{"id":2285741,"date":"2026-02-17T14:36:31","date_gmt":"2026-02-17T14:36:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/?p=2285741"},"modified":"2026-02-17T14:36:31","modified_gmt":"2026-02-17T14:36:31","slug":"musician-interview-george-steel-on-launching-a-new-thursday-night-series-at-the-gardner-museum-with-steve-reichs-landmark-music-for-18-musicians","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/musician-interview-george-steel-on-launching-a-new-thursday-night-series-at-the-gardner-museum-with-steve-reichs-landmark-music-for-18-musicians\/","title":{"rendered":"Musician Interview: George Steel on Launching a New Thursday-night Series at the Gardner Museum with Steve Reich’s landmark “Music for 18 Musicians”"},"content":{"rendered":"

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By Larry Hardesty<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cI would say <\/em>Music for 18 Musicians was probably the most influential piece of American concert music of the last quarter of the 20th century. You could conceivably stretch that to the most influential piece of American concert music since it was written.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

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Composer and producer George Steel. Photo: Whitney Lawson<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

George Steel is a composer, who has won the BMI Jerry Harrington Award for outstanding creative achievement in musical theater and whose commissioned work The Three Kings<\/em>\u00a0has become a staple of the Guggenheim Museum\u2019s Christmas concerts. He\u2019s also a conductor, who reopened the Park Avenue Armory in New York with programs of Mahler and Stravinsky and has performed around 100 concerts of Renaissance polyphony with the choral group he founded, the Vox Vocal Ensemble.<\/p>\n

For more than 30 years, he has also been a professional concert and opera producer. In 2018, after stints at the 92nd Street Y in New York, Columbia\u2019s Miller Theater, and the New York City Opera, Steel joined the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum as the Abrams Curator of Music.<\/p>\n

The Gardner already hosts what Steel calls \u201cthe oldest museum-based concert series in the United States,\u201d a Sunday afternoon concert series that features between 25 and 30 performances a year. But on February 26, 2026, it\u2019s inaugurating a new Thursday evening concert series<\/a> with a rare Boston-area professional performance of Steve Reich\u2019s seminal minimalist piece Music for 18 Musicians<\/em>. The Gardner\u2019s website declares that \u201cThursday Night Music concerts are open seating, single-set performances with no intermission.\u201d Admission to the museum\u2019s galleries is included with the concert ticket.<\/p>\n

Steel agreed to answer a few questions about the new series for the Arts Fuse<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n

The Arts Fuse<\/strong>: What\u2019s the premise behind the new concert series?<\/p>\n

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John Singer Sargent\u2019s 1903 portrait of composer Charles Martin Loeffler. Photo: WikiMedia<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

George Steel<\/strong>: Music is an integral part of what the Gardener Museum is. Music was Isabella\u2019s first love, I think. She opened the museum in 1903 with a concert by the BSO. She had built a perfect music room, and she conceived of the performance of classical music as central to the museum\u2019s life.<\/p>\n

The first concert she gave was mostly older music, and the second concert she presented was all music by her friend Charles Martin Loeffler, the composer. A portrait concert of a living composer was the second thing she ever did. So this balance between celebrating great works of the past and supporting and celebrating the music of living composers was something that has been there forever.<\/p>\n

Our flagship series is a series of concerts on Sundays at 1:30. But there\u2019s a lot of music in the world that I don\u2019t personally want to hear on Sunday at 1:30. It feels like evening music, and there are different audiences who might come in on an evening. We\u2019re only open one night a week, which is Thursday night, so I\u2019ve been working for a while to try to develop a Thursday night music series.<\/p>\n

And we\u2019re launching it this year, with this amazing professional performance of Music for 18 Musicians<\/em>. It\u2019s Steve\u2019s [Reich\u2019s] 90th birthday, it\u2019s the piece\u2019s 50th birthday, and of course, it\u2019s the U.S.\u2019s 250th birthday. And I would say Music for 18<\/em> was probably the most influential piece of American concert music of the last quarter of the 20th century. You could conceivably stretch that to the most influential piece of American concert music since it was written.<\/p>\n

AF<\/strong>: Where do you see that influence?<\/p>\n

Steel<\/strong>: Well, I mean, every time you turn on the television, you hear the influence of minimalism, but particularly minimalism as colored by Music for 18 Musicians<\/em>. Oddly, people don\u2019t think about the orchestration, but Steve\u2019s orchestration is amazing. This idea of four pianos and all these mallet instruments, undulating in time \u2014 that\u2019s totally his invention. And it\u2019s everywhere. You cannot escape it.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s also in the way that American concert music is received overseas, particularly in Europe. There was a long history of it being sort of a watery version of European music \u2014 Arthur Foote, God bless him, is sort of light Brahms.<\/p>\n

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Composer Steve Reich. Photo: Jennifer Taylor<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

