The Sixty-year Reich
NORDLINGER, JAY
The Sixty-year Reich A Bad Boy Becomes a Grand Old Minimalist By Jay Nordlinger The conductor Michael Tilson Thomas vividly remembers the New York premiere of Steve Reich's Four Organs. The year...
...Reich attended Cornell University, where he studied philosophy and played in a rock band...
...it is not quite a documentary...
...right weird, has just released a 10-disc set, which charts the composer's progress from the mid-1960s to the present...
...but Reich is habitually too late...
...The "cave" of the title is the Cave of the Patriarchs, where Abraham, Sarah, and their descendants are said to be buried...
...Take a 10-minute praise Him with strings and winds, Praise Him with sounding cymbals, praise Him with clanging cymbals . . ." The Desert Music (1984) also employs words—those of William Carlos Williams—but suffers from its length and suffocating sameness...
...After a few minutes, "a restlessness began to sweep the crowd...
...But already Reich was paring down, engaging in the act of reduction and elimination that is the hallmark of the minimalist style...
...The singers have but a single line of prose, plucked from the philosopher of language Ludwig Wittgenstein...
...But at the age of 14, he made a fateful decision: He gave up the piano for the snare drum...
...The words assume the character of drumming, or tribal chants...
...Reich can complain no more that he is misunderstood and unappreciated...
...It uses music—instrumental and choral—and videotaped interviews...
...Steve Reich has, somehow, reached the age of 60 and is more a grand old man than the brash, bad-boy minimalist who so alarmed that 1973 audience...
...There is, in fact, hardly any music in it at all, as commonly understood...
...The maracas that accom- nothing of importance has changed...
...Reich says about Four Organs that it is "the longest V-I cadence in the history of Western music...
...It is not quite an opera...
...1950s and '60s," he has said, "often felt they were without a home, a complete unknown—there was no ethnic underpinning...
...The words are repeated over and over, in slightly varying rhythm, for about eight minutes...
...He had thought to make his name as a philosopher—and he still makes forays into that discipline—but he felt the tug of composition and enrolled at Juilliard...
...The question is then posed, Who was Abraham...
...No, it is just Guinness Book of World Records, for-the-hell-of-it stuff, musically purposeless...
...There were "rustlings of programs, overly loud coughs, compulsive seat-shifting," and eventually "groans and hostile exclamations...
...Shakespeare may have written his sonnets with 10 perfect syllables per line— unvarying—but the method is not the glory of these poems, and the reader scarcely notices it...
...Call it a documentary-like quasi-opera, or a multimedia expression of political-musical theater...
...they begin in unison, but gradually go out of sync (or "out of phase") and thus give the impression of a round...
...Reich's minimalist primitivism contains elements of Gregorian chant, and indeed Proverb has an exceedingly strange commissioning status: It was ordered up both by the BBC for its hundredth anniversary and by the Early Music Festival of Utrecht...
...Reich's defenders assert that it requires discipline to listen to the piece and that those who lack it are missing something...
...It is instead an exercise in rhythm and tape recording, in which a sole, elementary pattern dissolves into noth- phone call, return to the piece, and ingness...
...Verses from Genesis are sung between spoken comments...
...Tehillim is lovely, Westernized...
...Eventually, it merely fades his "religious gene...
...I think it's an extremely politically relevant piece of work," Reich has said, which means The Cave has all the makings of a p.c...
...It is something like rap music, of the crudest sort, or a record that is stuck...
...nightmare...
...This is primitive music, a seeming advance, but actually a return to early man, with interestingly arranged grunts and nothing so mature as melody...
...The piece is profoundly disturbing and perhaps just slightly exploitative—as with so many works that borrow from and comment on the Holocaust—but it is undeniably affecting...
...The recording of it sold more than 100,000 copies—astonishing for a "classical" album—and won a Grammy award...
...So he "had to discover where I came from" and "wound up looking under my own bed...
...One of the movements features nothing but the ambient sound within the cave (along with what the composer refers to as "an A-minor drone...
...Then it is time for Part II...
...The Brother Walter pieces may be thought of as music to do drugs by, and, indeed, many have raised the question about Reich's early works, Do you need to be under the influence of drugs to like them...
...It turns out that the raw, untampered-with preaching of Brother Walter is the most listen-able and musical part of the piece...
