Steve Reich... on restoring tonality and pulse
‘We’re going to have a tonal centre and tap our feet, and that’s the way it is.’ Steve Reich is in full flow, talking to me from his home in New York. ‘The big break, the knife down the line, was between Stockhausen, Berio and Boulez on one hand – and Reich, Glass, Adams and Riley on the other. And our use of regular pulse and a tonal centre was an opening of the floodgates, particularly in the English-speaking world, to the basic blocks of music. I feel proud of that restoration.’ He checks himself: ‘That’s a funny word to use’ – he’s talking about something much more important than mere monarchies or institutions – ‘but this was a restoration of tonality and pulsation in the 1960s.’
If anyone has earnt the right to look back in pride and celebration, it’s Steve Reich. He will turn 90 in October, and he’s looking forward to the premiere of the piece he’s writing for the Colin Currie Group, In All Your Ways, an instrumental setting of a text from Proverbs. ‘There’s no singing in it, it’s just in my head,’ he says. ‘Colin wanted a piece without voices, so I said, “Aye sir, you got it.” But I like working with text, so I’m doing it silently.’ The day I talk to him, Reich is wrestling with the architectural problems he’s set himself. ‘I’ve got basically three rhythmic centres and four different harmonic structures, so three against four is the organisation of the piece. I set it up to be a bit of a challenge – and sure enough, it is.’
Steve Reich... the maximum minimalist
In his 90th year, Reich’s work ethic is undimmed: his commitment to turning those ‘basic blocks of music’ into carriers of emotion, creative life forms that sound out the places that only music does, is as absolute as it has always been.
So, let’s rewind and loop through the phases of Reich’s career to understand the musician and the person he is today. Oh, and before we do, I need to tell you that not once in our hour-long interview does Reich use the term ‘minimalism’. Reich wants us to experience the maximum we can – corporeally, emotionally, intellectually, spiritually – in his music. It isn’t ‘minimal’ at all: it’s about finding the maximum amount of feeling from each of those combinations of harmony and rhythm that define his music, from Piano Phase in 1967 to Reich/Richter in 2019.
The human voice and politics
But there are other essential elements in Reich’s work, in how it began and where it’s taking him and his listeners: the human voice and politics. In 1965 and ’66, Reich wrote It’s Gonna Rain and Come Out, two tape pieces that enshrine the principles of looping and phasing that he would explore throughout the 1960s and ’70s in his instrumental music. But these pieces aren’t abstract processes. Their inspiration is the voices Reich heard and recorded, the speech-melodies they make, and the meaning and impact of their words.
It’s Gonna Rain is a phrase spoken by Brother Walter, a Pentecostal preacher recorded by Reich in Union Square in San Francisco. ‘I went back to see him, to let him know what I was working on – and he was gone.’ One of the city’s itinerant preachers, Brother Walter was part of the ‘flotsam and jetsam of the city’ at that time. Working on the recordings in his studio, Reich’s tape machines fell out of sync, and the close-knit canons of It’s Gonna Rain – and of so much of Reich’s musical life – were born.
Come Out, 1966
Come Out, made in 1966, took Reich’s composition and his political involvement with the civil rights movement further. It was commissioned for a benefit for the Harlem Six, who were arrested following riots in 1964. Reich was initially asked to make a documentary based on recordings of the mothers, the children and the police involved in the case. Reich focused on a few words of Daniel Hamm, one of the wrongfully accused Harlem Six, who was later tried and convicted of first-degree murder, and beaten up by police while in custody. Daniel was 19 at the time and in Come Out his voice says, ‘I had to, like, open the bruise up, and let some of the bruise blood come out to show them.’
Reich takes those two words, ‘come out’, and puts them through a hall of mirrors in his tape machines, so that Hamm’s voice is looped against itself and magnified in time and texture, becoming a wall of sound in a vivid act of musical protest. ‘Of the money I was making, I said I would give the family 20 per cent, which I did,’ Reich remembers.
The piece was played at the benefit at New York’s Town Hall ‘as background music for passing the hat’ for donations. And even if Reich says, ‘People looked at each other: what the hell is this thing?’, everything was right about Come Out. ‘It was a good cause and a good piece. It was my contribution to the civil rights movement, with the voice of someone who was a direct participant, making an indirect appeal to those listening to come out and show your support.’
Steve Reich... real world inspirations
You can trace Reich’s career through his pieces that most obviously engage with real-world events, with human voices bearing witness to their lives and experience – from Come Out to Different Trains in 1988, which includes the voices of Holocaust survivors, to Three Tales in 2002, with its cast of scientists and thinkers whose speech-melodies prophetically test the limits of our relationship with technology.
The impact of Music for 18 Musicians
All of those pieces – and many more – attest to the real-world inspirations of Reich’s composing, the issues his music participates in. Yet as he says: ‘What’s the real-world cause behind Music for 18 Musicians? You’d be hard-pressed to say anything.’ Music for 18 Musicians is a meditation and transformation of a handful of chords and harmonies, over the course of an hour, for an ensemble of winds, strings, keyboards, percussion and wordless voices.
