Revolutionist In a Baseballcap

In light of the grandeur of his reputation, it is almost disconcerting that the man himself is still so present, writing at full force. You can ride the subway to the lower end of Manhattan, emerge onto a street within sight of the Brooklyn Bridge, walk for a minute or two, press a buzzer marked ‘Reich’, and, if you are fortunate, hear a crisp voice say “Come on up.” He does not look the part of the musical revolutionist, whatever that might be. With his black button-down shirts and signature baseball cap, he fits the image of an independent film director, a cultural studies professor, or some other out-in-the-world intellectual. Once he starts speaking, you feel the peculiar velocity of his mind. He is, notably, as much a listener as a talker, although he talks at blistering speed. He reacts swiftly to slight sounds in his midst – the soft buzz of a cell phone, a siren on the street outside, the whistle of a teakettle. Each sound has some information to give him. The windows have thick double panes: even for a listener as omnivorous as Reich, the city gives out too much information.

Steve Reich (Photo: Liszt Academy / Gábor Fejér)

Steve Reich was born in New York on 3 October 1936. His parents separated when he was still a baby, and he spent much of his childhood riding trains back and forth to Los Angeles, where his mother, a successful singer and lyricist, had moved. He later said that the clickety-clack of wheels on tracks helped to shape his rhythmic sense. Otherwise, he had a fairly ordinary middle-class upbringing; he absorbed all the humming waves of information that were being given out by America’s culture of post-war prosperity. His formative musical experiences were recordings rather than live performances. In particular, he found himself listening nonstop to Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 5, Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, and various bebop records featuring the likes of Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, and Kenny Clarke. Inclined at first towards philosophy, he studied the thought of Ludwig Wittgenstein at Cornell. Then he went to Juilliard for music. Seeking an escape from the East Coast establishment, he moved to San Francisco and enrolled in the music school at Mills College, where the Italian avant-gardist Luciano Berio was a visiting professor in 1961 and 1962. Most of Reich’s early works employed Schoenberg’s twelve-tone method, but there was something grudging about his use of the then-canonical compositional system. He began to hear alternatives in the modal improvisations of John Coltrane, who he went to hear some fifty times, and also in archival recordings of polyrhythmic African drumming.

One day in January 1965, he was fooling around with tapes of a Pentecostal preacher when he noticed an interesting effect. Two identical tapes of the preacher’s voice were running in unison, but one machine was playing slightly faster than the other, so that the tapes began to go out of phase. Listening on stereo headphones, with one ear tuned to the left machine and the other to the right, Reich had a physical reaction; the sound went down one side of his body and up the other. He generated an electronic composition from this happy accident, entitled It’s Gonna Rain. Reich now had a stroke of genius: he translated the going-out-of-phase effect into instrumental music. Piano Phase, for two pianos, uses a repeating pattern made up of the first six notes of the major scale. As the pianists move in and out of sync, a surprisingly eventful and colourful narrative unfolds, replete with modulations, transitions, and climaxes. In this and other pioneering process-driven works, a distinctive personality emerges – lean in form, detached in mood, logical in movement, yet marked by some indefinable mixture of beauty and sadness. The music has a soul of its own, which may fascinate and mystify the composer as much as it does the rest of us.

What came to be called minimalism was unleashed in full force in Four Organs, first conceived in August 1969, the month of the Manson murders and the killing of a spectator at a Rolling Stones show in Altamont, California. Explosions of violence had been filling the news: the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr, the massacre at My Lai in Vietnam, riots on university campuses and in inner cities. Four Organs is, in its own way, an apocalyptic, end-of-the-world piece; heard at full volume, its electric-organ sound becomes an all-out assault. In the 1976 masterwork Music for 18 Musicians, pulsating rhythm is balanced by a comparably sophisticated drama of harmony. The piece is almost symphonic in its narrative arc, proceeding from light to dark and back to light again. Reich wrote several more examples of what might be called ‘grand minimalism’, letting his discoveries resonate within a large frame. In Drumming, he applied lessons that he had learned from studying West African drumming at the University of Ghana. The Desert Music and Tehillim are spacious, dramatic settings of William Carlos Williams and the Hebrew Psalms, respectively. Then a new project seized Reich’s attention: he worked to erase the boundary between speech and music by teasing melodies out of the rise and fall of recorded voices. Perhaps the most haunting Reich work to date is Different Trains, which was given its premiere in 1988 by the Kronos Quartet. This was the first piece in which the composer used recorded speech to create melodic lines. It stemmed from the memory of those long railroad journeys of childhood, and also from the adult reflection that if Reich had been a child in Europe in the 1940s his fate might have been different: “As a Jew, I would have had to ride on very different trains.” The electronic component mingles voices of African- American Pullman porters with those of Holocaust survivors and the neutral noise of train whistles. As the string instruments sing along to these memory-shrouded sounds, they don’t tell us what to feel; they set forth a glistening grid, on which we can plot our own emotions. The result is a music of precision and tears.

Alex Ross