Music that not focused around melodic and harmonic structures

Boydell & Brewer University of Rochester Press

Chapter Title: STEVE REICH (1936) Chapter Author(s): STEVE REICH

Book Title: Three Questions for Sixty-Five Composers Book Author(s): Bálint András Varga Published by: Boydell & Brewer, University of Rochester Press. (2011) Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7722/j.ctt1x71xw.51

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Forty-Seven

STEVE REICH (1936)

In my mind’s eye, I can see the composer on stage, participating in a performance of his Clapping Music (1972). The piece is performed by two, facing each other, clapping increasingly intricate rhythmic patterns which appear to require the highest degree of concentration. What could be more basic to music than two people clapping? And yet it is immensely thrilling, you respond to it with your body as well as with your mind and the tension in you leaves you perhaps nearly as exhausted as the two performers must be feeling, even though the exercise only lasts for fi ve minutes at the most.

At the other extreme, there is Tehillim (1981) for voices and ensemble. I have not heard it for decades but its majesty still haunts me. It is a setting in Hebrew of Psalms 19, 34, 18, and 150; whether or not it is an expression of Reich’s faith is immaterial. If it is true that “beauty is in the eyes of the beholder,” I suppose you can also claim that the “message” of music is in the mind of the listener.

I.

I have had no experience that is the same as Lutosławski’s, but I have had a number of experiences with music that may be somewhat similar.

A. When I was fourteen years old, I heard a recording of Le Sacre du Prin- temps for the first time. I had never heard anything like it. (In fact, at that time I had not heard any Stravinsky, Bartók, Schoenberg, Berg, or Webern.) It made an enormous impression on me and I believe that the seeds of my desire to become a composer were planted at that moment.

B. In the same year—when I was fourteen—I also heard my first jazz recording. It was by Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Kenny Clarke, and oth- ers. It also made a huge impression on me and I decided to begin study- ing snare drum with Roland Kohloff (formerly timpanist with the New York Philharmonic) that same year. I would say that my drumming stud- ies and the rhythmic impulse in me that was touched by Stravinsky, jazz and, later that same year, by my first hearing of the Brandenburg Concerto No. 5 formed the basic musical energy in me which is still at work in my own compositions.

C. In 1957 I studied composition privately with Hall Overton in New York City and he had me return to playing simple music at the piano, in par- ticular, the first two books of Bartók’s Mikrokosmos. In these pieces I first clearly understood the different modes beyond major and minor. Even more importantly I became clear about the nature of canons as a basic

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208 • S t e v e R e i c h ( 1 9 3 6 )

compositional technique. Canons at the unison have since formed the basis of almost all my music. The entire “phasing” technique discovered with tape loops in It’s Gonna Rain (1965) and then transferred to musi- cal instruments with Piano Phase of 1967 can be correctly seen as a form of canonic procedure where the subject is short and the rhythmic dis- tance between the two or more voices is constantly changing.

D. In 1962, via a talk by Gunther Schuller, I examined A. M. Jones’s book Studies in African Music which, together with my work with tape loops in 1963, made me aware of the repetition of short patterns with their downbeats in different places as a new and radically different composi- tional technique. A few years later I encountered another book, Music in Bali by Colin MacPhee, which showed me, in notation, music made of repeating patterns played simultaneously in different note values so that one could hear rapid interlocking eighth notes, slower moving quarters, still slower half notes, and one huge gong which played only once per cycle of 64 beats.

E. While a composition student at Juilliard and later while studying with Berio at Mills College in California in the early 1960s, I used to spend many evenings at jazz clubs listening to John Coltrane. I also listened frequently to many of his recordings. One recording in particular, Africa Brass, capsulizes what I and many others learned from Coltrane: over one single harmony, maintained for as long as half an hour, many notes or even noises can be played. On Africa Brass the entire harmony stays rooted on the low E of the double bass, yet over it Coltrane, Eric Dolphy, and others play notes inside or outside the key of E minor as well as french horn glissandos, and shrieks on their saxophones.

F. In 1964 I helped Terry Riley put together the first performance of his In C. I suggested that he put a “pulse” in the piece to keep the players together, which he did using drummed out high Cs on the piano. The piece showed me one way that repetition of short patterns could func- tion as a compositional building block. The influence Riley’s piece had on me was similar to the influence La Monte Young had on Riley several years earlier in Berkeley and was also similar to the influence I had on Phil Glass in 1967 when he heard and studied my music for the first time in New York. Still later my Drumming, plus Riley and Glass had a for- mative effect on John Adams, Louis Andriessen, Michael Nyman, Gavin Bryars, and eventually many others, some in the world of pop music.

II.

Your question strikes me as very European. You say that everyday sounds either “inspire” a composer or they leave him “completely cold.” My answer is: neither of the above. I fi nd some natural sounds—particularly rain on

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S t e v e R e i c h ( 1 9 3 6 ) • 209

a roof, and nearby running streams or ocean surf, cicadas or crickets, and birdsongs among others, to be—at one time or another—comforting, fas- cinating, or mysterious. City sounds I fi nd generally irritating—especially if I am trying to sleep. When I fi rst did tape music in the early 1960s, I found natural and machine sounds interesting, but not nearly as interest- ing as human speech, which I used to make my early It’s Gonna Rain and Come Out. Basically, I get musical inspiration not from “sounds” but from music—notes, rhythms, and timbres. I should add that in Different Trains of 1988 I was inspired to combine the speech melody I had discovered in It’s Gonna Rain and Come Out with real musical instruments, namely the strings in the Kronos Quartet.

In City Life of 1995 I did use sounds I recorded in New York including car horns, boat horns, subway chimes, door slams, and many others includ- ing human voices. My primary idea was to “marry” the sounds to an appro- priate instrument. Bass drum and door slam, car horn and amplifi ed oboe, air brakes and cymbal, voices and strings, etc. After pieces using sampling like Different Trains, City Life, The Cave, and Three Tales I felt a need to return to instrumental music from 2002 until 2009 when I am now, once again, turning to sampled speech to match with the Kronos Quartet.

III.

Individual style is the revealing of one’s musical intelligence and emotions in concrete works. This revelation continues, and hopefully develops, through- out one’s lifetime. Self-repetition begins when musical intelligence and emo- tions cease to develop and one nevertheless continues to grind out music. Such self-repetition is earmarked by techniques which appear in earlier works and reappear in new works with no further signifi cant development in terms of harmony, counterpoint, rhythmic structure, orchestration, etc.

One can fi nd poor works within an oeuvre where self-repetition begins, only to fi nd them followed by a fi ne work that breaks new ground. Break- ing new ground should not be confused with mere novelty, and develop- ing a preexistent style should not be confused with self-repetition. Bartók’s String Quartet No. 5 develops the new ground broken by his String Quar- tet No. 4, and he then goes on to break further new ground in his (para- doxically more “conservative”) String Quartet No. 6.

The distinction between novelty and radical development on the one hand and self-repetition and development within a style on the other is dif- fi cult to make, but a composer must be able to make such distinctions in his own work—or suffer the consequences.

1983/2009

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