kuniko plays reich (LINN CKD385)

Booklet Notes

This album contains my arrangements of Steve Reich’s masterpieces from the 1980s. It contains Electric Counterpoint (1987), Six Marimbas (1986) and Vermont Counterpoint (1982). I worked on these arrangements during 2009 and 2010. They are arranged for solo percussion and pre-recorded tape for live performance. Each of these pieces is the first arrangement of their kind in the world. All three pieces were solo overdubbed; however I played through all the parts from the beginning to the end, without using loops or quantisation in order to emphasise the live atmosphere in ensemble performance. All of the mixings are based on my concepts and I closely collaborated with each recording engineer.

Meeting Steve Reich

During my time in Belgium, I performed with the contemporary music group Ensemble ICTUS and we played many of Steve Reich’s pieces. During an important rehearsal ahead of a major concert performing his Tehillim and City Life compositions at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, Steve appeared wearing jeans and a cap; this was the first time I met the great composer, Steve Reich. While I was playing the percussion part of City Life his eyes focused on my playing and afterwards he complimented me, saying, ‘This small girl plays so powerfully’. On the day of the concert we were still experiencing the very intense atmosphere his presence brought to the rehearsal, and keeping with this high emotion, we went on stage with Steve. Naturally, the concert was fantastic and I enjoyed playing Piece of Wood with him.

Since this concert Ensemble ICTUS has continued to perform Steve’s repertoire, including masterpieces such as Drumming, Music for 18 Musicians and Six Marimbas. Ensemble ICTUS has also collaborated closely with the dance company Rosas, which has included Steve’s works in their repertoire. Together with Ensemble ICTUS and Rosas, I had the opportunity to travel to many festivals in several countries and perform Steve Reich’s music. When I decided to leave Europe and move my base to the United States, I began focusing on my solo activities. After this break from ensemble performance, I had the desire to play Steve’s pieces again and I began to think of how I could challenge what I am able to do in my solo works.

Works with Steve Reich

Electric Counterpoint version for percussions

Electric Counterpoint (1987) was written for the legendary guitarist Pat Metheny and was premiered at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York. In 2009 I began thinking about playing this piece in my solo project Steel Drum Works, which includes steel pans, vibraphone and marimba. It had been a long time since I had seen Steve Reich (perhaps the BAM festival in 2003), but I emailed Steve anyway, explaining and exploring this idea of mine and he was surprisingly quick to reply. However, his initial reaction was reluctance towards my arrangement ideas. Reich’s counterpoint series was written on the concept of blending identical instruments together and the idea of mixing steel pans, vibraphone and marimba seemed to be extremely problematic. After some discussion with him, I went back to the drawing board and thought through how I could arrange the piece to meet my imagination, without distorting his original work. For a few days I reviewed the original score over and over again, and thought deeply about the composition. The solution was not to mix the different instruments in each movement, but to arrange it so that as each instrument enters at the end of the movement, they sound like waves in the background.

Movement I: Fast consists of eight parts with steel pans (a Tenor pan and a pair of Guitar pans) as the main instrument and the wave sound in the background is created by the vibraphone. (I call the beautiful transitional chords which appear at the beginning and the end of each movement the wave sound.) Movement II: Slow consists of nine parts. The vibraphone takes over as the main instrument and the wave sound is played by the marimba. Movement III: Fast consists of four parts; the marimba provides the bass, and the cutting sound which develops in the middle of this movement is played by the vibraphone. The piece finishes with the culmination of all of these instruments playing together.

Steve’s initial reply included a message saying, ‘First send me a recording of it’. So I stayed up almost three days and nights, overdubbing the numerous parts and sent the demo to Steve. Again, he replied promptly, saying, ‘Very good! Your version of Electric Counterpoint works very well’, and stating that he thought the arrangement was interesting. After formally receiving Steve’s approval and the paperwork from Boosey & Hawkes, I jumped into the Blackbird Studio in Nashville, Tennessee where the legendary recording engineer George Massenburg has his own studio. George is the genius who invented the parametric EQ as a teenager and is well known as the producer/engineer of many big hits in the 80s including Billy Joel, Linda Ronstadt, Phil Collins and Earth, Wind & Fire. George showed a great interest in this project and wanted to ‘Make it as great as possible’. As it turned out, George is a very good friend of Bob Ludwig who created many of Steve’s original recordings, which gave him an additional insight into the project. We spent two full days recording all the parts. After the recording process, I sent the rough mix to Steve, to which he replied, ‘Bravo! You made a beautiful arrangement’. Those challenging two days really paid off with his short compliment. I asked Akira Fukada, an AES Fellow who is a highly respected recording engineer with numerous awards including an AES Japan award, AES Fellowship award and Unesco award, and who is also a good friend of George to do the stereo mix. Prior to mixing, Fukada-san and I spent a great deal of time discussing the direction I wanted to take with my recording and reviewing the score. The completed stereo mix is beautiful and was done with extra care.

