Steve Reich

Steve Reich, born in 1936 in New York, majored in philosophy at Cornell University (1953�57) and studied composition at Juilliard School and then at the Mills College in California, where he received his master in 1963, studying with Luciano and Darius Milhaud (together with his friend Phil Lesh, the future founder of the Grateful Dead) while listening to John Coltrane's free jazz. In San Francisco he befriended the young electronic composers of the Tape Music Center. In 1965 he moved to New York.

During the day, he did all sorts of jobs, from taxi driver to postal clerk, but in the evening, he frequented the attics of the avant-garde, where he had the chance to make friends with other young amateurs, such as Steve Chambers and Jon Gibson (with whom he formed a legendary trio in 1966), and where he could perform his first compositions: Pitch Charts (1963), Music For Piano And Tapes (1964), Livelihood for tape (1965), Come Out for tape (1966), Melodica for tape (1966), Reed Phase (1966) for winds and tape.

From the beginning, Reich's music is very technical. Without being as strict and monomaniacal a scientist as Young, Reich is also not a mystical and sentimental artist like Terry Riley. Reich is a scholar of how music is produced: he is a technician of composition and orchestration, and simultaneously, a theorist and researcher of primitive music. Indifferent to both chance and melody, he is instead fascinated by rhythm and complexity (measured by the quantity of phrases moving simultaneously), by order and discipline, and by the becoming of music as a deterministic process. His compositions leave no space for improvisation, being in fact rigorously pre-determined. While for Young music is a living creature, for Reich it is a computer that just needs to be programmed. The music grows by itself, but without free will.

His major period, influenced by Terry Riley's In C (for which Reich helped organize the first performance in 1964), began with It's Gonna Rain (1965), composed of twenty-minute loops that are slightly out of sync, elaborated with the voice of a black preacher recorded live in San Francisco as he speaks about the Great Flood. From this early composition, "phasing" (progressive desynchronization) of two sounds, either identical, similar, or different, emerges as the distinctive feature of his music: the gradual dissonance of the base motifs produces rhythmic and melodic combinations that can continue to blend and transform infinitely.

In the trilogy of Piano Phase for two pianos and two marimbas (1967), Violin Phase for four violins and tape (1967), and Clapping Music for two handclaps (1972), it is the musicians (playing the same instrument and the same phrase) who must repeat the process of gradual out-of-sync shifting and the eventual return to unison. With these works, Reich abandons the "artificial" music of tapes and electronics, rediscovering the human performer, even though the compositional process remains very similar. Instead of tape recorders, Reich introduces the musicians. According to the composer, this activity of imitating machines sharpens the mind�s ability to concentrate: the musician�s skill lies entirely in the ability to adhere to the rules of the program. At the same time, it sharpens the listener's ability to concentrate, who must perceive a music consisting solely of minimal entities. In Violin Phase, for example, the performer plays against one, two, and finally three pre-recorded tapes of themselves.

In 1967, Reich conceived Slow Motion Music, which was never realized. It was meant to be another spoken loop similar to It's Gonna Rain, slowed down almost to a halt, but without losing its timbral qualities. It is the archetype of Reich�s "slowed down" works.

The following year, he composed Pendulum Music, an excursion into the territory of happenings and gestural music. Three microphones dangle from the ceiling, just a few inches from corresponding loudspeakers, with each microphone connected to its own speaker to produce the whistle of the Larsen effect: the performers need only swing the microphones and adjust the volume of the speakers.

Also in 1968, Reich formulated the theory of "music as a gradual process," meaning music that is its own compositional process, warning that in such music, there is no space for improvisation. The works Pulse Music (1969) for electronics and Log Drums (1969) for percussion and tape were born.

In 1970, Four Organs realized for the first time the idea of "slow motion music": the basic chord (repeated by four organs) stretches over time (in a kind of sound slowdown), while a fifth performer marks the rhythm with maracas. The model for this music is a pendulum slowly reaching a state of stillness. Towards the end, the piece takes on the ecstatic quality of Indian mantras.

That year, Reich began seriously studying African music (he traveled to Ghana in 1970) and Asian music (three years later, he went to Bali and in 1977 to Jerusalem), particularly the use of percussion and voice. Meanwhile, his group expanded, and other young musicians, including Philip Glass, joined.

