird-calls and tape hiss. It seemed a neat summary of Mr. Cage's sensibility.
- John Rockwell, “New Music Takes Festival to Chicago”, NY Times, July 7, 1982
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Chicago Symphony Orchestra
Reich, Steve Tehillim
for 4 singers and orchestra
The program entry for Steve Reich’s biography and the details about the work Tehillim are extensive, so I’ll refer you to page 36 of the photocopied (and pdf’ed) 1982 which can be found here at the late Michael Galbreth’s tribute to New Music America (he was the co-director of Houston 1986), and where you can find downloadable reproductions of the first five festivals held in NYC, Minneapolis, San Francisco and Washington and of course Chicago.
https://www.michaelgalbreth.com/_files/ugd/b4072f_0e552d7000614f6a931d717fad9f8ba7.pdf
Excerpt from the above:
In contrast to most of my earlier work, Tehillim is not composed of short repeating patterns. Though an entire melody may be repeated either as the subject of a canon or variation, this is actually closer to what one finds throughout the history of Western music. While the four-part canons in the first and last movements may well remind some listeners of my early tape pieces It’s Gonna Rain and Come Out, which are composed of short spoken phrases repeated over and over again in close canon, Tehillim will probably strike most listeners as quite different than my earlier works.
There is no fixed meter or metric pattern in Tehillim as there is in my earlier music. The rhythm of the music here comes directly from the rhythm of the Hebrew text and is consequently in flexible changing meters. This is the first time I have set a text to music since my student days and the result is a piece based on melody in the basic sense of that word. The use of extended melodies, imitative counterpoint, functional harmony and full orchestration may well suggest renewed interest in Classical, or more accurately Baroque and earlier Western, musical practice. The non-vibrato, non operatic vocal production will also remind listeners of Western music prior to 1750.
However, the overall sound of Tehillim and in particular the intricately interlocking percussion writing which, together with the text, forms the basis of the entire work, marks this music as unique by introducing a basic musical element that one does not find in earlier Western practice including the music of this century. Tehillim may thus be heard as traditional and new at the same time.
- Steve Reich, from his program notes
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Archival recording saved and preserved on cassette for 41 years until this very moment (with thanks to Kyle Gann):
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The performance of Steve Reich's Tehillim displayed his latest interest in Hebrew chant technique and provided insight to a twist in his compositional style. The work, scored for four vocalists and chamber orchestra, was based upon an additive rhythm process similar to that of his earlier work (i.e., the musical texture is dominated by repetition of a single musical idea; lengthening or shortening the pattern causes a noticeable alteration in the work's slowly evolving design). However, in contrast to Reich's earlier music, in which the voice contributed only as another instrument in the musical texture, Tehillim featured the voice in a solo role while instrumental forces acted as accompaniment. Thus, Reich's musical ontology has shifted emphasis. One's perceptions of time passing were guided by text definition rather than by cycles of repeated patterns.
- Deborah Campana "Two Reports" Perspectives of New Music, Autumn 1981
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The evening closed with Steve Reich's recent work, Tehillim, a compo- sition that represents several significant departures from his previous work. Scored for 4 women's voices, percussion, 2 pianos, 2 organs, strings and winds, the piece is a setting of a number of psalms in Hebrew, the first time Reich has used text in any of his post-student compositions. As a result the work involves melody as well as the shorter repeating patterns that are characteristic of Reich's output. The melodies are composed without regard for fixed meter or pattern, the rhythms are determined by the Hebrew text. Because of these approaches, the role of the singers is elevated to that of soloists, unlike the textural function of previous Reich vocal parts. The work is celebratory and fun, with much use of handclaps, tuned bongos, maracas and tambourines. Getting through the 25-minute piece was an act of endurance, not for the listener but for the singers (Jay Clayton, Rebecca Armstrong, Cheryl Bensman, Pamela Wood) and players, who waned noticeably towards the end. That, added to the general intonation problems in the orchestra, made the performance less than definitive, however enjoyable.
- Carl Stone, "Two Reports" Perspectives of New Music, Autumn 1981
***
The successful realization of "The Silence..." revealed the inherent religiosity of the piece in strong contrast to Steve Reich's Tehillim, a rather unsatisfying minimalist adaptation of four Psalms.
While one can appreciate Reich's new metrical freedom and the obvious content of this work, Tehillim was uninspiring. The extensive rhythmic variety diluted the characteristic mysterium tremendum of Reich's earlier compositions.
Whatever his present concerns, Reich's influence at New Music America was pervasive, even among the New Wave rockers.
- M. Staff Brandl + Thomas Emil Homerin, "Big Noise from Lake Michigan", Ear Magazine 1982
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Steve Reich's Tehillim - like everything else on the program, a Chicago premiere - has been heard in New York. Despite some insecurities from the players, Mr. Davies's performance had verve and intensity. The piece itself sounded thin; perhaps the orchestral version to be heard with the New York Philharmonic in September will correct that - but lively, too.
- John Rockwell, “New Music Takes Festival to Chicago”, NY Times, July 7, 1982. Did he have to point out that yeah, this came to NY already? - gd
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Jay Clayton was also involved in performing another work at the festival.
It was Steve Reich's work Tehillim, which was performed by members of The Chicago Symphony Orchestra. With his usual precision, Steve Reich has once again written an extremely successful work. A beautiful and fascinating piece, written for 4 female voices, piccolo flute, oboe, French horn, 2 clarinets, electric organ, 2 violins, viola, cello, double bass (the strings are amplified) and 6 percussionists.
The text for the piece Tehillim (the first piece with text that Reich has created since his student days) consists of some Hebrew psalms: "tehillim" is the Hebrew word for "psalms". Apart from the fact that some of the percussion instruments used in the piece were also used in biblical times in the Middle East, the piece has no particularly "musicological" content - even though Reich has studied Hebrew church singing in Israel and New York in recent years, but it is not only Reich's use of a text that makes this new piece unique in his production: the piece does not consist of repeated figures, unlike his previous works, and a slow movement is also included in the piece.
- Wayne Siegel, “Rapporter: New Music America Festivalen 1982” (original Dutch, google translation), DMT Seismograf, 1982
Alarm Will Sound’s version on y2b posted by “Lilium Laminae”