Steve Reich

By the mid-seventies Steve Reich had been through several major labels and none of them had known what to do with him. Record Collector put it plainly in its assessment of these albums: a run of prestigious companies had handled his career without success, marketing departments unable to place music built from repeating percussive cycles that owed as much to Balinese gamelan and Ghanaian drumming as to anything European.

Then Music for 18 Musicians. Reich and his ensemble recorded it in 1976, shortly after the Town Hall premiere, with Deutsche Grammophon's Rudolf Werner producing. DG left it on the shelf. By ECM's own account it was Manfred Eicher who pulled the tapes out of the DG archive and issued the record in 1978, on a label known for European jazz, at a moment when nobody would have predicted a minimalist score selling in those numbers. The New York Times review at the time reached for two words that stuck: shimmering, hypnotic. David Bowie later described it as Balinese gamelan cross-dressing as minimalism, which is closer to the truth than most of what has been written about it since.

The second ECM album (1980) collects Octet, Music for a Large Ensemble and Violin Phase. The last of these dates from 1967 and belongs to the tape-loop years, so the record runs backwards through its own material, ending where Reich started. Tehillim (1982) is the outlier and the turning point: settings of Hebrew psalms for four female voices and ensemble, conducted by George Manahan, the piece where melody returns to Reich's writing and where his study of Jewish liturgical cantillation enters the work directly. He moved to Nonesuch afterwards and never recorded for ECM again.

The three albums are reproduced here as facsimile sleeves in a card box, cut from the original analogue masters in a fully analogue chain and carrying the AAA designation. The booklet holds archive photographs, manuscript pages and an essay by Paul Griffiths.

Fifteen years of work, from the phasing experiments to the psalms, and the fifty years since Music for 18 Musicians was first performed in April 1976. Reich is ninety this October, and the piece is being staged this autumn by three generations of players at once.

3LP box set.