steve reich's clapping music on the el green line
music in transit, clapping games, and the man in the hat
Today we have a nice little video from 2009, 4 likes, under a thousand views, big homework vibe. It's Steve Reich's "Clapping Music" performed by "Team Blint", on Chicago's Green Line.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fyqWo_k9sXQ
According to the video description, this video was part of the 2009 University of Chicago Scavenger Hunt. The Scav (as it is called) is a typically wild and wooly affair that sends hundreds of students around Chicago looking for bizarrely specific items and achieving difficult tasks. Points are awarded for each item you get and extra points are awarded for spirited entries or inspired interpretations of the rules. The rules are very clear that you should be able to accomplish everything without breaking the law, although it's implied that basically you should be willing to break the law, that the law is less important than this game. As far as I can tell any legal ass-covering in the rules was put in after 1999, when one of the objectives was to build a working nuclear breeder reactor. FWIW the team that built the nuclear reactor still came in second. That should give you an idea of how serious people take this.
Anyway, in 2009 one of the items on the list said: "You know what the El needs? Quartets. Bring a little class to the subway music scene. [8 points]". I think in general Steve Reich is a good choice for music to perform on a subway-- this type of fast rhythmic patterns should be recognizable to anyone that's zoned out super hard on a train. Also it's immediately enjoyable and understandable to anyone else in the car-- a pattern set against itself but off by one, constantly rearranging itself until it returns back to unity. You don't need any context to groove on it. And to top it off, the instrumentation (hand clapping) is classic for a public setting. I'm thinking of course of "Miss Mary Mack", "Miss Lucy Had A Steamboat", and other hand clapping monster hits of the urban environment.
I wonder if these guys are still in touch, and if they ever bust this out on other occasions, or teach this to others. Maybe some of them are parents now, do they do this with their kids??
If you want to play along or listen to a cleaner copy of this piece, here's a more traditional duo arrangement, performed in part by the man in the hat himself: [Steve Reich & Wolfram Winkel - Clapping Music, YouTube, 5min]. I can't think of a single person who, in an enviroment hostile to baseball caps, rocks the baseball cap harder, than Steve. I love him. Incidentally I finally looked it up, and you say "Reich" with a "shh" sound at the end, like you're saying "rice" while cartoonishly drunk.
There's a lot of versions of this piece on YouTube and a few riffs and jokes on the subject. Here's an good riff featuring an edited clip of Ann Margaret and Lee Marvin, from the movie Point Blank (1967). [Angie Dickinson and Lee Marvin, YouTube, 6:50]. This one transcends YouTube joke into like "video art good" I think.
The playground clapping game closest to Steve Reich vibes is probably Slide Baby-- [Slide Baby, YouTube, 0:50].
Oh yeah and here's a link to the wikipedia article on the UChicago Scavenger Hunt: [University of Chicago Scavenger Hunt, Wikipedia] Peace everyone :)
If someone send this to you because you like American music and trains, or exhuberant Minimalism, you might also like other things I've written. This is Pleasant Realms, an email newsletter about mostly unstressful ASMR-adjacent YouTube videos.