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"HOW SMALL A THOUGHT IT
TAKES TO FILL A WHOLE LIFE"
- An Interview with Not-So-Minimalist Composer Steve Reich
By Christopher M. Wright
© 2005 Christopher M. Wright
All Rights Reserved
AMAZON
LINKS BELOW - Listen to Samples
Steve Reich (pronounced like 'rise' with an 'sh' at the end) has been called the most original musical thinker of our time. "There's just a handful of living composers who can legitimately claim to have altered the direction of musical history and Steve Reich is one of them," London's Guardian newspaper wrote.
His music has been performed by the London
Symphony Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, and the San Francisco Symphony.
Such noted conductors as Michael Tilson Thomas and Zubin Mehta have championed
his work. Several noted choreographers, including Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker,
Jiri Kylian of the Netherlands Dance Theater and Alvin Ailey, have created dance
performances to his music.
Reich was awarded the MacDowell Medal in 2005 (past recipients include composer
Aaron Copland and architect I.M. Pei). He also won Grammy awards in 1990 for
Different Trains and in 1999 for his piece Music for 18 Musicians. He was
elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1994. In 1997, in
celebration of his 60th birthday, Nonesuch released a ten-CD retrospective box
set of Reich's compositions, several newly recorded or re-mastered. In 1999, the
Lincoln Center Festival programmed a major retrospective of his work.
As a philosophy major in college, Reich studied the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein who penned the sentence, "How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life!" Reich is best known as a minimalist composer whose music is built on the repetition of simple patterns. In this conversation, he reveals how his musical thoughts have steadily been getting bigger and why the minimalist label never really fit in the first place.
Q: The most recent composition listed on your website, the You Are
(Variations) (2004), was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. The work is being
recorded by the Los Angeles Master Chorale for release on Nonesuch in summer
2005
[released - Amazon link below]. When's the release date and what can you tell me about this piece?
Reich: It's been recorded, it's been mastered, and now all we have to
worry about is the album cover and that kind of stuff. The piece I wrote before
it, Cello Counterpoint (2003), will also be on this new album. It will be out in
early September of this year. I believe You Are (Variations) is one of the
best pieces I've ever done. It's a 27-minute piece for singers and large
ensemble. It's built around four short texts. The first is 'You are wherever
your thoughts are' which comes from Rabbi Nachman of Breslav, who was one of the
most magnetic of the late 18th century Hasidic mystics. The second text is from
the Psalms, 'Shiviti Hashem l'negdi' in the original Hebrew or 'I place the
eternal before me' in English. Then there's a little pause followed by the slow
movement which takes a text from the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein
'Explanations come to an end somewhere'. The last text comes from the Talmud, 'E'mor
m'aht, v'ahsay harbay' or 'Say little and do much' in English. In English, 'do
much' is a musical dead end because it closes with the 'ch' sound just when you
want to musically extend it for a long time. But all those wonderful vowels in
the Hebrew - 'ah'say harbay' - allow you to extend it in time so that the sound of
the words is consonant with the meaning of the words, which has always been
extremely important to me. All four texts are very short, and can be set in a
matter of a minute or two. The variations form, resetting each text in different
ways, was basically forced upon me by
the brevity of the texts.
Q: What else are you working on?
Reich: I just completed another piece called Variations for Vibes,
Pianos and Strings for the London Sinfonietta and I'm about to start a piece
called Daniel Variations commissioned by Carnegie Hall; the Barbican Centre
in London; Cité de la Musique in Paris; Porto, Portugal, and by the Daniel Pearl
Foundation - that's the Wall Street Journal reporter who was murdered in
Pakistan by Muslim fundamentalist terrorists in 2002. That piece will use texts
from the Book of Daniel in the Bible as well as some of Daniel Pearl's last
words and a line from his murderers. The last text will be "I sure hope Gabriel
likes my music" which is taken from a tune that Daniel Pearl loved that was
played by 'Stuff' Smith, the jazz violinist. Daniel Pearl was not only a
reporter, he was a fiddle player.
Q: I think people who have not been following your career closely will be
surprised to learn you do not consider yourself a minimalist. Why do you object
to the term being applied to your music?
Reich: When I was helping to originate this music, there was no such word in my mind. When you discover something musically valid and exciting, you pursue it. Suppose we go to Paris, dig up Debussy, and ask him, 'Are you an impressionist?' I think he'd roll over in disgust at the question. Basically, terms like impressionism, expressionism and minimalism are taken from the visual arts and applied to music. They're useful if you're a musicologist or musical historian and you want to refer to a number of composers with one word. French impressionism, OK we know you're talking about Debussy, Ravel, Satie, maybe other people. Expressionist - Schoenberg, Berg and Webern. Minimalist - you're talking about Reich, Riley, Glass, Adams, Arvo Pärt, Young and more and more people as time goes on. But for musicians to think in those terms is to put themselves in a box. If you were to listen to my Piano Phase (1967) then The Desert Music (1984), you'd think the first guy's a radical avant-garde extremist and some other composer must have written The Desert Music. My job is to write the next piece. I keep all my options open and try to discover things I didn't previously know how to do.
