Everything about Steve Reich totally explained
Stephen Michael Reich (born
October 3 1936) is an
American composer. He is a pioneer of
minimalism, although his music has increasingly deviated from a purely minimalist style. Reich's innovations include using
tape loops to create
phasing patterns (examples are his early compositions,
It's Gonna Rain and
Come Out), and the use of simple, audible processes to explore musical concepts (for instance,
Pendulum Music and
Four Organs). These compositions, marked by their use of repetitive figures, slow harmonic rhythm and canons, have significantly influenced
contemporary music, especially in America.
The Guardian has described Reich as one of the few composers to have "altered the direction of musical history."
On
January 25 2007, Reich was named the 2007 recipient of the prestigious
Polar Music Prize, together with
Sonny Rollins.
Early life and work
Steve Reich was born in
New York City. When he was one year old his parents divorced and Reich divided his time between New York and
California. He was given piano lessons as a child and describes growing up with the "middle-class favorites", having no exposure to music written before 1750 or after 1900. At the age of 14 he began to study music in earnest, after hearing music from the
Baroque period and earlier, as well as music of the 20th century, and he began studying drums with
Roland Kohloff in order to play
jazz. He attended
Cornell University; he took some music courses there, but graduated in 1957 with a
B.A. in
philosophy. Reich's B.A. thesis was on
Ludwig Wittgenstein; later he'd set texts by that philosopher to music in
Proverb (1995) and
You Are (variations) (2004).
For a year following graduation he studied composition privately with
Hall Overton before he enrolled at
Juilliard to work with
William Bergsma and
Vincent Persichetti (1958 to 1961). Subsequently he attended
Mills College in
Oakland where he studied with
Luciano Berio and
Darius Milhaud (1961–63) and earned a master's degree in composition, where Reich composed
Melodica for
melodica and
tape, which appeared in 1986 on the three-LP release
Music from Mills.
Reich worked with the
San Francisco Tape Music Center along with
Pauline Oliveros,
Ramon Sender,
Morton Subotnick and
Terry Riley (he was involved with the premiere of Riley's "
In C" and suggested the use of the eighth note pulse which is now standard in performance of the piece).
Process music and Minimalism
Reich's early forays into composition involved experimentation with
twelve-tone composition, but he found the rhythmic aspects of the twelve-tone series more interesting than the melodic aspects. Reich also composed film
soundtracks for
The Plastic Haircut and
Oh Dem Watermelons, two films by
Robert Nelson. The soundtrack for
Oh Dem Watermelons, composed in 1965, involved basic tape work, using repeated phrasing together in a large five-part
canon.
Reich was influenced by fellow minimalist
Terry Riley, whose work
In C combines simple musical patterns, offset in time, to create a slowly shifting, cohesive whole. Reich adopted this approach to compose his first major work,
It's Gonna Rain. Written in 1965,
It's Gonna Rain used recordings of a
sermon about the end of the world given by a black
Pentecostal street-preacher known as Brother Walter. Reich built on his early tape work, transferring the sermon to multiple tape loops played in and out of phase, with segments of the sermon cut and rearranged.
The 13-minute
Come Out (1966) uses similarly manipulated recordings of a single spoken line given by an injured survivor of a
race riot. The survivor, who had been beaten, punctured a bruise on his own body to convince police about his beating. The spoken line includes the phrase "to let the bruise blood come out to show them." Reich rerecorded the fragment "come out to show them" on two channels, which are initially played in unison. They quickly slip out of sync; gradually the discrepancy widens and becomes a reverberation. The two voices then split into four, looped continuously, then eight, and continues splitting until the actual words are unintelligible, leaving the listener with only the speech's rhythmic and tonal patterns.
A similar, lesser known example of
process music is
Pendulum Music (1968), which consists of the sound of several microphones swinging over the loudspeakers to which they're attached, producing
feedback as they do so.
