For half a century, Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians has been a kind of perpetual motion machine: an intricately interlocking, endlessly renewable composition whose patterns shimmer and shift even as they circle back to where they began. For its 50th anniversary — and Reich’s 90th birthday — conductor/director Alan Pierson took that cyclical logic quite literally, turning the utterly distinctive, landmark work into a three-and-a-half-hour communal experience at New York’s Park Avenue Armory. Titled Music for 18 Musicians: Staged Variations, the October production presented the piece three times in uninterrupted succession, each performance entrusted to a different generation of musicians: members of the original Steve Reich Ensemble, students from the Manhattan School of Music’s Tactus program and Pierson’s own pioneering new music group, Alarm Will Sound.
But this was more than an endurance test or an elaborate anniversary tribute. With musicians gradually moving outward from the center of the Armory’s vast Wade Thompson Drill Hall and eventually surrounding the audience, Pierson conceived the three cycles as a kind of human life span. The original ensemble brought decades of authority to the music; the students supplied an exuberant, physically demanding interpretation that challenged conventional ideas about how the piece could be performed (think: someone running in circles while holding maracas and never dropping a beat); and Alarm Will Sound closed the evening with a more reflective, ritualistic reading. In between, a new commissioned work by Caroline Shaw provided a transition between generations. The result made plainly visible the remarkable community that has grown around Reich’s composition — and the way its emotional possibilities continue to renew themselves with each encounter.
For Pierson, whose relationship with Music for 18 Musicians dates to his days studying at the Eastman School of Music, the project was also the realization of a long-held ambition to reveal the work’s underlying simplicity and put listeners inside its musical organism. In conversation with SPIN, he discusses the inspiration behind Staged Variations, the unlikely challenges of producing a famously intricate score in motion, the extraordinary commitment of the young musicians who helped make it possible and why a piece he has lived with for decades can still meet him — and its audience — exactly where they are.
A celebration of Music for 18 Musicians could have taken many different forms. How did you and your collaborators arrive at the idea of staging it three distinct times in one evening? What drew you to that concept, and what did the physical space of the Armory add to the experience?
The very first flash of inspiration was to honor the 50th anniversary of Music for 18 Musicians by staging the work as a durational, cyclical, evolving experience. The aspects of the piece that got me fired up about this idea were: first, its cyclical structure — it ends exactly how it began; second, its emotional polymorphousness — it makes space for and resonates with wide-ranging emotional experience; and third, its status as a cultural icon — it’s music that people adore, and that stands up to repeated listenings. So many artists and fans of my generation grew up listening to it obsessively on a loop. I’ve had some of the most profound artistic experiences of my life at durational events like Taylor Mac’s 24-Decade History of Popular Music (where I met my husband in 2026, and which I now conduct), and I knew there was a profound durational experience to be created with this music.
The Armory was the only place I could imagine doing it. New York was clearly the place to celebrate this anniversary: Reich is a New York institution, and his development in the 1960s and ’70s was inextricably linked to the city; and especially since I wanted to center the generations of artists who’ve grown up around his work, this all needed to happen here. I wanted to express Reich’s musical organism through staging, and to put the audience in the midst of that organism. That meant a big, flexible space, with an institution equipped to make music at that scale. All of that added up to just one venue: New York’s Park Avenue Armory.
I didn’t initially have a clear sense of exactly how many times we’d play the piece. My first thought (probably due to the Taylor Mac inspiration) was 24! But then I thought maybe 12 or six would be enough? I started surveying players in AWS how many times they could imagine playing the piece in a single day, and how much break they’d need in between. Three was actually the shortest duration I could imagine that would communicate my vision for Staged Variations. It took nine months to actually get into a room to discuss the idea with the Armory’s Artistic Director, Pierre Audi. Pierre listened thoughtfully to my pitch, and then quickly put to rest my uncertainty about how many times to play the piece: we’d do it three times, he said.
What distinctive elements did each ensemble bring to the piece? I was particularly intrigued by the students from Tactus, who added an element of physical movement I’d never seen in Music for 18 Musicians.
