Steve Reich

In the summer of 1970 Steve Reich went to Accra to study Ewe drumming with the master drummer Gideon Alorwoyie at the University of Ghana. He caught malaria and came home early. What he brought back was Drumming, written between the autumn of 1970 and the autumn of 1971, for four pairs of small tuned drums, three marimbas, three glockenspiels, two female voices, piccolo and whistling. It runs eighty-five minutes, works a single rhythmic pattern through gradual phase shifting, and was the last piece in which Reich used the phasing process. K. Robert Schwarz called it minimalism's first masterpiece and the phrase has never really been contested.

This is the Deutsche Grammophon recording, made by Steve Reich and Musicians over three days in January 1974 at the Polydor studios in Hamburg, produced by Rudolf Werner, and issued the same year as the three-LP box DG 2740 106. It was the premiere recording of the complete Drumming, and it was the first time a major classical label committed to Reich at length. Werner would go on to produce Music for 18 Musicians two years later, a recording DG then declined to release and which Manfred Eicher took for ECM.

The personnel is worth reading. Russ Hartenberger, Bob Becker, James Preiss and Glen Velez are the percussionists you would expect. Joan La Barbara and Jay Clayton sing, joined by Janice Jarrett on Music for Mallet Instruments. And on marimba and glockenspiel in the second and fourth parts of Drumming sits Cornelius Cardew, who by 1974 had denounced most of the avant-garde in print and who is the last name anyone expects to find in a Reich ensemble.

The third record holds Six Pianos and Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices and Organ, both written in 1973 and both premiered by the ensemble at the John Weber Gallery in New York. They abandon phasing for the substitution of beats for rests, the technique Reich carried forward into everything after.

For the Original Source series the set has been mastered and cut directly from the original edited four-track tapes for the first time, by Rainer Maillard and Sidney C. Meyer at Emil Berliner Studios, in a fully analogue chain, and pressed at Pallas on 180g virgin vinyl. The 32-page booklet carries session photographs, facsimiles of the recording logs and Reich's own notes, alongside a detailed account by former DG executive David Butchart of how the project came about, drawn from Reich's correspondence with Werner. A separate certificate carries a text by Maillard on the state of the tapes and the decisions taken in mixing and cutting.

Hinged lift-off-lid box, original artwork, numbered limited edition. Out on 2 October 2026, the day before Reich's ninetieth birthday.