City Life (music)
City Life is a minimalist
The piece is scored for 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 vibraphones, unpitched percussion, 2 samplers, 2 pianos, string quartet, and double bass. All instruments except the unpitched percussion are to be amplified. A typical performance lasts about 24 minutes.
City Life uses
The samplers are loaded with speech and other common sounds from a busy city (car horns, door slams, air brakes, subway chimes, pile drivers, car alarms, heartbeats, boat horns, buoys, and sirens). The last movement uses bits of field communications from the New York Fire Department during the 1993
The Bluecoats Drum and Bugle Corps featured a section of movement one, "Check it out" in their 2013 production "...To Look for America."[citation needed]
Movements
The work is divided into five movements, and like many other Reich compositions they follow an arch-like form of A-B-C-B-A. They are:
- Check it out
- Pile driver/alarms
- It's been a honeymoon—can't take no mo'
- Heartbeats/boats and buoys
- Heavy smoke
Each movement is named for a sample contained within it. The first, third, and fifth movements use speech samples (often doubled with instruments, as in Different Trains), while the second and fourth use only rhythmic samples, which drives the tempo in these movements.
In true Reich style, the paired movements share a chord cycle. The first movement does not open with pulses (as in many of Reich's other pieces), but with a chorale. This same chorale appears in a slightly more dissonant voicing at the end of the fifth movement, leading the final chord which ends on an ambiguous C dominant/minor seventh chord.
References
- ^ a b "Steve Reich - City Life". www.boosey.com. Retrieved 2022-08-11.
- Reich, Steve. 1995. City Life. New York: Hendon Music/Boosey & Hawkes.
- Reich, Steve. Liner Notes. Proverb/Nagoya Marimba/City Life. CD. Nonesuch Records, 1996.
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