Once Pierre established that we’d play the piece three times, the broad shape of the experience quickly became clear to me. It’d start in the center of the space, gradually move outward — expressing the emanation of the piece into the cultural world — and eventually surround the audience, though with the piano/marimba pulse heartbeat holding fast at the center of the space the whole time. The first time would be a classic, conventional performance by the musicians who’ve been playing it for the past half-century; the second would be an exuberant staging of Music for 18 as a collaborative community, expressing the music’s joy and love; and the third would be reflective and ritualistic, expressing the music’s timeless, transcendent soul. A little inspired by the shape of Donancha Dennehy’s Land of Winter, the overall arc would be like the shape of a life: from youth, to the passionate energy of early adulthood and finally to a kind of transcendent peace.
Each group brought something special to that journey. The Reich Ensemble brought their decades of authority and experience. There’s a magical kind of calm confidence that OG ensemble members Bob Becker and Russ Hartenberger bring whenever they’re standing at the marimbas, playing that Music for 18 pulse. Alarm Will Sound brought a kind of mastery that comes from growing up in a musical world already transformed by Reich’s work. We really needed that for that final hour of the event, where the ensemble had to play at maximum speed and maximum distance, while also embodying a sense of floating, timeless peace. No small feat!
But it was always clear to me that the second rendition was going to be the most demanding and ambitious. The exuberant staging I was envisioning for this second hour of Music for 18 was unprecedented (50 years after its composition, professional ensembles still struggle just to keep performances on the rails, and the conventional wisdom was that the way to make the music work was for everyone to be as close as possible, and to focus on playing together.) Even I wasn’t totally sure my staging vision was possible — Steve was convinced that it wasn’t! — and it was certainly going to be a high-wire act.
This meant a lengthy and deep process: memorizing and internalizing the music so well that it became second nature, and then developing and finessing the highly physical staging collaboratively. I imagined this would take a year, and that a top music school would be the perfect partner: I’d done the piece with student groups over the years and saw how easily this music came to young musicians today. Plus, there was a lovely resonance here in the story of the production: Alarm Will Sound’s musicians had first played the piece when we were in school (where it was much harder for us than it is for today’s generation of students!), and the original Steve Reich and Musicians were mostly in their 20s when they workshopped the piece with Steve over two years in the 1970s.
I was thrilled that Matt Ward at the Manhattan School’s Contemporary Performance Program was game to jump on board and organize his students for the project. As luck would have it, they were already trying to organize a performance there for February 2026, which gave the students a chance to build confidence with the music and the memorization far ahead of the staged production. I first met with those Tactus musicians in October 2025, a year before the production. They’ve brought vast energy, love, and devotion to the project. By the end, they so owned their staging and their performance that I didn’t even feel I needed to rehearse them. I was just awed by how easy this impossible-seeming endeavor became in their hands. Watching them do this incredibly virtuosic, physical staging, and simultaneously giving the smoothest, most consistent, stable, and finessed performance of the piece I’d seen … it still blows my mind. The staging actually seemed to make the music easier for them to play.
It’s been deeply emotional to watch their journey with Music for 18. Their performance was meant to express the piece’s communal spirit and its love; and over the year of work, that spirit and that love seemed to infuse the whole ensemble. They really became a family. You could feel the love they have for each other through all of their interactions. It reminded me a lot of Alarm Will Sound’s early time together 25 years ago. They gave their final performance of the piece the morning after the rest of the production wrapped, in a Monday morning educational performance for a group of New York City high school students. I basically cried for the entire hour. I so hope that they’ll do this again.
Bang on a Can’s David Lang and Nico Muhly converse in the show program about how 18 Musicians was transformed by the belated publishing of its score, which finally allowed groups all over the world to perform it. When did you first interact with the written notation?
When I was a grad student at the Eastman School in the 1990s, I was part of starting a student-run new music collective there called Ossia, which gave birth to Alarm Will Sound, and which still exists to this day. We all really wanted to perform Music for 18 Musicians, and it so happened that that was right when Marc [Mellits] was finishing up the first complete score of the piece. So, we were some of the first to see it and play off of it.
