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 As with everything in 2020, the process was affected by the pandemic; one of the selected papers had to be withdrawn due to Covid complications.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).

Oliver Xu

Drumming: an Algorithmic Approach

Oliver XuThis 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.

Devenish photo by Olivia Davies

Digital Phasing: Using Latency as an Agent for Metric Change

Dr Louise DevenishCommissioned 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.

Andrea Mazzariello

Hearing in Reverse

Dr Andrea MazzarielloA 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.