This is the piece that made Reich an international name, with his 1978 recording on the ECM label selling 100,000 copies. Music for 18 Musicians had a real-world impact on the musical scene, changing the horizons of what was possible for composers and reaching an audience across jazz, avant-pop and classical. The work set the course for Reich’s ongoing influence across more of the musical universe than arguably any other composer in the 20th and 21st centuries. ‘Everything you do influences everything you go on to do in ways you can’t predict. We all change and develop. Yet we are who we are from the get-go.’
Steve Reich... the early years and becoming a composer
For Reich, personally and musically, that’s meant being a person of courage and resilience, with an unshakeable belief in the necessity of working and honing his craft. His parents split up when he was just a year old. They lived on either side of the US, so as a very young child he would cross the country with his governess to see his mother in California, and his father in New York. (Those are the train journeys that prompted him to think of those ‘Different Trains’ that other young Jewish children were forced on to in Europe at the same time in the late-1930s.)
He decided to become a composer in his early twenties, with no encouragement from his father. ‘It was a challenging time, for sure. There were periods feeling terribly angry and stressed. But I knew I had to make up for lost time: I mean, Bartók was five, Mozart was four, I was 20; what was I doing? But I dealt with all that. The solution was always to go on and write the next piece, to go onwards.’
That’s a combination of fierce determination and practicality, as well as hard-won confidence and a complete lack of self-pity which still marks Reich’s achievement, along with his unwavering commitment to those musical principles he says he’s so proud to have ‘restored’.
Steve Reich... a love of Bach, pulse and tonal centre
There’s also his unchanging aesthetic position, and his persistent allergy to European classical music from around 1750 to 1900, from Haydn to Mahler. ‘You have to recognise there are great composers writing great music that you just don’t care to listen to.’ Reich’s own canon includes African drumming and gamelan, and connects medieval composers like Pérotin to JS Bach, and then jumps to the 20th century to find Stravinsky, Bartók and John Coltrane. They are all linked by a very specific technical issue: ‘regular pulse’, Reich says. It’s there in all of those composers and repertoires which nourish him, but that pulse gets distended, Reich says, in the tempo rubato and conductorly indulgences from Beethoven onwards, just as harmony effloresces into the stretched and broken tonality of Wagner and Schoenberg.
That means that Reich is interested in composers and musicians who use the stuff of music – those pulses, those tonal centres – to express the things that only music on its own terms can do. ‘You listen to Bach and you hear incredible emotions,’ he says. ‘But the music isn’t wearing its heart on its sleeve. It’s day-to-day ecstasy and heartbreak, which is what we all experience. And Bach had a very pedestrian existence. The greatest musical genius that ever worked punched the clock. The Baroque period is basically a period of musical employees, working for the church. Religion and regularity of musical production are yoked together. There was no room for the tortured genius.’
A straightforward working composer
There’s no question that Reich is on the Bach side, and has no time for narcissism in life or in music. His Jewish faith is ever more important to him; he replaces being an employee with fulfilling commissions, and being on deadlines like the one he’s facing for In All Your Ways. The emotion of Reich’s music emerges not as a result of the work’s subject matter, and never through the manipulation of our emotions in post-romantic psychodrama.
Instead, like Bach’s music, like Stravinsky’s, it’s a result of the clarity and the mystery of proposing a single musical idea – like the one that starts one of Reich’s own favourite pieces, Proverb – and setting it in motion against itself, revealing and meditating on that melody, those chords; and in Proverb, those words from Ludwig Wittgenstein: ‘How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life.’
Reich feels this responsibility to his craft most sharply when he’s setting spiritual and sacred texts, as he has often done in recent years, in pieces like Traveler’s Prayer and Jacob’s Ladder. ‘You have to serve the text as best as you can, so that the musical questions are tied to the meaning of the text. When you join the aesthetic to the religious, you may still fail – or you may succeed wildly – but that frame of working is very stimulating, demanding and productive.’
Steve Reich... and spirituality
I try to draw him out on the spiritual dimension of his music, because it’s a tangible experience for us listeners in so much of his music on sacred subjects, like Tehillim and The Cave. But it’s also there in everything Reich has made, even in his purely instrumental music, from the urgency of Violin Phase to the time-warping alchemy of Drumming. There’s a feeling of witnessing the essences of music revealed and brought to new dimensions of physicality, technique and expression in every one of Reich’s pieces. If you listen deeply, you’ll find time transcended in the loops, canons and spirals that his music produces, and you’ll feel a shimmering halo, a state of heightened reality that changes your perception for as long as the piece lasts – and which resonates in the real world beyond.
Reich doesn’t answer the question of the spirituality of his music directly, except to acknowledge that it’s up to us, his listeners, to find what we need from his work. For him, the task is the same as it ever was: ‘My job is to write the next piece.’ And that’s the best and most generous answer there can ever be.
