Colin Currie Group : Steve Reich: The Sextets Review

by Steven Miller

Steve Reich’s music has long depended on a clear premise: of steady pulse and layered harmonic materials.  This is used to develop his compositions over time. His sextet works focus on that by distributing rhythm and harmony across interlocking compositional theme. With groups moving in poly-tonal and poly-rhythmic patterns anchored by a grounding pedal. Anchoring them in a manner that provides context.

With Steve Reich: The Sextets, the Colin Currie Group presents these works as variations on Reich’s composition structural logic. The ensemble has a long-term relationship with this repertoire, which makes the flow sound as variations on the core logic found in Reich’s writing.

Across the album there is always a pulse and sustained harmonic pattern. These remain fixed, while orchestration, layered activity, and harmonic color shift around them. Rhythm cells stays in motion, harmony grows over a pedal modal foundation. The ensemble’s contrast emerges through layering to bring out the structural changes in a balanced and meaningful musical manner.

“Double Sextet – II. Slow” shows how much expressive range that dual focus can hold. The pulse is constant, even at its most spacious. Piano establishes a steady grid while harmonic color expands above it, moving from modal clarity into denser, sometimes bitonal layers. What shifts is weight and texture: vibraphone takes over rhythmic motion at points, lightening the surface, before the full ensemble returns and density builds again. At the peak, multiple systems are active at once—polyrhythms, expanding harmonic color, and rising dynamics, creating tension through accumulation rather than disruption.

“Dance Patterns” runs the same engine in a more overtly rhythmic frame. Interlocking piano figures and mallet percussion establish tight, repeating cells that contract and expand between subdivisions. Harmonic motion still grows from a pedal base, but it’s embedded inside the pattern rather than floating above it. Orchestration becomes the primary variable: piano provides attack and definition, while vibraphone adds sustain and shimmer, creating contrast without altering the underlying structure. Even as the rhythmic language leans into more syncopated, globally inflected patterns, the system holds, pulse and grounding remain constant, and intensity comes from layering and density.

The ensemble’s control makes that system audible. Attacks are unified, accents are clean, and dissonances are tuned so they generate tension without blur. Just as important is how the group manages internal balance: rhythmic responsibility shifts fluidly between instruments, and changes in density feel deliberate rather than incidental. The “double sextet” concept reads less as two ensembles and more as a single, flexible instrument capable of redistributing its internal roles in real time.

What Steve Reich: The Sextets ultimately clarifies is that Reich’s sextet writing is not driven by repetition alone, but by controlled variation within a fixed framework. Pulse and harmonic grounding never disappear. Everything else, color, density, motion, evolves around them. That’s how the album works, and that’s why it holds together.