Matching his music to visual images is not a new departure for Steve Reich. His two video operas, The Cave and Three Tales, composed with his wife, the video artist Beryl Korot, were his most significant achievements of the 1990s. But for Reich/Richter, first performed in 2019 to mark the opening of the Manhattan arts centre The Shed, Reich worked with an existing film, Moving Picture (946-3), which the artist Gerhard Richter had made with the director Corinna Belz.
To coordinate changes in the visuals with his music, Reich worked with a time-coded copy of Richter’s abstract film. The images begin with simple stripes, which gradually divide and become more and more complex, before reversing the process and returning to the stripes with which it began; the music follows that arch-like structure across 38 minutes. Some of the reviews of early performances of Reich/Richter found it difficult to appreciate the visual complexity and the musical processes of the score simultaneously, but Reich always intended his score for 14 instruments (pairs of flutes, oboes, clarinets, vibraphones and pianos, with string quartet) to have an independent life in the concert hall, too.