Pendulum Music has never been recorded by Reich himself, but was introduced to rock audiences by
Sonic Youth in the late 1990s.
Reich's first attempt at translating this phasing technique from recorded tape to live performance was the 1967
Piano Phase, for two pianos. In
Piano Phase the performers repeat a rapid twelve-note
melodic figure, initially in unison. As one player keeps tempo with robotic precision, the other speeds up very slightly until the two parts line up again, but one sixteenth note apart. The second player then resumes the previous tempo. This cycle of speeding up and then locking in continues throughout the piece; the cycle comes full circle three times, the second and third cycles using shorter versions of the initial figure.
Violin Phase, also written in 1967, is built on these same lines. Reich also tried to create the phasing effect in a piece "that would need no instrument beyond the human body". He found that the idea of phasing was inappropriate for the simple ways he was experimenting to make sound. Instead, he composed
Clapping Music (1972), in which the players don't phase in and out with each other, but instead one performer keeps one line of a 12-quaver-long phrase and the other performer shifts by one
quaver beat every 12 bars, until both performers are back in unison 144 bars later.
Piano Phase and
Violin Phase both premiered in a series of concerts given in New York art galleries.
The 1970s
The 1967 prototype piece
Slow Motion Sound was never performed, but the idea it introduced of slowing down a recorded sound until many times its original length without changing pitch or timbre was applied to
Four Organs (1970), which deals specifically with augmentation. The piece has
maracas playing a fast
eighth note pulse, while the four organs stress certain eighth notes using an 11th chord. This work therefore dealt with
repetition and subtle rhythmic change. It is unique in the context of Reich's other pieces in being linear as opposed to cyclic like his earlier works— the superficially similar
Phase Patterns, also for four organs but without maracas, is (as the name suggests) a phase piece similar to others composed during the period.
Four Organs was performed as part of a
Boston Symphony Orchestra program, and was Reich's first composition to be performed in a large traditional setting.
In 1971, Reich embarked on a five-week trip to study music in
Ghana, during which he learned from the master drummer Gideon Alerwoyie. He also studied Balinese
gamelan in Seattle. From his African experience, as well as
A. M. Jones's
Studies in African Music about the music of the
Ewe people, Reich drew inspiration for his 90-minute piece
Drumming, which he composed shortly after his return. Composed for a 9-piece percussion ensemble with female voices and piccolo,
Drumming marked the beginning of a new stage in his career, for around this time he formed his ensemble,
Steve Reich and Musicians, and increasingly concentrated on composition and performance with them. Steve Reich and Musicians, which was to be the sole ensemble to interpret his works for many years, still remains active with many of its original members.
After
Drumming, Reich moved on from the "phase shifting" technique that he'd pioneered, and began writing more elaborate pieces. He investigated other musical processes such as
augmentation (the temporal lengthening of phrases and melodic fragments). It was during this period that he wrote works such as
Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices and Organ (1973) and
Six Pianos (1973).
In 1974, Reich began writing what many would call his seminal work,
Music for 18 Musicians. This piece involved many new ideas, although it also hearkened back to earlier pieces. It is based on a
cycle of
eleven chords introduced at the beginning (called "Pulses"), followed by a small section of music based around each
chord ("Sections I-XI"), and finally a return to the original cycle ("Pulses"). This was Reich's first attempt at writing for larger
ensembles. The increased number of performers resulted in more scope for psychoacoustic effects, which fascinated Reich, and he noted that he'd like to "explore this idea further". Reich remarked that this one work contained more harmonic movement in the first five minutes then any other work he'd written. Reich's recording of the work was the first release in
ECM Records' "New Series".
