By RAY LUSTIG

Composer and Juilliard alumnus Steve Reich has been called the most original musical thinker of our time by The New Yorker, and hailed as America's greatest living composer by The Village Voice. Reich first received recognition in the 1960s with works inspired by tape recorder loops. Early works like Drumming (1971) make use of a technique originated by Reich known as phasing, in which two identical, short segments of music or sound—the loops—play simultaneously, but repeat at slightly different rates, so that they soon become "out of phase," and what had sounded like a single voice reveals itself as two voices which move further and further apart, creating a continually evolving counterpoint between them that eventually returns to being back "in phase." Though Reich soon began to compose works unencumbered by such large-scale processes, the use of shifting rhythmic textures remained a hallmark of his music.

Recording technology also inspired Reich's landmark work Different Trains (1988), in which he wrote music that imitated the spoken inflection of recorded interviews with Holocaust survivors. Since the early 1980s, Reich's work reveals his growing interest in the human voice, to which he brings a non-traditional approach.

This year marked the composer's 70th birthday, and concert halls and performance spaces around New York and around the world are abuzz with festivals and special performances of his music. Reich recently took time out of his tightly packed schedule of travel, speaking, and attending performances to speak with Juilliard doctoral composer Ray Lustig for The Juilliard Journal.

Steve Reich in New York City, May 2005 (Photo by Jeffrey Herman )

Ray Lustig: Beginning in the 1980s, your work began to show increasing theatrical or narrative content. Could you talk a bit about how musical meaning and narrative meaning coexist in these works?

Steve Reich: Well, it all begins in 1981, with wanting to study Hebrew text, in Tehillim, and then finding that by setting a text, the text forces me—or any composer—to do things that I would not otherwise do, simply writing instrumental music. And I found that very exciting, to be forced to do things because the words have their own rhythm, and the words have their own meaning. You've got to take all of that into account—and taking it into account forces you into new musical areas. I am now writing more vocal music, the older I get, than instrumental music. And, as I said, the backbone of that interest is that I first of all choose a text that excites me. It's imperative that I find something that is of interest to me, because if I'm not interested, you are certainly going to be bored.

Listen to selections from Steve Reich's recordings.

Now, if you use recordings of actual people, as I did in Different Trains and The Cave—and in particular, the third movement of Three Tales, "Dolly"—then you are no longer setting a text; you are literally setting a human being. And you are definitely involved in something theatrical, with the actor being the documentary reality. See, what really interests me is documentary theater. I don't like the idea of someone pretending to be someone. Musical acting doesn't interest me at all. I think it's much more interesting to see the actual person there. And as they speak, you are getting their spirit, their soul. For instance, with Different Trains, if someone had asked me, "Steve, would you write a piece about the Holocaust?" I'd say, "Absolutely not. Are you crazy? Would you like me to drink the Pacific Ocean? It's out of the question." But when I did Different Trains, I had no idea what I was going to do. I was interested in sampling keyboard and in setting some voice—I knew not what—to use its speech melody as my melody. First I thought I'd use the voice of Bela Bartok. And I actually got recordings of Bartok speaking. Near the end of his life, he was recorded on WNYC. And then I thought to myself, "Well, do I want to use Bela Bartok while I'm writing a string quartet, have him looking over my shoulder?" I mean, it's hard enough as it is, right? I dropped that idea. I thought I'd use the voice of [the philosopher] Ludwig Wittgenstein, but there were no recordings of him, so I forgot about that. Now, don't ask me how—God knows—but these trips that I took as a child, between my divorced singer-songwriter mother in Los Angeles and my lawyer father in New York, popped into my head. And the woman who accompanied me—my nanny, my governess, Virginia—popped into my head. All of this sort of came. And I thought, "Well, I'll record them and use their speech melody as my speech melody"—also using a black Pullman porter, Lawrence Davis, who rode those same trains as I rode. Now, when I started getting these ideas, I thought to myself, "Well, what years did I do this?" And the years were 1937, '38, '39, '40 and so on. And I thought to myself, "Well, what was going on in the world during that period of time?" And what was going on then was that Hitler was trying to take over the world and kill every Jew he could get his hands on. And as a little Jewish kid, if I had been born in Budapest or Brussels or Rotterdam, we wouldn't be having this conversation.

