Overview

"Described by music critic Alex Ross as ""the most original musical thinker of our time"" and having received innumerable accolades in a career spanning over fifty years, composer Steve Reich is considered by many to be America's greatest contemporary composer. His music, however, remains largely underresearched. Rethinking Reich redresses this imbalance, providing a space for prominent and emerging scholars to reassess the composer's contribution to music in the twentieth century. Featuring fourteen tightly focused and multifarious essays on various aspects of Reich's work--ranging from analytical, aesthetic, and archival studies to sociocultural, philosophical, and ethnomusicological reflections--this edited volume reveals new insights, including those enabled by access to the growing Steve Reich Collection at the Paul Sacher Foundation archive, the premier institution for primary research on twentieth-century and contemporary classical music. This volume takes on the timely task of challenging the hegemony of Reich's own articulate and convincing discourses on his music, as found in his Writings on Music (OUP, 2002), and breaks new ground in the broader field of minimalism studies."

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9780190605285

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A book-length study of Steve Reich is long overdue, particularly one that critically and creatively engages his work - as this book does, from the title onward - beyond the bounds of the composer's own exegeses. The contributors' varied approaches constitute some the most exciting and insightful voices in contemporary music scholarship, commensurate with Reich's own complicated intersections with diverse musics, methods, and media. And because of Reich's ubiquity within contemporary art music as well as his eclectic inroads into popular culture, this volume will likely find its way onto the shelves of musicians, scholars, and fans alike. * Jeremy Grimshaw, Associate Dean, BYU College of Fine Arts and Communications, author of Draw a Straight Line and Follow It: The Music and Mysticism of La Monte Young * This volume 'rethinks Reich' both by drawing substantially on unexplored archive materials, and by approaching Reich's varied output from original and unexpected cultural perspectives. It represents a major contribution both to our understanding of Steve Reich and to the broader fields of post-1960 experimental and postmodern music. * Robert Adlington, Professor of Contemporary Music, University of Huddersfield *

Specialists in the arts or in cultural studies will appreciate this excellent collection ...Recommended * CHOICE * This volume 'rethinks Reich' both by drawing substantially on unexplored archive materials, and by approaching Reich's varied output from original and unexpected cultural perspectives. It represents a major contribution both to our understanding of Steve Reich and to the broader fields of post-1960 experimental and postmodern music. * Robert Adlington, Professor of Contemporary Music, University of Huddersfield * A book-length study of Steve Reich is long overdue, particularly one that critically and creatively engages his work — as this book does, from the title onward — beyond the bounds of the composer's own exegeses. The contributors' varied approaches constitute some the most exciting and insightful voices in contemporary music scholarship, commensurate with Reich's own complicated intersections with diverse musics, methods, and media. And because of Reich's ubiquity within contemporary art music as well as his eclectic inroads into popular culture, this volume will likely find its way onto the shelves of musicians, scholars, and fans alike. * Jeremy Grimshaw, Associate Dean, BYU College of Fine Arts and Communications, author of Draw a Straight Line and Follow It: The Music and Mysticism of La Monte Young *

Author Information

Pwyll ap Siôn is Professor of Music at Bangor University, Wales. He studied music at Oxford University. Ap Siôn has published books and articles in the areas of minimalist and postminimalist music, quotation and intertextuality in music and minimalist music in film and media. He has contributed record reviews and articles for Gramophone music magazine since 2007. Sumanth Gopinath is Associate Professor of Music Theory at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. He is the author of The Ringtone Dialectic: Economy and Cultural Form (2013), co-edited The Oxford Handbook of Mobile Music Studies, vols. 1 and 2 (2014) with Jason Stanyek, and has published work on Steve Reich, minimalism, new media, Marxism, country music, and other topics. He is the leader of the independent Americana band, The Gated Community.

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