Walker Art Center and The Schubert Club present
Ensemble Signal Plays Steve Reich:
Reich Richter Runner
Thursday, March 23, 2023
7:00 pm & 9:30 pm
McGuire Theater
PROGRAM
Steve Reich: Runner (2016)
Minnesota Premiere
Steve Reich: Reich / Richter (2019)
Minnesota Premiere
Performed with the film Moving Picture (946-3)
by Gerhard Richter and Corinna Belz
ENSEMBLE SIGNAL
Brad Lubman, Conductor
Paul Coleman, Sound Director
Courtney Orlando, Violin 1
Darian Donovan Thomas, Violin 2
Will Knuth, Violin 4
Ari Streisfeld, Violin 3
Isabel Hagen, Viola 1
Molly Goldman, Viola 2
Lauren Radnofsky, Cello 1
Arlen Hlusko, Cello 2
Greg Chudzik, Double Bass
Emlyn Johnson, Flute 1
Jessica Schmitz, Flute 2
Adrián Sandí, Clarinet 1
Ken Thomson, Clarinet 2
Michelle Farah, Oboe 1
Erin Lensing, Oboe 2
Oliver Hagen, Piano 1 (Reich/Richter); Piano 2 (Runner)
David Friend, Piano 2 (Riech/Richter); Piano 1 (Runner)
Doug Perkins, Vibes 1 (Reich/Richter); Vibes 2 (Runner)
Carson Moody, Vibes 2 (Reich/Richter); Vibes 1 (Runner)
Signal Team
Brad Lubman, Co-Artistic/Music Director
Lauren Radnofsky, Co-Artistic/Executive Director
Erin Lensing, Project Management Assistant
Runner is commissioned by Royal Opera House Covent Garden; Ensemble Signal through New Music USA's Commissioning Music/USA program, made possible by generous support from the Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust, the Ford Foundation, the Francis Goelet Charitable Lead Trusts, New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, New York State Council on the Arts, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and the Helen F. Whitaker Fund; Cal Performances, University of California, Berkeley; Washington Performing Arts, with the support of the Library of Congress Dina Koston and Roger Shapiro Fund; and Ensemble Modern, with kind support by the City of Frankfurt am Main.
Reich/Richter is commissioned by The Shed, NYC; The Los Angeles Philharmonic Association, Gustavo Dudamel, Music & Artistic Director; Cal Performances, University of California, Berkeley; Barbican Centre and Britten Sinfonia; Philharmonie de Paris; and Oslo Philharmonic.
“Given the Walker’s long history supporting my music, I am pleased to have Reich/Richter and Runner performed there by Ensemble Signal conducted by Brad Lubman, co-presented by the Walker and the Schubert Club. That Richter’s work has also long been in the Walker’s collection only makes our collaboration that much more fitting there.”
–Steve Reich
Ensemble Signal’s History with Steve Reich
Steve Reich has been an essential pillar of Ensemble Signal since our first days, working closely with the ensemble to prepare numerous performances of his work. He even gave us our name: Signal. Through our close collaboration with Steve in performing and recording a significant body of his work for almost a decade, the artists of Ensemble Signal have become central members of the next generation of interpreters of his music. For Signal, Steve is not only a composer whose music we love, he is also a mentor and dearest of colleagues.
Signal strives to honor the traditions of performance and production practices established by both Steve Reich and his own ensemble since the 1970s. We also work to naturally bringing our unique next-generation perspective as an ensemble, which includes many young Americans who have grown up listening to Reich’s work as well as the music it influenced—from pop to classical. Additionally, Signal Music Director Brad Lubman brings with him over 25 years of experience at the forefront of Reich’s music, having recorded, performed and given the world premieres of numerous works by Reich internationally.
Signal’s experience with producing Reich’s music is extensive: Signal has in its core repertoire over 20 works by Reich, and has mounted nearly 30 events involving Reich’s work at venues ranging from Lincoln Center Festival and Carnegie Hall to BIG EARS, have given over 150 performances of work by Reich, and released two Reich recordings on harmonia mundi.
“Ensemble Signal have given many of the best performances of my music I have ever heard.”
