Steve Reich's Radiohead piece Radio Rewrite has its premiere

Steve Reich's Radio Rewrite, the piece he built from two Radiohead songs, had its first performance on 5 March at the Royal Festival Hall in London. The London Sinfonietta played it under Brad Lubman, and BBC Radio 3 broadcast the concert live. Slate has a write-up of the premiere.

Introducing the work on the broadcast, Reich sang a little of “Everything in Its Right Place” to show the chord progression he had borrowed, which he joked is everything in Western music¹. The other song is “Jigsaw Falling into Place”, one of whose motifs comes back in the first, third and last movements. The five movements run without a break for about 20 minutes; Reich finished the score last August.

The piece goes back to Jonny Greenwood. Reich heard him in Krakow in 2011, at a festival of Reich's music, playing Electric Counterpoint, Reich's 1987 piece for a guitarist against a recording of himself. Reich had earlier written 2x5 thinking Radiohead might play it, before finding that not all of them read notation as easily as Greenwood.