A five-day festival this month pays tribute to Steve Reich, the minimalist composer whose music has influenced a generation, or two. BELINDA McKEONmet him in New York
‘I’M ON THE five-year plan now,” says Steve Reich, with a grin. He’s talking about what happens when you’re an icon of contemporary culture and you happen to have a big birthday: at a certain point, touch wood, the big birthdays keep coming. And you’re not going to get off with a few bars of
For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow,
even if those bars are played by two pianists moving in and out of sync, underlaid by a tape recording on which the final word of the chorus is indefinitely prolonged.
This is Steve Reich, for whose 70th birthday New York’s biggest cultural institutions stopped competing with one another, and came together to present a city-wide celebration of his work. Around the world, too, every month seemed to bring another Reich retrospective. The composer turns 75 this year, and the pitch has once again been intensified: Reich has taken 12 trips to international concerts and festivals in his honour in the past six months.
“And I ain’t 25,” he says of the energy such a schedule demands.
Reich looks younger than his years, dressed in his signature casual garb, complete with the baseball cap without which he seems never to be seen. He also marked his 70th birthday, in 2006, by relocating from Manhattan, where he was born, to a beautiful modernist house in upstate New York. From the road, the sections of the house, panelled in pale wood, seem to glide into each other, fold in around themselves. Inside, there is a sense of peace and ease, of a place in which work is both possible and pleasurable.
“Most of the time, in the last few years in New York, we didn’t avail ourselves much of the cultural opportunities,” Reich says of the move. “But if you’re always saying no to people, they get insulted. If you say, ‘I’m 50 miles out of the city, and there’s an ice storm,’ they’ll understand.”
And yet here he is travelling the world.
Later this month he’ll be in Cork for the Reich Effect, a five-day tribute presented by Cork Opera House. The festival will consist of performances both of Reich’s works and of the works of contemporary musicians and composers whom Reich has influenced. It’s an international festival, featuring Kronos Quartet and the Danish band Efterklang, among many others, but the curators have put a strong emphasis on Irish artists (including Crash Ensemble, Iarla Ó Lionáird, Gavin Friday and Elizabeth Cooney), exploring Reich’s impact on contemporary Irish music.
Reich will judge a competition in which electronic artists have been invited to submit their remixes of his seminal 1971 piece Drumming. By the time they reach Reich, the entries will have been whittled down to a shortlist, but he's bound to hear some diverse takes on his creation. And for someone who, in the early years of his career, kept performances of his music strictly within his own ensemble, preferring for the compositions not to be toyed with out of earshot, this is an interesting place to be.
“The best thing of all is when you’re writing music and other musicians want to play it,” he says. “And there is something really revelatory about hearing younger people play your music. Because they bring something to it that your contemporaries can’t do.”
He talks about Kronos Quartet and their world premiere of his most recent piece, WTC 9/11, at Duke University earlier this year. At first he was baffled about why the quartet chose to present the piece along with excerpts from his 1993 opera The Caveand with a version of the work many regard as his masterpiece, 1988's Different Trains.
"And then I saw how the last movement of WTC 9/11harkens back to the drones of The Cave," he says. "And I realised you could look at the piece in a totally different way. And then another performance that knocked my socks off was Colin Currie and his group doing Drummingat the South Bank [in London] this year. It was miked up high, it was expressionist, it was a brand new take. And I thought, Oh, we never could have done it that way."
The influence of Reich and his ensemble on contemporary music is layered into almost every genre. His minimalist innovations have certainly gone far beyond the confines of classical composition. Pieces like Drummingand Different Trains,as well as Come Out(1966), Four Organs(1969), Music for 18 Musicians (1976) and others, have done much to shape jazz and electronic music, but you'll hear their traces also in rock, pop, hip hop and techno. In fact, sometimes it seems possible to hear the influence on Reich of sounds that are not even music; his architectures of the pattern and the pulse seem discernible, sometimes, in the harmonies and dissonances of daily life, in the percussions and suspensions of the street.
That’s no doubt because it was the world itself which first put the mould on Reich’s genius; it was his early attunement to the sounds around him that sharpened his ear, and his sense of the music pulsing under every moment.
His parents separated soon after his birth, and as a boy he spent long hours on trains back and forth between New York and Los Angeles. He attributes his rhythmic sense to the clicking and clacking of the train wheels, and those sounds fuelled the moving and beautiful explorations of Different Trains, into which Reich mingled the voices of Pullman porters and Holocaust survivors (the rationale being that if he had been on a train in Europe during the same decade, his journey would have been very different).
The depths contained within the human voice gave him his first moment of musical epiphany. Reich's early influences included Stravinsky's Rite of Spring,which he heard when he was 14 years old; Bach's Cantata No 4; going to more than 50 modal-jazz performances by John Coltrane; taking part in Terry Riley's In C;listening over and over to Ella Fitzgerald scat singing and to the fast patterns of the 12th-century composer Perotin. All of these things were pivotal for the young Reich. But it was the tape recordings of a shouting Penecostal preacher that changed everything.
Reich was experimenting with the tapes, playing them against each other, when he heard the strange and complicated harmony they produced when they went out of phase. It's Gonna Rainwas born. So, too, in a way, was Steve Reich. It was 1965.
“My friend David Lang says to me, ‘I envy you when you were born,’ ” Reich says, “which is a very interesting remark.”
