Steve Reich

Steve Reich, L.A. Weekly, January 14, 1983

The last time your music was performed here it was by your own ensemble. Why the Philharmonic this time around?

That's something that's happening more in general. Tehillim was played by the New York Philharmonic and recently by members of the San Francisco Symphony under John Adams. The piece I'm working on now is a commission that can only be done by orchestra; there's no way on earth that I could do it with my own ensemble. It's for full orchestra and a 16-to-36 voice chorus on the poems of William Carlos Williams.

I want all my pieces to to be done by other people. I never intended that we would have an exclusive on them. The point of the ensemble has always been to do a kind of "ideal" version, a version that would be, so far as I could understand it, as good as possible. But that wasn't supposed to be the end of the story, it was supposed to be the beginning.

And now, happily, other people are showing an interest in performing my work. I would say that the more recent pieces, starting with Octet, are being written with that more in mind. The instrumentation is not as odd. For example, to perform Music for 18 Musicians, you need four pianos, three marimbas, two xylophones, vibraphone -- just to get that hardware, you've spent several thousand dollars in rentals.

Do you find that these musicians are excited about performing your music?

Yes. I find that things are better -- I mean, when I was in my late twenties, early thirties, it seemed like orchestras were all composed of very elderly gentlemen of the sort who couldn't possibly do this kind of music. Now that I'm 46, the orchestras look like they're younger, more enthusiastic, and much more simpatico. That's the way of the world.

Do the pieces change when performed by an ensemble other than your own?

Oh sure. In San Francisco, for instance, John Adams said, "I think there's too much percussion in Tehillim." And rather than get upset, I said, "Okay, so keep it quiet." And he did a version of the piece that was sort of more luscious and rich and concentrated more on the sound of the chords and the sound of the singing and kept the sound of the percussion in the background. My comment to him was, "Just pretend I'm dead." Because I find interpretation interesting. I was once sent a tape of a performance of Six Pianos from Virginia. It started out incredibly slow, but after listening awhile I said, "Hey, this is kind of a Southern gentleman's version of it." It was correct, and it really began to swing.

I would rather learn something from how other people pick out the notation and decipher it than simply try to impose on them a version I have in my head. Because, basically, pieces that have any interest to musicians in general, that survive, have that parameter. They can be played a little bit faster, a little bit slower, or with a slight shift in balance, to accommodate the taste of the players, or the conductor, as the case may be.

When you began with the new vernacular -- the "minimal," percussive, repetitive style -- in what sort of musical community were you working?

Isolated. There was no one asking me questions like this or giving me grants, and I was driving a taxi. I had just gotten my MA, and I was working with friends. The whole idea of having an ensemble was basically, "How am I going to get a piece like Piano Phase played?" I had certain ideas in my head, and I called up Jon Gibson, whom I knew from Mills College, and Arthur Murphy, whom I knew from Juilliard, and that was the first ensemble. It was just two good friends.

But you had been in an academic environment?

Oh, of course. I'd been all through academic environments. I'd been through Cornell and Juilliard and Mills College, and I'd had it up to here. So I went out and got a job driving a taxi, 'cause I wasn't going to take a job teaching theory. My feeling at that point -- even as a student -- was that teaching was not really for me, that it would get in the way of composing rather than support it.

Had you started in a more traditional mode?

Sure. When I was doing my graduate work I was writing 12-tone music, and what I had done to accommodate that style -- which I never felt to be compatible with the basic musical intuitions I'd had since I was a teenager -- was not to invert the row, or to transpose it to another key center, or to make it go backward, but simply to repeat it over and over again. And that was so I could make musical something I felt to be unmusical. So I could sort of sneak the harmony in the back door -- the first three notes would always form some sort of chord, and the second four, and so on -- and when [Reich's teacher, composer Luciano] Berio saw that, he said, "If you want to write tonal music, why don't you write tonal music?"

Did you encounter any criticism along the lines of "Tonal music is regressive?"

