steve reich, pops walker, and me (pt. 1)

Some time ago, I met two musical gurus in a single day.

Leaving a Quiznos sandwich shop in Harrisonburg, Virginia after completely failing to move the conversation with the girl behind the counter beyond “peppers? Lettuce? Dressing?,” I noticed a flier on the wall. “JAMES MADISON UNIVERSITY ANNUAL CONTEMPORARY MUSIC FESTIVAL,” it read; “STEVE REICH, ‘Our nation’s most important living composer’ – The New York Times.” I did a double take. For those of you not familiar with recent classical music, Reich is indeed a giant. He was an early experimenter with tape music, was one of the original architects of the minimalist movement (along with Philip Glass and La Monte Young), and has continued since then to create a corpus of music that not infrequently lends him monikers like “our nation’s most important living composer.” I first seriously encountered his music through an interest in Africa; much of the mechanics for his own compositions are drawn directly out of the same West African percussion traditions that attracted me so magnetically in college.

During the early 70s, Reich took a trip across the Atlantic and studied with Gideon Alorworye at the University of Ghana, Legon. Ironically, I encountered this same ensemble three decades later during my own travels. Every day, Alorworye and the Ghana Dance Ensemble would play their music with Reich, and every night, the composer would return to his room to transcribe the rhythms into Western notation. “Several repeating patterns of the same or related lengths and each with its own separate down beat” is “in simplified miniature… the essence of African rhythmic structure,” Reich later reported. (Gahu, 32) It might be worth glancing at one of the pieces Reich might have encountered to see what he’s talking about.

Agbekor originates from modern Benin, from which the Anlo Ewe people migrated. It was a violent trek, as the Anlo fought through hostile country in search of a peaceful place to settle. It’s comprised of several different interlocking rhythmic lines, many of which, as Reich highlights, feature downbeats different from the other parts. To discuss them, I’m going to have to use some musical jargon, so bear with me here. The part that dictates and directs the others is the gankogui, a sort of double bell. Its rhythm, pictured to the left, is at the heart of Agbekor. Notated in 12/8, it features both elements of duple and triple subdivision. If you’re not sure what that means, draw a line straight down the middle of the music above. You’ll notice that the stuff to the left implies a feeling of three (try thumping it out with your hands – dum da, da da! You’ll hear two strong beats among the six total beats, one falling on the “dum,” one falling on the rest. These divide the section into a pair of three beats each – triple subdivision). The stuff to the right, on the other hand, feels like it should be played in twos (each of those eighth notes feels like an offbeat to a silent strong beat occurring in those eighth rests; there are three strong beats among six total beats, dividing the section into twos – duple subdivision).

Taken altogether, the rhythm in this measure is very ambiguous. Over a total period of 12/8, the first half feels like three, and the second half feels like two. However, the next instrument in the ensemble – the axatse, a beaded gourd that produces a fantastically loud rattle – undercuts the duple part of that equation. The axatse goes through a wide range of variations throughout the dance, but they’re pretty much all based off the simplest incarnation (pictured to the right). It shares a downbeat with the gankogui pattern but heavily emphasis the three subdivisions a regular pulse of three eighth notes each.

The smallest drum in the ensemble, the kaganu, is similar in many ways to the axatse. It suggests a similar rhythm by playing each beat the axatse leaves silent; take them together, and you get the oom-pa-pa triplets of a waltz. However, if you take it out of context from the axatse, you never have a strong downbeat. On its own, you probably wouldn’t hear those rests as downbeats. Instead you’d hear something like the second model in 3/8.

So with all these threes, what are we to do with the twos implied by the gankogui? The next drum, the kidi, is traditionally the most independent and soloistic of the drums. At first glance, it appears to strengthen the sense of three promoted by the kaganu, but like the axatse, it also introduces a new downbeat and meter. The music to the left represents the kidi pattern within the context of the gankogui’s 12/8. On its own, however, the part is better understood in a 3/4 bar and occupying its own downbeat, as pictured to the left. What results are a new downbeat added to the mix and a new meter that with three eighth notes and three eighth rests surfs the line between the already ambiguous twos and threes of the 12/8 bar.

