Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On

Anyone wishing to get an idea of American minimalism could do much worse than starting here with this disk by the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra led by Edo de Waart. The two works featured are Steve Reich's Variations For Winds, Strings and Keyboards and John Adams's Shaker Loops. I feel the Reich work holds up a lot better decades later even if it isn't so familiar now from concert performances or radio plays. He uses a technique adapted from medieval religious music by such as Perotin of holding notes for an exceptionally long time to bind together and create three statements of a huge harmonic progression on which are laid increasingly intricate variations. It has much more varied tone colours than the Adams piece. Shaker Loops is very early John Adams and I wonder if he regrets composing it, since it is by far his most obviously minimalist work and whatever he has done since and no matter how far he has moved, the minimalist tag still gets applied. It doesn't really have any links with the Millenial Church ( Shakers ) who tremble or shake in moments of religious ecstasy but instead plays with the musical term shake or trill and incorporates techniques of tape loops as played by live musicians. These were premiere recordings of these works by musicians committed to them and they have the sense of authority that comes out of that.