Four Organs - Steve Reich (1970)

it starts with an innocent maracas player, alone in his robotic, unaccented shaking for almost four seconds. but, even though the shaking continues nonstop and steady for the rest of the fifteen minute song, the shaking is never left alone again for longer than a moment.

that's because at 0:04, the organs come in. four organs, to be exact. and when they do, you know it's Steve Reich minimalism at its finest.

i don't know anything about music, so i'll let Wikipedia describe exactly what happens in this song from start to finish: "the four organs, harmonically expound a dominant eleventh chord (D-E-F#-G#-A-B with an E in the bass), dissecting the chord by playing parts of it sequentially while the chord slowly increases in duration from a single 1/8 note at the beginning to 200 beats at the end."

now, to make this a little more visual, Reich's vision for the piece (as given at the premiere): "I had the idea that if a group of tones were all pulsing together in a repeating chord...one tone at a time could gradually get longer and longer.... The tones would simply begin in unison...and then gradually extend out like a sort of horizontal bar graph."

playing on organs popular in rock & roll at the time (think The Doors), the organists play longer and longer, more and more sustained tones, building on top of each other the entirety of the song. one chord. one chord the whole time. one chord over and over and over again. one chord, in the beginning, just an eighth note. then a quarter note, half note, whole note. one chord played for minutes at a time, by the end of the piece. with the omnipresent shaking as a foundation, they construct an upside down pyramid, working their way to textures so thickly layered that at one of the early performances, they nearly drove a poor old lady to insanity.

allmusic describes the first couple performances of the piece in 1971, when "Imagine," "My Sweet Lord," "Maggie May," and "Brown Sugar" were the world's biggest hit singles:

In 1970, Reich received a phone call from the conductor Michael Tilson Thomas asking for some new orchestral repertory, and he jokingly responded, 'Of course, my new piece Four Organs." To his great surprise, Tilson Thomas agreed to Reich's suggestion. While it was anything but symphonic, Four Organs was performed by the Boston Symphony in Boston's Symphony Hall in October, 1971, along with works by Mozart, Liszt and Bartok. The stoic New England audience took the work in stride, but a more volatile New York audience was less approving when it came to Carnegie Hall in 1973. Shouts, boos, cheers, threats and counter-threats by patrons broke out during the performance, and one elderly lady even banged her shoe on the edge of the stage in an attempt to stop the music. The New York Times critic Harold Schonberg reported that "the audience behaved as though red-hot needles were being inserted under fingernails." Nevertheless, Reich soon became a hot commodity and his reputation took off soon after the notorious concert.

as Meryl expressed last night, by comparing this reaction to that of Edouard Manet's Olympia, which also sparked controversy when it was shown in 1863, it seems that there's something to pieces of art that make people want to tear it to shreds. she said, "if your art upset a lot of people, you're probably doing something right." i think that's exactly what happened here.


one chord, two words, three syllables, four organs, five musicians, six stars.

listen.