Six Marimbas Counterpoint

The original is actually named Six Marimbas (1986) and as the name indicates this is for an ensemble consisting of six players with six marimbas. My arrangement of Six Marimbas, Six Marimbas Counterpoint, was named by Steve himself in 2010. I have played his great piece on various occasions and I have always felt that it is a difficult piece to perform live and to clearly express the intended rhythms in detail due to the characteristics of the marimba’s sound and also the physical distance of six players on stage. Originally, I was considering a project with film footage, until I suddenly had the idea of one player playing all the parts on one instrument. When I shared this idea with Steve, he immediately agreed it was a practical idea and approved a recording of it. I originally planned to play all six parts by myself, but on his suggestion, I arranged a new solo part which could be used to perform live, thusly creating a score for live solo marimba with pre-recorded tape of five marimbas. With this new arrangement, solo marimba players all over the world can perform this piece as a part of their solo repertoire.

I flew to Japan and asked Seigen Ono at Saidera Paradiso to record my arrangement. Seigen Ono is not only an excellent engineer, but he is also an artist whose talent spreads into all aspects of his work: recording, audio engineering, live performance and composition. He is perhaps Japan’s leading proponent of 1-bit DSD audio. Recently, Ono has been creating music for Comme Des Garçons, collaborating with John Zone in New York and other well known around the world. The recording went very smoothly with the help of Ono’s excellent intuitive sense and after two days we had two different versions of the solo. It was a physically daunting recording process as I had to play this approximately sixteen minute piece over twelve times! After some editing and a rough mix, I sent the demo to Steve. Unfortunately, his prompt response wasn’t what I had been hoping for; I had added in some reverb to the recording and as a result, the piece had too many overtones and had become too cloudy to hear the detail of the composition. So I went back to my original test recording and started mixing it again from scratch. The piece required strong attacks but I did not want to lose the natural resonance of the marimba. As I went back to the origins of this piece I realised it was originally written for six pianos and remembered a firm comment from Steve saying, ‘Be Bold!’. These two facts were an eye opener; the choice of mallets which I should have used became very clear as well as the direction of the sound. The mixing of Six Marimbas continued, and the sound image I tried to create was of the rhythmic patterns of all six pianos intertwining; this sound is very prominent in this recording. I spent several days completing the demo and sent it to Steve as usual, and he responded with the pleasant compliment of, ‘Bravo! This is a wonderful sound and it’s ready to go.’

Vermont Counterpoint version for vibraphone

The original Vermont Counterpoint (1982) is one of Steve’s masterpieces for flute, piccolo and alto flute and it is possibly the most widely performed piece after his New York Counterpoint. Perhaps this may be one the most widely performed pieces next to New York Counterpoint. There are many arrangements of this composition for various instruments, and I remembered a conversation with Steve a long time ago, where he mentioned this piece could be arranged for marimba. Originally, I wanted to arrange Vermont Counterpoint first and then Electric Counterpoint, however I had difficulty imagining how I could play it on marimba and I did not think I could clearly express the distinctive characteristics of this piece. The original piece has a very precise tonal concept based on a combination of long tones, rhythm and sound which comes from tonguing and native flute techniques; these techniques are extremely important to the beautiful construction of the piece and they add colourful timbres to it. I tried to find a way to replicate these qualities on the marimba using various marimba techniques, including the dead stroke technique, however the tempo of the piece is quite fast and it can easily lose its uplifting feeling when played slowly.

