13.8: Alarm Will Sound

Alarm Will Sound is an instrumental ensemble based in New York City. The group was initially formed by students at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, NY. While pursuing degrees in music, founders Gavin Chuck and Alan Pierson got into conversation about the limited opportunities for the performance of New Music (a standard term for recent, often experimental, art music compositions, many of which might be classified as avant-garde)—and especially minimalist music. They recruited a group of interested performers and started a concert series. Upon graduating from Eastman, the members of the ensemble decided that they wanted to keep working together, and in 2001 Alarm Will Sound was founded.

Image 13.18: This photograph of Alarm Will Sound was taken in 2011 by Michael Clayville. Source: Wikimedia Commons Attribution: User “Mclayville” License: CC BY-SA 3.0

The group’s first concert under their new name took place on May 24, 2001, in New York City’s Miller Theater. Unsurprisingly, given their collective interests, the program explored the music of minimalist composer Steve Reich (b. 1936). Reich was at the forefront of the development of minimalism in the 1960s. Although minimalist composers take a variety of approaches to their work, they share an interest in developing extended compositions from limited musical material. Reich himself has always detested the term “minimalism,” preferring the more descriptive “pattern and process music.” This is fitting: Most minimalist composers employ fixed transformative processes in their work.

Image 13.19: Steve Reich in 1976. Source: Wikimedia Commons Attribution: Hans Peters / Anefo License: CC0

Reich’s Compositional Processes

Reich’s earliest experiments were completed using tape loops. He discovered that if he played two identical loops of audio tape at slightly different speeds, he could produce a dazzling and constantly shifting array of effects, opening up a world of sound that could never be detected in the untransformed material. Reich’s first completed tape piece did not even use musical sounds. Instead, he built Come Out9 (1966) using a clip from an interview with Daniel Hamm, one of the Harlem Six—a group of black men (mostly teenagers) who were coerced into confessing to a 1964 murder and denied adequate representation by the courts. Although the men were convicted by an all-white jury in 1965, all but one of the charges were eventually overturned. In Come Out, we hear Hamm explaining the means to which he had to resort in order to convince police that he and his co-defendants had been beaten in jail and required medical attention.

Steve Reich created his pioneering tape loop composition Come Out in 1966.

Come Out was initially a byproduct of a sound collage that Reich built at the request of civil rights activist Truman Nelson, but it ended up being a broadly influential minimalist experiment. Over the course of the 13-minute work, Hamm’s voice slowly dissolves into a cacophony of rhythms and timbres. The words soon become unintelligible as the listener’s interest shifts to the element of pure sound. Although it is almost impossible to detect the gradual changes that are taking place, no two seconds of the recording are the same. Sustained attention is rewarded with an inimitable sonic experience.

Reich soon applied similar techniques to musical material, at the same time developing new approaches to facilitating gradual change over extended periods of time. Reich was a highly trained musician, having studied at the Juilliard School in New York City and Mills College in Oakland, CA. He also had omnivorous tastes: He was equally enthralled with jazz, the music of Bach and Vivaldi, rock, and Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. Later, he took opportunities to study non-Western traditions, including Balinese gamelan and West African drumming. All of these influenced his mature style.

Tehillim

On their inaugural concert, Alarm Will Sound performed two large-scale Reich works for orchestral ensemble and singers: Tehillim (1981) and The Desert Music (1983). We will consider Tehillim, which, by Reich’s own account, represented his first attempt to engage musically with his Jewish heritage. The texts, sung in Hebrew by four female voices, are taken from the Book of Psalms (the original Hebrew word for which is “Tehillim,” which literally means “praises”). In the first movement, we hear four lines from Psalm 19:

The heavens declare the glory of God;

the skies proclaim the work of his hands.

Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they reveal knowledge.

They have no speech, they use no words; no sound is heard from them.

Yet their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world.

In the heavens God has pitched a tent for the sun.

At first, a solo voice is accompanied only by a tambourine without jingles (intended by Reich to evoke the small drum mentioned in Psalm 150) and clapping—another mode of rhythmic accompaniment that was in use during Biblical times. We hear the entire Psalm text sung to a continuous melody, which is shaped by the rhythms of the Hebrew words. This is an atypical way for Reich to open a piece of music, but he soon begins applying transformations.