–Steve Reich
Composer's Notes
Runner (2016)
Runner, for a large ensemble of winds, percussion, pianos and strings was completed in 2016 and is about 16 minutes in duration. While the tempo remains more or less constant, there are five movements , played without pause, that are based on different note durations. First even sixteenths, then irregularly accented eighths, then a very slowed down version of the standard bell pattern from Ghana, fourth a return to the irregularly accented eighths and finally a return to the sixteenths but now played as pulses by the winds for as long as a breath will comfortably sustain them. The title was suggested by the rapid opening and my awareness that, like a runner, I would have to pace the piece to reach a successful conclusion.
–Steve Reich, 2016
Reich / Richter (2019)
The following is an excerpt from a 2019 interview with Steve Reich by Carol Ann Cheung.
How did this project first come together?
It goes back to 2009. I used to play occasionally with the Frankfurt based Ensemble Modern—Drumming Part 1 and Music for 18 Musicians. Richter was having a show at the Ludwig Museum in Cologne and wanted me to play Drumming Part 1 with members of the ensemble inside the show and to play Music for 18 Musicians at the nearby Cologne Philharmonie, all of which we did. It went extremely well and Richter and I had a chance to meet. We didn’t spend much time together but there was warm, mutual respect and admiration.
Seven years later, in 2016, I heard that he would like to discuss a new project. He suggested meeting at the Marian Goodman Gallery where he shows in New York. We met there and he showed me his Patterns book. It starts with one of his abstract paintings from the '90s. He scanned a photo of the painting into a computer and then cut the scan in half and took each half, cut that in half and two of the four quarters he reversed into mirror images. He then repeated this process of divide, mirror, repeat from half to quarter, eighth, 16th, 32nd, all the way up to 4096th. The net effect is to go from an abstract painting to a series of gradually smaller anthropomorphic “creatures” (since the mirroring produces bilateral symmetry) to still smaller “psychedelic” abstractions to very fine stripes.
Richter said he was making a film of the book together with Corinna Belz and would I consider writing the music? I said it was a very interesting project and that I would like to see some of the film. They sent some and I agreed to compose the score.
Does the film follow the same progression and structure as the Patterns book?
No, in the film, it’s basically the book backwards and considerably less systematic. It starts with the stripes, and then it changes gradually to larger and larger “abstract images” or anthropomorphic “creatures.” The film never gets to the full painting, but it gets close and then it goes gradually back to the stripes. So it’s kind of an arch form.
I know you’ve worked with arch forms in the past. Was that what attracted you to the project?
It was one factor but what really got me involved was the very beginning of the film with the pulsating, color shifting, glowing stripes. Instead of dividing, mirroring, and repeating, the film was multiplying and repeating. In computer terms, the initial stripes were made with 2 pixels. Then they gradually grew to 4, 8, 16, 32, and so on.
Now, just before I started work on this project, I completed two pieces: Runner and Music for Ensemble and Orchestra. Both pieces end with an oscillation between two gradually changing notes played by almost all the instruments. I felt that I wanted to begin a piece with that oscillation, and here the film began with 2 pixels. It was a perfect way to move from the end of my just-completed pieces to the beginning of this project. The structure of the music would be tied to the structure of the film. That was the basic idea.
You’re saying the film and the music are both based on the same structure. How exactly did that work?
The exact timing of the film, as with any film, is measured in standard SMPTE time code. It indicates the exact hour, minute, second, and fraction of a second of the film, and was visible in a window in the lower–right hand corner of the film as I worked with it on my computer. The time code indicates the exact moments where the visuals shift.
As I said before, when the film begins with the 2-pixel stripes, the music starts with a two–16th note oscillating pattern. When the film goes to four pixels, the music moves onto a four–16th note pattern, then to eight, and 16. After that, I began to think, this is going to get ridiculous, so at that point I began introducing longer note values—initially eighth notes, and later as the pixel count grew in the film, to quarter notes. By the middle of the film, when the images move from 512 to 1064 pixels and the images becomes larger and more “creature” like, the music really slows. Later, as the pixel count begins to diminish, the music moves back into more rapid eighths and then 16ths, ending with the most intense rapid movement. However, the changes between an image shift and the music changing are not so exact. Richter, Corinna, and I all agreed to keep some flexibility.
You’ve long been closely associated with the visual arts scene in New York. Do you feel like there’s something about your music that is particularly suited to arts collaborations?