Then the idea of combining the pedal and mute on the vibraphone came to me. The vibraphone supports a wider range of expression and when I attempted a few phrases I thought, ‘This is it!’ However, when reading through the score, I realised that the standard vibraphone, which is under three octaves, cannot cover the entire range of the composition. I considered transposing the piece but gave that idea up quickly, as I believed the original scoring was best. Previously, I had the opportunity to play Saito’s 4.3 octave vibraphone, and this vibe has a unique, yet beautiful, dark tone. From this experience I envisioned two options for performing this piece on vibraphone: one option was to add an extra note (a high D) to this vibe and play through the entire piece with one instrument and another option was to use a standard vibraphone but substitute an orchestra bell (glockenspiel) for the piccolo part in order to make it more practical for live performance and also for more players to be able to perform it. The piece starts with the beautiful tone of the vibraphone – with its bright high tones overlapping. Then the piece goes through a softer section before finally coming to the last part where hard rubber mallets twinkle and the tone is like a glockenspiel, gradually covering the whole vibraphone and coming to a grand climax. This piece was written similarly to the end of Drumming Part I.

Kazuya Nagae is the engineer who recorded this piece. In addition to his professional credentials and great musical sense, he is also a faculty member at Nagoya University of Arts in Aichi, Japan, close to my home town. The university has state of the art recording equipment, which is why I recorded this piece at the university. Nagae and I had a great conversation about my recording ideas; he clearly understood and agreed with my concept. He was very enthusiastic about the project and spent an enormous amount of time and energy studying the original music and experimenting with various recording approaches prior to the recording session. The recording went very well and the demo was fantastic. Steve’s initial impression was that, ‘The vibes by themselves are absolutely sensational’. However, we weren’t there yet and there were many challenges in one particular section. One final piece of advice given by Steve was to, ‘Please remember that this piece was written for flutes – not vibraphones. Alto flutes are much quieter than regular flutes and piccolos are the loudest of all.’ Even though I was familiar with the original, I did not see the very basic fact that when playing the alto flute part, I should play less and when playing the regular flute, I should play as marked, and lastly, when playing the piccolo part, I should play the loudest. After these last considerations, the beautiful vibraphone version of Vermont Counterpoint was completed. I cannot thank Mr. Reich and Mr. Nagae enough for their patience on this recording.

I ran into Steve for the first time in over ten years in Toronto, Canada in April 2010 while attending a concert at Koerner Hall. I spoke with him after the concert and he said to me, ‘Thank you very much for all of your hard work’. And as always, he was wearing his trademark jeans and cap; this was the same smiling Steve Reich I had met so many years ago.

I would like to express my gratitude to Steve Reich who has always demonstrated an enduring rigor towards music and provided fantastic advice and praise for me alongside his great passion for music. I started this project in January 2009 and it took almost two and a half years to complete, but now this music is able to be experienced by you, the listener. This gives me more pleasure than anything else. I hope you and many other people around the world enjoy this music. I am very happy with this recording and I am grateful to be able to call Akira Fukada, Seigen Ono, George Massenburg and Kazuya Nagae my close friends. These experiences have become my irreplaceable treasures.

© 2011 KUNIKO

Recording Information

All tracks are recorded at 192kHz / 24bit audio

Mastering: Bastiaan Kuijt, BK Audio, NL

Executive Producer: Philip Hobbs at Linn Records

All original music and supervision by Steve Reich

Arranged, performed and produced by Kuniko in consultation with Steve Reich

Cover photograph by Michiyuki Ohba

Design by John Haxby

Production Coordination Kim Campbell at Linn Records

Electric Counterpoint version for percussions

Recorded January 28 & 29^th, 2009 at Blackbird Studio, Nashville, U.S.A..

Engineered by George Massenburg | Kazuri Arai, assistant engineer

Stereo mix by Akira Fukada

Surround mix by George Massenburg

Instruments, 1-Tenor pan, A pair of Guitar pan, Vibraphone and Marimba

Six Marimbas Counterpoint

Recorded November 24 & 25^th, 2009 at Saidera Paradiso, Tokyo, Japan

Engineered by Seigen Ono

Mixed (stereo & surround) by Seigen Ono at Saidera Paradiso, Tokyo Japan.

Instruments, Marimba

Vermont Counterpoint version for vibraphone

Recorded March 28 & 29^th, 2010 at recording studio, Nagoya University of Art, school of music, Nagoya, Japan

Mixed (stereo & surround) by Kazuya Nagae

Instruments, Vibraphone

Credit

This arrangement made by permission of Boosy & Hawkes Music Publishers Ltd.