Phase Patterns, again for four organs, introduced an important novelty in the phasing process: rhythm. The ethnic music he studied inspired him to create a basic percussive figure, which the keyboards treated as if they were tuned drums. The unusual, barbaric, obsessive, and almost frantic rhythm is due to this injection of primitivism.

In practice, the early years of composition served to establish that atonality is not the only alternative to the tradition of bourgeois music. Reich proposed creating movement without relying on the rules of harmonic codes, allowing it to arise spontaneously through minimal repetition. This insight inevitably led to the rediscovery of rhythm. This breakthrough unlocked the impasse in minimalism and allowed for the construction of more elaborate architectures, with extended instrumentation and intricate algorithms.

1971 was a crucial year for the composer�s musical career. He was invited to Europe, where he had already gained significant prestige even outside the minimalist sphere, and where he was able to assemble a group of twelve musicians (including, among others, Cornelius Cardew and Joan La Barbara) from the most diverse backgrounds (classical, medieval, African, Indian, jazz). Finally, the prestigious Deutsche Grammophon decided to have him record a triple album, thus sealing his rise to the Olympus of austere classical music.

Drumming, for percussion, voice, and flute, was the longest and most ambitious of Reich�s compositions yet (lasting around an hour and a half) and marked his most austere application of the principle of music as a gradual process. At the same time, it�s also the work most directly influenced by African rhythms: the percussion, which definitely speaks to the composer more than electronic keyboards, includes bongo, marimba, and glockenspiel.

Drumming represents the ultimate refinement of phrasing, but at the same time introduces new techniques: the use of the human voice to imitate the sounds of the instruments (�tuk�, �tok�, �duk� male sounds imitate the bongos; �du� and �tu� female sounds imitate the marimbas); the gradual change in timbre, maintaining constant rhythm and tone; the substitution of hits for pauses (and then vice versa) within a continually repeating rhythmic cycle; the simultaneous combination of instruments with different timbres. It�s above all the use of timbre as a compositional element that given the piece such a revolutionary character: each movement offers a different combination of instruments, and seems to proceed on the basis of their timbres rather than on a predefined algorithm. The first part is a demonically possessed crescendo of bongos that conjures thoughts of ancient jungle ceremonies. During the second, in a hurricane of pounding marimbas, the voices sound their hypnotic babblings, as if they are joining the overall dance and being carried away by the swirling cadence. The third part is dominated by the layered jingles of glockenspiel, almost like a heavy rain, stubbornly pursued by the repetitive patterns of the two piccolos. The final part puts everything on stage, and is perhaps the most tribal movement, in its inexhaustible and torrential choral stride.

Drumming is a thorough, painstaking, almost maniacal work of welding and superimposition, that succeeds in conserving an intense poetic quality thanks to the range of solutions that the composer/director propose, the dynamism of music that�s continually expanding and contracting, and a shrewd blend of algorithm and inspiration, that of which makes the onomatopoeic syllables of the singers and the luxuriant carnival of timbres worthwhile.

Drumming, with its variegated timbral universe, decrees the end of orthodox minimalism. The version published in 1987, reduced from 85 minutes to only 56, reveals a music still less languid and still more energetic.

In the following decade Reich would use exclusively acoustic instruments (abhorring electronic ones), and an important role would always be reserved for percussion.

Six Pianos (1973) is a driving sextet for pianos, based on a more complex process of phasing and of mutating rests into beats, at a very fast tempo. Here too, as in Phase Patterns, the pianos are nothing more than tuned drums, but the effect is no longer that of a barbaric strumming. Six Marimbas (1986) is a version for marimbas.

Following Music For Pieces Of Wood (1973), Music For Mallet Instruments Voices And Organ (1973), besides foreshadowing developments for large ensemble, is in a certain sense a compendium of Reich�s musical �uvre, as it exploits the superimposition of two simultaneous rhythmic processes: the construction, beat by beat, of a (phased) duplicate of the repeating musical phrase; and the progressive lengthening of the notes (i.e. a �slow motion�) of another phrase. The unusual number of situations and variations (of movements and changes) lulls the listener into an interweaving of discrete sounds (percussion) and continuous ones (voices, organ) that play against one another, and even against themselves. Thanks to the quantity and variety of timbres employed, the effect is at once hypnotic and exotic, celestial and subliminal. For grace, chromaticism, and lightness, this is Reich�s In C.

