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75 th BIRTHDAY REICH
by LUCIE RENAUD
La Monte Young started it, Terry Riley (with his In C) provided
the foundation, and Philip Glass reclaimed it, but
many consider Steve Reich the most important figure in
American minimalism.
“My generation is not a revolution. It was a restoration! A restoration
of normalcy where popular sources were brought back into the normal
situation of classical forces, and classical music—music that I was
writing, that Glass or Terry Riley was
writing—was interesting to the pop
musicians,” explained Steve Reich,
his legendary baseball cap in place,
at the outset of an interview given for
the Domaine Privé concert, held to
mark his 75 th birthday, at the Cité de
la Musique de Paris, October 11 to 18.
Born October 3, 1936, in New York,
Steve Reich initially studied piano
before turning to percussion after
hearing Kenny Clarke, the drummer
for Miles Davis. He studied philosophy
at Cornell and deepened his understanding
of music history before
devoting himself to composition
with jazzman Hall Overton, William
Bergsma, and Vincent Persichetti at the Juilliard School, where he was
a contemporary of Philip Glass. He found himself in California next,
and worked with Darius Milhaud and Luciano Berio. He rejected serialism,
but stayed close to the modal jazz of John Coltrane and discovered
African rhythms and percussion, which would
repetition without redundancy
THE ESSENTIAL STEVE REICH
It’s Gonna Rain (1965)
was designed around a repetitive
motif and tape loops and essentially
plays on the contrast between
the human voice and
electronic sounds.
Music for 18 Musicians (1976)
is based on eleven fundamental
chords that serve as pillars for the
entire work. During the creation of
this piece, Reich studied the Balinese
gamelan.
Different Trains (1988)
superimposes the voices of Pullman
train conductors over those of
Shoah survivors accompanied by a
string quartet: the American Dream
mingled with the horror of war.
become the essence of the rhythmic
cells in his writing. Swept up
in the psychedelic wave, rock, he
adopted an approach not devoid of
tonal references.
When he reflects on his years of
study, Reich recalls the days when
it was necessary for a young composer
to master serial writing in
order to be taken seriously by
one’s peers. “I would say that I
have a great deal more respect and
regard for Webern than I do for
Schoenberg because Schoenberg
didn’t understand that he was
writing contrapuntal music; he
thought he was writing romantic
music with twelve-tone notes. Webern
understood that this was a
contrapuntal technique. That political
power, that you must write this way, was very powerful in the academic
world and throughout the musical world. I say that my generation
brought that to an end.”
Steve Reich has achieved this tabula rasa especially by prioritizing the
use of repetition, a strategy that allows him to create “music as a gradual
process.” In a 1968 text, he clarified his approach: “The distinctive
thing about musical processes is that they determine all the note-tonote
(sound-to-sound) details and the over all form simultaneously.
(Think of a round or infinite canon.) I am interested in the perceptible
processes. I want to be able to hear
the processes happening throughout
the sounding music. To facilitate
closely detailed listening a musical
process should happen extremely
gradually.”
Unlike Cage, who uses random
processes to influence the course of
the narrative, Reich opts for a more
collective search, a liberating ritual
that permits multiple combinations
of musical phrases from which he
extracts the final material.
“What I’m interested in is a compositional
process and a sounding
music that are one and the same
thing. … The use of hidden structural
devices in music never appealed to me. Even when all the cards
are on the table and everyone hears what is gradually happening in a
musical process, there are still enough mysteries to satisfy all,” he said.
“These mysteries are the impersonal, unintended, psycho-acoustic byproducts
of the intended process. These might include
City Life (1995) was built around
the sounds of New York City and
remains one of the composer’s
best-known works.
Double Sextet (2007) won a
Pulitzer Prize. Written for two identical
sextets with interlacing motives.
Reich considers this work
among his most complete.
WTC 9/11 (2011) has already
been the source of much controversy,
largely due to the original
album artwork depicting the Twin
Towers, which has since been
changed. Written for three string
quartets (one live, two recorded)
and recorded voices, it is meant to
be more dissonant.
sub-melodies heard within repeated
melodic patterns, stereophonic
effects due to listener
location, slight irregularities in performance,
harmonics, difference
tones, etc.”
Over the years, his musical language
has evolved, but he favors
small ensembles. If he composes
little today, his works are played
the world over, interesting even to
electronica DJs.
LSM
Steve Reich’s 2x5 will be performed at
Acadia University in Wolfville, Nova Scotia
on Feb. 4, 2011. Further performances of
his work may be announced in the upcoming
year.
TRANSLATION:
REBECCA ANNE CLARK
DECEMBER 2011 / JANUARY 2012
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