Q: When Michael Tilson Thomas conducted your Four Organs (1970) at Carnegie Hall in 1973, a man stood up in the balcony and cried out, "Stop, stop, I'll confess!" How has the way you maintain interest in the repetition of simple patterns changed over the years?
Reich: The way to keep interest in a repeating pattern is to compose the
pattern so that it is rhythmically and melodically ambiguous - a pattern where
you can't be sure where it ends and where it begins. One way to begin to achieve
this is to write in meters like 3/2 or 12/8 where the ear may sometimes hear a
group of 12 notes rhythmically as three groups of four and then as four groups
of three.
As the years passed, I used less repetition. Piano Phase (1967) was a 20-minute
piece that took two pages to write out because there's so much repetition. Then
you look at the You Are (Variations) (2004) which is over 200 pages for 27
minutes. Clearly there is hardly any repetition at all in You Are (Variations)
and when there is, it's limited to just a few times with some other nonrepeating music going on simultaneously. This started in the late 70's with
Octet (1979) which was later revised to Eight Lines in 1983. There's no
repetition in Tehillim (1981) at all, except for repeats of large scale chunks
of the music and you can find that in Haydn.
A different, but related fact is that, perhaps uniquely in the history of
Western music, all of my early music is for multiples of the same instrument -
four organs, four violins, six pianos. That kind of instrumentation was
necessary when I was doing highly repetitious pieces with a lot of contrapuntal
and rhythmic complexity. I wanted to form one overall contrapuntal web where you
wouldn't be hearing individual voices but only the conglomerate sound. The only
way to achieve that is to use multiples of the same instrument. But at the end
of Drumming (1970-71)
[Amazon link below], you have three marimbas, three bongo players, three
glockenspiels, and the piccolo, and the two singers - that's my first use of
simultaneous mixed timbres - which of course is the norm in Western and most non-Western music. In effect, I took a step backwards into the history of Western
music and blended together different instruments to make an overall ensemble of
mixed colors. In Music for 18 Musicians (1974-76), the roof really gets blown
off the instrumental constraints of the past. In The Desert Music (1984),
written for chorus and orchestra or large ensemble, you have all the orchestral
families. All my large pieces include several woodwinds - like City Life (1995)
[Amazon link
below],
You Are (Variations) (2004), Tehillim (1981) - lots of percussion, pianos, and
strings, and more and more vocal music. So I started out in the very radical,
unusual situation of not mixing instruments and then moved into the historically
predominant mode of using mixed ensembles. I still maintain multiples of
identical instruments within a large mixed ensemble because I still have these
interlocking patterns on identical instruments going on from time to time. I
never work with one piano or marimba, I always work with two or more - but
they're always playing simultaneously with other instruments of different
timbre.
Q: Speaking of instrumentation, you use standard instruments and the
human voice, but not electronic sounds. You're hardly a technophobe, given your
extensive use of tape loops, voice samples, and computer visuals. Why have you
resisted using synthesizers which could put hundreds if not thousands of
different sounds at your disposal?
Reich: Basically, I don't use synthesizers because I don't like the artificial sound of synthesizers. I like the sound of musical instruments. In scientific terms, if you play an A440 [440 hertz - the international standard for the pitch of A above middle C] on a violin with no vibrato, and you play it back on an oscilloscope where you can see the waveform, you'll see all kinds of dancing irregularities. And that's because human beings are fallible and the sound is not perfect, it's full of micro-variations. Synthesizers may have some random variations built in, but nevertheless produce more or less constant waveforms on an oscilloscope. The sound is the sound of electronics; I am not attracted to that. Even in my 'electronic' work, I'm sampling real sounds. In City Life [1995], it's the sound of a door slam or a pile driver or most importantly, a human voice. Those sounds have meaning. A car crash means something to you. A person saying 'its gonna rain!' or "come out to show them" gets to you. The sound of a synthesizer doesn't get to me so I don't use it.
Q: You started as a drummer at age 14....
Reich: I took piano before that.
Q: Can't believe everything you read, but here's my question: Given that
most of your early musical training was in drumming, it's not surprising that
rhythm and percussion are such a big part of your music. Why do you suppose
these elements have been relatively neglected by most composers?
Reich: I don't think they have been. Percussion basically came into its own in the 20th century. I learned a great deal from Stravinsky and Bartok and they certainly were very well aware of percussion and used it brilliantly. And later with John Cage, Varese with Ionisation, and lots of other composers percussion became the main voice in the ensemble. Percussion before the 20th century was an occasional use of tympani or cymbal crash and a little bit of snare drum. Then in the 20th century, you get the marimba, the vibraphone, tubular bells, glockenspiel, all kinds of instruments, to say nothing of flowerpots, brake drums etc. So percussion was an important reality when I was growing up. As a young person I was very taken with drumming, not percussion. My ideal was Kenny Clark, the bebop drummer with Miles Davis. What I'm doing has a kind of unique quality to it, there's no question about that, but I didn't come out of nowhere - no one comes out of nowhere. There was plenty of very strongly rhythmic percussive music, notably Stravinsky and Bartok, along with Miles Davis and John Coltrane and many others before I came along.
