Steve Reich, Béla Faragó, András Soós

Featuring: Group 180

condition (record/cover): NM / EX   With original innersleeve.

Two years after their debut Hungaroton LP - which placed Steve Reich and Frederic Rzewski alongside original compositions by group members - Group 180 returned to the studio in March 1985 to record their second album. The arc of the program is more concentrated here, and in some ways more revealing: two Reich works bookend two pieces by ensemble members, the American and Hungarian minimalists in direct adjacency without editorial comment.

Reich's Piano Phase (1967) is the work that established the phasing principle as a compositional method - two pianists playing the same repeating figure at marginally different tempos, the relationship between them slowly shifting through all possible phase relationships over the course of the performance. Octet (1979, here in an arrangement by Tibor Szemző) expands the method to a larger ensemble, the textures building and dissolving in the characteristic tidal motion. Between them, Béla Faragó's A Pók Halála + Sírfelirat (Death of the Spider + Epitaph, 1983) and András Soós's Duett (1985) show what Hungarian composers who had absorbed the American example were now doing with it - less as imitation than as the beginning of a conversation about what process music could mean in a different cultural context.

The political dimension of Group 180's activities had not diminished by 1985. Playing Reich in Budapest was still a statement. The music continues to make it plainly. Original Hungaroton pressing, with liner notes in Hungarian, English, and German.