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Frame from Piano Phase (solo) - First solo performance ever Plays via YouTube's privacy-enhanced embed

Piano Phase (solo) - First solo performance ever

Rob Kovacs
Music
YouTube
Cited on HN 3 times, 2015–2021, never outright recommended score 0
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026

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

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.

2 citations · 1 jokes · Music

3 Hacker News comments

From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.

@bane Sep 2016 Cites it
on HN thread Learning Web Audio by Recreating the Works of Steve Reich and Brian Eno
Read more
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

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