Icon: Steve Reich
We organize our lives in patterns – rituals that repeat, from morning coffee to nightcap, altering by increments we hardly notice, until eventually we realize that we have evolved away from the people we were a decade or two ago. This pulsation of constancy and transformation is what made the music of Steve Reich seem so familiar when it was revolutionary in the early 1970s. It’s also what makes so many of his scores sound fresh even now that they have acquired classic status. In the 1960s and ’70s, Reich was a pioneer, but from the beginning, his interest in interlocking patterns and gradual change gave his scores an antique, contemplative quality that has run through his whole career. City Life uses sampling to distill an essence of a New York street; Tehillim unfurls a brocade of rhythms, Jewish psalmody and lush organ arpeggios – but the composer’s personality rings with equal clarity through both.
Reich has made room in his life for a vast range of influences: bebop, 12th-century organum, Ghanaian drumming, musique concréte, Hebrew liturgy and baroque canon. What he most remembers hearing as a kid was Charlie Parker, Stravinsky‘s Rite of Spring and Bach’s “Brandenburg” Concerto No. 5. Reich assimilated these disparate sources without resorting to pastiche. From Stravinsky, he extracted the notion of static music built on driving rhythms and repeating nuggets of melody called ostinatos. From Parker he lifted the indecorous jouncing, lurching, and skipping of 1940s jazz. From Bach, he learned the practice of canon – the art of building a piece methodically from a melody that is doubled, layered, and overlapped with itself. The result is an utterly idiosyncratic sound world that’s also distinctly American. Reich’s catalogue is sprawling, and filled with masterworks: Below, we have highlighted what we consider to be the essentials.
The Essentials
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Never underestimate the creative potential of faulty technology. Phase music, one of minimalism's major currents, stemmed from the discovery that two supposedly identical tape players would always roll at different speeds. Reich looped a recorded snatch of speech, made copies, and played them back simultaneously. The result was a unison that slipped gradually out of phase - first into a reverberant crescendo, then into an eerie, incomprehensible tremor, and finally back into alignment.
more »The first tape pieces from the mid '60s - Come Out, based on a snippet of testimony by a boy who had been (falsely) accused of murder; and It's Gonna Rain, culled from a black preacher's sermon - are fascinating examples of pure process. They are musical lab experiments: Reich sets a mechanism in motion, then sits back and waits for it to end. Clapping Music applies the phase principle to the lowest of low-tech instruments: two hands slapped together.
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Reich and his fellow minimalists had to invent their own establishment. Cut off from the orchestral world, from universities, and from concert halls, they formed their own ensembles and performed in art galleries and private homes. Reich geared his performing forces to his budget, which meant that he wrote for tape machines, clapping hands, solo piano and drums. It wasn't until the mid '70s, by which time he was an avant-garde celebrity, that Reich wrote for a larger (more expensive) ensemble, and celebrated that milestone right in the seemingly neutral title: Music for 18 Musicians. Greater resources allowed him a broader range of textures, but too much freedom made Reich nervous, so he anchored his piece with a rigid pulse that runs through the hour-long piece, while the quality of sound keeps changing, like sunlight shifting color as it bounces off a glass building in the course of a day.
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This is what you get when you ask Steve Reich to write a string quartet: a work for a quartet of quartets - three on tape, one live (and amplified) - plus snippets of recorded speech that fuse with the counterpoint of strings. Commissioned by the Kronos Quartet and now played by ensembles around the world, Different Trains tells a story. Reich spent the years between 1939 and 1942 being shuttled across America by train from one divorced parent to another. It occurred to him only much later that if he had been living in Europe at the time, he would have been riding very different trains.
more »Truncated reminiscences, clipped from their contexts but still resonant, bob in and out of the texture. "One of the fastest trains"; "lots of cattle wagons there"; "they tattooed a number on our arm" - these phrases, uttered by a variety of melodious voices, are like ripped corners of grainy old snapshots. Speech shapes the score's contours. Reich mines the natural melodic inflexion of each phrase and turns it into a string motive. In other hands, this fusion of music, technology and oral history might have waxed sentimental. Reich is too cool for melodrama, but the effect is still poignant.
