Event overview
'"It's Gonna Shine": new light on Reich's source materials for It's Gonna Rain’
As part of the Department of Music's PureGold season, we present Keith Potter (Reader in Music, Goldsmiths) and John Pymm (Dean of Faculty of Arts, University of Wolverhampton), who will give a paper on Steve Reich's source materials for It's Gonna Rain’.
Talks begin at 5pm, and are followed by a Q&A session over drinks.
All welcome, not just for graduates.
Steve Reich’s tape composition, It’s Gonna Rain (1965), is now regarded as a seminal contribution to musical minimalism: among other things, the origin of its composer’s key technique of phasing, used in the majority of his works between 1965 and 1971.
The source materials of It’s Gonna Rain, now available at the Paul Sacher Stiftung in Basel, Switzerland, make possible an entirely new kind of interpretative strategy for examining this work’s significance. The presenters of this paper are privileged to be the first scholars to make these materials public; here, they offer some preliminary analysis of the documents, touching on just a few of the broader implications of narrativity that are prompted as a consequence.
The source materials themselves are twofold: audio and manuscript. Around 36 minutes of reel-to-reel tape ‘field’ recordings survive, evidently edited down by Reich from more extensive materials. Second, there are a total of nineteen pages of handwritten sketches, which may be divided into three categories. In addition to presenting a detailed description and evaluation of the significance of the audio materials, including the playing of several examples from these tapes, this paper focuses on just one of these three categories of handwritten sketches: three MSS pages transcribing sections of Walter’s ‘street sermon’ using musical notation.
This discussion is followed by some contextualization, both biographical and historical, of the material examined. Our discussion is located within the recent debates around this work that might be described variously as Africanist, counter-cultural, political (Cold War), biographical and religious. We conclude by attempting to chart the likely shape and characteristics of an entirely fresh interpretation of the work that draws new lifeblood from this evidence.
Keith Potter studied at the University of Birmingham, University College Cardiff and the University of York. Dissertations on Roberto Gerhard and Morton Feldman, plus several published articles on these composers, have been followed by a range of research and publications covering many different areas of contemporary music, with a particular emphasis on British and American work. Scholarship has been extensively supplemented with reviewing for many magazines, journals and newspapers. He was the co-founder and, for seventeen years, Chief Editor of Contact: a Journal of Contemporary Music , and for ten years a regular music critic on The Independent daily newspaper.
His present research work includes books on the American composers Earle Brown and Steve Reich, and collaboration with colleagues from the Departments of Computing and Psychology at Goldsmiths, and from the Department of Electronic Engineering at Queen Mary College, University of London, in a project on information and neural dynamics in the perception of musical structure, including particular reference to minimalist musical compositions.
From 2004 to 2007, he was Head of the Department of Music at Goldsmiths and also a member of College Council. From 2006 he has been on the Advisory Council of the Institute of Musical Research in the School of Advanced Study, University of London, and from 2007 on the Goldsmiths Honorary Degrees and Fellowships Committee. From 2007 he has been a founding committee member of the Society for Minimalist Music.
John Pymm has an impressive international profile, borne of three decades of experience in the arts. A graduate of the University of Birmingham, he also holds a postgraduate teaching qualification from Cardiff University and a taught Master’s degree from the University of Exeter. His MPhil thesis was supervised at the University of London School of Advanced Study by Professor Peter Dickinson and consists of an analytical exploration of Steve Reich’s Tehillim. John’s doctoral thesis was supervised by Professor David Nichols at the University of Southampton and is entitled Narrative Trails in the Speech-Based Music of Steve Reich.
A respected scholar in the music of American composer Steve Reich, John is a founder member of the Society for Minimalist Music, and was, in October 2013, elected as its President at the Society’s Fourth International Conference hosted jointly by UCLA and CalState University, Long Beach, California. Based on his doctoral and post-doctoral research at the Paul Sacher Stiftung in Basel, Switzerland, John has delivered papers at a number of international conferences and is, most recently, a contributor to The Ashgate Research Companion to Minimalist and Post-Minimalist Music (Ashgate, 2013).
John is Dean of the Faculty of Arts, University of Wolverhampton.
All welcome, not just for graduates!
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 20 May 2014 | 5:00pm - 7:00pm |
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