Celeste Hutchins, in a post about fonts and other topics, asks if Steve Reich's Come Out is exploitive:
But to my ignorant self, it seems like he's using the words of African Americans and then slowly degenerating their meaning until it's unintelligible.
Come Out was premiered at a benefit concert for the Harlem Six, a group of kids being retried for murder (one of the six apparently was guilty but not the one whose voice was used by Reich). The composer on Music Mavericks: I was given a stack of about 10 reels of tape with mothers and voices, and I said to the guy--Truman Nelson was his name--who was a civil rights person and scholar of John Brown, I said, “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.”
Steve Reich's Writings about Music does not really answer the question of the work and its meaning. Keith Potter in Four Musical Minimalists suggests the work resembles social protest with the repetition increasing its impact; it might have also served as a warning of the sixties' racial unrest to follow. Reich in the liner notes to Early Works talks about the use of recorded speech:
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.
• Reich work list on NewMusicBox.
• The piece is so minimal, basically a repeat of the phrase "come out to show them" with increasing phasing, such that by the end, it is bizarrely unintelligible albeit still musical. Robert Gable
• Amazon.com Music Sales Rank of Early Works: #59,528
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