Steve Reich: We were out in Los Angeles visiting our son, which we do every
January, February, and March. And I went to the LA Phil, for I don't remember what,
and I'm looking — I've been asked to write an orchestra piece. I'm really an ensemble person.
I've been doing that for years and years and years.
So I'm looking at the orchestra, and I see there's two firsts,
two seconds, and they're in a horseshoe, and right behind them are the
principal winds. Orchestras set up a certain way, and I realized the orchestra
is set up so if I just add two vibes and two pianos, there I am. I'm
back at my usual kind of ensemble, and particularly the exact same
one as "Runner," the exact same orchestration.
The subtitle of Music for Ensemble and Orchestra should be "Runner 2"!
It's surprising; people say, "Is there something similar about those pieces?"
The album should be called "Two of a Kind."
There is another background, which is that concertos as we think of them now
are based on the 19th-century concerto: concerto for violin, for piano (and then other people, but
primarily those two), but in the Baroque era it wasn't that
way at all. There would be a group of soloists, and the Bach Brandenburgs are
about that. The Fifth is about the flute and the harpsichord, which does double duty;
sometimes it's in the ripieno, sometimes it's a soloist. The harpsichord solo in
the Fifth Brandenburg is one of the high points in music for me —
the whole first movement. And it begins, as you know, with a broken D major chord:
[singing] da-da da-da da-da da-da...
There are several scale passages,
not arpeggio passages, in Music for Ensemble and Orchestra —
[singing] da-da dee-da da-da. da-da da-da da-da-da... —
and their various modes and whatnot, and they work. I've never dealt with
using scales as-is, but they work here.
So, it's kind of a tip of the hat [to Bach].
The bottom line is that when I went off to
LA for the LA Phil to do — so I went out there feeling "I don't know what to expect."
But it really worked. And my basic idea that the seating would
accommodate ensemble playing, A because they're seated right, and B because that's what they do —
sure enough, they could do it all. Piece of cake.
So that's what it is: Music for Ensemble and Orchestra.