Steve Reich Music for 18 Musicians New Classical,    Innova 678    CD   20
	Minimal masterpiece as seen from the heartland. See One Sheet
	Composers Performers Related Links Steve Reich GVSU New Music Ensemble GVSU home     Watch the trailer     NY Times article     Sample and buy from iTunes     NPR Weekend Edition Sunday

Title	Composer(s)	Performer(s)	Length
Music for 18 Musicians	Steve Reich	GVSU New Music Ensemble	60:00
1970s downtown New York City and Steve Reich’s brand of Minimalism are inextricably linked. That is all about to change. His era-defining opus, Music for 18 Musicians, one of his most enduringly popular works with its creamy orchestration and trippy patterns, has found new roots in the heartland. A band of regular Michigan students and volunteers led by Bill Ryan has devoted the last year to perfecting it; in the process, turning it into something of a lifestyle. This hybrid SACD/CD audiophile, surround recording captures every phrase of the work, as though you were hearing it for the first time in your life, farm-fresh. Engineered by Silas Brown on location at Grand Rapids’ Victorian temple to great music, the St. Cecilia's Music Center, the work seems newly-minted for the 21st century. Walking around Allendale, Michigan, home of the ensemble, where the land is flat, where one can see for miles and miles and miles, and where this view sometimes seems infinite, the music seems written for the location. The piece is huge, monolithic, yet unencumbered by its hour-long frame, by its huge staff of players and interlocking rhythms and melodies. It stretches long and far and encourages deep breathing and space, as does the home of this recording: The Grand Valley State University New Music Ensemble performs "Music for 18 Musicians" with a spirit and abandon befitting the passion of its composer, inspired by the commitment and experience of its leader, and with the exuberance and vision of its youth. With performances lauded by the New York Times and Bang On a Can Marathoners, we now invite you to discover this ensemble, and to rediscover this extraordinary work in its 100% organic glory. Listed in many Top Releases of 2007 charts, #1 iTunes Classical, #15 Amazon all music purchases, Billboard Top Ten crossover albums...
Who would have thought? From a Midwestern school in Michigan, Grand Valley State University, here comes a really first class New Music Ensemble. They spent a good long time rehearsing and then came to New York City and blew away a full house at the Winter Garden with their performance of Music for 18 Musicians–at dawn–during the Bang on a Can Marathon. They then went on to make a really moving recording of the piece. A gorgeous and stunningly accurate CD of Music for 18 Musicians, from the heartland to the heart. Take a listen. by Steve Reich
www.babysue.com Students and volunteers from Grand Valley State University spent about a year rehearsing and recording this project. Serious music critics and reviewers will no doubt be rather knocked out by their recreation of Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians. This is by no means an amateurish student project that doesn't add up. This is an excellent recording that has even been endorsed by Reich himself. Steve was decades ahead of his time when he composed this music in the 1970s. Not surprisingly, the material sounds anything but dated. Music features fourteen pieces which often recall the music of Phillip Glass. The music is hypnotic and slightly surreal...ultimately serene and essentially cerebral. The is a stereo/multichannel hybrid SACD that can be played on any standard CD player. We haven't heard it in 5.1 surround sound yet...but our guess is that the multichannel experience will be absolutely mind expanding.. by lmnop
The New Yorker The Grand Valley State University New Music Ensemble, from the farmlands of Allendale, Michigan, provides a case study in how new technology is playing to classical music's benefit. Last year, part of the group traveled to New York to attend Steve Reich's seventieth-birthday festival at Carnegie Hall and participate in a workshop. The Grand Valley's director, Bill Ryan, wrote a firsthand account of the visit for the Web site NewMusicBox, introducing his ensemble to a wider audience. In June, they performed Reich’s "Music for 18 Musicians" at Bang on a Can’s annual marathon concert in downtown New York; their time slot was five in the morning, but, for reasons that no one could quite understand, some four hundred listeners showed up to hear them play. The ensemble's recording of "Music for 18" is being released this week on the Innova label, its arrival heralded by a striking video "trailer" on YouTube, which ingeniously contrasts Reich’s hyper-urban music with shots of rolling cornfields. The Michigan musicians play with glistening precision, yet they also bring out the variously jubilant and wistful emotions beneath the surface of Reich’s score. The result is a vibrant recording that deserves to leap from the new-music ghetto onto the mainstream charts. In these unsettled times, it might have an outside chance of doing so. After all, for a little while the other day,a surprising name appeared at the top of Amazon.com’s Top MP3 Artists, outperforming even Kanye West: Richard Wagner. by Alex Ross
