College Park, MD

Celebrating 50 Years of Music for 18 Musicians

“As close to being a rock band as a chamber orchestra can be” (The New York Times), Alarm Will Sound is a 20-member band with a wide-ranging artistic vision that looks beyond genre—electronic versus acoustic, high-modernist versus pop-influenced, conventional classical concert versus multimedia experience. With a long history of presenting works by seminal 20th-century icon Steve Reich, Alarm Will Sound returns to The Clarice to play the Pulitzer Prize winner’s Music for 18 Musicians, one of the most influential minimalist works of all time.

Steve Reich has been called “the most original musical thinker of our time” (The New Yorker) and “among the great composers of the century” (The New York Times). Starting in the 1960s, his pieces It’s Gonna Rain, Drumming, Music for 18 Musicians, Tehillim, Different Trains and many others helped shift the aesthetic center of musical composition worldwide away from extreme complexity and towards rethinking pulsation and tonal attraction in new ways.