Forget massed strings; for Steve Reich rhythm is the key. The cutting-edge composer, who will be in Dublin next week for a major celebration of his work, talks to Michael Dervan
One of the things that comes across talking to composer Steve Reich is his raw appetite for things. The enthusiasms are strong, the distastes, too. The words sometimes almost tumble over each other as he talks, the speed and intensity causing a new thought, a new sentence to be grafted on before the last one has quite finished. Sometimes there are strands of thinking which overlap and interlock repeatedly, as if mimicking the interplay of rhythmic patterns in his music.
As Reich himself has pointed out, slow music is not really his thing. His trademark pulsing, his busily patterned foregrounds are energising rather than relaxing. After all, as child he wanted to become a drummer, and one of his earliest successes was a piece called Drumming, which offers pretty much what its title suggests.
Yet, at one point during the interview in his Manhattan apartment he invokes the image of the hare and the tortoise, and it's the tortoise he identifies himself with. He's talking about his time at the Juilliard School in New York, where, by conventional standards, he arrived rather late in the day, with a degree from Cornell (music and philosophy) already behind him.
His best friend at the time, he recalls, was "several years younger than me and way ahead of me". But "music is a very mysterious field. Who is going to go on and succeed is not always clear when you're at school. The friend I'm referring to is someone you've never heard of and never will. But he could write down John Coltrane solos on a napkin - and did - and actually published some Bill Evans transcriptions, and, you know, was writing like Elliott Carter, a phenomenal musician.
"But, temperamentally, psychologically, I was slow and steady, you know, like the tortoise and the hare, I was definitely the tortoise. I kept going."
Reich was nearly 30 before he produced anything that he still allows to be heard nowadays, the tape piece It's Gonna Rain, of 1965. This is a work of almost textbook minimalism, a fragment of speech repeated again and again, played slightly out of sync with itself so that it produces shifts in the listener's perception. It would be a further 11 years before he produced his big breakthrough piece, Music for 18 Musicians, in 1976.
REICH'S FAMILY BACKGROUND was not particularly musical. "Up to the age of 14 I had not heard a note of anything before 1750, never heard a note of Bach, never heard anything after Wagner, and never heard any real jazz. Broadway shows, yes. Hit parade, yes."
At 14, he heard his first Stravinsky and Bach, his first real jazz. "All of those, The Rite of Spring, the Fifth Brandenburg Concerto, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Kenny Clarke, really opened things up. That's when the force of musical attraction really hit me."
The musical history course given by William Austin at Cornell went from Gregorian chant up to JS Bach and then leapt forward to the 20th century, "Debussy, Charlie Parker, Stravinsky". For Reich, "this was fantastic. Austin considered this one chunk of musical history. The second part of the course went from Haydn up to Wagner. I liked the first part of the course.
"I remember hearing Perotin, 11th-century organum, played on recordings, and just being knocked out by it. This is music which actually turned out to have a very large effect on me. The piece, Four Organs, way back in the 1970s, would never have happened if it were not for listening to Perotin - augmentation carried on to unbelievable lengths. It happens when you're young. The magnet either pulls you or repulses you. And the magnet pulled me very hard."
An important influence in Reich's 20s, in the years when he was still finding his own musical voice, was Bartók, particularly the knotty music of the Third, Fourth and Fifth String Quartets - he now takes pride in having the same publisher as Bartók.
And he remembers the awfulness of writing exercises in imitation of Mozart sonatas.
"That was torture. I was terrible at it . . . I could do it, but it was like pulling teeth. Working with triads and diminished seventh chords, I just couldn't stand the harmonic language."
AT SOME POINT the dreaded word m-word is going to have to be dealt with. Minamalism/minamalist is the most convenient of labels, but it's one which the composers it's applied to usually object to. The rapid speech becomes briefly almost formal in manner as Reich dissociates himself from it.
"I'm a composer. I write music. I always thought it was absurd. The important thing is take a listen, take a look at the score, and then you'll know everything. Call it whatever you like. I think it makes perfectly good sense for music critics, music historians. It's convenient to have a vessel in which you can pick up me and Riley and Glass and maybe early John Adams and Arvo Pärt and several other Europeans and label it minimalism. It's understandable.
"If you're at all interested in this music, you're going to say, wait a minute, put that down. Glass started out with his additive rhythms and then got interested in arpeggiation and this became the backbone of everything, etc, etc, etc. Reich was a rhythmic processist and then became more harmonic and more expressive and texts came in. It's like French impressionism. That's the expression of somebody who really doesn't like Debussy and Ravel and Satie. Those three guys are like different universes, Ravel the classicist, Debussy oceanic, and Satie totally unique."
Unlike the overall label, Reich has no difficulty seeing different periods in his work. "There's the phasing pieces from It's Gonna Rain in 1965 up to Drumming in 1971. What it was in this early period was just basically multiples of the same instrument against themselves, or the same tapes, whatever it was. The idea was that you would hear all this interlocking, a web, because you had identities playing against themselves. Who was playing what, who cares? You were hearing this marvellous contrapuntal web."
REICH SEES SIX Pianos and Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices and Organ, both from 1973, as transitional pieces, the first looking backwards, the other, with its wordless, chaste, female voices, leaning forwards to Music for 18 Musicians (1976), a work that was harmonically conceived as a series of chords.