The New York Times Justifiably proud of the performance the group presented on campus in November, Mr. Ryan sent recorded excerpts to friends. The effort paid dividends: Through the violinist Todd Reynolds, the ensemble was invited to play “Music for 18 Musicians” at the break of dawn during this year’s Bang on a Can Marathon in New York. The excerpts also helped secure a deal with the Innova label to issue a studio recording of the piece. Mr. Ryan has posted a slick promotional trailer for the disc on YouTube. "They worked for a year on this thing, but what you feel as a result is a kind of ease," Mr. Reich said. "You know that these people are enjoying themselves; when you watch the video, you really see it. And it's great to see, because these are young people, and they're the future." by Steve Smith
New Sounds, WNYC The story of the year in new music circles. Out in the farmlands of Allendale, Mich., Bill Ryan, the director of GVSU's new music group, decided to have his all-student, all-volunteer band learn to play Reich's 1976 masterwork—long considered one of the most challenging pieces in new music. It was a labor of love—intense, obsessive love—and they not only learned to play the piece, they learned to play it well. by John Schaefer
Cleveland Plain Dealer Michigan's Grand Valley State University New Music Ensemble plays the piece with effortless cohesion. by Donald Rosenberg
Pittsburgh Post-Gazzette This new disc (a hybrid Super Audio CD, so it will play on usual CD players) comes with a rave by the composer himself, and it's easy to hear why. The Grand Valley State University's New Music Ensemble plays the heck out of this work. Rock-solid ensemble and vibrant phrasing...A must-hear, from beginning to end. by Andrew Druckenbrod
LA Weekly The results are clearly audible in the sharp-edged, hugely energized playing on the Grand Valley State Music Ensemble's new disc, on Innova, of Music for 18. Yes, they actually use 20, and somebody in the Reich band told them that that was okay. by Alan Rich
St. Petersburg Times Grade: A by John Fleming
Le Son du Souvent jouée depuis sa première, donnée à New York en 1976, Music for 18 Musicians de Steve Reich doit aujourd’hui faire avec une nouvelle interprétation de taille : celle du New Music Ensemble de l’Université d’Etat de Grand Valley. L’un des pères du minimalisme américain voit ainsi sa plus célèbre pièce rendue avec intelligence par des étudiants qui, s’ils sont originaires du Michigan, n’en démontrent pas moins un art délicat de l’interprétation. Qui sert avec légèreté le développement répétitif, met subtilement au jour les effets sonores permis par celui-ci, et arrive au terme de l’entreprise sans avoir jamais failli. Premier à célébrer le tour de force, Reich lui-même: « un disque magnifique, d’une précision renversante. by Guillame
The New York Times The music of Steve Reich has been eminently well served by his own ensemble and, partly as a result, largely dependent on it. For any who may have wondered whether future generations could uphold the standard, this magnificent student performance, hailed by Mr. Reich himself, should provide reassurance. by James Oestreich
Billboard Magazine REICH AND ROLL: Everybody loves an underdog. That fact, plus a deep and abiding passion for Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians, is what might have originally driven hundreds of listeners to check out a 5 a.m. performance of the piece by a group that almost no one had ever heard of. The setting: the annual Bang on a Can marathon, held at the World Financial Center's Winter Garden in lower Manhattan last June. The players: the Grand Valley State University New Music Ensemble from Allendale, Mich. The music: one of Reich's most popular and influential works. If that was too early for you, the GVSU players recently released their recording of Music for 18 Musicians on the independent label Innova. The result is a hyper-propulsive and yet silkily beautiful, entrancing and utterly alive interpretation that more than holds its own. The group mostly comprising students and entirely of volunteers, led by composer/conductor Bill Ryan spent nothing short of a year painstakingly working on this one mammoth piece. The results were, by all accounts of those who greeted dawn with these young musicians, simply exhilarating. It wasn't that they were simply able to negotiate a work that is famously excruciatingly difficult to play; instead, they fully and confidently claimed it as their own. And Reich's writing, by turns ebullient and meditative, proved the perfect match to greet the light of a new day. by Anastacia Tsiouclas
Baltimore Sun I've had a chance to submerge myself again in this brilliant work thanks to a terrific, if unlikely, new recording from the Innova label. The Grand Valley State University New Music Ensemble in Michigan is not your typical group of conservatory virtuosos, but, under the expert guidance of Bill Ryan, the players learned this complex, demanding score over a 14-week period last year, and learned it awfully well. They must have loved the challenge, given the kinetic, infectious charge of this vividly recorded performance. by Tim Smith
SA-CD.net Performance: Five stars Sonics: Five stars A wonderful début disc from a very enterprising young ensemble. by John Broggio
