Transpositional Combination of Beat-Class Sets in Steve Reich's Phase-Shifting Music

IN 1968 STEVE REICH WROTE Music as Gradual Process, an essay inspired by his work with compositional technique of phaseshifting.' Reacting against both aleatoric and serial composers, who use hidden structural devices to disconnect the compositional from the sounding music, Reich implied that in his phase-shifting music he had discovered way to enable musical processes to be perceived throughout sounding music, and thus to have achieved a compositional process and sounding music that are one and same thing.2 He showed draft of his essay-in-progress to James Tenney, who pointed out an important implication: then composer isn't privy to anything. Reich concurred, concluding that I don't know any secrets of structure that you can't hear.3 Such conclusion hardly encourages analysis. If there is nothing in bones that is not in skin, analysts may as well leave their surgical