"It has a key signature, it's in three sharps throughout. It is absolutely dependent on the feeling of tonal centre, but the idea is to make that feeling somewhat ambiguous. In music that repeats itself, the lifeblood of that music will be that both rhythmically and harmonically there will be some ambiguity or it will become flat-footed and dull, and all the nasty things that people used to say about this music will be true."
THE NEXT SHIFT was in 1981, when he decided to set a text. "I'd become very interested in my Judaic background. I went through the entire Book of Psalms in Hebrew and in English trying to find these chunks that I could just say to anybody. And then when I found them, it was if they reflected on me and said to myself: 'Handel gave me this. Bach gave me that. Stravinsky gave me this. What do you have in mind?' And lo and behold, my wife said as I was working on Tehillim: 'You're singing. Real melodies'. What really marks the piece off is a number of things. I was really using voices singing melodies. It was just bubbling up in my head."
The rhythmic character was completely new for him. "Suddenly comes this 5/8, 7/8, 2/4, 6/8, a whole different metric world, spontaneously and generated by the text. I realised that if you write with a text, that text is going to turn around and force you to do something you wouldn't otherwise have done. The text pushed me. I ended up with a Hallelujah in D major" - the very key of Handel's Hallelujah Chorus.
The changing metres turned up again when he used passages from three poems by William Carlos Williams in The Desert Music and have since materialised in a purely instrumental works.
Then, through the technology of the sampling keyboard came an entirely new integration of speech and music. "I remember thinking, 'They invented that for me'. Here's the keyboard where you can play anything that you can record into it, non musical sounds, or musical sounds. Me, I was interested in speech. You could bring it in wherever you wanted it, by just playing it on the keyboard."
Different Trains of 1988 integrates string quartet, with samples of speech and train sounds, evoking the trains in which the young Reich crossed America between divorced parents and the trains which carried Jews to very different destinations in Europe at the same time.
The sampling keyboard "also opened the door to opera". After Tehillim there had been invitations to write opera, all politely declined.
"I'm not attracted to the form. I don't know what to do. Spending three or four years writing something that you have no clear view of or enthusiasm for is a suicidal ticket.
"While working with Different Trains the light-bulb went on. I'm working with audiotape. What if it was videotape and you could see somebody talking about something and while you saw them on screen, there were musicians on stage playing, and you see the musicians. I spoke to my wife, Beryl Korot, the video artist, whose work I have a huge admiration for."
The outcome was The Cave, a multimedia work rooted in the Bible, which examines Abraham from the perspectives of East and West Jerusalem and New York City. "If you want to call it opera, that's fine. We originally called The Cave a documentary, music video theatre piece. Now, that's a helluva mouthful. So, OK, it's a video opera."
If the pace of production seems to have slowed down in recent years, that's because there was a second blockbuster work, the anti-technology video opera, Three Tales (again with Korot), premiered in Vienna in 2002. The current work in progress is a piece called Daniel Variations, with a text partly from the Book of Daniel.
The style is "dark, gritty, allows a lot of schmutz". The first text is "basically the dream of Nebuchadnezzar's own destruction, which he asks Daniel to interpret. The text is something like, 'I saw a dream, visions on my bed and images in my head frighten me'.
"I live four blocks from the World Trade Center. That's the world I live in. We're thinking of moving because of that. I don't think it takes an enormous stretch of the imagination to see how that text could apply to more than just me living in the world today." Other texts are associated with Daniel Pearl, the journalist kidnapped and murdered in Pakistan in 2002.
ONE OF THE threads that weaves its way through our conversation in his Manhattan apartment, a haven of New York calm a few blocks from the World Trade Center site, is a dissociation from the romantic orchestra that audiences know and love. He simply doesn't relate to the sound of massed string instruments, and he proposes a new format, where orchestras be fewer in number and larger in size, with integrated early music and new music wings (under specialist directors), give fewer programmes, but take all of them on tour.
He acknowledges John Adams as "a master of the orchestra. Just let me say that right up front. And if there's any future for the orchestra, he is contributing to the literature. And I can't name number two".
Among the contemporary works he mentions enthusiastically are Michael Gordon's Yo Shakespeare and Decasia (the score for Bill Morrison's film edited from decaying film stock).
For all the immediacy and responsiveness of his conversation, Reich comes across as a private man, modest on the one hand (he describes Bartók as "an incalculably greater composer than I am"), yet keenly aware of his own importance (as part of a generation which has "changed, completely changed the musical landscape").
He's clearly still suffering from the shock to the system of the terrorist attacks of 2001. But he seems to have recovered from one in the mid-1970s, when the success of Music for 18 Musicians kept him from composing. "When I came back to my studio to get to work in 1977 I found the faucet was dry, and it was terrifying. I thought, you get it once, and now you're wiped out." It wasn't true, of course. But you can sense the depth of satisfaction he feels from the fact that from 1971 he was able to give up other work, and live from composing and performing. There is an unusual resonance to his declaration that "I'm a very fortunate human being to be able to do what I love to do, and to be able to support myself and my family when many greater people than I had horrible times not being able to do that."
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Soundbites: the magic of Reich
Donnacha Dennehy, artistic director of the RTÉ Living Music Festival, on the appeal of Steve Reich's music.
'There are a few listening experiences that make an indelible mark on you. The first time I heard Reich was one of them. The piece was Music for 18 Musicians (the famous ECM recording by Reich's group). I was immediately swept away by the stunning beauty of the music. Its sense of pulsing motion, its lack of melodramatic gestures, its interlocking rhythms and clear-as-ice harmonies . . .I became addicted.'