Tokafi On some truly special occasions, a piece of music really lives up to the promises made by the composer in his introductory notes.”The breath is the measure of the duration of their [i.e. the player’s] pulsing. This combination of one breath after another gradually washing up like waves against the constant rhythm of the pianos and mallet instruments is something I have not heard before (...)” Steve Reich wrote at the time of the publication of “Music for 18 Musicians” and the work that went with this powerful picture was every bit as exciting, poetic and seminal as its description. On the occasion of Steve Reich’s 70th birthday as well as the 30th anniversary of “18 Musicians”, the New Music Ensemble of the Grand Valley State University has dared to challenge the manifold recordings of ths piece (including, of course, Reich’s own on ECM in the 70s) with a rendition that claims to be “farm-fresh”, to sound “as though you were hearing it for the first time in your life” and to have found “new roots in the heartland”. Have they gone mad? One of the hardest pieces to just play correctly By all means, we don’t mean to be disrespectful. But up until 2006, the New Music Ensemble didn’t even exist. And “Music for 18 Musicians” has been known as one of the hardest pieces to just play correctly – let alone play it enthrallingly. But as long as the talent’s there, you can’t beat a vision. And Bill Ryan, the musical director of the ensemble had one. For an entire year, he turned Reich’s music into the sole focal point for his musicians. They would wake up with it, live with it and go to bed with it, until it became an integral part of their body. What the group ended up with were empathically applauded concerts and a recording that had Steve Reich moved. And truly, there are many reasons to be proud. Plenty of Breath For one, their interpretation is not just a copy of one of the many renowned blueprints. In the hands of the New Music Ensemble, “Music for 18 Musicians” turns into a soft and warm undulation, in which the psychoacoustic effects that Reich doted on in his original liner notes and which he featured prominently in the ECM taping, have turned into a glistening shimmer on top of an airy and wavy aural hillscape. The Jazz connotations in the brass section and the voices are more prominent than ever before and there is a mood of pastoral beauty running through this version. And secondly, because the performers have realised that the score is not just about rhythm, it is about colour, melody, harmony, groove and time as well. Most of all, however, it is about breath and the Grand Valley students have plenty of it. They take almost five minutes more than Reich back in 1978 and this awards the music a spaciousness and sense of freedom that may not have been heard before. The ensemble plays “18 Musicians” like a medium, as if the music were constantly reinventing itself in every instant. There is no distance between the music and the performers, who seem to be stunned and overwhelmed by wave after wave of breaths washing up against the shore of their pulses again and again. Their album is a document of will and of determination, just as much as it is a statement of love and passion. It sounds improbable, but it’s true: In this case, the music really lives up to the promises in the press release. by Tobias Fischer
New York Magazine BEST CD FROM AN UNEXPECTED SOURCE 2007 When a 1976 work became the obsession of a group at Grand Valley State University in Michigan, it was clear that New York had lost its exclusive on Steve Reich. After rehearsing for eight months, they not only came to Manhattan to perform but even recorded it. The result proves (1) that what one person hears as a caffeinated urban pulse, another hears as the rhythm of the flatlands, and (2) that a bunch of midwestern kids can play Reich better than he can. by Justin Davidson
Philadelphia Inquirer The latest recording (and one of the best) comes from a university setting (an outpost of nonindustrialized music-making), the Grand Valley (Mich.) State University New Music Ensemble. by David Patrick Stearns
Washington Post Listed in the Top Ten Classical CDs of 2007. by
LA Weekly Listed in the Best Classical Events of 2007. by
The New York Times Listed as one of 2007 Most Notable Classical CDs. by
Calgary Herald Listed in the Best Tunes of 2007. by
Time Out New York Listed in the Top Ten Classical CDs of 2007. by
San Jose Mercury News Listed in the Top Ten Classical CDs of 2007. by
The Rest is Noise Listed in the Top Ten CDs of 2007. by
Rhapsody Editorial Staff Listed in the Top Ten Classical CDs of 2007. by
WNYC Soundcheck Winner of the Listener Poll for Top 2007 Classical CD. by
All Music Guide ...a splendid performance...Innova's Steve Reich: Music for 18 Musicians featuring Bill Ryan and the GVSU New Music Ensemble makes clear that some new music ensembles in the "hinterlands" are just as accomplished as their brethren in cities like New York, San Francisco or Chicago. It also sheds some light on possible variability within a piece that one would think would not allow for much variability at all. Well done, GVSU by