Reich explored these ideas further in his frequently recorded pieces
Music for a Large Ensemble (1978) and
Octet (1979). In these two works, Reich experimented with "the human breath as the measure of musical duration … the chords played by the trumpets are written to take one comfortable breath to perform" (liner notes for
Music for a Large Ensemble). Human voices are part of the musical palette in
Music for a Large Ensemble but the wordless vocal parts simply form part of the texture (as they do in
Drumming). With
Octet and his first orchestral piece
Variations for Winds, Strings and Keyboards (also 1979), Reich's music showed the influence of Biblical
cantillation, which he'd studied in
Israel since the summer of 1977. After this, the human voice singing a text would play an increasingly important role in Reich's music.
The technique […] consists of taking pre-existing melodic patterns and stringing them together to form a longer melody in the service of a holy text. If you take away the text, you're left with the idea of putting together small motives to make longer melodies - a technique I hadn't encountered before. |
In the late 1970s Reich published a book,
Writings About Music, containing essays on his philosophy, aesthetics, and musical projects written between 1963 and 1974. An updated collection,
Writings On Music (1965–2000), was published in 2002.
The 1980s
Reich's work took on a darker character in the 1980s with the introduction of historical themes as well as themes from his
Jewish heritage.
Tehillim (1981),
Hebrew for
psalms, is the first of Reich's works to draw explicitly on his Jewish background. The work is in four parts, and is scored for an ensemble of four women's voices (one high
soprano, two lyric sopranos and one
alto),
piccolo,
flute,
oboe,
english horn, two
clarinets, six
percussion (playing small tuned
tambourines without jingles, clapping,
maracas,
marimba,
vibraphone and
crotales), two
electronic organs, two
violins,
viola,
cello and
double bass, with amplified voices, strings, and winds. A setting of texts from psalms 19:2–5 (19:1–4 in Christian translations), 34:13–15 (34:12–14), 18:26–27 (18:25–26), and 150:4–6,
Tehillim is a departure from Reich's other work in its formal structure; the setting of texts several lines long rather than the fragments used in previous works makes melody a substantive element. Use of formal
counterpoint and functional
harmony also contrasts with the loosely structured minimalist works written previously.
Different Trains (1988), for
string quartet and tape, uses recorded speech, as in his earlier works, but this time as a melodic rather than a rhythmic element, following the earlier example of
Scott Johnson's
John Somebody (1978). In
Different Trains Reich compares and contrasts his childhood memories of his train journeys between New York and California in 1939-1941 with the very different trains being used to transport contemporaneous European children to their deaths under
Nazi rule. The
Kronos Quartet recording of
Different Trains was awarded the
Grammy Award for Best Classical Contemporary Composition in 1990.
New directions
In 1993, Reich collaborated with his wife, the video artist
Beryl Korot, on an
opera,
The Cave, which explores the roots of
Judaism,
Christianity and
Islam through the words of
Israelis,
Palestinians, and
Americans, echoed musically by the ensemble. The work, for percussion, voices, and strings, is a musical
documentary, named for the
Cave of Machpelah in
Hebron, where a
mosque now stands and
Abraham is said to have been buried.
The two collaborated again on the opera
Three Tales, which concerns the
Hindenburg disaster, the testing of
nuclear weapons on
Bikini Atoll, and other more modern concerns, specifically
Dolly the sheep,
cloning, and the
technological singularity.
As well as pieces using sampling techniques, like
Three Tales and
City Life (1994), Reich also returned to composing purely instrumental works for the concert hall, starting with
Triple Quartet (1998) written for the
Kronos Quartet that can either be performed by string quartet and tape, three string quartets or 36-piece string orchestra. According to Reich, the piece is influenced by
Bartók's and
Alfred Schnittke's string quartets. This series continued with
Dance Patterns (2002),
Cello Counterpoint (2003), and sequence of works centered around Variations:
You Are (Variations) (2004), a work which looks back to the vocal writing of works like
Tehillim or
The Desert Music,
Variations for Vibes, Pianos, and Strings (2005, for the
London Sinfonietta) and
Daniel Variations (2006).
