Bang on a Can

"I love Steve Reich's piece, Four Organs because it seeks to overthrow all definitions of how traditional music is made," says David Lang. "It was written in the sixties, and the music that was accepted around that time was very brainy, elitist and dense--it had as its premise that there was a hidden knowledge that the audience didn't have. Steve was one of the revolutionary younger composers who rebelled against that. The battleground was mostly about the question of what to do with your ego as the composer. What is the point of having someone listen to your work? Is it for them to think, Oh, that person feels things more acutely than I do, or, that person's brain is bigger than mine? These younger composers said, Maybe the point is: here's an interesting process or an interesting fact about the musical world, and the composer and the audience become equal as they listen to how the process plays out. What you are presented with in the beginning of Four Organs is a complicated sound--it's a beautiful chord, but it's a complicated chord--and the whole piece is a process of lengthening that pulls the chord apart. Steve sets up the argument and watches it unfold. It's like a microscope. Every time the cycle begins again, it is as if you turned on the next highest power of the microscope and you see the chord in just a little more detail. It's complicated, hard to listen to, sophisticated in its own way, yet every listener knows exactly where they are, what the composer's intentions are, what they are supposed to feel."