I think in the middle Sixties people saw my work as something so avant-garde that they really didn't think of it in terms of a return to tonality. I was criticized for being too repetitious. Someone who listened to Four Organs or Piano Phase or Violin Phase -- especially back then -- might say, "Well, this is just going on and on. There's no change here at all." And, of course, if you're just doing the dishes or taking a fast listen, maybe that's the way it sounds. You have to listen in a little bit to hear the details, to ascertain that there is in fact a change. But some people simply wouldn't do that -- they would tune out. After two minutes of the same chord they would say, "Well, this isn't changing." And on one level, of course, they're quite right -- and goodbye and good luck. Other people would say, "Oh, that rhythmic position changed, that timbral position changed."

Did you have the feeling you were on to something new?

Yes, but I really felt like I was doing something that I wanted to do. I had been a drummer since 14. I'd been very interested in jazz, and played it a little bit. I had gone through music school and been exposed over and over again to 12-tone and then serial music, and I wondered, "How do I fit in to all this? Is this way I became a composer?" And the answer was no. So when this style got going I felt that I was finally inside of myself. That was really the main thing.

To what degree is your music a "version" of African or Balinese or Hebrew music?

Not at all. What happened is that in 1962 I went as part of Berio's class at Mills College to a composer's conference in Ojai. One of the composers there was Gunther Schuller, who was writing his history of early jazz. And Schuller said, "I wanted to know what Africans were doing before they came to America, and I have discovered a book called Studies in African Music, by A.M. Jones." And I wrote that down. I'd heard African music, and I'd thought it very exciting, it swung a lot, but I had no notion of how one could produce this sound. So I went back to the Berkeley library, got this book out -- two books, actually, a book of scores and a book of comment -- and I learned more from that than from what I'd heard. I didn't analyze with my ears how the stuff was being made, but with the scores you could see, "Aha, different repeating patterns with downbeats in different places, also subdivisions of twelve." That made a strong impression.

It wasn't until 1970 that I actually went to Africa. Between 1962 and 1970 I had written Piano Phase, Violin Phase, Phase Patterns, Four Organs -- a lot of pieces that used the phasing technique, that were in 12/8, that used repeating patterns. In going to Africa, I didn't learn anything that I hadn't learned in 1962, but I got a kind of pat on the back, a kind of, "Sure, it's okay. This is a way of making acoustic music that would be as complicated in sonority as electronic music. Yes, percussive instruments can be particularly complicated vis a vis their timbre and their overtone structure." So it was a kind of giant, "Go ahead, do this. There's precedent." Maybe not directly in the West, but as time passed, I began to see more and more precedents in the West, in the medieval and Renaissance periods. Because phasing and all that stuff is just a variety of contrapuntal canonic technique; it's just a new wrinkle on writing a canon, where the subject of the canon is much shorter, and instead of changing the intervals, you're changing the rhythmic position, that's all it is. In that respect, it's a neo-medieval or neo-Renaissance technique. Some people have said, "Well, it isn't Western," because it doesn't relate to the traditional sonata allegro. And if you ask how it relates to Haydn and Mozart through Wagner, the answer is "Not very closely." But Western music does not begin in 1760; let's look at 1750 and before -- then, aha, suddenly we have lots and lots of hard information that relates to what I do.

Tehillim grew out of your study of Hebrew cantillation. Were you drawn to that music out of an interest in its structure, or was the pull more spiritual?

I became curious about it because I am Jewish. I had been in Africa and had studied Balinese music, and it was very interesting to see these people who had an ancient tradition and were maintaining it, and what was going to happen to them vis a vis their contacts with the West and so on. And around 1974 I became interested in my own background, which I hadn't explored as a child. I was brought up Reform, which meant information-wise I was a zilch. And in learning the language -- Hebrew, which I started at the age of 37 -- I asked the Hebrew teacher, "What are these marks? They're not the vowels, they're not the consonants." He said, "That's the musical notation." So I became interested in cantillation at the point and studied it with a teacher in New York. That led to studying some forms in Jerusalem, where there were non-Western men -- men who were born in Kurdistan, or in India, or Iraq -- and in sum it became very clear to me that my interest in this music was very similar to my interest in African and Balinese music, because I wasn't brought up with it. It's something I learned in middle age -- or late youth [laughs]. What I found again that I could use comfortably was not sound, but how it was put together.