But America constantly produces these mavericks \u2014 these nutcases, for want of a better word \u2014 who do their own thing that sounds nothing like European concert music. Often, it\u2019s music that embraces every kind of vernacular music. Charles Ives is an obvious example, or Conlon Nancarrow, who wrote for player pianos, or Ruth Crawford Seeger, for that matter.<\/p>\n

Steve spent a long time studying West African drumming and adopted a harmonic vocabulary loosely out of rock and roll and jazz. And his music was embraced warmly by European avant-garde composers who would never in a million years have dreamed up anything like it.<\/p>\n

Music for 18<\/em> represents a moment for him where he was able to bring together two things that he was working on. He talks about this freely, it\u2019s not my insight, but one of them is phasing, which is something that developed out of his studies of West African music. The most obvious example is Clapping Music<\/em>, which is one bar of music, and it\u2019s a palindrome: three pulses, a rest, two pulses, a rest, one pulse, a rest, two pulses, a rest,<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the whole piece, except it\u2019s played by two players. They clap in sync as long as they like, and then at some point, one of them shifts over an eighth note. So the same piece is coming at you asynchronously, and then that player moves over another eighth note and continues to do that until they cycle all the way back to a unison at the end. Or there\u2019s a piece called Piano Phase<\/em>, where two pianos are absolutely in sync, and then one of the pianos speeds up just infinitesimally until it gets a 16th note away, a moment where you have this moir\u00e9, and it\u2019s incredible. In Music for 18<\/em>, you have this rhythmic machine set up, and it phases in and out.<\/p>\n

The other thing he was working on was music based on the breath. So in Music for 18<\/em>, the bass clarinets and the singers make a great crescendo and recede as they run out of breath. It\u2019s the grid and the wave, the lattice with its moving moir\u00e9 patterns and the colliding wave.<\/p>\n

And the whole piece is based on a sequence of 11 tasty jazz chords, and it cycles through them. But what\u2019s amazing to me is \u2014 you know, there\u2019s a lot of minimalism that is very minimal. There\u2019s very little material, and it changes very slowly. But every iteration in Music for 18<\/em> over the span of its hour or so is delicious. They have groove, and they have tunefulness, and the orchestration is so varied.<\/p>\n

I should mention that David Bowie wrote an article about his 25 favorite albums of all time and included Music for 18<\/em>, which he had seen in New York in a loft. And that\u2019s the other thing about the piece: it\u2019s a very unusual ensemble, dominated by percussionists, which probably reflects the gamelan music that Steve was studying at the time. It wasn\u2019t concert hall music; it grew out of what was happening downtown in New York in the \u201970s.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Ensemble Signal in action. Photo: Stephanie Berger<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

AF<\/strong>: The concert announcement says that these Thursday night concerts are going to be no-intermission, single-piece performances.<\/p>\n

Steel<\/strong>: One of the problems we have in our hall is that when we put the tickets on sale, they sell out immediately, months in advance. Younger people tend to buy tickets closer to the performance, and the tickets are all gone. So we\u2019re experimenting with putting the tickets on sale much closer to the event, and the idea is to present something you don\u2019t have to describe in great detail. It\u2019s just like, \u201cWe\u2019re doing Music for 18<\/em>\u201d, and that\u2019s all you need to know. It\u2019s an experience.<\/p>\n

AF<\/strong>: Does that concept relate in some way to the museum setting?<\/p>\n

Steel<\/strong>: Our concerts are very much \u2014 people use this term pretty loosely \u2014 but they are curated. There\u2019s a model of curating where you say, \u201cWe\u2019re going to spend an afternoon with this artist\u201d, and I certainly do that myself. But Isabella left her collection and her museum \u201cfor the education and enjoyment of the public forever\u201d. So I\u2019m focused on education and enjoyment \u2014 and discovery. When you\u2019re at a museum, you move through the collection at your own pace, and you\u2019re always discovering something new. I want to capture that curiosity, energy, excitement, fun \u2014 and exposure to a strong point of view, which you certainly are when you\u2019re exposed to Isabella\u2019s particular choices.<\/p>\n\n

Larry Hardesty<\/strong> is the lead singer and songwriter for the band the Hopeful Monsters, whose song \u201cThe Inexhaustible West of the Heart\u201d<\/a>\u00a0features a three-line portrait of Brian Wilson. He earns a living as a science writer and editor.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n

\u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source artsfuse.org \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Larry Hardesty \u201cI would say Music for 18 Musicians was probably the most influential piece of American concert music of the last quarter of the 20th century. You could conceivably stretch that to the most influential piece of American concert music since it was written.\u201d Composer and producer George Steel. Photo: Whitney Lawson George […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2285742,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25179],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2285741","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-music"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/Musician-Interview-George-Steel-on-Launching-a-New-Thursday-night-Series.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2285741","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2285741"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2285741\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2285743,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2285741\/revisions\/2285743"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2285742"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2285741"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2285741"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2285741"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}