City Life (Reich)

City Life is a minimalist composition by Steve Reich written in 1995. It is scored for 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 vibraphones, unpitched percussion, 2 samplers, 2 pianos, string quartet, and double bass. All instruments except the unpitched percussion are to be amplified. Its duration is 24 minutes. It uses digital samplers amongst the instruments used in performance, and these play back a wide variety of sounds and speech samples, mainly recorded by Reich himself in and around his home town of New York City. These sounds include car horns, air brakes, car alarms and many other sounds associated with the city.

The use of the samplers extends the idea of using everyday sounds in music, indebted to the taxi horn in Gershwin's An American in Paris, the sirens used by Varèse, and Antheil's airplane propeller within the classical tradition as well as to rock and roll and rap. This use also harkens back to Reich's early tape pieces, such as It's Gonna Rain or Come Out. The samplers are loaded with speech and other common sounds from a busy city (car horns, door slams, air brakes, subway chimes, pile drivers, car alarms, heartbeats, boat horns, buoys, and sirens). The last movement uses bits of field communications from the New York Fire Department during the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.

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