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Listening Report – Steve Reich: It’s Gonna Rain

Steve Reich’s composition “It’s Gonna Rain” was published in 1968 and can be put into the genre of minimal music. The composition itself consists only of the utterance “It’s gonna rain” which is being repeated and played in different speeds.

The composition begins with the speech which ends with the utterance “It’s gonna rain”. The utterance mentioned is being repeated throughout the entire composition in various speeds. By using fast repetition, the listener can start to hear utterances or sounds that differ completely from the original sentence and thus make it hardly understandable. Only through concentrated listening, the listener could be able to keep on hearing the original sentence. I was able to hear a train ride and the noise created by a train while driving on the railroad. This noise can also be interpreted as a rhythm, produced through fast recurrence.

In the beginning of the song, the sentence “It’s gonna rain” was still synchronized with the listener and therefore easily understandable. However, due to the variation in speed, the listener is not able to focus on each repetition and starts to blend the repetitions together which causes the creation of different sounds and utterances for the listener.

During the composition, the composer also switches the focus from the left audio channel to the right, or vice versa. By attentive listening, it is also noticeable that the utterance is also being played on different speeds on the audio channels. The right audio channel appears to repeat the sentence on a slower level than the left audio channel which increases the chance for the listener to create new sounds with the same sentence in different speeds.

This composition can be seen as a part of minimalistic music since it uses the same sound and only modifies it by using different speeds for the sound and thereby creating a completely new composition.
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