Vic Firth
4 HN recommenders · recommended in 7 months, 2016–2025
1:05:56 · 2.7M views · Sep 28, 2012
A full performance of Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians by eighth blackbird with Third Coast Percussion and others, recorded in Chicago in 2011. It is an hour-long minimalist piece built on phasing and repeating patterns.
Recommended in coding-music threads as lyric-free, repetitive music that aids focus.
7 comments from Hacker News
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
> people talking/singing in a language I even partially understand to be highly disruptive That's readily addressed: Luritja: [LINK] Djambarrpuynu: [LINK] Kuanua: [LINK] If you're looking for patterned music to keep the world at bay you might look to composers like Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Wim Mertens, etc. eg: Music for 18 Musicians - Steve Reich this video
For me, the only genre that reliably works is "minimal" music, like stuff by Steve Reich[1] or Gas[2]. My definition of this genre would be music with no lyrics that has highly repetitive structures (differentiating it from "ambient" music, which I find too sleepy to be invigorating). [1]: Music for 18 Musicians this video [2]: Koenigsforst [LINK]
If you like a bit of weird time signature, arpeggios, and seemingly dissonant sounds that eventually harmonize into chaotic outburst you might enjoy what was my coding metronome back in the early 1980s ... YMMV - Steve Reich, Music for 18 Musicians this video
[tangent] Speaking of Steve Reich, if you haven't yet listened to his glorious Music for 18 Musicians ensemble piece (duration: 55 minutes), do give it[1] a try. An explanation of the composition and its structure: [LINK] [LINK] [1] this video [/tangent]