Word: reiche
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With its short, catchy melodic fragments, simple chordal harmonies, rock-steady rhythms and virtually trance-inducing repetitions, the minimalist music of such composers as Reich, 45, Philip Glass, 45, and John Adams, 35, is directly emotional in its appeal, a deliberate rebuke to three decades of arid, overly intellectualized music produced by the post-war avantgarde. Although minimal music is often tightly organized, its objective is to create a mood in the listener, not to have him follow a complicated puzzle. Minimal music (the term is borrowed from the less-is-more visual-arts movement...
...Four Organs performance at Carnegie Hall, has reservations. "Minimalism still has a lot to come to terms with," he says. "Will it show us dichotomies of human nature and thought that have made good classical music fascinating through the years?" Conductor Mehta, despite his championing of Reich's Tehillim, also sees some limitations. "After all," Mehta says, drawing an analogy to painting, "Seurat and his points didn't go on too long. I don't think it could last...
Despite his music's careful organization, Reich intends his work to be accessible. Says he: "I am interested in my music's surviving me. Anybody who is a composer and doesn't have any feelings about that would strike me as very odd and very inhuman...
...Reich's Tehillim should also find popular favor. The most formally conventional piece Reich has yet written, Tehillim (the name means psalms or praises in Hebrew) is in four movements and reflects its composer's interest in cantillation, or chanting of the Scriptures. The music has a strong Middle Eastern flavor with its crisp, jagged rhythms and exotic melodic turns, which compound and pile up on one another until the piece explodes in an irresistible shout of triumph. In Tehillim Reich has added an ecstatic element to his musical vocabulary, and his work has become more poignant...
...Reich's carefully crafted scores, meticulously notated in a small, clear hand, are the product of a Cornell philosophy major's search for systems and structures to support his musical vision. Although some of his music can seem as severe as his customary costume of unadorned white shirt and dark trousers, there is a deep warmth in his best works: Music for 18 Musicians (1976), one of Reich's longest (nearly an hour) and texturally richest pieces, infused with an uncharacteristic sense of brooding and menace; the Octet (1979), a sunny minimalist ode to joy; and Tehillim...