Come Out (Reich)

Common card · No. 459211

Come Out is a 1966 tape piece by the American composer Steve Reich. Civil rights activist Truman J. Nelson asked Reich to create a piece using recordings of voices for a benefit for the Harlem Six; Come Out was a byproduct of the collage's production. The Harlem Six were six black youths arrested for a murder of Margit Sugar, a Hungarian refugee, in Harlem in the weeks following the Little Fruit Stand Riot of 1964. Nelson agreed to give Reich creative freedom with the tapes. Come Out was constructed entirely from a loop of four seconds taken from the more than 70 hours of tapes Nelson presented. Reich used the voice of Daniel Hamm, one of those involved in the riots but not responsible for the murder; he was nineteen at the time of the recording. At the beginning of the piece, he says, "I had to, like, open the bruise up, and let some of the bruise blood come out to show them", alluding to how he had punctured a bruise on his own body to convince police who had beaten him to allow him to...

Read on Wikipedia · Image Hans Peters for Anefo, CC0