Observing the music of Steve Reich

1. Having immersed myself in the music of minimalist composer Steve Reich for several months, I considered how to capture the stringent, almost unfriendly, ascetic surface and the emotive classicism behind his work. How do I portray a “gradual musical process,” which, he says, resembles “turning over an hourglass and watching the sand slowly run through to the bottom”? Writing’s time is abstract, while music’s temporality is violent, deathly. I have therefore structured this essay into discrete pulses like those in Reich’s pieces. There are 18 pulses herein, a sentimental homage to Music for 18 Musicians, Reich’s most famous piece and perhaps his best.

2. Minimalism is the ill-fitting moniker given to a musical movement started in California in the mid-1960s and which towers above post-war classical music. Two currents exist: Terry Riley’s In C, from 1964, was the first great minimalist piece produced through rhythmic, repetitive pulses of sound. The droning infinity stretches pioneered by LaMonte Young lay out the other possibility. Minimalism demands attention to detail, does away with quick evolution and dynamic transformation in favor of slow, intimate revelation. The two leading minimalists are Philip Glass – the most famous composer since Stravinsky – and Steve Reich, both pulse composers.

3. The works of Steve Reich, now 87 and still writing, were born of rigour and emotional intensity. The pieces could go on forever, with sublime evenness slowly giving way to human depth. I met Reich at his home about an hour from New York City, which he left in the mid-2000s. He had no doorbell, but did have a small yellow tile with a triangular face reminiscent of a Picasso. I knocked, wondering whether he’d hear me, and he was immediately at the door with a scraggly beard, a black baseball cap and slippers. His living room was ample, sparse and not particularly colorful, with an almost cavernous triangle roof, a conversation pit and a fireplace, a wall-size window, and a bookshelf teeming with Jewish religious texts. He laughed often in the couple of hours that we shared but spoke with great seriousness.

4. Reich was a central participant in the debut performance of Riley’s In C, shaping the minimalist canon from the start. As a composer, he was first feted in the mid-1960s for two pieces that scrambled and reconstructed snippets of speech: from a Black Pentecostal preacher named Brother Walter who was speaking in San Francisco’s Union Square; and from Daniel Hamm, one of the Harlem Six, a group of Black men wrongly accused of murdering a white woman. He explains: “A lot of people were doing this at the time because it was a new technology, and it was relatively inexpensive to get a tape recorder. It became a kind of folk technology.” These pieces espoused the mathematical precision of 12-tone serialism, which was dominant in academic music – Schoenberg, Stockhausen, Boulez, Babbitt – without disdaining tonal harmony and rhythm, at once poetic and exact.

5. For It’s Gonna Rain, Reich set two analogue tape players next to each other with the titular phrase spliced into a loop. When he hit play, he said, “by chance or through divine inspiration the two loops were absolutely lined up, because I hadn’t carefully timed them. I began to hear the sound move to my left ear, which basically means that the machine that was feeding the left ear was a little bit faster than the other one. It began to creep down my left arm and out across the loops.” The piece, teeming with Cuban Missile Crisis eschatologia, features parallel, identical loops going out of sync and shimmering into echoes and repetitions that jaunt through the machine before, finally, reuniting. He called the effect, critical to his early work, phase shifting. In Come Out, from 1966, Reich edited a sound documentary for the Harlem Six retrial campaign. In lieu of payment, he requested permission to “create a piece if I found something interesting.” In the snippet Reich chose for Come Out, Hamm describes cutting open a bruise left by police beatings so the pooled blood could “come out to show them” he had been brutalized. Reich then left tape loops behind, exploring that same effect with other instruments from pianos to the rhythmic clapping of hands.

6. Susan Sontag, in Against Interpretation, argued against the pursuit of “meaning” in art and saw minimalist visual art as the vanguard of a “flight from interpretation.” Reich was close with leading minimalists like Sol LeWitt and Richard Serra as well as Pop artists like Roy Lichtenstein, who mocked morose notions of “meaning” by painting like a comic book artist. Like Sontag, they all rubbed shoulders in Downtown New York, and he insisted that his was “a generation where the artists and the musicians were really in contact with each other.” Minimalist musicians like himself and Glass were, he says, “certainly aware of Pop but much more in tune with LeWitt and Serra.” Lichtenstein even painted the cover of Reich’s album The Four Sections, and that painting, together with a few from LeWitt, now hangs in Reich’s home. Musical minimalists also took the sounds of jazz – the adolescent Reich saw Coltrane dozens of times at Birdland and revered bebop drummer Kenny Clarke – and early rock ’n’ roll to rescue academic music from serialist combinatorics.

