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The Radical Language of Steve Reich By RAYMOND J. LUSTIG
Perhaps it is not odd that the man The Village Voice has titled "America's greatest living composer" is admittedly not very interested in any music that came between Bach and Stravinsky. This was the era in which America's nascent concert music tradition remained unweaned from and largely beholden to its European progenitor. Steve Reich, labeled "the most original musical voice of our time" by The New Yorker magazine, is an embodiment of the American innovative ideal—one that was rescuing this country's musical tradition around the time Stravinsky's music was igniting Parisian passions. Members of the Juilliard community came out in large numbers to meet Mr. Reich and learn more about his music when he visited the School on January 24. Reich, himself an alumnus ('61, composition), listened to a concert presented by Juilliard percussion students, presented one of his new works, and spoke openly of his interests and influences to a diverse and sizeable Morse Hall audience.
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| Composer Steve Reich spoke to Juilliard students at a composer’s forum in Morse Hall on January. (Photo by Nora Kroll-Rosenbaum) |
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Reich's own career began in the 1960s, a time when originality had long reigned supreme, and the well of innovation might have seemed nearly exhausted. Against the grain of the serialist thirst for ever greater complexity, composers like La Monte Young and Terry Riley had begun experimenting with extremely static textures. Reich realized that static textures could be given direction and interest in a way that did not disrupt the minimalist aesthetic of stasis if, instead of remaining entirely static, they changed very slowly and gradually. His early and most famous works involve phasing, a process in which two identical repeating patterns play at slightly and almost imperceptibly different speeds. The result is complex. First, it mimics the acoustical phenomenon of reverberation, as what has sounded originally like a single sound is elongated slightly with slight directional deviation. It then progresses to a true echo, where a sound event is recognizably followed by itself in short order. Then, as the voices further diverge, one hears a canon at an ever larger time interval, until the relationship becomes quite difficult to discern. As the time interval reaches the length of the pattern itself, the two voices begin to come back "in phase." The approach of this moment is often difficult to anticipate, and as anyone who has had success viewing printed 3D images in a Magic Eye book will likely agree, the effect of order suddenly emerging from chaos can be quite dramatic. Having discovered phasing while working with tape loops, and composing two important early works for spoken words on recorded tape, Reich sought to use the process in live instrumental music. The success of Violin Phase and Piano Phase, his first works of this kind, arose from the composer's realization that pitch patterns could be composed that, when off-shifted, would yield interesting new patterns of their own, thus creating an aural kaleidoscope. Since phasing and interlocking patterns are more discernable when sounds have a distinct attack, much of Reich's compositional thinking naturally lent itself to percussion instruments, and his tremendous expansion of the percussion repertoire has made him well-known in the percussion world. Though his music has changed and expanded over his career, gradual transformation, interlocking patterns, a fascination with extended processes, diatonic harmonies, and a preference for percussion instruments continue to pervade his musical language.The forum began with performances of two of the composer's pieces by Juilliard students. Nagoya Marimbas (1994), performed by percussionists Michael Caterisano and Luke Rinderknecht, and Music for Pieces of Wood (1973), performed by percussionists June Han, Zachary Knight, Joseph Nola, Eric Roberts, and Chihiro Shibayama, were both well received by the audience and the composer alike. A recording was also played of Reich's new work You Are (Variations) for chorus and orchestra, as recorded at a recent live performance by the Los Angeles Master Chorale at Disney Hall in Los Angeles.
When asked about his influences, Reich had much to say. He recalled the unusual format of his two-semester, undergraduate music history survey course at Cornell, taught by the late pianist and organist William Austin. Austin chose to include in the first semester the period up to the death of J.S. Bach, as well as the later period beginning with Debussy, Ravel, Stravinsky, and their contemporaries, excluding the music of the entire intervening span—the Classical and Romantic eras—which were covered in the second semester of his course. The distinction for Austin was between music that he saw as polyphonic in nature (the former category) and music largely homophonic in its conception (the latter). Reich declared his immediate preference, even at the time, for the first semester's material. The contrapuntal techniques of 12th- and 13th-century composers Leonin, Perotin, and Machaut have greatly inspired his work, as have Stravinsky and Charlie Parker. Reich sees his own musical thinking as emerging from the French tradition of Debussy, Ravel, and Stravinsky, rather than the German tradition of Beethoven, Brahms, and Wagner, asserting that "'minimalism' owes more to Debussy and Ravel, than it does to anything in the German tradition."An enormous influence upon Reich's language has been his study of Ghanian drumming and Balinese gamelan in the early 1970s. His study of Hebrew scriptural chanting in the late 1970s also brought a new dimension to his music, most notably heard in his first major vocal work Tehillim (1981), a setting of psalms in Hebrew.As for his interests in current music, Reich expressed an "enormous regard" for Estonian composer Arvo Part—"I think he's a master"—as well as the early music of Dutch composer Louie Andriessen. Among Americans, he spoke of Michael Gordon and David Lang as composers who, though initially influenced by him, have more recently themselves exerted some influence upon his own musical outlook.Though Mr. Reich's visit was technically one of the composition department's regular series of visiting lectures for composition students, the forum drew interest from many parts of the Juilliard community, from instrumental students and faculty to dancers. The extensive setting of Reich's music to dance prompted a question from the audience about his attitude toward this use of his work. Reich expressed a delight in being "danced to," as well as a tendency of his own, especially in his younger years, to dance around his studio (though, he added, "in no way you would want to see onstage, that's for sure"). And although he has never worked with dancers in direct collaboration, he believes his music is organically infused with his own urge to move. "I just write what I write, and it turns out that it's mostly danceable." He quoted poet Ezra Pound, saying, "Poetry atrophies when it gets too far from music, and music atrophies when it gets too far from dance."Reich has created a radical language of his own that has reverberated throughout our own culture, as well as around the world, and continues to have an enormous influence on young composers. Steve Reich's music has its champions and detractors, yet among the former, praise is quite often laden with superlatives. London's Guardian has said of him, "There's just a handful of living composers who can legitimately claim to have altered the direction of musical history and Steve Reich is one of them."Raymond J. Lustig is a master's student in composition.
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