Steve Reich: Drumming Colin Currie Group & Synergy Vocals

• Steve Reich (b. 1936):
• 1 Reich: Drumming: I. — 16:28
• 2 Reich: Drumming: II. — 17:22
• 3 Reich: Drumming: III. — 11:47
• 4 Reich: Drumming: IV. — 09:30
• Total Runtime 55:07

Info for Steve Reich: Drumming

Steve Reich's legendary four-part composition Drumming (1970/71) is regarded as the first masterpiece of minimal music. For percussionist Colin Currie, there was no question that in 2016 he chose this piece for a concert for the 80th birthday of the composer at the BBC Proms. The Colin Currie Group impressively shows that the magic of ›Drumming‹ is still unbroken even after more than 40 years.

When the BBC Proms asked me to curate a concert to celebrate Steve Reich’s 70th birthday in 2006, I turned immediately to Drumming. A central pillar of his substantial output, the work is a thrillingly unclassifiable musical colossus, presenting robustly avant-garde attributes and positively teeming with energy. To date, it remains his longest work.

Based on a single twelve-note pattern, the work is in four parts, which all use the composer’s trademark 'phasing' technique to the fore of the musical development. In this process, musicians using identical timbres face off against each other, with one musician selected to accelerate their pattern until a new 'resulting pattern' is established, thus considerably enriching the counterpoint and texture of the music. When this happens repeatedly, and with numerous percussionists, the overall effect can be extremely fulsome indeed. To highlight these patterns further, the composer deploys women’s voices to interact with the sonority of multiple marimbas, then whistling and piccolo to reach the higher-pitched massed glockenspiels. Some flexibility is afforded the musicians in this process, whereby the number of repetitions involved is subject to change and indeed the selection and ordering of the patterns to be highlighted. As such, the work lives and breathes an extraordinary flexibility and suppleness in performance that is very much part of its unique allure.

Arguably, the work is also a line in the sand for the composer. 'Phasing' was in fact phased out after this composition, as if a particular musical process ultimately had been solved and sorted. In Part Four of the work, we hear his first ever use of a mixed-timbre ensemble, which he achieved by having all instrumental groups play together, thereby giving us a delectable foretaste of some of his colouristic combinations to come. Drumming also exhibits his first use of building patterns by substituting rests for beats (a process that is also used in reverse, by substituting beats with rests).

The joy in our continued performances of the music live in concert is in unearthing anew every nuance and acoustic subtlety available to the listener. It became important to the group to record the work as a document of where these musical inquiries have taken us, and what this adventure has brought out of the notes on the page. Performing the piece is continually fascinating: years of experience playing it in a wide variety of venues and spaces has presented us with multifaceted insights into what the music can offer. This is also the work that brought this ensemble and the composer together in person for the first time (in London in February 2010), and we are proud of our continued collaboration with Steve, which has resulted in many live performances together and the commissioning of new music for the group.

"I hope you enjoy this wildly brilliant work, in all its excitement, delicacy, audacity, and power." (Colin Currie)

"As neat and magnificent as a Rothko in its sewing-up of the bigger picture. A Drumming for this decade—and probably a few to come, too" (Gramophone)

"What gives Drumming (1970-71) its hypnotic allure is a sense of toppling jeopardy: its strict patterns liquefy and reform when one drummer accelerates, creating a new norm … Colin Currie Group's own recording, honed through long performance practice, brings you into a magic circle where every impact is precisely heard, every overtone burnished" (BBC Music Magazine)

Colin Currie Group
Synergy Vocals

Please Note: We offer this album in its native sampling rate of 48 kHz, 24-bit. The provided 96 kHz version was up-sampled and offers no audible value!

Colin Currie
Hailed as “the world’s finest and most daring percussionist” (Spectator), Colin Currie is a solo and chamber artist at the peak of his powers. Championing new music at the highest level, Currie is the soloist of choice for many of today’s foremost composers and he performs regularly with the world's leading orchestras and conductors.

A dynamic and adventurous soloist, Currie’s commitment to commissioning and creating new music was recognised in 2015 by the Royal Philharmonic Society who awarded him the Instrumentalist Award.

From his earliest years, Currie forged a pioneering path in creating new music for percussion, winning the Royal Philharmonic Society Young Artist Award in 2000 and receiving a Borletti-Buitoni Trust Award in 2005.

Currie has premiered works by composers such as Steve Reich, Elliott Carter, Louis Andriessen, HK Gruber, James MacMillan, Anna Clyne, Einojuhani Rautavaara, Jennifer Higdon, Kalevi Aho, Rolf Wallin, Kurt Schwertsik, Alexander Goehr, Andrew Norman, Mark-Anthony Turnage, Julia Wolfe and Nico Muhly. Looking ahead, in the coming seasons, Currie will premiere new works by Andy Akiho, Helen Grime and Simon Holt.

Currie is Artist in Association at London’s Southbank Centre, where he was the focus of a major percussion festival Metal Wood Skin in 2014 and continues to perform there every season.

Colin Currie Group
is a virtuosic ensemble that specialises in the music of Steve Reich. Their performances of Reich’s music have been hailed by the composer as “the best I’ve ever heard”.

Led by Colin Currie (“the world’s finest and most daring percussionist”, Spectator), the hand-picked ensemble was formed in 2006 for a performance of Drumming at the BBC Proms to celebrate the 70th birthday of Steve Reich. In the subsequent decade, the Colin Currie Group have performed Drumming around the world. They have expanded their repertoire to include many of Reich’s most popular works, including Music for 18 Musicians, Sextet, Tehillim and Music for Pieces of Wood and are privileged to have frequently had the composer present when rehearsing and performing these works.

The Colin Currie Quartet
was formed in 2018 to present exciting and adventurous works written for percussion quartet. The group is made up of Colin Currie, Owen Gunnell, Adrian Spillett and Sam Walton, who form the core of the Colin Currie Group, and in this new collective they perform works by Steve Reich and branch out into other composers who have been swept along by that highly influential force.

As some of the world’s leading solo, symphonic and chamber percussionists, each player of the quartet brings a different and insightful slant to the art of chamber percussion performance, and the group will be adding substantially to its repertoire in the coming years, including a dramatic piece for four drumkits by Julia Wolfe and a brand new quartet by British composer Dave Maric.

In 2018/19, their debut season, they performed at the NCPA Beijing, Wigmore Hall, Norfolk & Norwich Festival, Dublin’s Great Music in Irish Houses and East Neuk Festival in Scotland.

Booklet for Steve Reich: Drumming