Steve Reich

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This article is about the American composer. For information on the U.S. soldier killed in Afghanistan, see Steve Reich (Army).
Steve Reich
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Steve Reich

Steve Reich (born Stephen Michael Reich, October 3, 1936; last name pronounced [ɹaɪʃ]) is an American composer. Reich is known as one of the pioneers of minimalism, although he sometimes deviates from a purely minimalist style. Ideas Reich has developed include using tape loops to create phasing patterns (such as in his first works, It's Gonna Rain, Come Out, Drumming); and using processes to create and explore musical concepts (Pendulum Music, Four Organs). These compositions, marked by their use of repetitive figures and phasing effects, have been a major influence in contemporary American music as well as contemporary music as a whole; The Guardian has described Reich as one of the few composers to have "altered the direction of musical history".

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Early life and work

While Reich was born in New York, his childhood years were split between divorced parents in New York and California. He was given piano lessons as a child and describes growing up with the "middle class favorites", having no exposure to music written before 1750 or after 1900. At the age of 14 he began to study music in earnest, after hearing music from the Baroque period and earlier as well as music of the 20th century, and began studying drums with Roland Koloff in order to play jazz. His college years were spent at Cornell, where he took some music courses but graduated (in 1957) with a B.A. in philosophy. (Reich's B.A. thesis was on Ludwig Wittgenstein; later he would set text by the philosopher to music in Proverb (1990) and You Are (variations) (2004).)

In the following year he studied composition privately with Hall Overton; he then moved on to Juilliard to study with William Bergsma and Vincent Persichetti (1958 to 1961). Subsequently he attended Mills College in Oakland where he was taught by Luciano Berio and Darius Milhaud (1961-63) and earned a master's degree in composition.

Early on, Reich was influenced by fellow minimalist Terry Riley. Riley's loosely-structured aleatoric work In C combines simple musical patterns, offset in time, to create a slowly-shifting, cohesive whole. Reich adopted this approach to compose his first major work, It's Gonna Rain. Written in 1965, It's Gonna Rain is made up of recordings of a sermon about the end of the world given by the African American Pentecostal preacher Brother Walter. The sermon was transferred to multiple tape loops played in and out of phase, with segments of the sermon cut and rearranged.

Come Out (1966) was constructed along similar lines. A single spoken line given by an injured survivor of a race riot is manipulated. The survivor, who had been beaten, punctured a bruise on his own body to convince police about his beating. The spoken line includes the phrase "to let the bruise blood come out to show them." Reich re-recorded the fragment "come out to show them" on two channels, which are initially played in unison. They quickly slip out of sync; gradually the discrepancy widens and becomes a reverberation. The two voices then split into four, looped continuously, then eight, and continues splitting until the actual words are unintelligible, leaving the listener with only the rhythmic and tonal patterns of speech.

The 11-minute piece is an example of process music. So is 1968's Pendulum Music, which consists of the sound of a microphone swinging over a loudspeaker, producing feedback as it swings. (Pendulum Music was recorded by Sonic Youth in the late 1990s.)

Reich's first attempt at applying this phasing technique to live performance rather than recorded work was the 1967 Piano Phase, for two pianos. The performers begin by repeating a rapid twelve-note melodic figure in unison. One player continues, keeping tempo with robotic precision, while the other slowly speeds up until they are lined up, one note apart, and then resumes the previous tempo. The cycle of speeding up and locking in continues throughout the piece, with a new figure being introduced once the original figure has come full circle. Violin Phase, also written in 1967, is built on these same lines, a theme later explored in Clapping Music (1972) and The Desert Music (1984). Piano Phase and Violin Phase both premiered in a series of concerts given in New York art galleries.

Four Organs (1970) deals specifically with augmentation, and was based on a piece written in 1967, Slow Motion Sound, which was more of a prototype piece. Having never been performed, the idea of slowing down a recorded sound until many times its original length without changing pitch or timbre was applied to Four Organs. The result was a piece with maracas playing a fast quaver pulse, while the four organs stress certain quavers using an 11th chord. This work therefore dealt with rhythmic change and repetition. It is unique in the context of Reich's other pieces in being linear as opposed to cyclic like his earlier works—the superficially similar Phase Patterns, also for four organs but without maracas, is (as the name suggests) a phase piece similar to others composed during the period. Four Organs was performed as part of a Boston Symphony Orchestra program, and was Reich's first composition to be performed in a large traditional setting.

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New directions

Drumming (1971), a 90-minute piece for a 9-piece percussion ensemble plus female voices and piccolo, marked a new stage in Reich's career, and the beginning of his shift in focus toward composition and performance with an ensemble of musicians. Composed shortly after his return from a five-week trip to study music in Ghana, Drumming draws much of its inspiration from that experience as well as A. M. Jones's Studies in African Music about the music of the Ewe people. He also studied Balinese gamelan in Seattle. Around this time he formed his ensemble, Steve Reich and Musicians, which was to be the sole ensemble to interpret his works for many years; the group remains together today with many of its original members.

