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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 processes to create and explore musical concepts (for instance, Pendulum
Music and Four Organs). These compositions, marked by their use of repetitive
figures and phasing effects, 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 25 January 2007, Steve 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 would 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 (Reich composed a student piece for string orchestra)
and Darius Milhaud (1961–63) and earned a master's degree in composition.
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 loosely structured
aleatoric 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 example of process music is Pendulum Music (1968), which consists of the
sound of several microphones swinging over the loudspeakers to which they are
attached, producing feedback as they do so. (Pendulum Music was recorded 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 do not
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 had
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 harked back to earlier
pieces. The piece is based around a cycle of eleven chords introduced at the
beginning, followed by a small piece of music based around each chord, and finally
a return to the original cycle. The sections are aptly named "Pulses", Section
I-XI, and "Pulses". This was Reich's first attempt at writing for larger ensembles.
The increased number of performers resulted in more scope for psycho-acoustic
effects, which fascinated Reich, and he noted that he would 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 had 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 influence of
Biblical Cantillation, which he had 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 had not 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
political 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 will again be with tape, and he also states that
he is 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
prog-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
indierock 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.
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.
Source : Some of the information on this page came
from a Wikipedia article and is licensed under the GNU Documentation
License. ©2008 www.geneticmatrix.com.
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Steve
Reich - Manifesting Generator - Biography
