Steve Reich

Steve Reich (b. 1936) is an American composer who, alongside Philip Glass, Terry Riley, and La Monte Young, is considered an originator of musical minimalism. His compositions consist primarily of instrumental pieces for various ensembles, ranging from solo instruments with prerecorded tape to pieces for full orchestra. The most frequent configurations make prominent use of melodic percussion instruments, attesting to his training as a percussionist. Reich engaged periodically with disparate musical traditions throughout his early career—technological experimentalism in the 1960s, African drumming and Hebrew cantillation in the 1970s—and has since forged a compositional idiom distinguished by its attention to pattern and pulsation. Born and raised primarily in New York City, Reich studied philosophy at Cornell University and music at Juilliard before moving across the country in 1961 to study at Mills College with Luciano Berio. Moving within the Bay Area’s experimental art scenes, Reich discovered the process of phasing when working with tape loops, leading to his first acknowledged pieces: It’s Gonna Rain (1965) and Come Out (1966). After relocating to downtown New York in 1965, Reich translated this phasing process into instrumental music, resulting in works such as Piano Phase and Violin Phase (both 1967), as well as his influential manifesto, “Music as a Gradual Process.” In the early 1970s, Reich’s palette expanded to encompass new timbres and processes of pattern and repetition. The large-scale Drumming (1970–1971) and Music for 18 Musicians (1974–1976)—both conceived for his ensemble, Steve Reich and Musicians—are exemplars of his mature minimalist style and helped establish his reputation both within and outside of the classical music world. By the early 1980s, Reich’s music began a process of legitimation within academia and performance institutions: Tehillim (1981) and The Desert Music (1983), for instance, were composed for major orchestras. Both reveal a rekindled interest in voice, text, and speech which found new expression in Different Trains (1988), a string quartet which utilized speech fragments of Holocaust survivor testimonies as generative melodic and harmonic material. Reich continued to explore this technique in large-scale documentary music video theater works (The Cave [1990–93] and Three Tales [2000–03]), as well as chamber works such as City Life (1995) and WTC 9/11 (2010). By the end of the millennium, Reich was widely regarded as America’s foremost living composer; his Pulitzer Prize in 2009 for Double Sextet (2007) seemed a belated affirmation of this perspective.

Industry

Amidst the heated fray of the Culture Wars emerged a scrappy festival in downtown New York City called Bang on a Can. Presenting eclectic, irreverent marathons of experimental music in crumbling venues on the Lower East Side, Bang on a Can sold out concerts for a genre that had been long considered box office poison. Through the 1980s and 1990s, three young, visionary composers—David Lang, Michael Gordon, and Julia Wolfe—nurtured Bang on a Can into a multifaceted organization with a major record deal, a virtuoso in-house ensemble, and a seat at the table at Lincoln Center, and in the process changed the landscape of avant-garde music in the United States. Bang on a Can captured a new public for new music. But they did not do so alone. As the twentieth century came to a close, the world of American composition pivoted away from the insular academy and toward the broader marketplace. In the wake of the unexpected popularity of Steve Reich and Philip Glass, classical presenters looked to contemporary music for relevance and record labels scrambled to reap its potential profits, all while government funding was imperilled by the evangelical right. Other institutions faltered amidst the vagaries of late capitalism, but the renegade Bang on a Can survived—and thrived—in a tumultuous and idealistic moment that made new music what it is today.

Prisoners’ Voices

Frederic Rzewski composed Coming Together and Attica in response to the 1971 uprising at the Attica Correctional Facility. The texts for the works draw upon testimonies of two men who participated in the riot: Samuel Melville and Richard X. Clark, respectively. Rzewski condemns the government crackdown on the uprising through representations of both prisoners and prison. In these and other works, the prisoner is a figure of suffering. Both Melville and Clark suffer through efforts to raise a voice about the hardships of incarceration only to have that voice break apart into fragments and silence. Prison emerges as a space of increasing confinement, conveyed by rigorous compositional schemes that tightly link individual sections and close them off in a larger sealed structure. The musical evocation of confinement along with the expression of psychological distress in the texts creates scenes of suffering. Through these scenes, Rzewski brings out the infliction of pain that scholars have viewed as a fundamental aspect of incarceration. The interaction between the critiques of incarceration and the compositional schemes in Coming Together and Attica is an example of how artists at the time (Steve Reich and sculptor Melvin Edwards) drew upon abstract idioms and materials in works that comment on contemporary political developments.