Above: In September 2005, the Juilliard Dance Ensemble presented the premiere of Sir Isaac's Apples, choreographed by Eliot Feld and set to Reich's seminal work, Drumming, performed live by the Juilliard Percussion Ensemble. (Photo by Hiro Ito) Below: Steve Reich Musicians performing Drumming in 1973. (Photo by Franco Gorgoni )

And suddenly I realized, the way I can deal with Holocaust survivors is by using their speech melody exactly the same documentary way as I'm going to use Virginia's voice or Mr. Davis, the Pullman porter's, voice. I'm not going to overlay a hyperdramatic, phony, pale imitation of the horror of the Holocaust; I'm simply going to have them speak about their own lives, and their voices will contain all the necessary emotions.

RL: Is it ever a conscious goal of yours to make a socially relevant statement with your music?

SR: I love music, and I love writing music. And when I'm writing the music, I want to love what I hear that I'm doing. And if I don't, I trash it. I throw it away. In my computer, I have lots and lots of "save as" files with lots and lots of rejected material. Why is it rejected? Because I think that it doesn't sound as good—or it sounded good on Monday, but by Tuesday it didn't sound so good. Intellectually, it wasn't really very sound; it wasn't really strong. So you have to satisfy your brain—as an intellectual, as a musician—and know that this music is durable, and is really well made and well thought out. And you have to satisfy your heart, above all, because if you're not moved by this music, then no one else will certainly be moved by it. And if they aren't, then the music is a failure. And that's the most important thing you can say about any music.

So it doesn't matter at all what a composer does, in terms of what text they choose, whether it's important in the world. The only thing that matters is, are they writing really good music? If they are writing really good music that people to love to listen to, that moves them emotionally, and that is well put together in a craftsman-like way, then that music will live, irrespective of whether it's about anything that's socially relevant. Because something that's socially relevant now may be socially irrelevant a hundred years from now.

With Different Trains, if someone had asked me, "Steve, would you write a piece about the Holocaust?" I'd say, "Absolutely not! Are you crazy? Would you like me to drink the Pacific Ocean? It's out of the question."

RL: Could you talk a bit about your collaborative work with your wife [the video artist Beryl Korot]? How did your collaboration begin, what was the process like, and is it ongoing?

SR: We did two pieces—the first was The Cave, and the second was Three Tales—and have no plans of doing a further work, but we may. But it won't be very soon, because I'm busy doing music-only pieces, and she's busy doing gallery and installation pieces for museums.

Basically, it started because I was asked to do operas during the 1980s by the Netherlands Opera and the Frankfurt Opera. And I said, "Thank you very much; it's very flattering, but no," because I'm not interested in the form, and I don't like the operatic voice. A lot of my contemporaries were doing operas at the time, so I'd hang up the phone, and I'd think, "Geez, there ought to be something that I could do." Then in 1988, I did Different Trains. As I was working on the piece, I thought, "Well, I'm working with audio tape; what if I were working with videotape and you could see these people who were speaking—or some people that are speaking about something—and you could see onstage musicians playing their speech melody, as they spoke? Aha. Here is my possibility for opera." And since I am married to a very first-rate video artist, I spoke to her about this. And she said, "Well, why don't we make a few tests and see what it looks like?" So we made some recordings of ourselves and other people speaking, and I made sort of mini-mockups of their speech melody and played it behind their voices. And we thought, wow, this is interesting. But we had no subject matter. So we had a very quick meeting, and very quickly decided on the Cave of Machpelah. Most people would say, "What in the world is that?" But we knew exactly what it was: the cave where Abraham and Sarah and Isaac and Rebecca and Jacob and Leah from the Bible are buried in the town of Hebron in the West Bank. And we felt that, because of our interest in Judaism and the Torah, this was of interest. And because, unfortunately, this is also something which is very much with us today on the political and religious level, it became a very worthwhile classical story to use as a vehicle for a video opera.