...the other is in Europe and bears other children to the camps...
...Minimalism is painting with a single color, showing forth a single form, ad nauseam...
...True, it conjures up the gentle motions and aridness of the desert (not to mention what being out in the sun too long can do), but, like so much else in Reich, it seems like a practice piece, something a student is assigned to do before the real composition begins...
...Reich chose particularly well in his use of Psalm 150: "Praise Him with drum and dance, Which leads to the central problem of minimalism: its incompleteness...
...Soon, Reich was at the heart of the counterculture, living a beatnik existence in San Francisco...
...they are long, punishing, headache-inducing minutes...
...Reich's most recent recorded work is among his most emblematic: 1995's Proverb, for voices, electric organs, and vibraphones (which are virtually omnipresent throughout Reich's ceuvre...
...For him, the process is too alluring, and too cramped, even of late, when he has permitted it some breathing room...
...I had to mouth numbers and shout our cues so that we could stay together...
...He is a lion of the culture, a world-renowned icon, critically almost untouchable...
...Later, he moved to California, where he studied under Darius Milhaud and Luciano Berio, two of the most daring composers of the day...
...you can make out the vague, dim sounds of a guided tour underway...
...Reich's record label, Nonesuch, a proud purveyor of the avant-garde, the "uncommercial," and the outJay Nordlinger is associate editor of The Weekly Standard...
...Then there is The Cave (1993...
...Simple percussion would dominate the rest of his life...
...Reich knows more music than his Ewe mentors, but it is unclear that he has improved significantly on them...
...It then settles on just three words—those of the title...
...He found an audience beyond his Haight-Ashbury and SoHo core with his Music for 18 Musicians (1976), which is not merely an interesting but a beautiful work...
...So does minimalism reach back in time for the sparest sounds and thoughts, defining what is most modern by what is most ancient...
...His first Jewish piece was Tehillim (1981), a group of three Psalms, sung in Hebrew...
...He is almost a musical scientist, an inventor who knows what he is doing and can explain to anyone why (as the great composers normally cannot...
...It stands for Reich's entire mission: "How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life...
...But the set testifies to a movement, a sensibility, and a man, revealing much of what is laudable and regrettable in the musical culture today...
...Does he end the piece only ley and Seattle), Reich turned when he—even he, at long last—has inward, finding what he has called tired of it...
...It is not every day that a gifted kid does such a thing, for while no instrument presents broader possibilities than the piano, perhaps none presents as few as the snare drum...
...Reich is at his most effective when he relaxes his grip on the technical reins and allows his imagination to roam a little...
...Reich still has new frontiers to discover, the company likes to think...
...Reich recalls the time when someone told him that he heard the words "black rhino, black rhino" in It's Gonna Rain...
...With the minimalists, the process, the technique, is often the main thing, and it is vulgarly exposed, at the expense of art...
...others might contend that it takes, instead, incuriosity, a contentment with too little for too long...
...He is no doubt right (the reference is to chords), but is this something to brag about...
...Come Out had its debut in New York's Town Hall at a benefit for the murderous gang known as the "Harlem Six...
...He developed a process called "phasing": You play copies of a single tape on two separate machines (which are bound to contain subtle mechanical differences...
...Tehillim still echoes the primitive, but that mode is appropriate for these songs...
...It too uses a single phrase—the blunt "Come out...
...These are not eight ordinary minutes, as you may spend while reading a magazine or watering the garden...
...By the end, it is a cacophony of almost unbearable ugliness, conveying pointless distress...
...It begins with typing on a computer (Reich's obligatory percussion...
...These "phase" experiments—fascinating, maybe, but unlovable—are somewhat like Rorschach tests, in which listeners are invited to hear what they wish...
...Minimalism—the lulling, stupefying repetition of brief musical phrases—has become all-pervasive in the intervening years...
...How to describe it...
...Born in 1936, Reich was weaned on traditional Western music...
...Many of the Americans are well known: Richard Serra, Carl Sagan, Arthur Danto, Dennis Prager, and Daniel Berri-gan...
...But instead it is serious, searching, even enthralling...
...The piece, composed for string quartet and taped voices, relates the story of two loco-motives—a perfect aural subject for Reich's style...
...Reich answered, "Well, if you heard it, that's what you heard...
...It was like choosing to leave Oz for Kansas...