7. In the words of musicologist Robert Fink, Reich’s music “addressed itself to the ubiquitous subject… to influence everyone and be fully attended to by no one.” It was the counterculture’s smarter predecessor, an act of faith in music-listening as transmission of an influence, and as world-creating background noise in the age of mass-media advertising. Everything, as the cybernetic theorem goes, is information traveling within a series of closed systems – your brain, a loft, an art gallery, a music venue. Art’s function was to produce diffuse effects or states of mind by transmitting information, and media like tape loops could encode the world through waveforms and binary code.

8. In his 1968 essay-manifesto, Music as a Gradual Process, Reich insisted that his interest was in setting up a “musical process” and observing its unfolding. “Focusing in on the musical process makes possible that shift of attention away from he and she and you and me outward toward it.”

9. After an interview about Reich’s work with longtime Village Voice critic and composer Kyle Gann, he told me: “I’d love to just have a conversation about Reich not mentioning Glass, it’s just that the two of them are such good foils for each other.” Glass and Reich have helmed contemporary classical music since the early 1970s and were once close collaborators. Their aesthetics are similar, with Reich leaning avant-garde and Glass more commercial. Their disdain for the academic world in which contemporary classical music still lives bound them together. When the two were neighbours downtown (but not successful enough to pay the bills), they started a moving company together and did odd jobs as plumbers and cab drivers. Yet, by the mid-70s, they had broken up: Glass retitled his piece Two Pages for Steve Reich to remove all mention of his former friend, who may have never accepted Glass’ commercial success.

10. Nowadays, one of Reich’s “best musical friends” is David Lang, co-founder of the prominent classical music organization Bang on a Can in the 1980s. Eli Greenhoe, Lang’s student, described Reich’s sense of harmony to me as “tectonic,” making the “room just change its atmosphere” with every chord change. The repetitiousness of Reich’s Four Organs, premiered in 1973 at Carnegie Hall, aggravated audience members until one lady stomped her feet on the stage to demand the performance cease. The resemblance to Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring premiere must have delighted Reich, who said, chuckling with a smile and leaning back, some had described Four Organs as “the longest five-one cadence in the history of Western music.” The piece sounds variations of one chord for around 14 minutes, and only resolves into another chord in the final 10 seconds.

11. Reich’s early style peaked with Drumming, composed around 1970, and Music for 18 Musicians, composed in the mid-70s, whose recording was a hit in classical music terms, selling over 100,000 copies. Their sound is patient, exploratory, and completely anticlimactic, rendering exhilarating minute shifts in melody and rhythm. Reich opted for acoustic instruments like marimbas and glockenspiels, and ad hoc instrumentations far from a standard orchestra, giving his pieces a singsong, even pop quality. His training as a percussionist came to the fore in those years, as did his exploration of Ghanaian and Balinese drumming music. He took inspiration carefully, but without apology: “I didn’t want to sound Balinese, I wanted to think Balinese. Musical structures can be applied to all kinds of instruments or voices. Think of a canon (or round) in Western music. It could sound like Bach or Webern or a kid’s tune or Jim Tenney’s electronic glissando piece, For Ann (rising), which I used to call ‘Afternoons at JFK’.”

12. Reich is sometimes accused of extracting sounds and ideas from Black traditions and sounds, not to mention Black men’s voices themselves in his tape pieces. His accusers are not wrong, though for Reich it’s just the reality of his biography: “If you grew up as an American, you grew up in a multicultural society, period.” Born in New York City in 1936 to a Jewish family, Reich was awash in the post-war “culture of repetition” that Fink diagnosed. His music mirrors the world in which he was born, including its relentless extraction of Black people’s labour and humanity. Reich feels and sounds deeply American: “I am definitely an American composer. It couldn’t have happened anywhere but America. That’s just plain old reality, because of the jazz influence and the way we approached non-Western sources. And because of rock ’n’ roll.” 

