Name: Steve Reich on His Music for Ensemble and Orchestra
Uploaded: 2020-04-04T06:14:44.000Z
Duration: 2 min 35 s
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Steve Reich: We were out in Los Angeles visiting our son, which we do every

January, February, and March. And I went to the  LA Phil, for I don't remember what,

Adverbs of degree

and I'm looking — I've been asked to write an orchestra piece. I'm really an ensemble person.

I've been doing that for years and years and years.

So I'm looking at the orchestra, and I see  there's two firsts,

two seconds, and they're in a horseshoe, and right behind them are the

principal winds. Orchestras set up a certain way, and I realized the orchestra

is set up so if I just add two vibes and two pianos, there I am. I'm

back at my usual kind of ensemble, and particularly the exact same

one as "Runner," the exact same orchestration.

The subtitle of Music for Ensemble and Orchestra should be "Runner 2"!

It's surprising; people say, "Is there something similar about those pieces?"

The album should be called "Two of a Kind."

There is another background, which is that concertos as we think of them now

are based on the 19th-century concerto: concerto for violin, for piano (and then other people, but

primarily those two), but in the Baroque era it wasn't that

way at all. There would be a group of soloists, and the Bach Brandenburgs are

about that. The Fifth is about the flute and the harpsichord, which does double duty;

sometimes it's in the ripieno, sometimes it's a soloist. The harpsichord solo in

the Fifth Brandenburg is one of the high points in music for me —

the whole first movement. And it begins, as you know, with a broken D major chord:

not arpeggio passages, in Music for Ensemble and Orchestra —

[singing] da-da dee-da da-da.  da-da da-da da-da-da... —

and their various modes and whatnot, and they work. I've never dealt with

So, it's kind of a tip of the hat [to Bach].

The bottom line is that when I went off to

LA for the LA Phil to do — so I went out there feeling "I don't know what to expect."

But it really worked. And my basic idea that the seating would

accommodate ensemble playing, A because they're seated right, and B because that's what they do —

sure enough, they could do it all. Piece of cake.

So that's what it is: Music for Ensemble and Orchestra.

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Steve Reich on His Music for Ensemble and Orchestra

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