Steve Reich in his studio in 1971. The composer's interest in African music led him to study drumming in Ghana. (Photo © Landry/Girouard )

RL: Since the genesis of the concept of these works was spurred by your being asked to write an opera, and also seeing colleagues taking on opera projects, would it be fair to say that, in a way, your multimedia works have arisen as your unique response to the call of the operatic genre?

SR: No. That's false. I have no interest in opera. I like The Threepenny Opera, and I like [Stravinsky's] The Rake's Progress, and I can listen to bits of Bluebeard's Castle by Bartok. Otherwise, I never listen to any opera at all. I never go to the opera, nor have I any plans to.

The point was, if I'm not doing opera, what kind of music theater am I interested in? Well, I'm interested in movies, and I'm interested in video. And this was a solution, as a substitute for opera—a way of making musical theater which is not opera, but which is theatrical, I hope.

RL: I'd like to ask you about your experiences at Juilliard: what your time was like, if you have any sort of salient recollections, and how Juilliard fits into your development as a composer.

SR: What I learned most at Juilliard was that the most important thing as a composer is to compose and to write pieces. And the wonderful thing about Juilliard—or indeed, any conservatory—is that there are lots and lots of performing musicians around. So you, at lunch time, can sit down at a table and get together with a group of people and say, "Hey, I'd like to write a string quartet. Would you guys be interested in playing it?" And maybe, if you're lucky, it'll all work out, and they will be. You meet performers, you get friendly with performers, and you have the opportunity to write for them. There is no better teacher than the practical experience of writing the piece, having it played, having it criticized by the instrumentalists as to whether it fits their instruments well, whether it's idiomatic writing or not, what's difficult about it, what mistakes you've made in terms of fingerings—all these details. This was the most invaluable part of my experience at Juilliard.

I should also add that my occasional studies with Vincent Persichetti were extremely valuable, because Mr. Persichetti was one of those rare individuals who is really gifted at teaching. You can teach, but you may do that simply to make a living; most composers are, unfortunately, in that position. Vincent Persichetti was a man who was able to become his students. He knew who you were. And not only who you were, but who you were on Wednesday, you know—the 25th of March, 1959—and what you needed, that day, to understand. He was such an outstanding musician that he could improvise any style. He could understand any style, including the one you were trying to work out. And he had a vast grasp of musical history, and could therefore point out to you what you were doing that was related to earlier styles. For instance, I went in to him when I was writing what was known at the time as "free atonal music." Well, it was neither free nor was it atonal. But it was complicated harmonically. It was probably similar to Webern Op. 5, or Bartok Quartet No. 4, something in that neck of the woods. And I said, "Mr. Persichetti, I know there's harmony in here, but it's too complicated for me to put into numbers. Can you help me?" And he would say, "Well, look—here's a dominant chord, but it's been altered. You could say that this was the root of the chord; or you could say that the tritone away from it with the lower two was, in a sense, the root of the chord—because you can read it either way, and either way, it functions as a dominant." And I said, "Thank you!" It was real information. So I would say those were my outstanding experiences at Juilliard.

RL: Do you have thoughts on the role of a conservatory today, for both performers and composers, in fostering new music?

You have to satisfy your brain—as an intellectual, as a musician—and know that this music is durable, and is really well made and well thought out. And you have to satisfy your heart, above all, because if you're not moved by this music, then no one else will be.

