Steve Reich turned 90 on Saturday, prompting reflection on his early tape pieces from the mid-1960s, It's Gonna Rain and Come Out. These works are vital not only because they opened his imagination to the micro-canon – playing the same material slightly faster or slower – after one of his tape machines slipped out of sync with the other, but because they set human voices. It's Gonna Rain uses the voice of Brother Walter, a Pentecostal street preacher in San Francisco, whose 1965 warning of apocalypse Reich recorded and looped against itself, turning the voice into a wall and wail of sound. Come Out (1966) features Daniel Hamm, one of the Harlem Six, six black men wrongly convicted of first-degree murder in New York; Reich's piece was commissioned for a benefit for their legal costs as "background music for passing the hat". Reich says these pieces don't just set words, they "set human beings", using recordings as musical material, political inspiration and emotional expression. Techniques like looping, canon-ing and fugue-ing are embedded in the facts of where they were made and whose voices are represented.
Hannah Kendall and the Plantation Machine
That terrain of historical consciousness is essential to Hannah Kendall's music. She is inspired by the "plantation machine", Cuban writer Antonio Benítez-Rojo's phrase for the industrial processes and global networks of dehumanising capital that powered the slave trade, still echoed today by all the machinery of capitalism, from environmental destruction to technological control. Kendall turns these ideas into visceral musical experience by reworking the sound of ensembles and orchestras. As she puts it, she "creolises" the orchestra, putting dreadlock cuffs on string instruments to change, mute and distort their sounds; her compositions include walkie-talkies, music boxes, harmonicas and kettles. These reference historical and musical contexts, from the blues to her imagination of music made by enslaved people, including prayers and songs spoken and sung into kettles to be out of earshot of plantation owners. Her works Shouting Forever Into the Receiver and Building a Burning House will be part of the Barbican's Always, Already There festival later this month, followed a few days later by the world premiere of I Have Discovered the Secret of Death with the London Symphony Orchestra, also at the Barbican. Kendall's music remakes the orchestra to interrogate the histories of trade, slavery and globalisation that made civilisations function, and to which the instruments, halls and institutional fabric of the western orchestra are indebted.
Celibidache's Purist Ideology and Its Human Cost
Sergiu Celibidache is in the spotlight this week as a biopic, The Yellow Tie, opens in UK cinemas. The movie – the most watched Romanian film of 2025 – tells of his pursuit of music against his father's fierce opposition, his appointment to the Berlin Philharmonic at 33, and how his single-minded, supposedly purist approach was born: his belief that any audio recording was a soul-stealing lie that could not represent live performance. (Hundreds of recordings of his work, especially from his later years, were released after his death in 1996.) Another film, Abbie Conant: A Solo Among Men, tells a story about the conductor not told. At 25, Conant was appointed Munich Philharmonic's principal trombone in 1980 after a blind audition, but wasn't allowed to take up her job. As Celibidache, the orchestra's principal conductor, told her: "We need a man for the solo trombone". She was demoted to second trombone, paid less than male colleagues, openly bullied by Celibidache, and when she initiated legal proceedings against the City of Munich alleging discrimination, she was forced to undergo humiliating medical and physical tests to prove her stamina, lung capacity and ability to play under pressure. Conant won her case after over 12 years and left the orchestra of her own accord in 1993.
No Such Thing as Pure Music
Much of Celibidache's reputation rests on his performances with the Munich Philharmonic, above all Bruckner's symphonies. But his excessively slow performances, sonically beautiful but expressively one-dimensional, often feel like a Brucknerian bad joke. Calcifying these symphonies with one-dimensional monumentalism does no favours to Bruckner's expressive power and contradictions. (Even more of a nadir is Celibidache's so-slow-it's-barely-alive performance of Bach's Mass in B Minor: the opening fugue is a masochistic trial of patience.) As Conant's experience shows, if you lose yourself to the revelations of his performances, you have to ignore the human cost they came at. "Purity", as always, is no such thing, and comes at an inevitably impure price. Reich, like Kendall, understands this and composed with empathy and understanding, rather than following an ideology that would rather pretend that the goal of transcendence is worth subjugating the human.