(Translated from my original Italian text by Robert Gramillano)

1976�s For 18 Musicians, influenced by Indonesian gamelan, showcases three areas of innovation: in instrumentation, never before so copious and varied (violin, cello, two clarinets, four pianos, three marimbas, two xylophones, a vibraphone and four singers); in harmony, which Reich had never given much movement (for the first time dissonance is permitted); and in structure, which establishes links between families of instruments throughout the various sections (a rhythm or a melody can move from one group of instruments to another corresponding group of instruments in the transition from one section to another). With regards to the rhythms, there are primarily two, simultaneous and superimposed: the uninterrupted, mechanical one of the pianos and percussion and the human one, established by the breath of the singers and wind instruments (Reich wants the breaths to break one after the other like waves against the constant rhythm of the percussion instruments). The piece is created from a very simple algorithm: the ensemble starts playing a cycle of eleven chords, continues exploring each chord for around five minutes and ends by playing the complete cycle again. There�s not a single note that doesn�t come from those chords. Even so the harmonic development is explosive, and the resulting whole has a tragic note.

The almost �galactic� attack of the strings, which develops in waves and reflections, is cut by the dark vibrations of the cello, establishing the tense and supernatural atmosphere, before being engulfed by the jungle tribalisms of the pianos and marimbas, which are in turn sucked into the hypnotic fanfare of clarinets and singers. The second part hovers, starting from a pressing vibration of strings, voices and xylophones, into an irresistible choral carnival with a demoniac rhythm. The chaotic hammering of the pianos accompanies the ending until the obsessive oscillations of cello, clarinet, and voice close the piece in rapid succession.

The eighteen feverish pulsations create colorful and continuously changing soundscapes, and their rhythmic contrasts define the atmosphere, at one point cheerful, the next tragic, to meditative, and the next suspenseful. In its cryptic and solemn unfolding, the suite alternates between different combinations of instruments and again one gets the impression of a unique attention in pulling together different timbres. Although everyone is utilized as percussion, each "percusses" in their own way, and can be further "customized" by the duration and frequency of their rhythm. This work is like a chamber sonata whose ensemble changes during its performance.

Reich also discovered a new trick of his: by varying the harmonic rhythm and keeping the melodic phrase constant, he changed the unchanged component, the melody. His music is more and more like a mechanical sequence of placements, phase shifts and displacements, perturbed by a subtle game of balancing and magic. This stripped orchestral music, pulsating and circular, in which even the breath of the performers has its importance, is a refined ballet of men disguised as machines.

If the Phases for violin and piano had been for minimalism what Boulez's Structures had been for serialism, that is a programmatic manifesto, a groundbreaking work, this symphony for small orchestra goes beyond the limits of that same program with a contradiction in terms that highlights its expressive potentialities, a little like Stockhausen with Gesang Der Junglingee and Boulez himself with Pli Selon Pli.

Revising and expanding on concepts and themes already present in For Mallet Instruments and For 18 Musicians, Music For Large Ensemble (1978), originally conceived for thirty instruments, continues the program of progressive expansion of the orchestra. The strings now have the same weight as the pianos and the percussion, and the voices now have a fixed place next to the sounds of the acoustic instruments. The pressing polyrhythmic pulsation of the percussion, of clear Asian derivation, the pounding hammering of the pianos, the soft sol-fa triplets of the singers are enriched by the frantic pinch of the strings and the long breaths of the wind instruments. If it were not for the lack of a thematic development, it could be said that Reich has arrived at symphony. The deployment of means is in fact at that level, but Reich�s art is still above all an experiment on the combination of patterns (stable, growing, decreasing).

Octet (1979), for two pianos, string quartet, and two winds, confirms the tendency� inspired by studies on Jewish chant� to stretch melodic lines, a tendency already glimpsed in the previous work. The octet, opened by fast-moving figures for piano, cello, and clarinet, is immediately colored by a frenetic dusting of overlapping phrases that suddenly opens onto a driving section in which the hammering cadence of the clarinet and the long, anemic chords of the cello are answered by a cheerful flute dance. At every moment one perceives that some instruments play louder and faster than the others, and therefore seem to come to the foreground while the others, slowed and muffled, serve as their chorus. Extremely colorful, the fanfare moves like a sea of waves, presenting at every instant a stable overall aspect, yet shattered into details that change rapidly� also due to a unifying theme (almost always played by the piano) on which Reich weaves a slow progression of chords and a web of melodic figures.

