The Selected Papers were chosen from of a Call for Papers issued in July, 2020. The requirements were that the submissions should concern Steve Reich’s music and his influence. Suggested topics were Reich and: performance practice; percussion; popular music; theory; American culture; and global perspective. Proposals could be made with media interactivity or other forms of creative scholarship. As with everything in 2020, the process was affected by the pandemic; one of the selected papers had to be withdrawn due to Covid complications. The peer review panel was: Russell Hartenberger, Chair (Nexus; University of Toronto); Victoria Aschheim (Dartmouth College); Aiyun Huang (University of Toronto); Adam Sliwinski (Sō Percussion; Princeton University).
– This project uses an algorithmic approach to explore the concept of resultant patterns as used by Steve Reich in Drumming. It seeks to analyze what it means for a resultant pattern to be interesting and to encode these intuitive musical characteristics into a computer algorithm.
– Commissioned as part of the Digital Phasing project by Louise Devenish, Jet Kye Chong’s Still Drumming 2020 exploits latency and geographical distance, offering a pandemic perspective on Reich’s signature techniques.
– A presentation of rhythmic voice leading as a pedagogical application of beat-class analysis to identify transformations of rhythmic motives in Steve Reich’s Mallet Quartet.
– An examination of the challenges and rewards of playing the percussion music of Steve Reich using the themes of “Texture, Space, and Survival” as taken from a 1987 Reich essay of the same name.
– An examination of the function of relationship and community in the creation of Steve Reich’s Drumming, and an assessment of the benefits and challenges of collaborative approaches to creating music.
– A fresh look at Drumming and Come Out that makes us wonder if what we thought was happening was actually happening and if our bodies actually understand what we hear.