A Companion to Mallet Quartet
class CoAuthor
def __init__(self, name):
self.name = "Tyler M. Howie"Format (When): Where
- Publication (2021) – Drumming@50
- Presentation (2017) – Nief-Norf, Sixth International Conference on Music and Minimalism (Titled: Rhythmic Voice Leading in Steve Reich’s Mallet Quartet)
TL;DR
Steve Reich’s Mallet Quartet (2009) has enjoyed canonical success in its genre. Its rhythmic motives, as in much of Reich’s later music, gradually morph throughout the piece. This paper presents rhythmic voice leading as a pedagogical application of beat-class analysis (Cohn 1992; Roeder 2003) to identify these transformations.
Rhythmic voice leading segments the music into formal units derived from rhythmic prototypes, helping performers mentally compartmentalize, memorize, and efficiently rehearse music. For a rhythmic prototype example, take the Atsiagbekor bell pattern—a pattern Reich frequently uses (Hartenberger 2016). Marimba 1 repeats a composite rhythm composed of two different rotations of the bell pattern. Simultaneously, Marimba 2 cycles through altered bell patterns, varied by displacing onset positions, or voices. Practicing rotations of this pattern makes much of the Mallet Quartet into pattern recognition. As such, this paper serves as a practical companion for performance of this piece and others like it.