Steve Reich turned 90 on Saturday, and I’ve been thinking about his early tape pieces from the mid-1960s, It’s Gonna Rain and Come Out. They’re such vital works not only because they opened his imagination to what could happen if you made a micro-canon – playing the same material slightly faster or slower – which is what happened when one of his tape machines slipped out of sync with the other: it’s that these are human voices that Reich is setting. It’s Gonna Rain is made from the voice of Brother Walter, a Pentecostal street preacher in San Francisco, whose warning of apocalypse in 1965 Reich recorded and looped against itself, over and over, so that Brother Walter’s voice becomes a wall and wail of sound, a sonic realisation of the sublime inundation he’s announcing. Come Out was made in 1966 with the voice of Daniel Hamm, one of the Harlem Six, six black men wrongly convicted of first-degree murder in New York. Reich’s piece was commissioned for a benefit event for their legal costs as “background music for passing the hat”.
These pieces don’t just set words, Reich says they “set human beings”, using the vocal recordings not only as musical material but political inspiration and emotional expression. Techniques that are seemingly all about narrowly musical processes – looping, canon-ing, fugue-ing – are embedded in the facts of where they were made and how, and whose voices are being represented by whom.
