Clapping Music

Clapping Music is a minimalist piece written by Steve Reich in 1972. It is written for two performers and is performed entirely by clapping.

Reich and his ensemble were on tour in Europe in 1972. After a concert in Brussels, the promoter asked him if they would like to go see some flamenco music. They ended in a club and watched a pair of musicians who by Reich's account were terrible guitarists and singers. However when they started clapping very loudly, Reich and his group, who were mainly percussionists, joined in. After the concert Reich realised that he could use this as the basis for work, not least as it could be performed with only a few people rather than taking two trucks of equipment.

A development of the phasing technique from Reich's earlier works such as Piano Phase, it was written when Reich wanted to (in his own words) "create a piece of music that needed no instruments beyond the human body". However, he quickly found that the mechanism of phasing slowly in and out of tempo with each other was inappropriate for the simple clapping involved in producing the actual sounds that made the music.

Instead of phasing, one performer claps a basic rhythm, a variation of the fundamental African bell pattern in 12/8 time, for the entirety of the piece. The other claps the same pattern, but after every 8 or 12 bars shifts by one eighth note to the right. The two performers continue this until the second performer has shifted 12 eighth notes and is hence playing the pattern in unison with the first performer again (as at the beginning), some 144 bars later. The variation of the African bell pattern is minimal; it contains just one additional beat. However, this minimal addition results in a much more interesting piece from the point of view of the variation of syncopation as the piece progresses.

In Reich's 1974 book Writings about Music there is a picture of the piece being performed at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston, Texas on 13 November 1973.

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