Music for Dozens of Farmers

Nancy Matumoto's Reaping What She Sows, Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians

Fifty years ago today, one of the most important pieces of modern music had its world premiere at Town Hall in Midtown Manhattan: Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians.

The piece has no conductor, and cycles through patterns of eleven chords; the vibraphonist cues transitions with a single pitch; and in the opening and closing sections the singers and wind players don’t play to a bar line at all.

Perhaps most important, it’s pulled between two measures of time. The repeated rhythm of the West African-inspired percussion is the reason why some of the most interesting DJs feature on the Reich Remixed album. The beats are rich, layered and sophisticated.

The other measure of time comes from the vocalists and wind instruments: they take a full breath and pulse a single note for as long as their lungs will hold it, and then cue the next change. “The breath is the measure of the duration,” Reich writes.

(It’s this tension, by the way, that means that the Coldcut track on the Reich Remixed album doesn’t quite work. It’s just got the beats programmed in nicely, but lacks the human pull of breath and listening. The remix doesn’t capture the texture of the original which, honestly, is all texture.)

I've been hearing this piece in my head while reading Nancy Matsumoto's Reaping What She Sows, a tour of the women rebuilding the alt food system — a Minnesota organic grain farmer in the middle of a golden sea of GMO corn, Indigenous fishers off Vancouver Island, cacao growers in Belize. She journeys through the different domains in which women are transforming the food system: from grain to seafood to agave, and the result is a rich, textured tapestry of change.

Reaping What She Sows is Music for Dozens of Farmers. No conductor. No featured voice — Matsumoto narrates her own presence very lightly. Each woman is a pulse; each chapter a phrase; the alt food system she’s documenting gets described in the shape it actually takes. Here are short supply chains. There is decentralised labour. People working close to the ground and to each other.

Industrial food is a symphony with a conductor and a featured soloist. What Matsumoto is reporting is a different score entirely — pulsed, breath-scaled, durable because of the similar patterns in each domain.

Fifty years in, Reich’s piece has outlasted a great deal of the music that once seemed more serious. We can only hope that the alt food system that Matsumoto describes, with origins that long predate the industrial one, outlasts the crisis that the modern system has spawned.

Hold your breath, but don’t stop breathing.

The breath is the measure of the duration.