“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 Drawing from unpublished essays and unreleased recordings, this chapter situates Reich’s music of the 1970s—from Drumming to Music for 18 Musicians—within a broader history of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.

Afro-Electric Counterpoint

Using Electric Counterpoint as a central reference, this chapter outlines the constitutive role played by audible cultures of the non-West in shaping the distinctive sound of Steve Reich’s music. Reich’s involvement with African music, in particular, extends beyond the common historical narrative of “influence” (construed as mostly confirmation and encouragement for an already formed style). Electric Counterpoint draws on a host of African musical strata—ranging from literal quotations and paraphrases to the application of techniques and principles—derived from local expressive cultures, ritual traditions, biospiritual practices, and musical cosmologies from Ghana, Nigeria, Central African Republic, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Uganda, and Mozambique. The project tracks the way music and sound circulates within different regimes of meaning, mediation, and value, with a particular interest in retrieving the often tributary and ephemeral phenomena found in geographically remote cultures that, for complex reasons, are systematically written out of world history.

Steve Reich’s Counterpoints and Computers

This chapter re-evaluates the role of Steve Reich’s 1980s Counterpoint series in the context of his reinvention as a venerated member of New York’s new music establishment. It aims to show how Reich's re-engagement with past compositional interests—now expressed in more conventional terminology—formed a significant step in facilitating his gradual transformation from outsider to insider. Running in parallel with Reich’s transition toward tradition was a significant change in the composer’s working methods through the use of computer technology, as found in works such as The Four Sections and Electric Counterpoint. An investigation into this important new development offers insights into how Reich has since then pragmatically incorporated digital compositional habits alongside previous analog ones, all while maintaining a secure foothold in the Western classical canon.

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.

Repetition, Speech, and Authority in Steve Reich’s “Jewish” Music

Steve Reich’s “Jewish” works are logocentric to the core and thus, for all their sonic exuberance, culturally conservative. Beginning with experimental tape works like It’s Gonna Rain (1965) and My Name Is (1967), and blossoming into extended speech-driven multimedia “operas,” Reich doggedly explored his sense that the human voice transmitted something like prophetic Truth, tracing out his own path from the patriarchal tradition of Hebrew cantillation to the “self-presence” that philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau found at the origin of human language. As a composer, Reich put his musical ear (and his digital sampler) at the service of the logos, deriving both the visuals and the music of The Cave from distinctive speech patterns of its various “talking heads.” And yet, as Jacques Derrida famously noted, speech, music, and writing are not so easily separated—and the composer’s intent is exceeded by the complexity of his word-saturated operatic language.

“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.

“Moving Forward, Looking Back”

This chapter traces the influence of the Western classical tradition on Steve Reich’s musical language with reference to his important work Octet, composed in 1979 then subsequently reorchestrated and renamed Eight Lines. Previous scholarly accounts of this work have focused on Reich’s use of extended melodic lines, drawing on the composer’s own comments that these were derived from his immersion at the time in Hebrew cantillation. While acknowledging Reich’s debt to Jewish music, this chapter locates Eight Lines within the broader context of the European tours with his ensemble during the early to mid-1970s. The innovative melodic lines in Eight Lines are constructed around largely goal-oriented harmonic (that is to say, “Western”) structures as much as through the composer’s own immersion in cantillation music, suggesting that his style from this point onward can be read more as a synthesis of Western and non-Western influences.

“Departing to Other Spheres”

Steve Reich’s Four Organs (1970) is a watershed work in the history of musical minimalism, famously causing an uproar at Carnegie Hall on January 18, 1973. Scholars have typically discussed the work’s technical details and have avoided drawing a wider intertextual circle around it to encompass contemporaneous auditory cultures and contexts. Filling this lacuna, this chapter offers a historically plausible reading of the piece, in part by identifying linkages to 1960s US/UK pop/rock and soundtracks for film and television and by attending to the composition’s peculiar instrumentation, its rhythmic-metrical patterns, and its narrative trajectory. What emerges is a fresh interpretation of Four Organs: the work narrates a form of subjective sublimation charged with psychedelic sound imagery, effecting that sublimation through a semblance of bodily and planetary departure—and, as such, suggests racial-political resonances with the US space program during the Cold War, including the previous year’s Apollo lunar landing in 1969.

Introduction

This introduction starts off by situating the music of Steve Reich both in relation to popular culture (film, contemporary fiction, and popular music) and as the subject of serious musicological study. An overview of the ever-changing landscape of Reich scholarship is then provided—from formal analyses to approaches that seek to view the composer’s music through the prism of the “new musicology.” The introduction concludes by arguing that the gap between discourse and practice is sometimes extensive. Reich’s own reflections can at times obfuscate more complex realities that lie under the surface. In encompassing sketch studies, discourse analysis and reception history, hermeneutic investigations, intertextual studies, historical timelines and contexts, harmonic and formal analysis, philosophical and religious ruminations, and deep archival digging, this volume draws on a wide range of perspectives that contribute a wealth of knowledge and learning that complements Reich’s own writings.