Q: You studied drumming in Ghana in 1970. What did you learn from that experience?
Reich: To continue doing what I had already been doing. I knew about
Ghanaian music before I went there from reading A. M. Jones' book, Studies in
African Music back in 1963. People say I went to Ghana and Drumming [1970-71]
was the result - false. I went to Ghana and got a big pat on the back -
confirmation! Confirmation to keep doing what I had been doing. Piano Phase and
Violin Phase were written back in 1967. All of my early stuff was very rhythmic
and used repetition. It was in 3/2 - 12/8, which is a meter that's found in
Africa. In Studies in African Music, Jones wrote about the Ewe tribe in Ghana
and that's the tribe I mostly studied with when I went to Ghana. In a sense I
went through the book 'live'. Jones' book was in two volumes. One was text about
the music but the other was transcriptions of the music into Western notation,
and seeing this music in notation is much more important for a composer than
hearing it because it's impossible to analyze by ear as a Westerner. But seeing
individual instruments play repeating patterns where their downbeats do not
coincide, that certainly opened my eyes in 1963. Actually going to Ghana was a
very positive experience and, as I said, confirmed what I had already been
doing.
Q: You have written that "the musical theater form must change constantly
to reflect its time and place." Your model is Kurt Weil's Threepenny Opera
which
portrayed the German Weimar Republic with a nonorchestral cabaret ensemble and a
nonoperatic vocal style. Where do you see the future of music going with regards
to multidisciplinary projects?
Reich: I have some remarks about the future of music in my book [Amazon link below] that I wrote back in 1970 when I was young and actually most of them came true. But right now I'd be a little bit more reticent, and I wouldn't forecast about the future of music because very often people react to something and move away from it. People might have forecast that music was going to become very dissonant and 12-tone back when I was a young man but between myself, Arvo Pärt, John Adams, Terry Riley, Phil Glass and many others, lo and behold it hasn't gone in that direction at all.
Since we live with computers and almost everybody I know is working with one, it would be very strange if somehow the computer didn't work its way into music theater because it opens up so many possibilities, i.e., sampling, video, and so on and so forth. We are in fact seeing more and more pieces using media and musicians as a form of musical theater and this reflects our time the way the banjo, the saxophone, and trap drums reflected Kurt Weil's time.
Q: One reason you devised your own style of music was so that you could remain involved in performing it. One may reasonably infer that your limitations as a performer must have limited the music you were writing in some ways. Do you think this is true?
Reich: Yes, I think it definitely was in the early days, but the last
piece of mine that I play in was Tehillim in 1981. After that, I wrote myself
out of the pieces. I no longer constrain the parts so that I can play every
individual one. But I originally started out as a graduate student deciding that
I would play in my own music. It was the wisest decision I could have made at
that time. It put me on a very good footing with fellow musicians who respected
the fact that I was part of the ensemble and not simply handing them the paper.
It taught me a great deal - about the practicalities of writing for percussion,
strings, voices and winds - that I've continued to apply to this day. The best
way to learn orchestration is to write for a player or play with them and, if
there's a problem, they'll let you know. Sometimes I'll simplify a part because
I want musicians to enjoy playing and singing my music. If they don't enjoy it,
eventually they'll stop performing it.
Q:
Composer William Bolcom has called this a
particularly dull time for music. He told me in a 2005 interview that he's
"never found pop and art music more boring in general than just now." Do you
agree?
|
Arvo Pärt Starter
Disc |
Reich: No, I don't at all. I think Arvo Pärt is the greatest living European composer and I'm always curious to hear what his next piece is. I'm very interested in the young American composers in the 'Bang on a Can' group, particularly Michael Gordon and also David Lang. I'm also curious to hear what Julia Wolf comes up with. Sometimes Michael Torke comes up with a very beautiful piece, particularly his Proverb pieces. Ingram Marshall can come up with a beautiful work like Kingdom Come and John Adams is always worth listening to. In the pop scene, I'm curious about the whole DJ thing. Some things I've heard go on and on as if they're writing a composition. So I can see aspects of the pop world influencing the present classical music scene. And I also see people in the pop world doing more extended pieces without words. In a few years I could see a young person being unclear as to whether they want to be into electronic avant-garde pop or part of the new music scene.
|
|
Most of the music being written today is
trash, but most of the music written in Beethoven's time was trash! We don't
know about it anymore and that's OK because if you've got a garden you have to
work very hard to cultivate a few things that are worthwhile. If the rest turns
out to be weeds - well, that's the way the world is. Who knows what's worthwhile
today? Time will tell.
Q:
It's been a great honor to speak with you.
You've influenced my music as well. There's a spot where I go into polyrhythmic
pulse with tuned percussion and another spot where I put one percussion voice a
beat ahead of the others, setting up some very interesting cross-rhythms between
the voices.
Reich:
I'm not going to sue you. Glad I could be
useful. I'm delighted.
www.stevereich.com
- concert dates, discography, multimedia samples and more
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© 2005 Christopher M. Wright
All Rights Reserved - This material may not
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Different Trains (Grammy)
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