I. Psalm 19:2-5, “The heavens declare the glory of God” from Tehillim. Composer: Steve Reich. Performance: Alarm Will Sound (2011)

Time	Form	What to listen for
0’00”	Melody	The Psalm text is presented by a solo singer and accompanied by tambourine and clapping
0’36”	Melody (repetition)	Another singer repeats the melody, which is now doubled by clarinet
1’12”	Canon in 2 voices	The two singers perform the melody in canon
1’47”	Canon in 2 voices (two repetitions)	The strings enter with sustained harmonies
2’59”	Canon in 4 voices	The tempo slows; each phrase is repeated many times; the voices are doubled by reed organ and accompanied by maracas; the string harmonies continue
8’49”	Melody	The solo singer is doubled by clarinet and accompanied by tambourine, clapping, and maracas
9’24”	Melody (repetition)	The string harmonies return
9’58”	Melody (repetition)	A second singer harmonizes below the melody
10’32”	Melody (final statement)	The texture thins as elements disappear one by one

The second time through the melody, the singer is doubled by a clarinet, while a second percussive accompaniment of tambourine and clapping enters in canon with the first. Next, we hear the melody in a two-voice canon, one singer echoing the other. Soon after the canon begins, the strings enter with sustained harmonies. At the conclusion of this turn through the complete melody, the tempo slows and the texture fractures into a four-voice canon. The four singers repeat each individual line of the Psalm many times. They are doubled by electric organ, which contributes a reedy timbre, and accompanied by maracas. The sustained string harmonies gradually shift, seemingly out of time with the voices. Finally, the original soloist—again doubled by clarinet—assumes the melody once more, to the accompaniment of drums and maracas. She is briefly harmonized by one of the other singers, but the movement ends much as it began.

While Tehillim is quite different from Come Out in all surface respects, we can see how Reich’s basic compositional process is consistent. The textures in Tehillim—as in Come Out—are created from the increasingly complex layering of limited sound material. In the case of Tehillim, Reich relies on rhythmic and melodic canons, augmented by slow-moving, kaleidoscopic harmonies.

Orchestrating Aphex Twin

The members of Alarm Will Sound were brought together by their love for music like Tehillim, and in their early years they found a great deal of success staging concerts that highlighted the work of individual living composers. However, they also shared a passion for popular music— in particular, the innovative electronic dance music of Aphex Twin. Members of the ensemble began discussing the possibility (and purpose) of recreating Aphex Twin’s music using acoustic instruments.

Image 13.20: Aphex Twin performs at Coachella in 2008. Source: Wikimedia Commons Attribution: Octavio Ruiz Cervera License: CC BY-SA 2.0

According to founder Gavin Chuck, the idea was controversial: “There were heated debates about the nature of digital vs. acoustic sound, and of machine precision vs. human expressiveness. There were disagreements about whether we should be as faithful as possible to the originals, or interpret them more openly.” Despite the varied opinions about the merit of such a project, Alarm Will Sound eventually took it on. Their work culminated in the 2005 album Acoustica, which primarily featured arrangements taken from Aphex Twin’s 2001 album Drukqs.

Whether or not all of the work required to make and record these arrangements was worthwhile is debatable. We will consider the opening track from Acoustica, “Cock/Ver10.”10 One might argue that Alarm Will Sound’s limited sound palette and acoustic means of production are inferior to the programmed beats, digitally- refined timbres, and studio effects of Aphex Twin’s original11—or one might prefer the sounds of orchestral instruments. It is hard not to be impressed by the skill of the arranger, Stefan Freund, who translated Aphex Twin’s track into an orchestral score, and by the individual performers, who place complex rhythms and melodic gestures in exactly the right place.

“Cock/Ver10” 10. Composer: Aphex Twin (arr. Stefan Freund) Performance: Alarm Will Sound (2011)

11. “Cock/Ver10” was included in Aphex Twin’s 2001 album Drukqs.

From Chuck’s perspective, the strength of the project lay in its capacity to connect the ensemble with new audiences and put their artistic values on display. It became, in his words, “an important platform from which to pursue a wide-ranging artistic vision that doesn’t worry too much about genre—electronic vs. acoustic, high-modernist vs. pop-influenced, conventional classical concert vs. multimedia experience.” In short, by recording the works of Aphex Twin, Alarm Will Sound proved that they were eager to embrace good music from unexpected quarters.