13. Reich is also Jewish, though he was mostly indifferent about it until his late 30s, when he’d developed an interest in yoga. “The idea of following a discipline which comes out of a religion – obviously yoga comes out of Hinduism – appealed to me very strongly,” he says. A cursory excursion into Kabbalah with a book published by Straight Arrow Press (of Rolling Stone magazine) started a chain reaction after his wife and collaborator Beryl Korot’s father saw him with the book under his arm: “How can you study Kabbalah if you haven’t studied Torah? And I thought Zing! This is a good question.” By the mid-80s he considered becoming a rabbi and began keeping Sabbath. Searching for his own musical tradition, Reich was not interested in Eastern Europe but told me: “the cantillation of the Torah is still going on, 3,500 years later. I find this particularly attractive in the Middle Eastern Sephardic tradition, but the structure of cantillation with fixed melodic patterns is used worldwide.” For somebody so open to using musical structures not remotely his own, such emphasis on spurious ideas like ancientness and authenticity – not to mention the focus on a tradition that bears no clear connection to his own genealogy – rings off-key. Reich wrote his first Jewish piece in 1981: Tehilim, a setting of four psalms – a kind of prayer once sung though now read. Different Trains, one of his most famous compositions, premiered in the late 80s and juxtaposed Reich’s personal experience riding trains from New York to LA in the late 1930s and early 1940s with the “different trains” that European Jews rode in those years. Reich returned to the spoken voice, though now it’s closer to documentary: he recorded his ageing governess, train workers, and Shoah survivors. Snippets of language vibrate throughout a meditative, plaintive piece that, for all its virtues, lacked the concussive originality of the 60s and 70s.

14. Religious experience – particularly prayer – has been at the core of Reich’s work from the beginning. He’s long admired the 12th-century medieval musician, Pérotin, associated with the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris. “The part that has stayed with me to this day, is [Pérotin] didn’t just have the chant line going up and down, he extended this melodic tone to become a drone… The idea that something which is melodic can be slowed down to the point where it becomes the tonal center for other voices in the texture is remarkably fruitful for me.” Drones and lentitude were a mode of prayer, a way to invoke God in an era utterly unlike our own.

15. I asked Reich about “innovation.” Minimalism, which was found in technologies like the tape loop and a futuristic sound palette – not to mention its origin in the countercultural tech mecca of San Francisco – begs the question. Reich was categorical: “I never think of the word at all… I do what attracts my ear… it’s a very personal feeling, otherwise the work will not be very interesting to anybody. If it doesn’t really move me, how is it going to really move you, or anybody else?” He understood that technologies like the tape loop had opened new possibilities in the 1960s, but insisted: “In retrospect we can say that what Pérotin did was innovation, but it’s based on observing the music of his predecessor and thinking spontaneously or gradually: What if I add two more voices? What if I took one of the four tenor voices, and stretched it like a rubber band? If you want to call that innovation, it’s how music develops over the centuries. It doesn’t make any innovation necessarily better than what preceded it.”

16. I attended a performance of Radio Rewrite, a Reich piece from 2012 inspired by Radiohead. Conductor Brad Lubman’s Ensemble Signal, Reich said, was one of his preferred interpreters of his work. Radio Rewrite takes two songs that Reich found compelling, Everything in its Right Place and Jigsaw Falling into Place, and explodes them into alternating movements of light and dark, speed and lentitude, major vitality and minor obscurity. Reich kept the momentum and chord progression of Jigsaw…, which rings crystalline through marimbas and vibraphones, while the shooting star melancholy of Everything… drags violins into stunning depths that barely resemble the Radiohead original. It’s as close to pop as Reich has come, and a reminder that pop was never far from his remit.

17. The ends of Reich’s pieces are remarkable: Four Organs is only justified in its conclusion when a second chord finally appears; It’s Gonna Rain and Come Out only cohere as the process of phase shifting runs its course and synchronicity returns. Others simply fade into nothingness, their internal logics no longer tenable and Reich’s patient observation exhausted. Reich’s music bears the imprint of a lifetime performing his music; he gave up playing live at age 70. I asked if he missed performing, which surprised him, and he thought quietly for the first time in our conversation. He recounted a recent encounter with old members of his ensemble at which they listened to a recording of Music for Mallet Instruments: “As I was listening to it, I was back there, you know, back there in it. But I couldn’t do it now. I can listen to old recordings and get into a state of mind where I think, wasn’t that wonderful. But it’s past, and it’s sad.” Then again, he said, “there’s a lot of sad things about getting old but there’s a lot to rejoice about. I couldn’t have written [2009 Pulitzer Prize winner] Double Sextet when I was younger. Now, my music is played and recorded by others all over the world, so my passing won’t mean that much… the music has a life of its own.”

18. Warning against nostalgia for youthful dexterity, Reich counsels: “That person isn’t here. I replaced him. Like you replaced the kid who was sick rolling on the floor.” The avant-garde is for the young, and his work now brims with grandeur and the comfort of a life lived looking ahead. Creations sent onward, left for others. Reich’s goal was once to leave behind “he and she and you and me,” to find some “it” to dissolve into. Whether he succeeded is for you, the reader, my alias, my twin, to decide. 

Photography Geordie Wood

This article is taken from Port Issue 35. Continue reading, buy the issue or subscribe here