Sylvain Marquis

As a musicologist, I do not think I can still write today about Steve Reich. I love his music too intensely, and my analytical capacity would probably be obscured or frozen by this emotion. However, if my personal ethics prevents the scholar to speak, the musician may well write a note.
So ! We expect the release of Double Sextet and 2x5 which are already available in pre-order on the Nonesuch label's website. In the meantime we can already see and hear the piece on Youtube (see below, it's in 3 parts), or deceive our impatience with this interview, which also includes a midi file of 2x5.

Watching the video of Double Sextet, I am still took in this vital impetus that inhabits all his music. It's like an incantation that would make a pulsating ode to life, and just woke up the energy of our body. A very readable structural use of the augmentation and canon, articulating the tension of harmonies : the piece seem simple, just like Stravinsky's pieces... (But when you open the score of Agon or Dumbarton Oaks, it's another story.) His formal principle firmly drawn, and the ability to twist the rigid frame by melodic and harmonic flow, tend all the music in the arc of a contained expressiveness. If the tension between form and content in the music of Morton Feldman explores repetition and floating suspention, Steve Reich offers a tension that bubbles and stamps, an incredible energy that always seems about to blow his contrapuntal matrix!
In 1976 he predicted it might seem romantic with his Music for 18 musicians. But it's not romanticism, it's a baroque thrill. And today you can feel that Reich baroque expressiveness take as much impact as its shape does not break.
Well finally, the musicologist has spoken ...