Are you generally as interested in structure as in what you flesh it out with?

Well, all that's irrelevant when the piece is done. Finally, what you've got is what you hear, and what you hear either moves you or it doesn't. And that is, I suppose, the bottom line. Certainly for the listener. And also for the player. Once that is attractive and moving and engaging, then you may move on to say, "Well, I wonder how he put it together." We think Bach is great not because he's so complicated but because he's so great -- and then we find out he's so complicated.

Who do you think makes up your audience?

Well, it's changed, I'm happy to say, so that I have less and less of a perception. My ideal audience is a sea of faces I know not at all [laughs]. That's just to say that it's the most flattering when you can't even predict who might be interested in your music. It used to be a mostly younger audience, but now I see some older faces. I like it. I like seeing punks and old fuddy-duddies and anything in between.

Do you think your music is accessible, and does that matter?

I don't know. I am how I am. I'm sure I'm more accessible than Arnold Schoenberg. You certainly can make a decision to become more accessible. I never have. I've always written as I wanted to, and it's turned out that most of what I do is fairly accessible. I'm happy with that. I'm at ease with it. I liked a lot of popular sources, loved jazz, had some interest in pop music, Broadway show-type pop music when I was a kid. And in a sense it's poetic justice -- the things that interested me when I was very young are now coming out in my own music and attracting people from the popular audience as well as the classical audience. But it's never been a conscious decision.

Do you hear your work reflected in younger pop or serious composers?

Yes, both. I met Eno back in 1974 in London. I'm flattered and pleased -- except that I'd like a check some time [laughs]. I'm glad to see that it's a two-way street -- you know, that I could learn something from John Coltrane, and Eno could get something from me. It all makes some kind of loose sense to me. And I'm perhaps even more pleased that there are people like John Adams, who seems to have learned something from me, and who I think is just an enormously talented and wonderful young composer.

You pretty much embody the current "big thing" in serious music. Do you hear anything exciting coming after minimalism?

Well, you know, we're living in a time when a lot of old ideas are being brought out. There's a not of neoclassicism being done. I've recently been getting to know David del Tredici, who I think is avery, very good composer, very different from myself. And there's George Rochberg. In Europe, most of the young people -- I mean people in their twenties and thirties -- are writing stuff that could pass for Richard Strauss, or Brahms. It's not the same, but the overall gestalt is much closer to that than it is to post-minimalism or anything else. Then there are people in New York who are coming out of rock. Laurie Anderson -- I only know "O Superman" and a couple other things. I like what she's doing. I think of her more as a popular artist, and a very, very good one -- the way Gershwin was really first-rate.

I guess the answer would have to be that as far as a major new technique that makes you say, "Wow," no, not yet, no. But that may be my ignorance, because it very well may be happening out in the Mission District of San Francisco or out here in one of the canyons, and it just hasn't bubbled up far enough for me to know about it.

Do you see divisions between types of music -- folk, popular, serious -- as useful?

Sure. Everything is what it is. I think it's good to distinguish differences -- I don't think that's necessarily a value judgment. Whether Charlie Parker is as great or not as great as Bela Bartok is not a question I would want to answer. Or John Coltrane vis a vis Pierre Boulez. I think those are silly questions. Or George Gershwin vis a vis Aaron Copland. I think there are great artists, and they emerge in different fields, and their work survives and endures. And I think you can observe that one comes out of Tin Pan Alley and another comes out of a conservatory. But that isn't a value judgment. That's simply knowing that this is green with spots and that is purple with stripes.

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