[MUSIC PLAYING]
STEVE REICH: What this Nightcap concert
amounts to is showing a genre of music which
might have been sort of brought into being to a certain extent
by these counterpoint pieces, but which has been in the air,
I think, for a long time, of simply
having a soloist multiplied.
What happened vis-a-vis the counterpoint pieces,
I got a telephone call from Ransom Wilson, the flutist.
And he said, hi, you know me.
I'm Ransom Wilson.
I'm a flutist.
Will you write me a flute concerto?
And I said no.
I don't write for soloists.
But we sort of unpleasantly hung up.
And I thought to myself, here's this world class musician.
He's asking me to do something.
And all I can say is no?
I mean-- so I remembered that I had written a piece called
Violin Phase, which is for a solo violin who is prerecorded
several times and then plays against these pre-recordings
in a multiplication.
I thought to myself, hm.
So I called Ransom Wilson back.
I said, Ransom, I don't know if you'll consider this,
but would you consider the possibility
of pre-recording yourself on flute, on alto flute,
on piccolo, and then playing live against it?
And he said, yeah.
That sounds great.
So that was the birth of Vermont Counterpoint, which is
for just that instrumentation.
A few years later passed.
And Richard Stoltzman kind of asked the same kind
of question.
And I wrote New York Counterpoint,
which will be played by Anthony McGill.
In the case of Nico Muhly, this piece
is, again, another thing where he, instead of notating
quite clearly exactly what he wants,
he's throwing out a series of musical ideas
and letting the player determine that.
I mean, he sent me the score, and he said,
you can see it's more of a shopping list than a score.
So and Nico's usually very, very precise in his notation.
But it's quite attractive.
And it's for gamba.
Gabriella Smith-- I saw Carrot Revolution on YouTube
and I said, this woman is a force to be reckoned with.
So she's a very interesting case.
And she's obviously going to be one of the great composers
of her generation.