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 for which only one of the six was responsible. Truman Nelson, a civil rights activist and the person who had asked Reich to compose the piece, gave him a collection of tapes with recorded voices to use as source material. Presumably, 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 on the basis of his earlier work It's Gonna Rain, agreed to give him creative freedom for the project. A composer is a person who writes music. ... Stephen Michael Reich (born October 3, 1936) is an American composer. ... For other uses, see Harlem (disambiguation). ... Its gonna rain is a musical composition written by Steve Reich in 1965 and approximately 17 minutes and 50 seconds in length. ...

Breakdown of the composition

Reich eventually used the voice of Daniel Hamm, one of the boys involved in the riots but not responsible for the murder; he was nineteen at the time of the recording. At the beginning of the piece, he says: "I had to open the bruise up and let some of the bruise blood come out to show them" (alluding to how Hamm had punctured a bruise on his own body to convince police that he had been beaten). The police had not previously wanted to treat Hamm's injuries, since he did not appear seriously 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 a phase shifting effect, characteristic of Reich's early works. Gradually, the discrepancy widens and becomes a reverberation and, later, 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 piece is a prime example of process music. For other uses, see Unison (disambiguation). ... Definition of phase shift Phase shifting describes relative phase shift in superposing waves. ... This article is about audio effect. ... In music, a canon is a contrapuntal composition that employs a melody with one or more imitations of the melody played after a given duration (e. ... This article needs to be cleaned up to conform to a higher standard of quality. ... For the popular Tamil film, see Rhythm (film) Rhythm (Greek = flow, or in Modern Greek, style) is the variation of the length and accentuation of a series of sounds or other events. ... Process music or systems music is music which arises from a process, and more specifically, music which makes that process audible. ...

Trivia

• Come Out was Reich's first commercial recording on Columbia Records.
• Captain Beefheart quotes the composition in the lyrics of his song "Moonlight on Vermont" (from Trout Mask Replica).
• The quotation from Come Out is sampled at the beginning of the Madvillain song "America's Most Blunted".
• It also appears on the Unkle "Bruise Blood" remix of Tortoise's song "Djed."

Columbia Records is the oldest brand name in recorded sound, dating back to 1888, and was the first record company to produce pre-recorded records as opposed to blank cylinders. ... Don Van Vliet (born Don Glen Vliet on January 15, 1941, in Glendale, California, USA) is a musician and visual artist, best known by the pseudonym Captain Beefheart. ... Trout Mask Replica is a 1969 double album by Captain Beefheart (real name: Don van Vliet) and His Magic Band with artwork by Artist Cal Schenkel. ... Categories: Stub | Hip hop albums | 2004 albums ... UNKLE is a British musical outfit founded in 1994 by school friends James Lavelle and Tim Goldsworthy. ... Tortoise, an instrumental rock band, formed in Chicago, Illinois in 1990. ...

See also

• Harlem Six

• Truman Nelson

References

1. Blom, Eric, ed. Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. Hardcover ed. 10 vols. St. Martin's Pr., 1954.
2. Griffiths, Paul. "Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians" Grove Music Online: the World's Premier Authority on All Aspects of Music. Ed. L Macy. Oxford Univ. Pr. 7 Nov. 2005 <http://www.grovemusic.com>.
3. Steve Reich Interview -Gabrielle Zuckerman, July 2002
4. Bomb Magazine: Steve Reich and Beryl Korot, by Julia Wolfe