Album of the day (#4118): Music For 18 Musicians

[albummaster]

Today's album of the day

Music For 18 Musicians by Steve Reich (View album | Buy this album)

Year: 1978.
Country:
Overall rank: 590
Average rating: 83/100 (from 274 votes).

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Tracks:
1. Pulse - Sections I - IV
2. Sections V - X - Pulse

About album of the day: The BestEverAlbums.com album of the day is the album appearing most prominently in member charts in the previous 24 hours. If an album, or artist, has previously been selected within a x day period, the next highest album is picked instead (and so on) to ensure a bit of variety. A full history of album of the day can be viewed here.

[DommeDamian]

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[rostasi]

Tho I have a some issues with Reich,
this album certainly not only introduced a
lot of people who would normally shy away
from minimalism as a musical category but
in some ways shined a light and added some
soft-focus to traditional gamelan music
(especially Balinese) for these same folks.

I was at the Chicago premiere of this work and
you could be easily entranced by its shifting
textures and timbres being performed by a
stage arrangement that was more in-line with a
“traditional” concert setup. Aurally, and somewhat
compositionally, it’s a decent work that pole-vaulted
him to some extra notoriety, but since I’m more a fan
of his earlier work (mainly because it was more
auricularly challenging), I kind of feel that his later
compositions are pallid means of extending his modern
music celebrity. Phil Glass rubs me the same way.

[EyeKanFly]

[rostasi]

Well, of course, this is just my preference when it comes to his work,
so YMMV when it comes to the whole of his output. I think when he
said about … 18 Musicians that it had more harmonic movement in
the first 5 minutes than in any other work of his up to that time, it was
definitely something that not only gave him a sense of satisfaction with
dealing with the movement of the 11 chords that make up the basis of
the work, but it raised his notoriety primarily because it was more
audience-friendly than his works before that.

I remember winning a copy of the ECM LP of Octet, …Large Ensemble
and Violin Phase and when I put it on the turntable, I was kind of
disappointed that two of the three were kind of milquetoast while the
newly recorded version of Violin Phase was nice to hear. It was pretty
clear that this was the area that he was going in and wanted to stay
rather than continually searching out for the something fresh.
So, yes, pretty much everything before this era is the stuff I’ve always
found more interesting aurally. Even his ’74 book, Writings About Music
(not to be confused with his later, Writings On Music - sheesh, the guy
even names his book as a variation ) is an interesting read from that time.

If you found Come Out difficult, then, I'd say, that you just may be better off staying
with his post-70s work and avoid the dozen or so works before the above recording came out.