“What I feel about my early pieces—things like Come Out and Piano Phase—and actually in general, the most important thing about any piece of music is the emotional effect it has on the listener. But aim for that effect and you will never achieve it. So what do you do? Well, I’ve always thought you must go about your business in the best possible way you can as a craftsman, using your inside emotional drive, and hopefully it’ll all work out.”
Excuse the duplicity, but that’s the quote I used to sign off the last article I wrote about Steve Reich, back in 2003 when he was promoting Three Tales. It was a terrible interview—essentially a conversation between two men who didn’t want to be there. I had savage man-flu and a word-weary Reich had been holed up in a hotel room all day fielding journalists’ questions. I was last in line and atchoo’ed my way through enough questions, which Reich dutifully answered, to get the story, but only subsequently did I realize what a revealing nugget he had handed me, something well worth repeating here. And through the desensitizing filter of Nurofen, there was one other standout moment: Reich suddenly mimicked an archetypal conductor down-beat that was loaded with “feeling”—think Bernstein or Kleiber—and said “I got no truck with that”.
Memories which rewind through my mind as, once again, I prepare to speak to Reich. That faux-conductor down-beat? What exactly did Reich mean by that? I’m intrigued, too, to ask those follow-up questions about aiming, or rather not aiming, for emotional effect that my feverish flu placed off-limits last time. And the time is right—Reich is 75 this year, a milestone that the Barbican Centre in London will mark in May with a weekend of concerts under the banner “Reverberations: The Influence of Steve Reich”, suggesting that the influence of Steve Reich is a phenomenon at least as important as the music of Steve Reich. At home in New York State (he and his wife moved from their downtown Manhattan apartment a few years ago), Reich is noticeably more at ease, although behind his effortless warmth and charm lurks a combative edge. Some questions are tossed back—“well, what do you think?”, “where did you get that quote?”—and with half our allotted time gone, he reminds me that there’s still much ground to be covered.
I remind Reich of our earlier interview, and how his words about emotional effect have remained with me. “Well, I agree with myself!” he laughs. I explain that I admire Come Out, his 1966 composition for tape which is based, like its companion piece It’s Gonna Rain, on a recorded fragment of speech, re-recorded over two tape recorders, one of which gradually falls out of sync so that the speech patterns stutter, then freewheel, towards abstract sound—because its expressive impact is achieved purely through sound. Nowhere does Reich attempt to manipulate this through emotive shifts of harmony or theatrical flourishes which, given that the piece is based on recordings of a black teenager beaten up by the police during the Harlem riots of 1964, shows admirable dignity and restraint. Come Out doesn’t ask “isn’t it terrible what happened?”; rather it transforms a moment in history into a different type of art altogether, part documentary, part music, leaving the rest to the audience’s discretion. “It was very important to establish that the kid’s voice sounds like it does and he’s talking about a riot situation in Harlem,” Reich explains. “Then his voice turns into this loop and the loop begins to create the work. Using these generative processes, which lay all the cards on the table, there are enough mysteries to be satisfying. In these early pieces, there’s a tension between the bare bones concept—one thing staying put, something else getting faster—and the result of that process, which is totally a more intense experience.”
As a description of how music operates, Steve, I say, that almost sounds banal. “So long as the music doesn’t sound banal, or else we’re in trouble. But that’s what a lot of musicians of a serial persuasion who were ruling the roost in the 1960s and ‘70s said. They would look at a score like Piano Phase and tell me there was nothing there. And my answer to that: you go play it.”
Piano Phase, Violin Phase and the lesser-known Reed Phase applied the lessons Reich had learnt from Come Out and It’s Gonna Rain to an instrumental canvas. One player keeps a melodic figure running steady as the second player inches slightly ahead; the process is enthralling because the original melody is progressively stripped of its context but remains subliminally active. Then Reich wrote Four Organs, in which a single chord is gradually stretched and augmented around a rhythmic chug-a-chug framework provided by a pair of maracas. Throughout the 1970s, Reich developed these basic concepts into ever grander and more ambitious structures; Drumming and Music for 18 Musicians moved Reich from the cult underground to as overground as one can get, as people started to call this new music “minimalism”.
I loved the form-meets-content purity of Drumming and Music for 18 Musicians but my love affair with Reich’s music then went through a rocky patch. In 1990 I bought the CD of Reich’s orchestral piece The Four Sections (1986), performed by the LSO under Michael Tilson Thomas, and paired with his classic 1973 Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices and Organs played by Reich’s own ensemble. But something felt instinctively wrong. A Reichian melodic fragment played by an instrumentalist in his own ensemble sounded fresh and expressively blameless; bowed by the string section of the LSO, however Reich’s melodies leant towards precisely that “conductorly” push-pull sense of expression that he warned me about in 2003. It was like Rothko’s blues and purples suddenly outlining landscapes and bowls of fruit instead of hovering in space. Nor did Michaeel Tilson Thomas have any audible function in The Four Sections other than as a human metronome; the more consciously MTT shapes the phrases, in fact, the less Reichian the music sounds. And proof of my misgivings came with Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices and Organ, the sluggish rhythmic attack of the LSO suddenly replaced by the Reich Ensemble’s crisp rhythmic articulation and bebop-like, arrowhead impetus.
