Clapping Music
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Clapping music is a minimalist piece written by Steve Reich in 1972. It is written for two performers and is performed entirely by clapping.
A development of the phase shifting technique from Reich's earlier works such as Piano Phase, it was written when Reich wanted to (in his own words) "create a piece of music that needed no instruments beyond the human body". However, he quickly found that the mechnism of phasing slowly in and out of tempo with each other was inappropriate for the simple clapping involved in producing the actual sounds that made the music.
Instead of phasing, one performer claps a basic rhythm of 12 quaver beats in length for the entirety of the piece. The other claps the same pattern, but after every 12 bars s/he shifts by a quaver. The two performers continue this until the second performer has shifted 12 quavers and is hence playing the pattern in unison with the first performer again (as at the beginning), some 144 bars later.
In Reich's 1974 book "Writings about Music" there is a picture of the piece being performed at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston, Texas on 13 November 1973.[1]
[edit] External links
[edit] References
- ^ Reich, S. (1974). Pendlum Music. In Writings about Music (pp. 12–13). The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (Co-published by: New York University Press). ISBN 0-919616-02-X