My first reaction was: the downbeats are not where I thought they were! My second reaction was: wow, it all looks so complicated! I’d learned the piece from the two Steve Reich and Musicians recordings, and it was the radical, powerful simplicity of its structures that really made me fall in love with the music. Those structures weren’t easily seen in the score. Reich had set out — wisely! — to create a score and parts that would make the piece as readable as any more conventional work from the classical music canon, so that even if you knew nothing about the piece and had never heard it played, you could pick up the music and play it correctly. But that meant creating a score with a ton of detail that unintentionally obfuscated some of its simplicity.
So I was immediately curious to find a way to represent the piece on paper that expressed that radical simplicity. I spent more hours than was wise working on this back then, but didn’t get all that far in. Then in early 2026, as I began working with the Tactus musicians on memorizing the piece and on developing the staging, it suddenly hit me that we really needed that simple, clear map of Music for 18 that I’d dreamed of all those years earlier. That turned into the 50th Anniversary Map that I created with my husband, Paul Melnikow, and which was featured in the Staged Variations program.
18 Musicians has been called “the most present-tense music ever.” Do you concur? If so, why?
I’ve never heard that phrase before, but I love it. I discovered early on that in the midst of wildly varied emotional experiences, Music for 18 Musicians would connect to what I was feeling and make it feel deeper, better and more profound. I might be heartbroken over some frustrated crush, excited about some new project, inspired by the changing view out an airplane window, or just enjoying the routine of cleaning my apartment: whatever my present was, this music would heighten it. So, that’s how that quote resonates with me. And that’s why this show works: you can hear the same music again and again and be always taken somewhere new.
Alarm Will Sound is one of the most respected interpreters of Steve’s compositions. What keeps drawing you back to 18 Musicians? Is there a Steve piece you’ve yet to tackle that piques your interest?
It’s exactly that present-tense-ness that brings me back to Music for 18 again and again: it’s deeply emotional music that’s available to wide-ranging emotional experience. Steve was part of a vanguard that welcomed beauty and joy and emotion back into serious music. The two pieces that will forever be dearest to me are Music for 18 Musicians and Tehillim, both of which are intertwined with the origins of Alarm Will Sound (we recorded Tehillim when we were still students). But I adore so many of his works. I was struck and delighted by the energy and joy in his latest piece, In All Your Ways. I’d love to do that one sometime! I’m also very attached to his early, rigorously focused process pieces like Four Organs. And I’ve been curious to explore some of his conceptual works from the 1960s, like My Name Is, which involves recordings of audience members saying their names; and Slow Motion Sound, which is just the instruction “very gradually slow down a recorded piece to many times its original length without changing its pitch or timbre at all.” Steve quickly moved away from these sorts of abstract, electronic explorations to more human, acoustic music. But electronic music technology has made both of these concepts infinitely easier to realize, and I think that both suggest lots of interesting new performance possibilities today.
Alarm Will Sound just released a new album, New Acoustica, but are there any other recordings or commissions on the books?
Music for 18 Musicians created a template for a kind of musical work that particularly excites me: long-form, abstract music that takes listeners on an emotional journey. So, I think of it a lot as I’m working on new projects, and I’m endlessly gratified to get to work with great composers who share those ambitions. This week, we’re touring Georg Friedrich Haas’s already iconic 1999 work, In Vain. It’s an extraordinary, powerful experience of music and light, which I think owes a lot to Music for 18. We’ve also got an evening-length work by one of my favorite composers, Cassandra Miller, in development. Plus, of course other exciting stuff on the horizon that I can’t talk about yet!
As an artist focused on the intersection of music and theater, opera is a particular passion for me. So I’m very excited that in April, we’ll be giving the New York premiere of Mark Morris’s staging of David T. Little’s new opera, What Belongs to You, which we released on album a few months ago. I’ve been passionate about David’s work since premiering his early opera, Dog Days, and I think this is his greatest opera yet.
2026 has been our biggest recording year yet: New Acoustica comes on the heels of two live recordings of theatrical works, What Belongs to You and Mary Kouyoumdjian’s Paper Pianos, plus the Lift release of music by AWS artists, and an appearance on composer Davor Vincze’s Ashes album. It’s an exciting time to be making new music. And I’m curious to think about what the next production will be to build on what I learned creating Staged Variations at the Armory.