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Part documentary, part music video, part meditation on the cataclysmic effects of technology, Three Tales is meant to be seen as well as heard. Reich collaborated with his wife, the video artist Beryl Korot on this show, and their contributions were intertwined from the beginning. If the soundtrack also stands on its own - and it does - it's because by the late '90s, Reich had absorbed narrative techniques into his compositional style. In the first part, "Hindenburg," Korot weaves a black-and-white fabric of images from the day - May 6, 1937 - when the transatlantic passenger zeppelin with a swastika on its tail exploded over Lakehurst, N.J. In the video, the airship looms, gleaming, plump and huge, like a flying inflatable skyscraper - and then bursts into flame. Reich supplies a metallic-sounding, martial score that crackles with the rap of snare drums. As in Different Trains and in his other video piece with Korot, The Cave, "Hindenburg" contains bits of interviews, free-floating sentences spoken on camera that become a part of the musical weave. But while in those other works, Reich let his tunes, tempos and rhythmic phrases grow out of the musical content of the speech and change with each new voice or statement, here the music is bounded by a rigid frame. The tempo is constant and inflexible and the recorded snippets of speech are stretched or compressed so that they all conform. The result is close to the old, mechanistic Reich of the '60s.
more »For Part 3, "Dolly," which deals with the case of the first cloned sheep, Reich and Korot constructed an ensemble piece from hours of interviews with geneticists and ethicists, who utter their thoughts at a deliberate, operatic pace. Music interrupts and embellishes with aria-like repetitions. "We, and all other animals, are machines created by our genes," the intense Oxford geneticist Richard Dawkins says, and then repeats in an exulting loop: "Machines! Machines! Are machines!"
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Although City Life is one of Reich's finest works, it's not part of the canon, maybe because it's atypically agitated, dense and exciting. The word "minimalism" is a spectacularly inapt label for this suite of five concentrated movements made of pulsating chords that mix with car alarms, pile drivers, police radios and a snippet of a street corner sermon. Reich spent most of his adult life living in Lower Manhattan, and he battled his neighborhood's sonic assault by walking around with foam plugs in his ears. (He eventually moved to the country.) For this piece, he opened his ears to the rough music of New York's sidewalks and produced the composer's equivalent to the street photography of Garry Winogrand.
more »The sampled sounds in City Life are not studio-clean, but enriched with air and noise. "Check it out," yells a sidewalk vendor, and we can almost see the bus lumbering past behind him. Muffled lines like "It's fulla smoke," are not the soundtrack of a generic emergency, but aural artifacts of the World Trade Center bombing in 1993. City Life gets its power from vivid specificity.
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"How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life." The one-line text of Reich's 14-minute piece Proverb, quoted from philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, could be the minimalist credo. And it's a perfect epigram for a composer who twice built quarter-hour works from nothing more than a truncated phrase of speech, looped, doubled, and repeated, with the two loops slightly out of synch (It's Gonna Rain and Come Out).
more »Proverb is a distillation of the contemplative Reich: The musical source is 12th-century liturgical music composed at the cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris, particularly by the composer known to history only as Perotin. The choice was not haphazard. Medieval French polyphony, like the Ghanaian music he mined for Drumming, is built on the cross-relations of independent and repeating patterns. The music may be of Christian extraction but both the idiom and the Old Testament echoes of the title link it with another neo-medieval vocal work, Reich's 1981 Tehillim ("Psalms").
The Life’s Work
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Of the composers generally referred to as "minimalist" (a label almost universally rejected by those to whom it is applied), three have had a substantial and direct impact on modern music both popular and classical since the 1960s: Philip Glass, Steve Reich and, to a somewhat lesser degree, John Adams. Glass has had the greater commercial success and Adams has worked in larger forms with more prestigious orchestras, but Reich has made the most consistently interesting music in both harmonic and rhythmic terms, successfully setting repetitious, slow-changing patterns into interesting and musically compelling structures. As he has repeatedly and adamantly stated, his is not "trance" music; he expects the listener to pay close attention, and his music amply rewards those who do. This monumental ten-CD retrospective collects the original recordings of Reich's published music, except for the new recordings of "New York Counterpoint," "Eight Lines," "Four Organs," and "Music for 18 Musicians." It documents his progression from early tape pieces (deceptively simple, foreshadowing later work with phase shifting and canonic structures), to more recent choral/orchestral works that demonstrate conclusively that Reich's music is far from "minimal." His most famous works are included, notably "Music for 18 Musicians," "The Desert Music," and "Different Trains," widely regarded as his masterpiece. There are, however, some curious exclusions: His groundbreaking "Violin Phase" is missing, not to mention the charming "Music for Pieces of Wood" ("Clapping Music," from the same period, is included), and his gorgeous composition for flutist Ransom Wilson, "Vermont Counterpoint." Nevertheless, this box set is an essential purchase for anyone with a serious interest in modern art music. The packaging is beautiful, and the accompanying booklet includes full track and personnel listings, a chronology of Reich's career, appreciative notes from fellow musicians, and an excellent new interview by Jonathan Cott.
