SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Steve Reich, Drumming and other works: The Colin Currie Group, Synergy Vocals and Rowland Sutherland (piccolo) Town Hall, Birmingham 20.2.2010 (BK)

Clapping Music (5’) (1972)
Nagoya Marimbas (5’) (1994)
Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices and Organ (17’) (1973)
Drumming: (60’) (1971)
Part 1 – Four pairs of tuned bongos
Part 2 – Three marimbas, two female voices
Part 3 – Three glockenspiels, piccolo, whistling
Part 4 – Complete Ensemble

The Colin Currie Group – Colin Currie, Tony Bedewi, Richard Benjafield, Joby Burgess, Adam Clifford, Andrew Cottee, Owen Gunnell, Adrian Spillet, Sam Walton.

Synergy Vocals – Amy Haworth, Heather Cairncross, Micaela Haslam (Director.)

This was an important  and highly enjoyable concert, and an extension to the London performance of  Drumming on February 16th  reviewed  by Carla Rees. It was also the culmination of Birmingham Town Hall's innovative 'Drumming Day' which had included the  Colin Currie Percussion Discovery Family Concert, an event that encouraged local children to explore rhythm and improvisational games with percussion instruments and also to take part in a staged performance of a work for nine drums by the Danish composer Per Norgaard. If the children gained half  as much pleasure from the family concert as the adult audience did in the evening, then the day must have a been a towering success.

The Colin Currie Group was formed in 2006 when Colin Currie was asked by the BBC Proms' organisers to produce a late-night event to celebrate  music by Steve Reich who was then in his 70th year. Since then, the ensemble of young percussionists has devoted itself to further Reich performances, particularly of Drumming, a work that Currie disarmingly describes as both 'tricky' and 'needing a special set of skills.'  These are  massive understatements by any reckoning: watching  four people with eight beaters play complex and rapid passages faultlessly on a single marimba or glockenspiel  - while accompanied by up to nine other musicians - came across more like something superhuman.

The programme was particularly elegantly constructed with four carefully sequenced pieces of increasing complexity, illustrating the development of Reich's famous 'phasing' technique. Beginning with the now legendary Clapping Music, a  piece designed in 1972 to be played by two pairs of human hands, the concert introduced  'phasing' in  its simplest form  - if simplest is ever the right word for Reich  -  and went on successively to add more instruments and voices before ending with a  tour de force performance of the hour long Drumming. Clapping Music has a twelve beat rhythm based the West African  'bell pattern' delivered by two musicians, one of whom maintains the same rhythm through the whole piece. After several repetitions, the second 'player' jumps one beat ahead  and starts looping the rhythm from its second beat alongside the original version. After several more repetitions, the second player jumps forward  by a further beat and repeats the process until  all  twelve  jumps forward have been completed so that the players are eventually synchronised again, returning to their original unison. After more than thirty years since Clapping Music was composed, it remains a  stunning piece- the auditory equivalent of an optical illusion - in which the listener becomes increasingly beguiled by ever shifting surges of sound made up of the intricate patterns arising from harmonics of the basic hand claps as well as the fundamentals. In his programme note, Colin Currie says that Clapping Music is a concert piece that anyone can try at home since it only takes five minutes to perform. Well, maybe: if  you can count three against two against six in your head while one of you remembers when to make the jumps forward, that is.

Although out of date order in terms of its composition,  Nagoya Marimbas  for two instruments and two players, was the perfect choice for introducing the audience to the use of  melody as well as rhythm within Reich's phasing technique. This time,  as well as moving the players apart rhythmically, Reich writes variations and embellishments to his interesting melodic lines with  truly fascinating results. Never heavy-textured or hard to follow despite its furious cascades of notes, this is also deceptively subtle music full of luminous transparency, that reveals  an easily  discernible, intelligent and complicated  structure. It is named after the city of  Nagoya in Japan where it  was first performed.

Clapping Music,  Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices and Organ (1973)  and the first part of Drumming were the only pieces in this programme that I had heard live before -  in a concert by Reich's own band 'Steve Reich and Musicians' about 30 years ago in London. By comparison with recordings  - also by Reich's band - and unreliably distant memories of the live performance, I found Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices and Organ much louder than I was used to, at least at first. This was a minor quibble however and after a short period of adjustment, I was able to settle down to what proved to be a riveting  account of one of my favourite Reich pieces. The Colin Currie Group was joined by three women  members of Synergy Vocals, whose contribution with chirupping bird-like sounds and something like quiet scat-singing added a texturally apt extra dimension to the repetitive soft organ chords which are the foundation for much of the music. To my mind, Music for Mallet Instruments is Reich at his most meditative, lulling the listener into a seventeen minute long reverie in which interest never flags because of  the colours added by  marimbas, metallophones and glockenspiels as well as the skilled key and time signature changes between each of the work's four movements. This is music of lasting pleasure so far as I am concerned and it was a real privilege to hear it in live performance for only the second time.

And so to Drumming itself, surely one of the greatest examples of 'minimalism' ever devised: except that minimal, it is not. From the accelerating 'train journeys' of Parts One and Two, by way of  the ethereal glockenspiels, piccolo and whistling in Part Three through to Part Four's breathless gallop for the whole ensemble, this is a work of considerable grandeur. Fusing all of Reich's early interests, jazz music, his studies with the Ghanaian drummer Gideon Alorwoyie, influences from the likes Berio, Milhaud, Morton Subotnick and Terry Riley,  and even his undergraduate studies in philosophy to greater or lesser extent, Drumming is a remarkable and  enduring achievement.

'The world is all that is the case,' wrote the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, the subject of Steve Reich's BA thesis,' and 'Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must keep silence.' Paradoxically, it  may be  the carefully placed and  deliberate silences in Reich's music as much as his phased rhythms and melodic manipulations that lead listeners to hear notes and melodies that may or may not 'really' be there - the 'sounds between the sounds' as the Bang On A Can All Stars ensemble have described them according to James Murphy's excellent programme notes for this concert. In a sense, Reich's music shows us how to perceive 'the world' more clearly than many other composers while Colin Currie's contribution  was to gather musicians  together who showed us a little more of Reich himself than is sometimes  apparent. A superb concert then, played with apparently effortless ease by a truly wonderful group of young and highly talented musicians.

Bill Kenny

Footnote:  I realise that I am older than I once was and so must adjust to fashion, but while I have become accustomed to people talking through operatic overtures and even singing along to the tunes in 'Carmen' this concert provided some of us present with a completely new kind of distraction. Not one,  but actually two middle-aged couples near me spent the evening indulging themselves energetically in what I can best describe tactfully as displays of  'consensual frotteurism.' I wouldn't have minded quite so much if their vigorous caressing  had been in time with the music but then, as Colin Currie pointed out, Drumming can be tricky to perform.