City Life (music)
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City Life is a concert work written by composer Steve Reich. It uses digital samplers amongst the instruments used in performance, and these play back a wide variety of sounds and speech samples, mainly recorded by Reich himself in and around his home town of New York. These sounds include car horns, air brakes, car alarms and many other sounds associated with the city.
The recordings also include fragments of speech, some of which have their 'speech melody' performed by the other instruments. A normal element of speech is intonation, and in this work Reich transfers intonational patterns to instrumental melody notation. Reich's first use of this approach is in Different Trains, following the earlier example of Scott Johnson's John Somebody.
