Come Out (Reich)

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Come Out is a 1966 piece by American composer Steve Reich. Reich was asked to write this piece to be performed at a benefit for the retrial of the Harlem Six, six black youths arrested for committing a murder during the 1964 Harlem riots that only one of the six was responsible for. Truman Nelson, a civil rights activist, had asked Reich to compose the piece, giving him a collection of tapes with recorded voices to use as source material. Reich's response was: “Look, I’ll do this, and I’ll do it for nothing, but you’ve got to let me make a piece out of anything I find.” Nelson, who chose Reich based on his earlier work It's Gonna Rain, agreed to give him creative freedom.

The voice Reich eventually used for the work was that of Daniel Hamm, then nineteen, one of the boys involved who was not guilty of the murder, saying: "I had to open the bruise up and let some of the bruise blood come out to show them." Hamm had punctured a bruise on his own body to convince police that he had been beaten; they had not previously wanted to treat Hamm's injuries, as he had not appeared sufficiently wounded.

Reich re-recorded the fragment "come out to show them" on two channels, which initially play in unison. They quickly slip out of sync to produce the phasing effect which characterizes Reich's early works; gradually the discrepancy widens and becomes a reverberation, and then almost a canon. The two voices then split into four, looped continuously, then eight, until the actual words are unintelligible. The listener is left with only the rhythmic and tonal patterns of the spoken words; Reich says in the liner notes to his recording Early Works of using recorded speech as source material that "by not altering its pitch or timbre, one keeps the original emotional power that speech has while intensifying its melody and meaning through repetition and rhythm." The work's phasing technique makes it, like many of Reich's early works, an example of process music.

Come Out was Reich's first commercial recording on Columbia Records. The track has been sampled in works by various artists, including Camper Van Beethoven, DJ Spooky, Tortoise and by Madlib on the album Madvillainy. Captain Beefheart references the piece on his song "Moonlight on Vermont" on his seminal album Trout Mask Replica, using the phrase as a repeated refrain in the second half of the song.

References

Paul Griffiths: 'Steve Reich', Grove Music Online ed. L. Macy (Accessed [7 Nov 05]) [(subscription access)]
[Steve Reich Interview with Gabrielle Zuckerman, July 2002]
[Bomb Magazine: Steve Reich and Beryl Korot, by Julia Wolfe]

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