Telling a composer you hate their piece is always high-risk but Reich takes it like a man. “I quite like the The Four Sections but you’re right: it’s the wrong orchestration. I haven’t written anything for orchestra since 1987, because after The Four Sections I realized the rhythmic intricacy of what I do demands one player to a part. For John Adams, writing for orchestra makes absolute sense, but I just don’t need 18 first violins; in the orchestral pieces I wrote, I was asking the players to do things that, really, are wrong to ask 80 musicians to do. If you think about Come Out and Piano Phase, those pieces feed off the idea of pairs of matching times—if it was piano and electric organ the piano might overpower the organ and you wouldn’t hear either the process or the melodies that emerge from inside the phasing. And recent things, like Double Sextet, Cello Counterpoint and 2x5, still rely on matched pairs of instruments.
“You see, before the microphone was invented, the only way to get volume was to have numbers. But with the microphone all that changed. Miles Davis played trumpet, yes, but that ‘Miles Davis sound’ could only exist because he put a harmon mute inside his instrument and then played it through a microphone; it was the microphone that allowed Miles’s horn a presence in halls designed for 100-piece symphony orchestras.”
So the microphone is integral to Reich’s concept of orchestration? “Absolutely. It’s my job to orchestrate my music as well as I can and I use amplification not to make it loud, but to balance, say, the xylophone and the piano blend. It’s nothing to do with the sociology of the orchestra—the fact that rehearsal time is never enough, and there are musicians sitting there who aren’t into the music, all of which is true—it’s just that in terms of acoustic engineering, the orchestra is wrong for my music.”
I mention Tilson Thomas’s role in The Four Sections. What is it about Reich’s music that makes the traditional role of a conductor seem obsolete? “From a classical perspective, all my pieces are chamber music. The musicians don’t follow anybody, they listen to each other. Every piece I wrote between Piano Phase and Music for 18 Musicians includes a specified number of repeats—so the players can repeat a particular bar, say, between three and seven times. When I made these pieces initially, I didn’t even write in the number of repeats because I trusted the musicians’ instincts; the idea is, you listen to what you’re doing, and listen to the person next to you, and when the time feels right, you move to the next bar. So these pieces are based on an expanded idea of chamber music, as opposed to conducting. And then musicians give you feedback. I tried Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices and Organ with my ensemble. I could feel the palpable lack of interest around the room so I got rid of it. The emotional reaction of musicians you trust is priceless.”
When I followed Music for 18 Musicians with a score recently, making a connection between eye and ear stressed how far Reich has removed himself from a Western classical mindset. Its refrain-and-chorus-like structure reminds me of a vastly enlarged popular song format; clarinets and voices move together in rhythmic unison like saxophones and brass in a big-band; the endlessly displaced rhythms fly straight out of Charlie Parker; the vibraphone refrain which heralds each new section, appearing every time either with augmentation or diminution, suggests the Notre Dame polyphony of the early French composer Perotin; and the bass parts are as catchy and uncluttered as a Marvin Gaye boogaloo bass-line. Something else becomes clear. All this music that feeds into Reich’s sound world relies on a fixed pulse, a groove. That’s why Reich has no truck with a conductor’s rubato.
“A musician who spends his life playing Schubert is just not going to be able to play my music," Reich nods sagely. “Brahms is a great composer—his invertible counterpoint at the 12th is, like, really fantastic—but I don’t want to hear a note of it, not now, not later, not ever. Same thing for Mahler, Wagner, Sibelius. It if all disappeared tomorrow, I wouldn’t even know. If you don’t follow that discipline of a fixed beat, I’m not interested. In fact I’m profoundly disinterested. The one thing people asked me when I wrote 2x5, which is for the instrumentation of a rock band, is how can you expect classical musicians to rock?
“But this generation has produced a new kind of musician who knows how to play Stockhausen but who also knows about John Coltrane, DJ culture and African music. On the recording of 2x5, Mark Stewart plays electric guitar. He trained as a cellist at Eastman and is Paul Simon’s musical director. So he’s a classical musician and he’s a rock musician. The other guitarist, Bryce Dessner, went to Yale and plays in The National, a rock band you’re going to hear a lot about. So he’s a classical musician and he’s a rock musician! I think time is on most composers’ sides. Attitudes change through osmosis. This music’s in the air. Of course these young guys know how to play it.”
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by Daniel Eno
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