Zubin Kanga: Silver Screens / Steel Strings, London, City, University of London, 26 March 2019

Zubin Kanga has about as wide a range of performance experience as one can get playing recently written art music – his bio mentions collaborations with contemporary warhorses like Thomas Adès, George Benjamin, and Steve Reich – but as a solo performer he has cultivated a distinctive and specialised practice that maps onto the wider action of international New Music in increasingly fascinating ways. For the past few years, his solo tours have showcased an expanded practice which binds the performer to one or another technological apparatus that centrally determines the form and execution of the piece, raising questions of autonomy, authorship and identity. These concerns are reflected in the titles of the tours: ‘Dark Twin’, ‘Cyborg Pianist’ and, currently, ‘Piano Ex Machina’.

Singing beyond the TV Screen: Documentary, News and Interviews as Operatic Material

John Adam’s opera Nixon in China (1987) opened the era of what some critics called ‘CNN operas’ — an operatic mixture of political issues and televisual representation. Since Nixon, various attempts to interrogate issues of world politics, power and realism on the (post)operatic stage took place: video documentary opera Three Tales (1998–2002) by Steve Reich and Beryl Korot, “The News” (2011) by Jacob ter Veldhuis (Jacob TV), five one-minute operas by Michel van der Aa (produced from 2010 to 2014, commissioned for the Dutch TV program Der Wereld Drait Door), Aliados (2013) by Sebastian Rivas, to mention only the few. This article attempts to give a partial overview of different operatic approaches to televisual expression and to illuminate ways of depicting documentary and news in recent opera focusing on the political figures.

“Machine Fantasies into Human Events”

For most of 1968 and early 1969, Steve Reich devised and constructed his Phase Shifting Pulse Gate, a machine he designed along with an engineer. However, after only two performances Reich abandoned the machine and renounced the future use of electronic technology in his music, save amplification. Despite this compositional move, various critics of the early 1970s continued to describe Reich’s works in technological or mechanical terms, calling his music “controlling” or akin to the German word “Fließband” (assembly line). Rather than mechanical control, Reich claimed to seek bodily control and often compared his musical practice to yoga, a practice he had maintained for nearly a decade, which markedly informed his notions of musical time, compositional control, and performer freedoms. Drawing from unpublished essays and unreleased recordings, this chapter situates Reich’s music of the 1970s—from Drumming to Music for 18 Musicians—within a broader history of technologies of the body and mind.

From World War II to the “War on Terror”

This chapter investigates aspects of the creative process behind Reich’s “docu-music” work, WTC 9/11 (2010), which constitutes the composer’s response to the terrorist attacks in the United States of America, specifically those in New York City, on September 11, 2001. Sketch materials, including recorded interviews, computer files, and handwritten sketches, belonging to the Steve Reich Collection at the Paul Sacher Stiftung in Basel, Switzerland, reveal how both documentary content and musical design have informed the work. Based on an analysis of these materials, three aspects relating to the creative process of WTC 9/11 are examined: the treatment of speech recordings; the direction of interviews; and structural and referential elements of the work. This chapter not only reveals insights into Reich’s compositional process and techniques but also uncovers other significant factors in the composer’s docu-music approach, such as how autobiographical elements inform his work.

Different Tracks

This chapter examines various ways in which Steve Reich set out to shape overall structure in his first two sample-based compositions, Different Trains (1988) and The Cave (1993). Drawing from Reich’s composition sketches held at the Paul Sacher Stiftung (Steve Reich Collection) as well as from analytical observations, the chapter offers an account of several of the decisions involved in shaping the dramaturgical and harmonic structures of these works. The chapter devotes particular attention to a discussion of harmonic devices Reich uses to articulate structure, navigating between the restrictions imposed by the samples used on the one hand, and the unifying logic of a harmonic framework on the other—on both micro and macro levels.

“We Are Not Trying to Make a Political Piece”

Steve Reich and Beryl Korot’s 1993 video opera, The Cave, addresses a potent political subject: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Yet shortly after its premiere, they publicly disavowed art’s capacity to effect political or social change. This disavowal belies the explicitly political genesis of The Cave, the development of which throughout the 1980s coincided with rising Arab-Israeli tensions and the First Intifada. Early sketches, outlines, and descriptions of The Cave reveal that the pair initially viewed their quasi-opera as a step toward “reconciling the family of man.” By 1993, however, they instead adopted a seemingly apolitical stance, shying away from answering the fundamental question they had set out to answer: How can Jews and Muslims live together peacefully? This chapter argues that traces of this bid for peace remain in the opera’s music, text, and narrative structure, and that despite its purported neutrality, The Cave espouses an Americanized vision of Arab-Israeli reconciliation.