It's gonna rain is a musical composition written by Steve Reich in 1965 and approximately 17 minutes and 50 seconds in length. It was Reich's first major work and a landmark of musical minimalism and process music. Musical composition is: an original piece of music the structure of a musical piece the process of creating a new piece of music // A musical composition A piece of music exists in the form of a written composition in musical notation or as a single acoustic event (a live performance... Steve Reich Steve Reich (born Stephen Michael Reich, October 3, 1936) is an American composer. ... 1965 (MCMLXV) was a common year starting on Friday (the link is to a full 1965 calendar). ... Minimal music is sometimes applied to classical music of the last 45 years which displays some or all of the following features: emphasis on consonant harmony, if not functional tonality; reiteration of musical phrases, with subtle, gradual, and/or infrequent variation over long periods of time, possibly limited to simple... Process music or systems music is music which arises from a process, and more specifically, music which makes that process audible. ...

The source material of It's gonna rain consists entirely of a tape recording, made in January 1965 at San Francisco's Union Square, of an African American Pentecostal preacher named Brother Walter speaking about the end of the world (Grimshaw [1]) and the accompanying background noises, such as the wings of a pigeon taking off. The piece opens with the story of Noah and repeats the phrase "it's gonna rain" before looping this sentence. Reich uses two tape normal Wollensack taperecorders with the same recording, originally attempting to align the phrase with itself at the halfway point (180 degrees), but due to the imprecise technology in 1965, the two recordings would fall out of synch with one tape gradually falling ahead or behind the other due to minute differences in the machines and playback speed. Reich decided to exploit this phase shifting wherein all possible recursive harmonies are explored before the two loops eventually get back in synch before the end of the piece. This article needs to be cleaned up to conform to a higher standard of quality. ... In music the compositional technique phasing, discovered by composer Steve Reich, is that while the same part is played on two musical instruments, one instrumentalist keeps playing in steady tempo, while the other gradually moves ahead of the first until it becomes out of and then back in phase (the...

Reich created another similar composition the next year called Come Out, in which the same process is done with the phrase, "come out to show them". Come Out is a 1966 piece by American composer Steve Reich. ...

Source

• AllMusicGuide.com: It's Gonna Rain, for tape Composition Description by Jeremy Grimshaw

External links

• Steve Reich: Early tape pieces Interview by Jason Gross