In a very recent interview with
The Guardian, Reich stated that he continues to follow this direction with a yet unnamed piece commissioned by
eighth blackbird, an American ensemble consisting of the instrumental quintet (
flute,
clarinet,
violin or
viola,
cello and
piano) of
Schoenberg's piece
Pierrot Lunaire (1912) plus percussion. Reich thinks that it'll again be with tape, and he also states that he's thinking about Stravinsky's
Agon (1957) as a model for the instrumental writing.
Influence
Reich's style of composition has influenced many other composers and musical groups, including
Philip Glass (especially his early pieces),
John Adams, the
progressive rock band
King Crimson, the new-age guitarist
Michael Hedges, the art-pop and electronic musician
Brian Eno, the composers associated with the
Bang on a Can festival (including
David Lang,
Michael Gordon, and
Julia Wolfe), and numerous
indie rock musicians including songwriter
Sufjan Stevens and instrumental ensembles
The Mercury Program,
Tortoise,
So Many Dynamos,
Do Make Say Think and
A Silver Mt. Zion.
Godspeed You Black Emperor composed a song, unreleased, entitled "Steve Reich". His music has also been a source of inspiration to
ambient and
techno musicians. A melodic line from his 1987 work
Electric Counterpoint was used by
The Orb in their 1991 hit
Little Fluffy Clouds. This connection has been honored in a 1999 album by DJs and electronic musicians,
Reich Remixed, released on
Nonesuch Records. Reich's
Come Out and
It's Gonna Rain are cited as early examples of how
minimalist music evolved in tandem with advances in technology, and have served as templates for the application of
loops and
delay in contemporary
electronic dance music. An additional parallel between Reich's work and that of
electronic dance music artists is an emphasis on a minimum of form (as opposed to a minimum of material) in which sonic elements such as
timbre and
texture are used to 'amass' sound in a vertical direction. Massification has, in fact, evolved into a movement of
electronic dance music in which extreme densities are created with a relatively limited number of sonic elements. This evolution echoes similar developments in Reich's work, as he and other minimalist composers moved from simplicity to more complex combinations of
pulses and
polyrhythms. Electronic dance music practitioners have also adopted the "rhythm as melody" aesthetic that Reich embraced after studying
West African drumming in
Ghana and encountering the "chiming" timbres produced by
Indonesian gamelan orchestras.
John Adams commented, "He didn't reinvent the wheel so much as he showed us a new way to ride." He has also influenced visual artists such as
Bruce Nauman, and has expressed admiration of choreographer
Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker's work set to his pieces.
Reich often cites
Pérotin,
J.S. Bach,
Debussy and
Stravinsky as composers he admires, whose tradition he wished as a young composer to become part of. Jazz is a major part of the formation of Reich's musical style, and two of the earliest influences on his work were vocalists
Ella Fitzgerald and
Alfred Deller, whose emphasis on the artistic capabilities of the voice alone with little vibrato or other alteration was an inspiration to his earliest works.
John Coltrane's style, which Reich has described as "playing a lot of notes to very few harmonies", also had an impact; of particular interest was the album
Africa/Brass, which "was basically a half-an-hour in F." Reich's influence from jazz includes its roots, also, from the West African music he studied in his readings and visit to Ghana. Other important influences are
Kenny Clarke and
Miles Davis, and visual artist friends such as
Sol Lewitt and
Richard Serra.
Reich recently contributed the introduction to
Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture (The MIT Press, 2008) edited by Paul D. Miller a.k.a.
DJ Spooky.