Emusic This recording may well have been classical music’s story of the year in 2007: a group of students and volunteers from the farmlands of western Michigan decides to take on one of the most important and challenging works of the late 20th century. And to the amazement of critics, listeners, the composer and perhaps even the musicians themselves, the Grand Valley State University New Music Ensemble actually pulls it off. Steve Reich’s piece “Music for 18 Musicians” has a prosaic title that gives little hint of the roiling seas of interlocking melodic fragments and rhythmic patterns that make up the driving yet trancey work. Reich’s own recording, with his handpicked ensemble, debuted in 1976, and for years it was assumed that only his ensemble could negotiate the piece. Even after recent recordings by top contemporary music groups in music centers like Frankfurt and London, Reich’s urban minimalism has “New York” written all over it — or at least, it did until this band from Allentown, Michigan (population 11,000) showed up with a powerful performance that is truly a labor of love and obsession. by
MUSO It may well be the most revealing yet of 18's manifold rhythmic and harmonic niceties...Mainly though, it's the quality of the performance itself that is most potently insinuating. Lightness of texture is a hallmark of the blends realized under Ryan's direction, with a genuine feeling that these are real individual musicians listening empathetically to one another...An 18 for the new millennium? You got it. by Terry Blain
Weekend Edition Aired February 3, 2008 Now more than three decades old, Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians has become an icon of 20th-century American music. At almost an hour in length, the piece unfolds like a slowly shifting dream, with sections of repeated material ebbing and flowing around a cycle of 11 chords. It's scored for strings, percussion, woodwinds and voices, and takes tremendous concentration on the part of the 18 players. To this day, the work is mainly performed by the composer and his loyal group of musicians. It took courage, then, for a group of players at a small Midwestern college (not known for its music department) to mount a performance of Music for 18 Musicians — not just for their own amusement, but to play at the high-profile Bang on a Can Festival in New York City. Under the direction of Bill Ryan, the New Music Ensemble at Grand Valley State University — amid the cornfields of western Michigan — practiced the music for nearly a year. Ryan recalls a mixed response when he first announced the idea to his students. "A few people couldn't wait until I finished my sentence before they wanted to sign up; they knew the piece. But a few didn't know who Steve Reich was." Rehearsals were tough going, initially, but Ryan says he saw a breakthrough eventually. "We had been looking at the work for about six weeks, and there were moments in the rehearsal where I started to see the players come out of their own parts — relaxing, looking around, using their ears, listening to parts that were happening across the room. I knew then that our concert would be fine." Ryan and five members of the ensemble flew to New York to watch Reich's ensemble perform the piece and strategize with them about how to play it. All the hard work came to fruition last spring, with Ryan and his ensemble playing Music for 18 Musicians early in the morning at the Winter Garden Atrium. "It was magical to see my ensemble in that environment," Ryan says. "Here we are, this group from the middle of the Midwest that no one had ever heard of, playing at this significant new-music event. It was just glorious to see the sun come up as we were finishing the piece." Their performance charmed the critics. Alex Ross of The New Yorker wrote the group "succeeded in holding 400 listeners transfixed at 4 a.m." Ryan and his New Music Ensemble have documented their long journey into Reich's Music for 18 Musicians with a new surround-sound recording of the piece. by Liane Hansen
Music Web International We have reached a period where music by composers who came of age in the 1970s, such as Steve Reich and Philip Glass, is played not only by their own ensembles, but by other groups and orchestras. While there have been a few notable recordings of Reich’s music - not overseen by the composer - in the past decade, this key minimalist composer’s music shows no sign of becoming part of the more general "classical" music repertoire. Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians, considered to be the composer’s seminal work and the one that got him attention outside the avant-garde, has been recorded by several groups other than the composer’s. This new recording by the Grand Valley State University New Music Ensemble shows that it is a work that remains vibrant today. Music for 18 Musicians was a breakthrough work for Reich, not only because it was the first of his works to be scored for a relatively large group of musicians, but also because it was released on the "mainstream" ECM label. The work is in 14 parts, and is based around 11 chords, each of which develops small melodic phrases, before cycling back to a restatement of the original section. Lasting around an hour - Reich’s original recording was just over 56 minutes - this work is mesmerizing and, at times, because of its pulsing rhythms, hypnotic. Yet it has a foot-tapping rhythm, and its micro-melodies are memorable; it’s the kind of music you might want to hum or whistle, if you are so inclined. This current recording by the Grand Valley State University New Music Ensemble has received excellent reviews everywhere, and is a best-selling classical recording on the iTunes Store. Reich himself called it "A gorgeous and stunningly accurate CD". It’s hard to compare recordings of Reich’s compositions. The