''It's Gonna Rain'' is a

minimalist In visual arts, music and other media, minimalism is an art movement that began in post– World War II in Western art, most strongly with American visual arts in the 1960s and early 1970s. Prominent artists associated with minimalism include Do ...

musical composition for magnetic tape written by Steve Reich in 1965. It lasts about 18 minutes. It was Reich's first major work and a landmark in minimalism and

process music Process music is music that arises from a process. It may make that process audible to the listener, or the process may be concealed. Primarily begun in the 1960s, diverse composers have employed divergent methods and styles of process. "A 'musi ...

Analysis

The source material of ''It's Gonna Rain'' consists entirely of a tape recording made in 1964 at San Francisco's Union Square. In the recording, a

Pentecostal Pentecostalism or classical Pentecostalism is a Protestant Charismatic Christian movement

preacher, Brother Walter, rails about the end of the world, while accompanying background noises, including the sound of a pigeon taking flight, are heard. The piece opens with the story of Noah, and the phrase "It's Gonna Rain" is repeated and eventually looped throughout the first half of the piece. For the recording, Reich used two normal Wollensak

tape recorder An audio tape recorder, also known as a tape deck, tape player or tape machine or simply a tape recorder, is a sound recording and reproduction device that records and plays back sounds usually using magnetic tape for storage. In its present ...

s with the same recording, originally attempting to align the phrase with itself at the halfway point (180 degrees). However, due to the imprecise technology in 1965, the two recordings fell out of sync, with one tape gradually falling ahead or behind the other due to minute differences in the machines, the length of the spliced tape loops, and playback speed. Reich decided to exploit what is known as

phase shifting In physics and mathematics, the phase of a periodic function F of some real variable t (such as time) is an angle-like quantity representing the fraction of the cycle covered up to t. It is denoted \phi(t) and expressed in such a scale that it v ...

, where all possible repeated harmonies are explored before the two loops eventually get back in sync. The following year, Reich created another composition, '' Come Out'', in which the phrase "come out to show them" is looped to create the same effect. The work is in two parts of roughly equal length, the first using the "It's Gonna Rain" sample as mentioned above, the second using a separate section of the speech with short phrases cut together and the resultant pattern then phased as in the first part, but with additional tape delay to create a more processed sound. During a lecture at the

Long Now Foundation The Long Now Foundation, established in 1996, is an American non-profit organization based in San Francisco that seeks to start and promote a long-term cultural institution. It aims to provide a counterpoint to what it views as today's "faster ...

, electronic musician Brian Eno cited ''It's Gonna Rain'' as his first experience with minimalism and the genre that would come to be known as ambient music.

References

External links

"Steve Reich: Early tape pieces"
interview by Jason Gross. Perfect Sound Forever. April 2000.
"Will Wright and Brian Eno - Generative Systems"
video of lecture at Long Now Foundation {{Authority control 1965 compositions Compositions by Steve Reich Process music pieces