The pulse of Steve Reich's work lends itself ideally to translating the atmosphere of a metropolis into music.
Street noise
For City Life Steve Reich took to the streets to record the sounds of New York. Conversations, car horns and alarms, a pile driver, slamming doors, as well as the beating of a heart. Played on samplers, these form the foundation of Reich's paean to the city in a concert in which he takes centre stage. He conjures up New York, in its unflappable vastness and its hecticness.
Pulse rate is also the basis for Double Sextet. It was actually written for an ensemble playing against a recording of itself, but is performed here by two identical instrument groups operating as twins throwing the music back and forth to each other. The rhythms of the two parts interlock in fast and slow dances.
New work by Tansy Davies
Tansy Davies, former Composer in Residence at The Concertgebouw, wrote Canopies of Liquid Light commissioned by Asko|Schönberg. She decided that her work would be a counterpart to City Life. Like Reich, she was inspired by what she observed in the environment, her surroundings, however, were quite different. Davies stayed in the south of France while composing. "I was surrounded by trees, but the sunlight was incredibly bright," she says. "At the time, I was reading a lot about solar flares and quantum physics, and it occurred to me that music and light are part of all these invisible forces around us." Davies gives musical form to the invisible forces of the cosmos.
Programme
Steve Reich
Double Sextet
City Life
Tansy Davies
Canopies of Liquid Light - world premiere commissioned by Asko|Schönberg
Asko|Schönberg mmv students Conservatorium van Amsterdam
Clark Rundell conductor
Þ City Life - Asko Schoenberg (askoschoenberg.nl) Thu 18 Apr - 20:15, Muziekgebouw, Amsterdam
English (UK) 
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