SR: Absolutely. As far as learning by doing—that is, by writing pieces and having them played—a conservatory is a marvelous place to do that. Another thing you learn at a conservatory is to study the music of the past, and to imitate it yourself. And that is a worthwhile activity. To come up with an original style while you are still a student may occasionally happen, but generally speaking, what happens when you're a student is that you are imitating older styles. Also, you may be doing exercises in formal disciplines like four-part harmony or species counterpoint, and you may wonder to yourself, what possible use will this have for me? Well, I would like to say that I remember being about 35 years old and writing Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices and Organ, thinking to myself, "My gosh! I'm 35 years old and I'm writing four-part harmony." Well, I wasn't following all the rules, but I knew what the rules were, and I knew why I was breaking them. These simple, traditional disciplines can sometimes feel onerous and irrelevant. But take my word for it, they will—in unforeseen ways—become relevant. And that's what's interesting. Learning about canon, you know, it seems very mechanical. What possible use could this have? Well, a canon is simply a procedure that is open to any kind of sound you like. You can sound like Sumer is Icumen In in the Middle Ages; you can sound like Johann Sebastian Bach; you can sound like Anton Webern; you can sound like Steve Reich. And you're still writing in canon. Now, that's an interesting technique. Whether it's sampled hip-hop or 12-tone music or diatonic scales, these techniques are basically ways of structuring any sound you like. And augmentation canon simply says, O.K., you're going to have the same material following itself, only you're going to make it longer; the durations are going to grow in value. Well, what does that say about sound? It says actually nothing whatsoever about sound. So for me, personally, the period of musical history from, let's say, Perotin in the 11th century up to Johann Sebastian Bach in 1750, is a particularly fruitful one. I've found that more fruitful for me than, let's say, the period of common practice of Haydn to Wagner. That's an unusual position to take—but it is mine, and it's where I really got my information. And then I got information from the earlier part of the 20th century, from Debussy and Ravel, from Bartok and Stravinsky. And particularly from Bartok, from whom I learned an enormous amount.

RL: As a performer of your own music, you probably have a more dynamic relationship with your music than you would if you left your music to players. Do you have anything to say about your own role in your music making as a composer-performer?

SR: Well, I think it was a crucial thing for me to do when I was younger. When I was a music student, as I told you, the serial music—music of Boulez, Stockhausen, Berio, and John Cage, in a sense—was all the rage, and the necessity in that period of time. And that music was exceedingly difficult. Very few people could play it. People who wrote pieces like that, I doubt that they heard a lot of it in their heads, these student composers. They certainly never played it at the piano. And at night, I would go and hear John Coltrane, who'd pick up his saxophone and play. And I was presented with a kind of moral musical dilemma. It seemed that Coltrane had it right, and that these people writing this complex music they could neither hear nor play had it wrong. And so I thought, "Well, whatever limitations I may have as a performer, it's important that I perform in my own pieces." And I started doing that back in the 1960s. And it's stood me in very, very good stead, because you are involved with other performers in a way that performers respect. And it put me in touch with what I could do and what I couldn't do—and what I couldn't do, I simply left out. Now, as years passed, I began to write things that, in fact, I couldn't play; because I had done so many pieces that I'd been involved in, I felt free to do that and to write beyond my own means. But without starting out that way, I don't think I would've been able to write as solidly and as well for musicians as I subsequently was able to do. So do it yourself. If you're a conductor, then conduct, or if you're a player, then play; if you program drum machines, program drum machines. But getting involved in the performance of your own music is invaluable.

RL: Can I ask you what music runs through your head, or is running through your head right now?

SR: Most frequently, it's the piece that I just finished.

RL: I thought you might say that.

SR: I've been hearing a lot of Daniel Variations right now, because we just played it. And I haven't really had a chance to begin Double Sextet, which is the next piece I'm going to be writing. But I won't be able to do that until December really, because of all these concerts.

RL: Well, I'd like to thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me, Mr. Reich. And happy birthday!

SR: Thank you very much.