"Clapping Music"

Glenn Kotche at Modern Drummer 2006 Festival Glenn is the drummer from Wilco and also a top percussionist and yet really does'nt fit in this geeky muso-fest of wanky drummers! He's actually playing listenable stuff as well as completely blowing minds with technique and feel! Now for the most authentic older version Go Here "Clapping music" a minimalist piece written by Steve Reich in 1972. A development of the phasing technique from Reich's earlier works such as Piano Phase, it was written when Reich wanted to "create a piece of music that needed no instruments beyond the human body". However, he quickly found that the mechanism of phasing slowly in and out of tempo with each other was inappropriate for the simple clapping involved in producing the actual sounds that made the music. Instead of phasing, one performer claps a basic rhythm of 12 quaver beats in length for the entirety of the piece. The other claps the same pattern, but after every 12 bars s/he shifts by a quaver to the left. The two performers continue this until the second performer has shifted 12 quavers and is hence playing the pattern in unison with the first performer again (as at the beginning), some 144 bars later.