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Steve Reich Different Trains (1988) Achim Bornhöft New Work (world premiere) HELIOS String Quartet Steve Reich, born in New York on October 3, 1936, had piano lessons from early childhood and at fourteen began to study drums with Roland Kohloff, who later became first timpanist of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. From 1953 to 1957 Reich studied philosophy at Cornell University, focusing on the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein. He also attended William Austin’s music courses there. From 1957 to 1958 he studied composition privately in New York with Hall Overton. From 1958 to 1961 he studied composition at the Juilliard School of Music in New York with William Bergsma and Vincent Persichetti and from 1962 to 1963 at Mills College in Oakland, California, with Darius Milhaud and Luciano Berio. He amassed essential experiences at San Francisco Tape Center (1963–65). There he performed the work It’s Gonna Rain (1965), which typified his early work with tape loops, and collaborated with the filmmaker Robert Nelson (The Plastic Haircut, 1963; Oh Dem Watermelons, 1965). In New York in 1966 he founded a tape studio and with Arthur Murphy and Jon Gibson founded his own ensemble. In the following years he premiered with this ensemble the compositions with phase shifting that would point the way to his personal style, like Come Out (1966) and Piano Phase (1967). By 1976 the group Steve Reich and Musicians had grown to include eighteen musicians. He studied African drumming techniques with a master drummer of the Ewe tribe at the Institute for African Studies of the University of Ghana in Accra and composed Drumming (1971), in which he merged the techniques he had used thus far and explored new ones. From 1971 to 1973 he toured the United States and Europe with Steve Reich and Musicians. In 1973 and 1974 he studied Balinese gamelan music with Balinese teachers of the American Society of Eastern Arts in Seattle und Berkeley, and followed it with an intense period of work on Music for Eighteen Musicians (1974–76), a piece that brought him to the attention of a large audience. From 1976 to 1977 he learned Hebrew and studied the Torah and the cantillation of the Scriptures in New York and Jerusalem. The first work to result from these studies was Tehillim (1981), which was also the first work since his student days to set a text to music. It was commissioned by the SDR in Stuttgart, the WDR in Cologne, and the Rothko Chapel in Houston. It was followed but other commissioned works like The Desert Music (1984), Sextet (1985), and Electric Counterpoint (1987). The inspiration for Different Trains for string quartet and tape (1988) came from the composer’s childhood impressions and became a kind of sociocritical document. In addition to important concert programs, Reich has been the subject of a television broadcast in the respected series Great Performances (USA, 1987) and of a composer portrait as part of Perspectives ’88 (London). As a main proponent of Minimal or Repetitive Music in the United States, Reich has based extended compositions on tiny ostinato motifs. He is convinced that the processes that determine the structure must be audible. He thus sees his own work in contrast to serialism and to certain chance operations by John Cage that produce similar tonal results. The early compositions from It’s Gonna Rain (1965) to Four Log Drums (1969) are phase shifting in sound processes that start out as simultaneous: two tape loops with identical recordings of voices produce, as a result of differences in playback speed of the tape players, a continuous moving apart of what started as simultaneous (Come Out, 1966); two pianists produce a similar gradual process by means of a conscious, minimal accelerando of just one of two identical parts (Piano Phase, 1967). The subtlest phase shifts are found in Drumming (1971). Reich experienced the drum patterns of African music as a confirmation of his own structural forms, though he continued to use Western musical instruments. The particular effects of his music are based on the fascination that results from the rhythmic processes in the complete intellectual coolness of their calculation. By contrast, the Minimalists Philip Glass, Terry Riley, and La Monte Young were more concerned with meditation. Reich’s precision has resulted in some misunderstandings: it seems machinelike or even totalitarian. In fact, however, it results from the musician’s complete identification with the rhythm. From 1970 onward Reich began to introduce substantial variants into his compositional technique: increasing extension of sounds (Four Organs, 1970), gradually filling in pauses with beats, integrating the human voice and African (Drumming) or Balinese elements (Music for Eighteen Musicians). From 1979 to 1985 he frequently wrote for larger forces, both orchestra (Variations for Winds, Strings, and Keyboards, 1979) and choir and orchestra (The Desert Music, based on texts by William Carlos Williams, 1984), but then he returned to his preference for ensembles of soloists, in which the players are given greater responsibility. A further-reaching innovation in his work came with Tehillim (1981). The melodic structural model of the psalms and a flexible meter enabled him to set music using word painting and to invent longer melodies. In addition, much like Conlon Nancarrow, he employed the principle of the canon, and engaged with both the Eastern and Western traditions, not in a historicizing or adaptive way but productively. This reflection on the past and the heightening of realism in both a musical and sociocritical sense (Different Trains, 1988) gave Reich’s music more color and made it easier to understand, without calling into question the particular nature of Minimal Music. In its use of autobiographic and documentary texts, Different Trains for string quartet and tape has greater coordination of the textual and musical statements. In the first movement, “America: Before the War,” repetitive patterns in the strings combine with realistic locomotive sounds, from of which the text “From Chicago to New York” then emerges: as a young boy Reich often traveled great distances by train, shuttling between his divorced parents. The second movement, “Europe – During the War,” is about the deportation of Jews in train cars, which would have been a threat to him as well. The third movement, “After the War,” is about travels of those who had returned to the United States. Even before he had begun studying music at the Folkwang Hochschule in Essen, Achim Bornhöft, born in 1966, had one the first prize of the Forum junger Deutschen Komponisten. Additional awards followed, such as first prize in the composition competition of the Cooperativa Neue Musik (CNM), the Felix-Mendelssohn-Bartholdy Förderpreis, first prize in composition in the Bundeshochschulwettbewerb, and the Folkwang Preis for composition in 1993. While studying with Nicolaus A. Huber and Dirk Reith, he began collaborating with the choreographers Olimpia Scardi, Stefan Hilterhaus, and Wanda Golonka, producing several pieces with them. Guest performances brought them to various theaters in Germany and in Europe. Following his exams he received a DAAD scholarship to study at the renowned Computer Center for Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) der Stanford University. Between 1996 and 1999, Achim Bornhöft was a lecturer at the Universität Duisburg and the Folkwang Hochschule in Essen. In the years that followed his compositions were performed at international festivals in Germany and abroad. Lecture and concert tours have taken him to Mongolia and Kyrgyzstan, among other places. In collaboration with the architect and stage designer Ulrich Baumeister, Achim Bornhöft has been involved in choreographed works for the stage alongside his activity as a composer. In 1998 he received the composition scholarship of the Heinrich-Strobel-Stiftung des Südwestfunks and realized two full-length dance productions together with his ensemble. In 2001 he had a scholarship from the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie (ZKM) in Karlsruhe. In 2003 he received the Kunststipendium am Mummelsee for his work Orplid: Spiegel and Schilf and cofounded the music publishing house sumtone along with the composers Ludger Brümmer and Michael Edwards. Achim Bornhöft lives in Tübingen and is currently working on his doctorate at the university there with a dissertation on “composition as a reflection of technical development.” |
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