It’s certainly true that when I first came to public attention in New York and elsewhere in the 1960s and early '70s, my major performances were at museums. The world premiere of Drumming, performed by Steve Reich and Musicians, was at the Museum of Modern Art in its original movie theater in 1971. It had never been used for music before that except when John Cage presented a concert there in the 1940s. The premiere of Four Organs was at the Guggenheim Museum. Pendulum Music, performed by myself, Richard Serra, Bruce Nauman, Michael Snow, and James Tenney was done at the Whitney in '69. My ensemble gave the London premiere of Tehillim at the Hayward Gallery during the first show of Mark Rothko in the UK while the American premieres were performed first in the Rothko Chapel in Houston and then in the 20th-century galleries of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
There was a real camaraderie on a personal, intellectual, and artistic level in the New York arts community in the ’60s and ’70s. I lived on Duane Street and Richard Serra lived around the corner—Michael Snow just a few blocks away. When I gave the concerts at the Park Place Gallery run by Paula Cooper around ’67, Rauschenberg and the whole Judson Dance scene came. That was the context in which I was living. I’ve been married for 45 years to visual artist Beryl Korot with whom I’ve collaborated on two video operas. So I have a long history of being connected with visual artists.
About the Artists
ENSEMBLE SIGNAL is a New York-based ensemble dedicated to offering the broadest possible audience access to a diverse range of contemporary works through performance, commissioning, recording, and education. Signal was founded by Co-Artistic/Executive Director Lauren Radnofsky and Co-Artistic Director/Conductor Brad Lubman. Since its debut in 2008, Signal has performed over 350 concerts, premiered numerous works, and co-produced ten recordings. Signal has appeared at Lincoln Center Festival, the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Series at Walt Disney Concert Hall, BIG EARS Festival, Carnegie Hall's Zankel Hall, Lincoln Center American Songbook, The Library of Congress, Washington Performing Arts, Cal Performances, Tanglewood Music Festival of Contemporary Music, Ojai Music Festival, the Guggenheim Museum (NY), NPR Tiny Desk Concerts and the Bang on a Can Marathon. They’ve regularly worked directly with nearly all the composers they perform in order to offer the most authentic interpretations, a list that includes Hans Abrahamsen, Unsuk Chin, Michael Gordon, Georg Friedrich Haas, Oliver Knussen, Helmut Lachenmann, David Lang, Hilda Paredes, Steve Reich, Kaija Saariaho and Julia Wolfe. Their recording of Reich's Music for 18 Musicians released in May 2015 on harmonia mundi received a Diapason d'or and appeared on the Billboard Classical Crossover Charts. Recent highlights include the world premiere and 130 performances of Reich’s Reich/Richter for large ensemble, with artwork and film by Gerhard Richter for the inaugural season of New York’s new multi-arts venue, The Shed (spring 2019), and the US premieres of Reich’s Runner at venues across the US (2017-18). Highlights in 2022 included the US premieres of music by Luca Francesconi and George Lewis, the world premiere of a new work by Darian Donovan Thomas, a concert of music curated by Julia Wolfe at Carnegie Hall, as well as workshop performances with the next generation of composers.
"Ensemble Signal gave over 100 performances of Reich/Richter in New York when the piece premiered in 2019, and over 50 of those were led by the great conductor Brad Lubman. To say that they know and have an intuitive mastery of the piece is an understatement. They bring energy, accuracy and passion to every performance.”
–Steve Reich
BRAD LUBMAN, American conductor and composer, has gained widespread recognition for his versatility, commanding technique and insightful interpretations over the course of more than two decades. A frequent guest conductor, Lubman has led many of the world’s most distinguished orchestras including the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony, Danish National Symphony, NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra, DSO Berlin, SWR Sinfonieorchester, WDR Symphony Cologne, Orchestre Philharmonique Radio France, BBC Symphony Orchestra, Filarmonica della Scala, Brussels Philharmonic and the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic. In addition, he has worked with some of the most important European and American ensembles for contemporary music, including Ensemble Modern, London Sinfonietta, Klangforum Wien, and Steve Reich and Musicians. He has conducted at new music festivals across Europe, including those in Lucerne, Salzburg, Berlin, Huddersfield, Paris, Cologne, Frankfurt, and Oslo. Lubman was the recipient of the 2019 Ditson Conductor’s award, in recognition of his distinguished record of performing and championing contemporary American music. Lubman is founding Co-Artistic Director and Conductor of the NY-based Ensemble Signal. Since its debut in 2008, the Ensemble has performed over 350 concerts and co-produced ten recordings. Their recording of Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians on harmonia mundi was awarded a Diapason d’or in June 2015 and appeared on the Billboard Classical crossover charts. Brad Lubman is on faculty at the Eastman School of Music and the Bang on a Can Summer Institute.
