Reich - New York Counterpoint

Reich - New York Counterpoint

Originally for clarinet, this work has become a favourite for saxophone groups and indeed soloists where performed with backing track. The beauty of the opening movement, which references Reich's 'Music for 18 Musicians', pulls in the listener in a way that sometimes ambient electronic music hypnotises and draws one into quite an altered state of mind. Nearly every entry carefully dovetails into the next and the next and the next with seemlessness. There is a rhythmic ambiguity in the second movement that allows the pulsating chords to drift in and out of existence without unsettling the musical flow. It is only the final movement where we really hear 'New York' as cliched busyness, aggression and taxi horns. So different from the tape-pieces, where extreme dissonances and distortions often emerged during the working out of minimalist processes, here the sound of the piece is always settled in recognisable modes and chords. The hocketting of the lower instruments is desperately exciting. The effect of a recording as opposed to a live performance of this work is quite different.