Reich, Steve (EN)

Reich /raɪʃ/ Steve, actually Stephen Michael Reich, *3 October 1936 New York, American composer. As a child, he learned to play the piano, and from the age of 14, to play the percussion with R. Kohloff. From 1953–57 he studied at Cornell University, where he graduated in philosophy and took several music courses with W. Austin. In 1957–58 he studied composition privately with H. Overton in New York, in 1958–61 with W. Bergsma and V. Persichetti at the Juilliard School of Music; there, from 1961–63, he obtained his Master of Arts degree from D. Milhaud and L. Beria at Mills College in Oakland (California). For the next few years, Reich stayed in San Francisco, where his solo concert took place. In 1966 he went back to New York and, together with A. Murphy and J. Gibson, formed the ensemble “Steve Reich and Musicians”, which later expanded to over 20 musicians, with whom he continues to perform his own works to this day. First concerts of his music took place in galleries and museums, which were centres of experimental art. From 1967–71, Reich was lecturer at the New School for Social Research in New York. In the summer of 1970, he went to Ghana to study percussion at the Institute for African Studies at the University of Ghana in Accra with G. Alorwoyie, an outstanding percussionist from the Ewe people. In 1973 and 1974, Reich studied gamelan with Balinese musicians at seminars of the American Society for Eastern Arts in Seattle and Berkeley, while in 1976 and 1977 he studied Hebrew, Torah and traditional forms of Hebrew Psalmody in New York and Jerusalem. Reich’s first European tour took place in 1971, which included performances in Paris and London. His numerous grants, which he received in the 1970s, including, from the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York State Council on the Arts, enabled him to devote himself exclusively to composing and performing his own musical works. In 1987, the movie Steve Reich. A New Musical Language was filmed, directed by Margaret Williams. In 1997, the 10-CD album Steve Reich was released by Nonesuch Records. Works: 1965–1995. In 1999, retrospective concerts of Reich’s music were presented as part of the Lincoln Center Festival in New York. In 2000, the composer was honoured with a Regent’s Lectureship at the University of California, Berkeley, and was named Composer of the Year by “Musical America” magazine. In 2006, Reich celebrated his 70th birthday. On this occasion, festivals and concerts of his music were organised all over the world. In 2008, the composer donated documentation of his work to the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel, including, autographs of works, letters, recordings, and photographs. Reich was a guest at the 9th edition of the Sacrum Profanum festival, devoted to the presentation of American music, in 2011 in Kraków, at which his works (including the video opera Three Tales) were performed. In 2016, he was awarded the dignity of Deb’s Composer’s Chair at Carnegie Hall, which position he held until 2017. In the 2016/2017 concert season, over 400 concerts of Reich’s music took place in more than 20 countries around the world, including concert series and festivals in New York, San Francisco, London, Paris, Tokyo, Cologne, and Toronto, to celebrate the composer’s 80th birthday.

Reich has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1994 and the Bayerische Akademie der Schönen Künste since 1995. In 1999, he was awarded the title Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et Lettres. Reich is the winner of Grammy Awards for Different Trains (1990) and for Music for 18 Musicians (1999), and he was also awarded the Schuman Prize from Columbia University (2000). Reich was also awarded with Pulitzer Prize in Music for Double Sextet (2009), Praemium Imperiale award in Tokyo (2006), Polar Music Prize (2007), BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award (2013), Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement in Music from the Venice Biennale (2014), Nemmers Prize in Music Composition from the Northwestern University (2016), Grand Prix artistique de la Fondation Simone et Cino Del Duca (2019), Edward McDowell Medal (2005), and the Gold Medal in Music of American Academy of Arts and Letters (2012). The composer was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the California Institute of the Arts (2000), Juilliard School in New York (2009), New England Conservatory of Music (2011), Royal College of Music in London (2016), and the Liszt Academy in Budapest.