STEVE REICH has been called "the most original musical thinker of our time" (The New Yorker), and "among the great composers of the century" (New York Times). Starting in the 1960s, his pieces It’s Gonna Rain, Drumming, Music for 18 Musicians, Tehillim, Different Trains, and many others helped shift the aesthetic center of musical composition worldwide away from extreme complexity and towards rethinking pulsation and tonal attraction in new ways. He continues to influence younger generations of composers and mainstream musicians and artists all over the world.
Born in New York and raised there and in California, Reich graduated with honors in philosophy from Cornell University in 1957. For the next two years, he studied composition with Hall Overton, and from 1958 to 1961, he studied at the Juilliard School of Music with Vincent Persichetti and William Bergsma. Reich received his master’s degree in music from Mills College in 1963, where he worked with Luciano Berio and Darius Milhaud. His studies have also included Balinese gamelan, African drumming (at the University of Ghana), and traditional forms of chanting of the Hebrew scriptures.
His ensemble Steve Reich and Musicians toured the world many times, and his music is performed internationally by major ensembles and orchestras, including the New York and Los Angeles philharmonics; London, Sydney, San Francisco, and BBC symphony orchestras; London Sinfonietta; Kronos Quartet; Ensemble Intercontemporain; Ensemble Modern; Britten Sinfonia; Colin Currie Group; Ensemble Signal; International Contemporary Ensemble; Bang on a Can All-Stars; Alarm Will Sound; and eighth blackbird.
Double Sextet won the Pulitzer Prize in 2009, and Different Trains, Music for 18 Musicians, and an album of his percussion works performed by Third Coast Percussion have all earned GRAMMY Awards. He received the Praemium Imperiale in Tokyo, the Polar Music Prize in Stockholm, the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale, the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge award in Madrid, the Del Duca prize of the Institut de France in Paris, the Nemmers Prize from Northwestern University, the MacDowell Colony Medal in New Hampshire, the Debs Composer’s Chair at Carnegie Hall, and the Gold Medal in Music from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has been named Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France, and awarded honorary doctorates by the Royal College of Music in London, the Juilliard School in New York, and the Liszt Academy in Budapest, among others.
Reich has been widely recorded starting back in the 1960s and ’70s by Columbia Masterworks, Deutsche Grammophon, and ECM records. Beginning in 1985, he began an exclusive recording relationship with Nonesuch Records. Since then Nonesuch has released 22 new recordings of his music and two large boxed sets. Recent releases include the world premiere recordings of Reich/Richter, Runner, and Music for Ensemble and Orchestra. A definitive collection of his recordings by Nonesuch is planned for 2023.
One of the most frequently choreographed composers, several noted choreographers have created dances to his music, including Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, Jirí Kylián, Jerome Robbins, Justin Peck, Wayne McGregor, Benjamin Millepied, and Christopher Wheeldon.
His 2019 work Reich/Richter, composed for a film by visual artist Gerhard Richter and film maker Corinna Belz, was presented in over 100 live performances by Ensemble Signal and International Contemporary Ensemble as part of the opening of The Shed in New York City. The work has since toured the UK and Europe, with performances by the Britten Sinfonia, Ensemble intercontemporain, Estonian National Symphony Orchestra, and Oslo Philharmonic.
Reich’s documentary video opera works—The Cave and Three Tales, done in collaboration with video artist Beryl Korot—opened new directions for music theater and have been performed on four continents. His work Quartet, for percussionist Colin Currie, sold out two consecutive concerts at Queen Elizabeth Hall in London shortly after tens of thousands at the Glastonbury Festival heard Jonny Greenwood (of Radiohead) perform Electric Counterpoint, followed by the London Sinfonietta performing his Music for 18 Musicians.
In 2022, Reich published a new book Conversations (Hanover Square Press / Harper Collins), which reflects on the composer’s career and music through a series of conversations with some of the world’s greatest artists, including Stephen Sondheim, Michael Tilson Thomas, Brian Eno, Richard Serra, Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, and Jonny Greenwood.
"There’s just a handful of living composers who can legitimately claim to have altered the direction of musical history and Steve Reich is one of them" (The Guardian).
Reprinted by kind permission of Boosey & Hawkes.
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