After Drumming, Reich moved on from the "phase shifting" technique that he had pioneered, and began writing more elaborate pieces. He investigated other musical processes such as augmentation (the temporal lengthening of phrases and melodic fragments). It was during this period that he wrote works such as Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices and Organ (1973), and Six Pianos (1973).

In 1974, Reich began writing what would be classed as his seminal work by most, Music for 18 Musicians. This piece involved many new ideas, although it harked back to earlier pieces. The piece is based around a cycle of eleven chords introduced at the beginning, followed by a small piece of music based around each chord, and finally a return to the original cycle. The sections are aptly named "Pulses", Section I-XI, and "Pulses". This was Reich's first attempt at writing for larger ensembles, and the extension of performers resulted in a growth of psycho-acoustic effects, which fascinated Reich, and he noted that he would like to "explore this idea further". Reich remarked that this one work contained more harmonic movement in the first five minutes then any other work he had written. It was the first release in ECM Records' "New Series".

Later that same year he published a book, Writings About Music, containing essays on his philosophy, aesthetics, and musical projects written between 1963 and 1974. An updated collection, Writings On Music (1965-2000), was published in 2002.

Reich's work took on a darker character in the 1980s with the introduction of political themes as well as themes from his Jewish heritage. Tehillim (1981), Hebrew for psalms, is the first of Reich's works to draw on his Jewish background. The work is in four parts, scored for an ensemble of four women's voices (one high soprano, two lyric sopranos and one alto), piccolo, flute, oboe, english horn, 2 clarinets, six percussion (playing small tuned tambourines without jingles, clapping, maracas, marimba, vibraphone and crotales), two electric organs, two violins, viola, cello and double bass, with amplified voices, strings, and winds. A setting of text from psalms 19:2-5 (19:1-4 in Christian translations), 34:13-15 (34:12-14), 18:26-27 (18:25-26), and 150:4-6, Tehillim is a departure from Reich's other work in its formal structure; the setting of texts several lines long rather than the fragments used in previous works brings melody in as a substantive element. Use of formal counterpoint and functional harmony also goes in contrast to the loosely-structured minimalist works written previously.

Different Trains (1988), for string quartet and tape, uses recorded speech, as is his earlier works, but this time as a melodic rather than a rhythmic element. The pieces takes Reich's memories of childhood cross-country train trips and the associated sounds, comparing and contrasting them with the different trains sending other children to death in Europe under Nazi rule.

In 1993, Reich collaborated with his wife, the video artist Beryl Korot, on an opera, The Cave, which explores the roots of Judaism, Christianity and Islam through the words of Israelis, Palestinians, and Americans, echoed musically by the ensemble. The work, for percussion, voices, and strings, is a musical documentary, named for the Cave of Machpelah in Hebron, where a mosque now stands and Abraham is said to have been buried. The two collaborated again on the opera Three Tales, which concerns the Hindenburg disaster, the testing of nuclear weapons on Bikini Atoll, and more modern concerns, specifically Dolly the sheep, cloning, and the technological singularity.

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Influence

Reich's style of composition has influenced many other composers and musical groups, including the rock band King Crimson, the group of composers associated with the Bang On A Can festival (including David Lang and Julia Wolfe), and indie rock musician Sufjan Stevens. He has also influenced visual artists such as Bruce Nauman.

His music has also been quite influential to ambient and techno musicians. A melodic line from his 1987 work Electric Counterpoint was used by The Orb in their 1991 hit Little Fluffy Clouds. This connection has been honoured in a 1999 album by DJs and electronic musicians, Reich Remixed, released on Nonesuch Records.

Reich has expressed admiration for Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker's choreography for some of his works.

Reich often cites Pérotin, J.S. Bach, and Stravinsky as composers he admires, whose tradition he wished as a young composer to become part of. Others who have influenced his work include visual artist friends such as Sol Lewitt and Richard Serra.

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Quotes

"(...) I drove a cab in San Francisco, and in New York I worked as a part-time social worker. Phil Glass and I had a moving company for a short period of time. I did all kinds of odd jobs (...) I started making a living as a performer in my own ensemble. I would never have thought that it was how I was going to survive financially. It was a complete wonder."

From an interview with Gabrielle Zuckerman, 2002 (see Links)

"The point is, if you went to Paris and dug up Debussy and said, “Excusez-moi Monsieur…are you an impressionist? ”, he’d probably say “Merde!” and go back to sleep. That is a legitimate concern of musicologists, music historians, and journalists, and it’s a convenient way of referring to me, Riley, Glass, La Monte Young (...) it’s become the dominant style. But, anybody who’s interested in French Impressionism is interested in how different Debussy and Ravel and Satie are - and ditto for what’s called minimalism. (...) Basically, those kind of words are taken from painting and sculpture, and applied to musicians who composed at the same period as that painting and sculpture was made(...)."

From an Interview with Rebecca Y. Kim, 2000, www.stevereich.com

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Notable works

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See also

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External links

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References


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Interviews

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Listening

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Others

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