Eight Lines (1983) is a revised version of Octet

The Variations For Winds, Strings And Keyboards of 1979 are a chaconne of more than twenty minutes, orchestrated in the spirit of the typical Middle Eastern *fourth* and an even more vivid chromaticism. The finale� a radiant tumult of flutes and oboes� is one of the most poetic moments of Reich�s career.

The result of his studies on Jewish cantillation is Tehillim (1981), in which Reich sets several psalms to music for a chamber orchestra with four female voices, six winds, two organs, and five strings. With the mechanical process of iteration further reduced, the composition seems to come alive, in its still sparse harmonic simplicity, from Middle Eastern percussive folklore (the first part) and African folklore (the fourth part, perhaps the most intricate), and from the frigid, ethereal polyphony of the Ars Nova (the third part, perhaps the most hypnotic), but also from medieval saltarelli and sarabandes (the second part). This long chamber lied is one of his most accessible works and, at least in the 1982 orchestral version, is also another chromatic delirium like the Variations.

Desert Music (1984), perhaps his masterpiece, further expands the ensemble by adding chorus and members of the Brooklyn Philharmonic. One hundred sixteen musicians and fifty microphones constitute the largest apparatus ever used by a minimalist composer. This colossal work denounces the nuclear threat through five movements with texts by poet William Carlos Williams. The atmosphere is apocalyptic, crossed by dissonant tremors and intense polyrhythmic pulsations. The hypnotic quality of his music (still prominent in the frantic rises and falls of the first and last movement) is lost in the monumental symphonism of this work. The cheerful and impetuous fanfares of the second and fourth movement, for instance, have lost much of the early mechanistic character and come increasingly close to the vigorous barbaric style of Le Sacre du Printemps or Bart�k�s chamber music. The dissonant string quartet that opens the third movement� although constructed mathematically� displays an almost baroque variety and complexity. The finale of the third is a vortex of dissonances verging on electronic music. Thanks to the new expressive vocabulary, Reich achieves dramatic results that were previously impossible for him: the fifth movement is a masterpiece of restrained suspense, painful contemplation, vehement desolation, with its syncopated and agitated cadence of cello and viola, the fractured continuum of the violins, and the Wagnerian apotheoses of the choir reduced to a feeble intermittence. The result is oppressive and hallucinatory, like Penderecki�s Threni or Britten�s War Requiem.

The writing becomes increasingly meticulous, and Reich gradually enriches his game of spontaneous reproduction with new and more refined rules. His �uvre up to this point has been an impressive crescendo, happily ennobled by a disruptive chromatic imagination.

Three Movements (1986) is another orchestral work, and it stands as an impeccable example of minimalist repetition. It boasts one of the most vibrant movements of Reich�s career (the first one), more akin to Michael Nyman's scores than to Reich's own style.

If Sextet (1984) is almost a transcription for percussion and keyboards of the previous work, Electric Counterpoint (1987) is instead a series of melodic counterpoints played by one guitar against the prerecorded tape of twelve other guitars; and the quartet Different Trains (1988), dedicated to the Nazi trains that transported Jews to the concentration camps, adopts techniques completely unprecedented for him: composed for string quartet and tape, the former imitates the melody of speech, while the latter emits �found� sounds of trains and sirens, as well as �processed� fragments of spoken voice. The idea of using speech as a sound source seems like a return to the aesthetic of It's Gonna Rain and Come Out, but the interaction with the instruments is completely new (in fact, it is the sounds produced by the voice that guide the instruments). These are, however, minor works that mark the artist�s first serious crisis of inspiration.

Reich�s music has always retained the characteristic of being rigidly evolutionary: once begun, the piece proceeds in a predictable way, both for the performer and for the listener. The piece is defined by the goal the performer must reach and by the process through which they are allowed to arrive there. In practice, Reich is creating a slow-motion replay of how harmony is produced. By slowing down its synthesis, he tends to make discrete what should be a continuous flow of sounds, and it is no accident that percussion plays such a large role in his compositions.

His music is a theater in which the various instruments act. Reich, functioning as director, assigns each instrument a part tailored precisely to its characteristics. Little by little, he is staging the entire orchestra. And in fact, Four Sections, whose premiere was held in 1987 with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, finally gives the impression that Reich is leaving behind the episodic character that has always marked�and limited�his art.