music does not allow much in the way of interpretive options, and Reich calling this CD "accurate" is probably the best praise one can give. The music itself demands precision and accuracy. One of the main selling points of this recording is the quality of its sound; something that, looking back, Reich’s initial 1976 recording on ECM lacks. This hybrid CD - it plays in surround sound on an SACD player - offers a unique listening experience that other recordings do not. However, much of the praise garnered by this recording seems to highlight the fact that this "all-student, all-volunteer band" was able to perform such a challenging work. This is like questioning Shakespeare’s ability to write Hamlet because he was simply "a glover’s son". There is no reason why, with hard work and dedication, a group of talented musicians cannot perform a work like this, and the fruit of their dedication is present here. They certainly deserve recognition for their hard work. But that, in and of itself, is no reason to buy this recording of 18 Musicians rather than another. If the sound is the main criterion, either this recording, or Reich’s 1997 recording on Nonesuch, are the discs of choice. The 1976 ECM recording sounds flat by comparison to either of these, though its slightly faster tempi give the music more drive. The 2004 live recording by the Amadinda percussion group suffers from, well, live sound. This present recording also has a more delicate balance among the instruments, which gives it a very good texture; the playing of this work reflects less an ensemble than a group of instruments playing together. Needless to say, this is the most important work of minimalist music, and one that people should discover. Much more so than the work of Philip Glass, Steve Reich’s music, while less well known - mostly because Reich doesn’t compose film scores at a Dickensian rate - inspires and moves the listener. The hour you will spend with a recording of this work is an hour during which your mind will expand to new musical horizons. If you have never heard Music for 18 Musicians, go out and buy this recording now. by Kirk McElhearn
Barnes and Noble The Grand Valley State University New Music Ensemble of Allendale, Michigan offer a revelatory new performance of Steve Reich's 1978 masterpiece. by
Fanfare Perhaps you even know the back-story by now. Someone visionary at a small Michigan state college hires a New York musician to build a new music ensemble as a flagship group for the institution. Said director decides to program one of the great founding masterpieces of the American minimalist tradition. Students, faculty, even community members are recruited for the undertaking and they rehearse most of a year. They take a field trip to New York to participate in a Carnegie Hall workshop on the composer's music, they meet the master, and he gives his blessing. At the same time, one of the composer-directors of New York's Bang on a Can hears their performance and immediately invites the group to perform at his festival. They do so, on the 24-hour marathon concert, bringing down the house at 5:00 a.m. Then a record company comes knocking, they place a snappy video trailer on YouTube, and here we are. The whole thing has a wonderfully Caparesque ring to it. And the result? I'm happy (and relieved) to say- - excellent. I've listened with a head-to-head comparison with Reich's own premiere recording (of many years back) on ECM, and the differences are really only matters of interpretation. The GVSUNME (they might need a better acronym) takes a little longer, and seems to allow more repetitions of modules than Reich, though that may well be because the original was an LP and had to fit within said time constraints. Interestingly though, the piece feels as though it's going a little faster, even though close comparison shows the tempos to be about the same. The difference comes from the fact that the Michiganers seem to "swing" the music a bit more, and one feels the large-scale background progressions a little more strongly. This is a plus, though simultaneously the crisp precision of the original recording is striking in its own right. The sound on Innova is more spacious, though again ECM's transparence and clarity is a selling poing from a different angle. The sonics here may also be a function of the SACD multichannel format. While I've listened on a good stereo system, I have not heard it in full surround mode, and I suspect some of the reverberance would be parsed out if played in an environment for which it's ideally designed. The new release does have one extra selling point, in that the subsections of the work are indexed here, unlike on the original. But really it's apples and oranges between the two, and how nice that's the case. Above all, I marvel that here we have young people taking on a work that caused excitement and consternation about 30 years ago. After almost exactly one generation it's clear that this is a masterpiece that can stand different interpretations and gets easier to understand and perform with the passage of time. Kind of gives you hope. Bravo to all concerned. by Robert Carl