To perfect this ambiguity, the kolobotdzi adds a third distinct downbeat and reinforces the sense of twos. Pictured to the right, the klobotodzi falls on the third eighth note of the gankogui’s 12/8, and, like the kidi, occurs twice within the gankogui’s cycle. Also sharing with the gankogui a distinct downbeat and greater degree of interior rhythmic certainty, the klobotodzi on its own is also best understood in 3/4 (pictured below the original model).

The last drum, the totodzi, exhibits the simplest pattern. Pictured to the left, it is an extremely sparse texture, but is important for several reasons. First, it reemphasizes the third eighth note as a new downbeat. Second, it strengthens the sense of duple subdivisions. Third and most importantly, it is the only drum to share one full iteration with the gankogui; a full cycle of each other drum is set into a smaller but related durations (two cycles of klobotodzi and kidi per one cycle of gankogui; four of kidi). This lends much-needed support to the dance’s overall 12/8 period, compromised by the myriad shorter patterns layered on top of it and the gankogui’s own two distinct halves (three downbeats followed by three offbeats).

What results is a polyrhythmic dance of the utmost elegance and economy. Pictured to the right in a score set to the gankogui’s 12/8, the overall structure emerges. If we think in terms of Reich’s definition of African rhythmic structures – “several repeating patterns of the same or related lengths and each with its own separate down beat” – we see that two instruments each occupy three different downbeats, all separated by an eighth note. Besides the basic structural satisfaction of such consistency, it is significant that in 12/8, a meter defined by its capacity to be divided into either twos or threes, there are three different downbeats, each being stated by two instruments each. Similarly, two instruments emphasize the triple subdivisions of 12/8 (axatse and kaganu), and two instruments emphasize the duple subdivisions (totodzi and klobotodzi). Of the remaining two instruments, one is entirely ambiguous (kidi), amenable to iteration in either two or three. The last, the gankogui, the source and heart of the entire dance, is both. It has two halves; the first suggests three, the second suggests two. It seems that the Anlo Ewe, finding only violent conflict around them, constructed a music of the utmost symmetry, elegance and inner peace.

Now imagine Reich encountering this music for the first time, drumming in some sweaty outdoor classroom in West Africa. Upon transcribing one full variation of a dance, he would presumably produce a score much like the one displayed above. It is surely no coincidence that parts of the above score closely resemble scores of Reich’s own music. Let’s think about one of Reich’s simplest and most ubiquitous pieces, Clapping Music. All of the material of this work consists of a single measure. One performer claps it out, over and over and over again, while a second performer claps a version of it that moves an eighth note after every few repeats. A visualization of the moving part is pictured below:

In the first measure, you see the basic rhythm; in the second, it moves over an eighth note, in the second, another one, and so one. The interest derives from the interlocking polyrhythms created by the two parts played together. Eventually, the parts line up again and the piece is finished. Reich called this process “phasing,” and it forms the basis of a huge swath of his output; most of his early pieces like Clapping Music, Piano Phase, Violin Phase and Drumming are bare articulations of the phasing process, and his later music would continue to employ it along with other devices. More than almost any other composer I can think of, Reich uses a single flagship musical device, and it is phasing.

This process is drawn straight from the multiple downbeats evident in agbekor. Clapping Music in particular resembles agbekor very closely. For one, both pieces are in a form of 12/8, and the body of each piece is spent determining ways to subdivide those 12 beats. But here’s the really cool thing, the thing that really shows how a ton of Reich’s music is drawn almost directly out of West Africa. If we read down the score of agbekor vertically rather than horizontally, we see an exact copy in reverse of the phase process outlined in Clapping Music. In fact, if we were to replace agbekor’s myriad rhythmic patterns with the single one from Clapping Music and read the score from bottom to top, you’d have an exact replica of the piece. Reich’s structural trope is to alter the patterns of Ewe music (in the case of Clapping Music, reduce it to a single pattern and extend its downbeats across every possible pulse) and read the score vertically instead of horizontally.