Reich came along at a time when the Schoenberg aesthetic of 12-tone serial music dominated, when harmony was not fashionable. "And if you wrote tonal music you were a joke. When my early tape pieces came out, and from Piano Phase up through Drumming, the American academic scene completely turned their back. They said it was infantile."
A 1973 Carnegie Hall premiere of Four Organs brought the audience close to a riot. They expected Bach and Liszt, not rock organ and maracas. The conductor, knowing the value of controversy, was thrilled, but Reich felt differently. “I want people to love my music,” he says, looking uneasy at the memory even 40 years later. “When that happened, I was white as a sheet.”
Reich’s approach to composition has changed many times over the years. After Drumming, he left the technique of phasing behind, although he continues to work with canons between instruments. Four Organs was the unveiling of what came to be called minimalism, in which chords were prolonged, the harmony moving in many directions; Tehillim (1981) and The Desert Music (1983) developed those concepts.
He went back to voice with The Cave,before returning to instrumental music with 1999's Triple Quartetand, the piece that may be Reich's favourite, You Are (Variations), in 2004, into which texts from philosophy and scripture were woven. Reich again turned to text for The Daniel Variations, in 2006, a composition in which lines from the biblical Book of Daniel and from the last words of Daniel Pearl, the American reporter murdered by fundamentalists in Pakistan, unfold within a series of harmonies. After that came Double Sextet,in 2007 (for which Reich won a Pulitzer), followed, in 2009, by 2X5 and this year's WTC 9/11, a trio of works demonstrating Reich's lasting relevance.
Double Sextetwas commissioned by the Eighth Blackbird ensemble, while 2X5 was written for rock instruments and premiered by Bang on a Can, in a double bill with Kraftwerk. WTC, like Different Trains, was a Kronos Quartet commission, and like Different Trainsit is not a piece Reich wants to see reduced to sociohistorical narrative. "I would say of every piece of music that its subject matter, as time passes, becomes more and more irrelevant," he says. "What has to work is the music. If it doesn't, the piece dies, and the subject matter along with it."
In Cork, Double Sextet, 2X5and WTC 9/11will receive their Irish premieres, the first two by Crash Ensemble and the latter by Kronos Quartet. Reich says he is glad his newest work is the focus of the event.
"It's nice, at 75, not to have just retrospectives, but to be able to say, 'Hey man, here's what I've done in the last five years. What have you done?" He laughs, but a little bashfully; this matters to him. "I mean, it's great that people love Drummingand Music for 18 Musicians," he says. "But what did you do for me lately?"
His next piece, London Counterpoint,is a commission for the London Sinfonietta that will be scored for a large ensemble, not a typical Reichian set-up. He has had a prolific few years, but he does not expect to finish the piece until 2013. "I'm a snail," he says, but it's the demands of this birthday year that are keeping him from his studio.
And there have been other commitments. He is cleaning up old scores, giving them a clear notation; just yesterday, he says, he finished the final proofread of the new score of Drumming."It's been in this strange manuscript that I made back when I wrote the piece, with lots of inaccuracies, and handwriting, and lots of the work on it was done verbally and out of xeroxes. So it needed a good, straight-ahead notation, and I'm glad my publishers are pushing on this, because it's the time to do it."
That tattered old manuscript of Drummingsounds like exactly the thing diehard Reich fans would love to get their hands on, but his archive contains no real mysteries or surprises, he says: his drafts are all indexed and digitised, and anyone who wanted to could easily pinpoint the moments when his pieces almost went wrong, or at least almost went in a very different direction. "They can see where the stinkers are," he says with a laugh.
“But really, there’s no music that you don’t know. The music that you don’t know is in the garbage can. Which is copious. Because music has to magnetise you and draw you in, and if it doesn’t do that, it’s failed. Period.”
Before you go: essential listening
Reich's most famous piece, and the one that has served as the entry point for so many people, is Music for 18 Musicians. Premiered in 1976, it remains a fresh, compelling work both in recordings and, especially, live. You can hear a section of it at stevereich.com or a version played by Reich and other musicians on a Nonesuch collection called Steve Reich: Works 1965-1995.
The South Bank Show on ITV did a special on Reich, in 2006, and the full show is now available on YouTube. Reich’s website also has links to the programme, which features contributors such as Brian Eno and Michael Nyman.
There are various recordings of Different Trains,a three-movement work for string quartet and tape, but the 1990 Nonesuch recording by the Kronos Quartet is recommended.
The Reich Effect: What's on?
A five-day festival revolving around the music of a minimalist modern composer? It’s ambitious, and the programme is creative, so it will be interesting to see just how the Reich Effect pans out when it kicks off at the end of the month.
Devised by Cork Opera House, it has a range of events that draw in some interesting names. Among them, of course, will be Reich himself; the composer will be in conversation with John Kelly following a film about him.
The Kronos Quartet (July 28th), one of the most influential and lauded in modern music, will play a selection of works by Reich, including an Irish premiere of WTC 9/11.
Crash Ensemble (July 31st) will perform a programme that includes works by other composers, including Donnacha Dennehy, and will feature Gavin Friday and Iarla Ó Lionáird.
Elsewhere, the Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson (July 31st), who acknowledges his debt to Reich, is worth catching, as are the Danish collective Efterklang (July 30th), who perform with the composer Daníel Bjarnason, the Messing Orchestra and guest musicians.
Also promising is the RTÉ Concert Orchestra (July 29th), which will play pieces by Nico Muhly, Kjartan Sveinsson of Sigur Rós and Johnny Greenwood of Radiohead.
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