Audiophile What an unexpected musical and audiophile treat! The strict Minimalism of Steve Reich has probably been exposed to more listeners via this long but trippy work than any of his other music. Personally, it’s the only Steve Reich work I ever listen to, because the interlocking rhythms and melodies build up so inexorably toward some really swinging jazzy orchestration. The work has a watershed status in Minimalism similar to Terry Riley’s In C, and its recording by Nonesuch has long been the standard. Now here’s a big surprise: a band of university students and volunteers from Allendale, Michigan spent the better part of a year learning and continually rehearsing Music for 18 Musicians under their instructor, Bill Ryan. They honed their performance of the demanding work to the level of the composer’s professional ensemble. Then they took it and themselves to the annual Bang On a Can Marathon in New York City and blew everyone away - including the New York Times critic. Their powerful and spirited performance was held at dawn during the festival. Then they went home to Michigan and recorded the work in 5.1 SACD surround sound in Grand Rapid’s St. Cecilia Music Center and here it is. Comparison with the original Nonesuch CD showed little musical differences. Perhaps at about 5:30 from the top the original 18 musicians got the jazzy swing element just a little better than the students, but overall both performances were almost identical, except that the addition of the hi-res surround - putting the players all around you - adds 100% to the musical experience. The work, full of Reich’s patented playing around with phasing effects, builds very slowly in instrumentation, complexity and jazziness. The woodwinds come in strong at track 8 and things really swing; the entrance of the maracas at track 6 is another major moment in the work. Everything is so much more transparent and impactful on the new SACD. It makes it much less likely to get on the nerves of anti-Minimalists. This is a New Music must-have! by John Sunier
Big Takeover A lively, robust performance... it's not so much a celebration of this work as a well-deserved and precisely enacted continuation of its life span. by Dave Heaton
All About Jazz When Steve Reich released Music for 18 Musicians (ECM, 1978), it was a consolidation and major leap forward in the pulse-based music that the minimalist progenitor had been exploring on earlier compositions including “Four Organs” (1969), a piece that relied on nothing more than a six-note chord, yet was a near flat-out sonic assault. 18 Musicians was an altogether more complex and sophisticated work, with a broader textural palette based largely on tuned percussion—piano, vibraphone, marimba and xylophone—but also working with maracas, voice, strings, and clarinets to create a sweeping, hour-plus long suite that was hypnotic, melodic, and eminently accessible. With the mathematical precision by which its eleven sections and wrapping “Pulses” develop, it's a demanding suite to play. It's also a challenge to create differentiation from previous versions, especially when Reich himself has released two versions—the original 1978 ECM recording and a later, slightly longer 1996 Nonesuch Records edition. For a University Ensemble to take on this challenging music is impressive, and Grand Valley State University's New Music Ensemble has done a remarkable job with its own take on Music for 18 Musicians, under the guidance of director Bill Ryan. Length-wise at 61 minutes somewhere between Reich's two versions, what helps define this version is that, while there are, indeed, 18 musicians, and the basic instrumentation is the same, the apportioning of that instrumentation is different. Reich's 1996 version featured seven pianos to the NME's six; two maracas to NME's three; four xylophones to NME's two. It's a subtle difference but, when assessing NME's reading, one that changes the complexion of the piece ever so slightly. While both versions traverse sonic territory from airy atmospherics (despite the ever-present pulse that drives the entire piece) to denser counterpoint, NME's version feels ever so slightly lighter. Reich has always managed to possess a certain levity when compared to minimalist cohort Philip Glass' greater gravitas, leaning more to the ethereal, even during the more active “Section XI.” With a composition like this, the mix also becomes an equal part of defining the overall soundscape, and Ryan and co-editor/producer Silas Brown do a marvelous job in spreading the sound across a three-dimensional aural landscape, making it an even greater trance-inducing experience than Reich's 1978 original. Reich, like his minimalist co-founders, has evolved beyond the stricter regimen of his earlier work, yet Music for 18 Musicians remains a classic, and the perfect entry point for those who've yet to take the dive into a style of music that is often criticized for being too strongly based on mathematics and logic. Ryan's New Music Ensemble proves, with its version of Music for 18 Musicians, that the beauty of Reich is just that: beauty—and a remarkable ability to create resonant, evocative music from a highly considered standpoint. by John Kelman
Audiophile Audition What an unexpected musical and audiophile treat!... This band of university students and volunteers honed their performance to such a high level they stunned audiences--including the critic for the New York Times-- at the "Bang on a Can" music festival... A "New Music" must-have! by John Sunier
emusic.com Top 5 Albums of the Decade by John Schaefer
Soundcheck Listener poll: Top Classical Album of the Decade by WNYC