The masterpieces of this art of decomposition and recomposition remain Music For 18 Musicians, the octet, and Drumming, but the impression persists that none of them is a fully realized work, but rather a notebook of sketches.

Compositions for solo instruments and tape such as Vermont Counterpoint (1982) for flute, New York Counterpoint (1985) for clarinet, and Electric Counterpoint (1987) for electric guitar rediscovered the technique of "phasing" originally developed for Violin Phase.

But, overall, Reich's compositions of the 1990s showed a remarkable expansion of tonal and harmonic ranges.

The monumental multimedia "opera" The Cave (1993), a collaboration with video artist Beryl Korot (his wife), set texts from the Torah and the Quran to music and images (it required five screens and eighteen musicians). The first act begins with a solo for imaginary typewriter (actually handclapping and percussion), Typing Music - Genesis XVI. That's pretty much the only inspired moment of this work. The rhythmic emphasis of the vocal and piano cantillation of Genesis XII Genesis XXI and The Binding of Isaac is embarrassingly trivial by Reich's past standards. And are we supposed to be impressed by the blurred murmur of Interior of the Cave in the age of digital soundscaping? In general, there is very little music: most of the "opera" is taken up by spoken-word segments that are tedious to say the least. The ones that are, finally, music are very brief, sometimes lasting only a couple of minutes.

The concertos City Life (1995) for sampled sounds of the city and ensemble (strings, two pianos, percussion, vibraphone, two sampling keyboards), and Proverb (1996) for six voices (text by Ludwig Wittgenstein), two keyboards, and two percussion, were collected on City Life (Nonesuch, 1996). The a-cappella beginning of Proverb evokes the seclusion of medieval convents, but soon it becomes obvious that the voices are following a path of increasing complexity as they call each other and respond to each other in varying degrees of proximity. The instruments add yet another layer of counterpoint, but they mostly simply keep a rhythm. The five-movement City Life presents another side of Steve Reich, one that is equally comfortable with organizing instrumental sounds and incorporating found sounds. The first movement, Check It Out, is scored for syncopated piano, car horns and sampled voice. Pile Drive - Alarms disjointed chamber music duetting with car alarms and propelled by bolero drumming. It's Been A Honeymoon - Can't Take No Mo toys with a vocal sample that is deformed and repeated frantically until it almost becomes a hip-hop beat for the minimalist fanfare of the winds and the piano. The fifth movement, Heavy Smoke, conjures a touch of melodrama by juxtaposing the city with strings, winds and piano that are not quite repetitive but only tentatively so, as if they lacked the momentum to indulge in the usual coordinated dance.

Works: 1965-1995 (Nonesuch, 1997) is a ten-disc retrospective box-set

Triple Quartet (1999) features a string quartet layered three times to produce yet another variation on Reich's "phasing" technique.

Reich Remixed (Nonesuch, 1999) contains (awful) remixes of his classic compositions.

Three Tales (2001) is another collaboration with Korot, a video-opera in three acts: Hindenburg (1998), Bikini and Dolly. Another disappointing work like The Cave, too focused on the spoken-word dialogue, it was recorded on Three Tales (Nonesuch, 2003).

Different Trains (Naive, 2004) contains Different Trains for double string quartet and tape, Triple Quartet for 3 string quartets, The Four Sections for orchestra.

You Are (Variations) (Nonesuch, 2006) contains the four-movement You Are four pianos, mallet instruments and voice, as well as Cello Counterpoint.

Different Trains (Signum, 2006) containes the Triple Quartet, Duet and Different Trains.

Other compositions include: Double Sextet (2007) for a sextet (flute, clarinet, violin, cello, vibraphone and piano) playing against a prerecorded sextet on tape; the double quintet 2 x 5 (2008) for twin rock bands; the Mallet Quartet (2009); and WTC 9/11 (2011) for three string quartets (one live and two recorded) and samples.

WTC 9/11 (2011) contains WTC 9/11, i.e. his three-movement requiem for the terrorist attacks of 2001, scored for three string quartets and voices, Mallet Quartet (2009) for two vibraphones and two marimbas and Dance Patterns (2010) for for two vibraphones, two xylophones and two pianos.

Runner (2016) is scored for 19 instruments (piano, strings, winds, vibraphones and percussion). Music for Ensemble and Orchestra (2018) is scored for a full orchestra, and was first recorded by Susanna Malkki conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic.