Piano Phase (solo) - First solo performance ever

Rob Kovacs0 HN recommenders · 2015–2021
767K views · music · evergreen · Uploaded 2011-01-27

A solo performance of Steve Reich's Piano Phase, with one pianist playing both parts, recorded in 2004 with Reich in attendance. It is a 15-minute minimalist phasing piece.

HN uses it as the reference performance when discussing Reich's phasing pieces and their recreation in code.

Watch on YouTube

3 comments from Hacker News

@radiorental2015 · in “Interactive Visualisation of “Piano Phase” by Steve Reich”

Is this it? [VIDEO] edit: nevermind, decided (for once) to read the youtube comments. This is Kulas Hall at Baldwin-Wallace College Conservatory in Berea, OH

@bane2016 · in “Learning Web Audio by Recreating the Works of Steve Reich and Brian Eno”

This is an incredibly beautiful tutorial. Art, deconstruction, minimalism and some of the greatest musical artists of the 20th century! What an amazing way to explore the mechanics and mechanisms behind these artists. I had heard of other minimalist artists before, but until a couple years ago somehow had missed Reich. I'm now an addict, especially to his later pieces when he really started growing his work into larger and larger themes. "Music for 18 Musicians" has become one of my favorite pieces of music of all time. I say this as somebody who finds a great deal of modern art fairly deplorable -- the first time I heard some of Reich's pieces I stayed up the entire night finding everything of his I could put into my ears. Reich has a nack for finding incredibly beautiful and urgent patterns and sounds and exploring them to a kind of amazing fullness. I never had the pleasure to play any of this pieces when I was attempting to become a musician, I understand that the practice for a piece can take months to a year because of the difficulties of maintaining your part of the phase. Listening to his music is, to me, a very intense activity, because I desperately want to notice when the music starts changing and because of the phasing it never does. There's certain parts of the phasing to that I find particularly enjoyable, but I've also found that you can't just jump to them, you have to encounter them in the context of the phases that come before and after. Once you get quite f

@w-m2021 · in “Synchronized violin players reveal uniqueness of human networks”

And you don’t even need to build a network! Same results can be achieved by using multi threading on a single instance.. [VIDEO]