Come Out (Reich)

Come Out is a 1966 piece by American composer Steve Reich. He was asked to write this piece to be performed at a benefit for the retrial of the Harlem Six, six black youths arrested for committing a murder during the Harlem Riot of 1964 for which only one of the six was responsible. Truman Nelson, a civil rights activist and the person who had asked Reich to compose the piece, gave him a collection of tapes with recorded voices to use as source material. Nelson, who chose Reich on the basis of his earlier work It's Gonna Rain, agreed to give him creative freedom for the project.

Analysis

Reich eventually used the voice of Daniel Hamm, one of the boys involved in the riots but not responsible for the murder; he was nineteen at the time of the recording. At the beginning of the piece, he says, "I had to, like, open the bruise up, and let some of the bruise blood come out to show them" (alluding to how Hamm had punctured a bruise on his own body to convince police that he had been beaten). The police had not previously wanted to deal with Hamm's injuries, since he did not appear seriously wounded.

Reich re-recorded the fragment "come out to show them" on two channels, which initially play in unison. They quickly slip out of sync to produce a phase shifting effect, characteristic of Reich's early works. Gradually, the discrepancy widens and becomes a reverberation and, later, almost a canon. The two voices then split into four, looped continuously, then eight, until the actual words are unintelligible. The listener is left with only the rhythmic and tonal patterns of the spoken words. Reich says in the liner notes of his album Early Works of using recorded speech as source material that "by not altering its pitch or timbre, one keeps the original emotional power that speech has while intensifying its melody and meaning through repetition and rhythm." The piece is a prime example of process music.

In dance, the piece was used in 1982 by the Belgian choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker as part of one of her seminal works, Fase, which became a cornerstone of contemporary dance.

References in other recordings

References

  1. ↑ From Straight to Bizarre - Zappa, Beefheart, Alice Cooper and LA's Lunatic Fringe, DVD, 2012
  2. ↑ Saucier, Mark. "Moonlight On Vermont". The Captain Beefheart Radar Station. www.beefheart.com. Retrieved 22 June 2012.
  3. ↑ Camper Van Beethoven hooks up with fans St. Petersburg Times, 20 January 2005
  4. ↑ Dixon, Steffi, Nicolas Jaar, Ben UFO and Omar-S mark our 500th podcast
  5. ↑ Shanley, Mike. "DEDICATED TO PAINTING, NOT THE PAINTER: Doug Gillard". Blurt Magazine. blurtonline.com. Retrieved 8 February 2016.

External links

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