So Percussion
Steve Reich Drumming
(Cantaloupe)
Drummers are famously a breed apart, temperamental and individualistic, so to have a group like So Percussion made up solely of drummers, four in all, is an intriguing prospect. Happily, they play 'as if with one mind'. Scored for nine percussion instruments, including bongos, marimbas and glockenspiel, Drumming is a multi-track recording of one of Steve Reich's minimalist masterpieces that demonstrates the young musicians' expertise across the percussive board. Only the voices are not their own.
Reich is generally hailed as the US's leading composer, and Drumming came out of his time in Ghana in the early 1970s where he absorbed the complex rhythms of African drumming and transformed them into his trademark minimalism - musical composition that pares down rhymes, harmonies and patterns to their bare essentials.
Because of the extended repetitions in Reich's score his music is sometimes called trance, and Drumming, with its repeated series of rhythms, could be mistaken for background music.
