Radio Rewrite
About this Piece
In September 2010 Reich met the Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood at a festival of Reich’s music in Poland, where Greenwood was playing Reich’s Electric Counterpoint. This introduced the composer to the music of Radiohead, and two years later he completed Radio Rewrite, reworking the Radiohead songs “Everything in Its Right Place” and “Jigsaw Falling into Place.”
“It was not my intention to make anything like ‘variations’ on these songs, but rather to draw on their harmonies and sometimes melodic fragments and work them into my own piece,” Reich writes. “This is what I have done. As to actually hearing the original songs, the truth is – sometimes you hear them and sometimes you don’t.
“Radio Rewrite is in five movements played without pause. The first, third, and fifth are fast and based on ‘Jigsaw’ and the second and fourth are slow and based on ‘Everything’.”