Steve Reich – Pendulum Music
Steve Reich’s Pendulum Music (1968) stands as one of the most iconic works of the late 1960s experimental avant-garde — a concise yet profound demonstration of sound as a process rather than an expression. Written during a period of intense exploration of minimal and conceptual art, it dispenses entirely with conventional instruments, notation, and virtuosity. Instead, it proposes a simple but radical act: each performer holds a microphone above a loudspeaker, releases it, and allows it to swing like a pendulum. As the microphones pass over the speakers, they produce bursts of feedback that phase in and out of alignment, creating waves of interference, rhythm, and resonance.
The resulting sound world is at once mechanical and organic. The feedback tones pulse, beat, and blur as the swinging arcs gradually slow, revealing hidden rhythmic relationships and shifting overtone structures. The performers’ role ends once the pendulums are set in motion — what follows is a self-generating process, a sonic sculpture unfolding in real time. When the microphones come to rest, the feedback stabilises into a sustained drone before fading into silence.
For Klang Systematiek, Pendulum Music embodies the ensemble’s fascination with the boundary between performance and installation, between intention and emergence. In our interpretation, the performers’ action — the simple gesture of release — becomes a ritual that sets a system in motion. The music is not “played” but allowed to occur; it happens within the shared field of physics, acoustics, and space. Every performance is unique, shaped by the architecture, materials, and layout of the room — by air currents, by proximity, by the bodies of the listeners themselves.
Our realisations of the piece place the audience within the installation rather than before it. Listeners are invited to move freely, to experience the sound field from multiple points, to sense the invisible geometry traced by the swinging microphones. In certain spaces, the ensemble integrates subtle lighting and electronics, extending the visual and acoustic dynamics of the pendulums into the environment. This approach situates Pendulum Music not only as a historical landmark but as a living, spatial experience — an event that unfolds between art, science, and perception.
The work also reflects Klang Systematiek’s broader ethos: that music can emerge from systems of attention rather than from display. Though Pendulum Music requires no instrumental skill, it demands profound sensitivity to timing, resonance, and decay — forms of listening that transcend technique. The performers’ collaboration is one of restraint and awareness, allowing a process to reveal itself rather than imposing form upon it.
In this way, Pendulum Music resonates deeply with the ensemble’s exploration of composers such as La Monte Young, James Tenney, and Pauline Oliveros — artists who understood sound as a phenomenon of relation and transformation. Reich’s piece, with its minimal means and maximal perceptual impact, invites both performers and audience to rediscover what it means to listen collectively: to witness sound as a living event, suspended in time, where the simplest physical act can open vast fields of experience.
Images
