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Listening Report- Steve Reich’s “It’s Gonna Rain”

 

Steve Reich is considered one of the most important musicians of all times, since he is the inventor of the so-called minimalism. Despite that, this piece seems to belong to the generative music, that is a kind of music, which is not a finished product of a genius, but something put in motion that creates itself. The main feature of the generative music are the lack of a defined beginning and end and an apparent lack of control; it’s ever-different and changing, created by a system.

This piece consists entirely of a tape recording made in 1964 at San Francisco's Union Square. In the recording, a Pentecostal preacher, Brother Walter, rails about the end of the world, while accompanying background noises, including the sound of a pigeon taking flight, are heard. The phrase "It's Gonna Rain" is repeated and eventually looped throughout the first half of the piece.

Variation and repetition are the key words I would use to proceed to the interpretation of this piece. It doesn’t deal with a particularly evocative or emotional piece, but Reich decided to exploit what is known as phase shifting, where all possible repeated harmonies are explored before the two loops eventually get back in sync. What impresses me the most about this piece is the fact that it looks like a remix, in a period in which remix wasn’t invented and explored yet. A simple phrase is taken and transformed into something new, into a whole song with an unpredictable and catchy rhythm, that represents an important explorative step towards the invention of the modern music and new sounds. When I first heard that, I thought “What is this?”, but then I realized that without these kinds of experimental sounds, there wouldn’t have been new genres of music, which we appreciate and look at today.

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