Chord of the Day: The Desert Music

The Desert Music is a composition by minimalist composer Steve Reich written between 1982 and 1983 and based on The Desert Music and Other Poems by William Carlos Williams. The piece is made up of five movements and lasts nearly forty minutes but it’s the first few minutes of the first movement that has always caught my ear:

I was always fascinated with the outlining harmony, which is a jarring, pulsing array of chord swells. It has impossibly close-voiced chords that bucked so much of what I’d been taught about harmony with its ambiguous tonal centre and plentiful dissonance. I decided I had to work out what was going on. I always felt it was like a musical palindrome because I couldn’t pin-point that start or end of the cycle.

The five-chord cycle is spread across four flutes, two pianos, a choir, string ensemble and marimbas. Obtaining a digital copy of the score was harder than it should have been but I managed to find a copy on Boosey & Hawkes. These harmonies aren’t the easiest to describe in terms of chord names we’re familiar with. Some of them are so richly extended they use almost every scale tone in their given mode. Neither functional nor jazz harmony does a good job of explaining what is happening.

Let’s look at the original loop. I’ve divided the composite sound into five major groups: the flutes, the piano, marimba (originally composed for two pianos and two marimbas but they play a mirror-like ping-pong rhythm so I’ve simplified it), the choir and finally the string section. Let’s start off with the flutes.

The original is in 6/4 time and each chord lasts between four and five bars. This is just a simple reduction to make it easier to read and understand the context and overall tonality. I’ve also included the notes spelt out for those of you who don’t read music. You may notice that the key signature changes in bars 2-4 to Ab and the last bar are in C. As with many of Reich’s pieces, there is an abundance of pulsating instrumentation, which I’ve mostly avoided in my audio demonstrations for simplicity.

Flutes

The flutes are playing cluster chords in their upper-middle register. We start off with a G7sus-like chord built on stacked fourth intervals with an A at the top. This moves to an Eb with an added 9th in the second measure. Next there are two chords with no overtly real major nor minor feel. The loop is concluded by repeating the first chord, although as we’ll see later this is further re-contextualised by other elements or the orchestra.

Below is the Logic piano roll. Ordinarily, colour is used to denote volume (velocity), but I’m just using it here for visual aid, rather than dynamic marking.

Marimba

In a register close to the flutes, the marimbas play similarly simple harmonies. We also see a Bb introduced with the first chord, making me think that it shouldn’t be read as an F chord (the major 3rd and 4th degree aren’t often used together). At the moment it’s unclear what it could be. Interestingly there’s an A natural (flattened 9th degree) in bar three, which might suggest a movement away from the implied Ab.

Piano

This is where it starts to get a little complicated. We see a Db added to the first chord and, with the doubled A octave in the left hand, we can safely assume our scale looks something like A, Bb, C, Db, E, F and G – not a million miles away from the altered scale.

The bass part (A, C, Eb, F and D) can perhaps give us some clue as to the root notes of the chords, and it leads me to believe that the fifth chord is a D minor.

Choir

The bass is reaffirmed by the choral ensemble; other than that we don’t learn anything new. The upper soprano voices mimic the flutes.

Strings

The string section covers the largest register, in particular, the first violin which reaches an F two octaves above middle C. We can see much more clearly that our last chord is like a Dm9/11, containing the G, E and C.

There You Have It

There are some things of note. The last chord is almost a Dm chord and it leads back to the first chord in the cycle, a Gø7/A, which is a v I progression of sorts (please be aware I am simplifying these voicings). Gø is the vii of Ab, and chords two, three and four sit in this key.

It’s hard to be reductive about exactly what’s happening here: these harmonies weren’t designed to be played with two hands on a piano and even my best attempts at encapsulating Reich’s orchestration lost something when being forced to sacrifice clusters of tones. Using these type of chords in your own work is not as easy as copying and pasting them in; careful attention has to be paid to how you’re going spread such dense clusters over different voices and timbres.

Part of what makes this work is the claustrophobic voicing in each group of instruments. Each taken on its own doesn’t really tell the whole story. What I love about this progression is its cyclical nature. Before obtaining the score, I really struggled to point out the first chord*, not knowing whether or not it was a four, five, six (or longer) chord sequence.

*Interestingly enough the score has a “1” rehearsal mark on chord two.

Reich is best-known for his minimalist compositions built on simple rhythmic ostinatos that gradually shift in phase over long segments of time, but I think his harmonies sometimes go unnoticed or at least don’t attract the same attention.

It’s worth looking into other works of his from the same period: (Music for 18 Musicians from 1978 is a great starting place, as it has similar rhythmic and harmonic makeup; and, of course, his seminal Different Trains from 1989 for tape and string quartet. But perhaps my favourite composition of Reich’s aside from The Desert Music is his Electric Counterpoint, written for Pat Metheny.

Big thanks to Alarm Will Sound’s very own Alan Pierson who actually corrected me on a small transcription error.

This is a great post! But there’re some mistakes. 2 of the flutes should be 8va & 1st mba chord is: pic.twitter.com/KdKV000pQj

— Alan Pierson (@AlanPierson) March 17, 2017