...In 1970, Reich went off to Ghana, where he studied drumming with the masters of the Ewe tribe...
...Steve Reich is unquestionably a brilliant man...
...One train bears him and his family on a pleasure trip in America during World War II...
...The Cave will not often be performed—it is extremely problematic and expensive to stage ("a glorious white elephant," Reich calls it)—but the excerpt on the Nonesuch compendium is, as is usually the case with Reich, more than enough...
...The audience made so much noise that, in spite of the fact that the music was amplified, we were unable to hear one another's playing...
...The participants give their various responses...
...pany the words sound like crickets in Reich demands patience, but music the night, and they leaven the monot- is not ideally an endurance test...
...Minimalist composers, when they are alert, step in to rescue us before the onset of coma...
...He is obviously more than a New Age dabbler, trading off the elite culture's near-blind affection for anything radical...
...Some tried to shout the performance down...
...Similarly, Sextet (1985) avails itself of a comparatively wide array of tools, playful and brooding against the tick-tock of the relentless Reichian pulse...
...Ravel cared about the structure of his Bolero, which represents a sort of proto-min-imalism, but the piece is, above all— despite its bastardization by Holly-wood—a work of breathtaking loveliness, shrewdly paced and concluded on time...
...It's Gonna Rain begins with a full 13 seconds of Brother Walter's rant-ings about the Flood...
...The piece is Reich's attempt to sort out the unyielding problems of the Middle East...
...But his works lack a fundamental musicality...
...He contracted malaria and had to leave after only five months, but he brought home with him the inspiration for Drumming (1971), a piece for percussion ensemble that has been shortened to an hour for the Nonesuch set...
...The encounter resulted in two of the pieces that set American music on its heels: It's Gonna Rain (1965) and Come Out (1966...
...It is—unusual for Reich—unam-biguously American, carrying the impress of Aaron Copland, Walter Piston, and Leonard Bernstein...
...The Four Sections (1987) is one of only a handful of Reich pieces for orchestra...
...Reich himself allows, with extreme understatement, "It's a hard piece to describe...
...As Reich's fellow composer John Adams says, minimalism is an act of "spring-cleaning," made necessary by "a certain critical mass of complexity, beyond which lies only sterile mannerism...
...Reich both makes the music follow the speech and manipulates the speech (via tape) so that it conforms to his musical conceptions...
...He includes in it crescendos and de-crescendos, plus exotica like bass clarinets, which is not a lot to ask for but in Reich is really something...
...The year was 1973, the site Carnegie Hall...
...Certainly many of Reich's admirers were, and are...
...Reich uses the voices and opinions of Jews and Arabs in the Holy Land and of Americans back home (including black Americans and American Indians, who vent their own grievances...
...ony somewhat, creating a counter- After his immersion in African monotony of their own...
...How does music and Indonesian gamelan Reich know when to stop...
...At moments, Reich, Philip Glass, and the other minimalists— who are typically viewed as terribly advanced and beyond the comprehension of their detractors—seem light years behind Hildegard of Bin-gen, the medieval abbess who thrilled to the countless possibilities of actual notes...
...Reich admires his fellow minimalist Arvo Part—by whom he says he is "knocked out"— but Part seems to deploy minimalism to musical (and mystical) ends, while Reich frequently seems satisfied with the marvel of his own cleverness...
...At one point, a woman rose from her seat, walked down the aisle, and "repeatedly banged her head on the front of the stage, wailing, 'Stop, stop, I confess!'" Flash-forward almost a quarter of a century...
...Reich is sadly vulnerable to gimmicks, to musically unnecessary (and distracting) tricks...
...Nonesuch is careful not to call it a retrospective...
...In 1988, Reich scored an unabashed popular success with Different Trains, written for the Kronos Quartet, chamber-music guardian of the new...
...Reich found a black Pentecostalist preacher, Brother Walter, down at Union Square and recorded some of his exhortations...
...Does it music (which he absorbed in Berke-matter...
...But it must be that even those mavens who grin and bear it—who soldier through the music that other people have trouble being polite about—occasionally murmur to themselves, "Stop, stop, I confess...
...The pleasantness of the first locomotive is drowned in the chaos and menace of the second, as an accented voice (culled from historical archives) says, "1940," and, "on my birthday...
...People in the out, like a rock song...
Vol. 2 • July 1997 • No. 44
