What is the story?

Three Movements is one of the many Steve Reich pieces that do what they say on the tin. Other no-nonsense titles include Drumming, Four Organs and Music for 18 Musicians. Here, the ‘three movements’ take the form fast–slow–fast and run as a continuous whole.

What’s the music like?

The first movement slowly builds up a texture of multilayered pulsing strands, which seem to glint with different highlights as the harmonies shift. The pulse might be regular (equally spaced notes) or, later, more angular, but the fast repetition of notes contrasts with the slowly shifting harmonies.

The more melodic, slower second movement is taken from Reich’s then-recent Sextet (1985), but whereas there the intertwining lines were taken by synthesisers, here the spotlight falls on oboes and clarinets, supported by violins. Adding to the balletic feel is the mellow, sensual strain of the vibraphones that feel like a comping (strumming) jazz-style electric guitar. By the end of the movement, the vibes have shifted into the foreground.

The percussive core group picks up the speed to lead off the third movement, which borrows from Reich’s Sextet as well as New York Counterpoint (also 1985). Reich plays on the ambiguous division of twelve beats into three groups of four or four groups of three. Towards the end, he uses the medieval technique of the ‘mensuration canon’, in which the same melody is heard in more than one voice simultaneously, but at different speeds.

What is the story?

Premiered in Los Angeles by tonight’s conductor, Susanna Mälkki, Music for Ensemble and Orchestra appeared more than 30 years after Three Movements, but shares with it the idea of the two contrasting groups, harking back to the Baroque concerto grosso.

What’s the music like?

Whereas a concerto grosso usually has three movements (running fast–slow–fast, as in Three Movements), here Reich adopted a palindromic five-movement form – ABCBA. He also used this form in Runner. This was an idea that reflects back to his studies at the Juilliard School in New York around the turn of the 1960s, when he was avidly studying Béla Bartók’s Fourth and Fifth String Quartets.

Again, the movements run without a break, but the junctures are more clearly defined by downward shifts of tempo towards the central movement, before shifting back up the gears after the halfway point.

With its pulsing rhythms and soundworld that draws in two vibraphones, two pianos and an electric bass, we hear some similarities with Three Movements, but the Music for Ensemble and Orchestra is more conversational and the shifts in harmony or melodic patterning more discernible. This was Reich’s first piece for orchestra since The Four Sections nearly 30 years earlier, and there’s both freedom and joy in it.

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