Reich on himself
[...] I drove a cab in San Francisco, and in New York I worked as a part-time social worker. [[Philip Glass |
All musicians in the past, starting with the middle ages were interested in popular music. (...) Béla Bartók's music is made entirely of sources from Hungarian folk music. And Igor Stravinsky, although he lied about it, used all kinds of Russian sources for his early ballets. [[Kurt Weill |
Works
- Soundtrack for The Plastic Haircut, tape (1963)
- It's Gonna Rain, tape (1965)
- Soundtrack for Oh Dem Watermelons, tape (1965)
- Come Out, tape (1966)
- Melodica, melodica and tape (1966)
- Piano Phase for two pianos, or two marimbas (1967)
- Slow Motion Sound concept piece (1967)
- Violin Phase for violin and tape or four violins (1967)
- My Name Is for three tape recorders and performers (1967)
- Pendulum Music for 3 or 4 microphones, amplifiers and loudspeakers (1968) (revised 1973)
- Four Organs for four electric organs and maracas (1970)
- Phase Patterns for four electric organs (1970)
- Drumming for 4 pairs of tuned bongo drums, 3 marimbas, 3 glockenspiels, 2 female voices, whistling and piccolo (1970/1971)
- Clapping Music for two musicians clapping (1972)
- Music for Pieces of Wood for five pairs of tuned claves (1973)
- Six Pianos (1973) - transcribed as Six Marimbas (1986)
- Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices and Organ (1973)
- Music for 18 Musicians (1974–76)
- Music for a Large Ensemble (1978)
- Octet (1979) - withdrawn in favor of the 1983 revision for slightly larger ensemble, Eight Lines
- Variations for Winds, Strings and Keyboards for orchestra (1979)
- Tehillim for voices and ensemble (1981)
- Vermont Counterpoint for amplified flute and tape (1982)
- The Desert Music for chorus and orchestra or voices and ensemble (1984, text by William Carlos Williams)
- Sextet for percussion and keyboards (1984)
- New York Counterpoint for amplified clarinet and tape, or 11 clarinets and bass clarinet (1985)
- Three Movements for orchestra (1986)
- Electric Counterpoint for electric guitar or amplified acoustic guitar and tape (1987, for Pat Metheny)
- The Four Sections for orchestra (1987)
- Different Trains for string quartet and tape (1988)
- The Cave for four voices, ensemble and video (1993, with Beryl Korot)
- Duet for two violins and string ensemble (1993)
- Nagoya Marimbas for two marimbas (1994)
- City Life for amplified ensemble (1995)
- Proverb for voices and ensemble (1995, text by Ludwig Wittgenstein)
- Triple Quartet for amplified string quartet (with prerecorded tape), or three string quartets, or string orchestra (1998)
- Know What Is Above You for four women’s voices and 2 tamborims (1999)
- Three Tales for video projection, five voices and ensemble (1998–2002, with Beryl Korot)
- Dance Patterns for 2 xylophones, 2 vibraphones and 2 pianos (2002)
- Cello Counterpoint for amplified cello and multichannel tape (2003)
- You Are (Variations) for voices and chamber orchestra (2004)
- For Strings (with Winds and Brass) for orchestra (1987/2004)
- Variations for Vibes, Pianos, and Strings dance piece for three string quartets, four vibraphones, and two pianos (2005)
- Daniel Variations for four voices and instruments (2006)
- Double Sextet (2007)
Selected discography
Drumming. Steve Reich and Musicians (Two recordings: Deutsche Grammophon and Nonesuch) So Percussion (Cantaloupe)
Music for 18 Musicians. Steve Reich and Musicians (Two recordings: ECM and Nonesuch)
Octet/Music for a Large Ensemble/Violin Phase. Steve Reich and Musicians (ECM)
Variations for Winds, Strings and Keyboards/Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices and Organ/ Six Pianos. San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, Edo de Waart, Steve Reich & Musicians (Deutsche Grammophon)
Tehillim/The Desert Music. Alarm Will Sound and OSSIA, Alan Pierson (Cantaloupe)
Different Trains/Electric Counterpoint. Kronos Quartet, Pat Metheny (Nonesuch)
You Are (Variations)/Cello Counterpoint. Los Angeles Master Chorale, Grant Gershon, Maya Beiser (Nonesuch)
Further Information
Get more info on 'Steve Reich'.
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