Reich, along with Ph. Glass, T. Riley, and L.M. Young is one of the creators and main representatives of the minimal music in American music. Minimalism appeared in the 1960s in the United States as an opposition opposed to both serial music and aleatorism. Its main features were the multiple repetition of motifs and concordances, material and technical limitation, the use of long tones and long-lasting concordances, neotonality and static form. Reich’s early works included: Pitch Charts, soundtrack to the movie The Plastic Haircut, with the usage of collage technique, and piece for a tape Livelihood, referring to “musique concrète”. The feature heralding the minimalist trend was the limitation of musical material in the composition Pitch Charts, in which the musicians performed the same set of pitches, but each could play it in any rhythm. The assumptions of minimalism are fully evident in Reich’s works from 1965–70, almost all of which are composed in a phase shifting technique. For Reich, the term “phase” is not just a spatiotemporal concept but signifies the basis of a compositional technique (phasing), which involves simultaneous shifts of motifs or phrases. In fact, this discovery contributed to the imperfection of tape recorders, which, when working simultaneously, did not have exactly the same speed. The principle common to works written in this technique was the occurrence of two identical, constantly repeated melodic or rhythmic models, which were at first performed in unison. Later, one of the models gradually accelerated and overtook the repeated second model. The temporal separation between the two models became progressively clearer until the sound of both models returned in unison. Reich first used this technique in the compositions for the tape It’s Gonna Rain and Come Out. A shared feature of these works was that they were both recorded on tape in the form of short, spoken sentences, which, due to the small difference in tape speed in the tape recorders, gradually became more and more divergent. By using speech in this way, it was possible to distinguish the melodic, rhythmic, and even harmonic layers in the compositions. In Piano Phase for 2 pianos, Reich applied the phase-shifting to purely instrumental music. In this composition, the first pianist repeats a phrase at one tempo, while the second performer begins to play faster than the other, consequently resulting in a difference in sound in the subsequent bars. The analogous composition to the mentioned above, Violin Phase, Reich used four instead of two instrumental voices. It features 4 identical, simultaneous sounding melodic-rhythmic patterns, shifted in relation to each other by different rhythmic units. This results in a harmonic structure in which melodies or melo-rhythmic one- or two-voice structures, which the composer referred to as ‘resulting patterns’, can be distinguished aurally by writing them into the main violin part. Most of Reich’s compositions and especially his works from the 1970s, can be described as ‘repetitive’. Their most important feature is the constant repetition of sounds, motifs, short melodies (or short groupings of motifs and sounds) and sometimes consonances and their groupings. Phase-shifting and repetition techniques are also used in Drumming, but this piece stands out because the composer has experimented in it by gradually reducing rests in favour of beating sounds (or vice versa). The rhythms of the dance music of the Ewe tribe from Ghana, performed on percussion instruments, were the source of inspiration for this composition. In Reich’s subsequent works, the structure is enriched through the use of rhythmic constructions, augmentation, and the replacement of rests with beats (Six Pianos, Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices and Organ and Music for Pieces of Wood). Despite rhythmicity still being the basic principle of structural design, the formal division of these works is dictated by diatonic function. In Music for 18 Musicians characteristic are pulsating chord sounds, which can last for any desired duration, with each of the chords serving as the fundamental sonic basis for a given musical section. The flow of the composition involves slow, gradual transitions from one chord to the next. In addition, an interesting principle from the tradition of Balinese gamelan music is included, by which the drummer shouts to give the signal to transition to the next fragment. In Music for 18 Musicians the signal marking the transitions to the next chord is played on the metallophone. This work is a breakthrough in Reich’s oeuvre due to the enrichment of the harmonic-melodic layer and the enlargement of the cast of instruments. His subsequent compositions also move in this direction: Music for a Large Ensemble, Octet and Variations for Winds, Strings and Keyboards. Reich’s compositions from the 1960s and 1970s are the realisation of his concept of music as a gradual process, particularly his compositions using the phase-shifting technique. It was described by the composer in his essay Music as a Gradual Process from 1968, published in Writings about Music. According to Reich, music is a gradual process, similar to the flow of sand in an hourglass or an unbalanced swing coming to rest. Listening to or performing music is a kind of ritual that involves focusing one’s attention on the process of its shaping. The composer used repetition technique in Vermont Counterpoint, New York Counterpoint, and Electric Counterpoint. Each composition features one instrument playing with a group of instruments of the same type or with parts of these instruments recorded on tape. Main part of the instrument is not treated as solo, but as an individual part, interacting with the others. Canon is one of the most important technical resources in these works. Composer’s inspiration from jazz music is evident in both New York Counterpoint, and Sextet. Reich, in several compositions from the 1980s, influenced by his study of liturgical chants and Hebrew recitations, gave an important role to melody. This tendency can be seen in his vocal and instrumental compositions (Tehillim for voices and ensemble, The Desert Music for choir and orchestra) and in orchestra pieces (Three Movements and The Four Sections). Tehillim is a religious work, which uses the texts of 4 psalms in Hebrew. In this work, the rhythmicity, versification, and intonation of the psalms determine the metre, rhythm, melody, and formal division of the work. In The Desert Music evident are influences from jazz and contemporary English choral music. The Four Sections is a concerto for orchestra, in which the individual sections, including, strings, percussions, and woodwinds have the role of a concertato. The contrapuntal technique (characteristic interweaving of melodies played by the same groups of instruments), and repetition technique. Reich in his symphonic and vocal compositions from the 1980s sought more and more different inspirations. However, there are still some common features between works from this period and those from earlier years, such as repetition technique, the use of canons and the occurrence of tonal centres.

The composer used in Different Trains, and video operas The Cave and Three Tales a technique of manipulating the text, which originated in the tape-based compositions from the 1960s. In these works, speech, quoted from the tape simultaneously with the “background” music played on acoustic instruments, shapes the musical development of the works. These compositions have characteristics of a musical document, a record of history. Different Trains is a three-movement piece: I. America – Before the War, II. Europe – During the War, III. After the War. This is also an autobiographical piece, because it thematically refers to the composer’s childhood, when Reich travelled by train from New York to Los Angeles with his teacher, Virginia, in 1939–42. The second part of the work reflects the tragedy of the Jewish people during the Second World War in Europe. In this composition, the voices of Virginia, L. Davis, a retired railwayman, and Rachella, Paul and Rachel, Holocaust survivors, are played from tape. Reich also used train sounds of whistles from the 1930s and 1940s (captured on tape using computer technology), the sound of a siren and a warning bell. Different Trains can be performed by a string quartet with a tape-based accompaniment on which the parts of the 3 string quartets have been recorded, or by a string ensemble. Spoken sentences and phrases (musicalised with sampling by using synthesisers and a computer) are repeated in the course of the piece. Their melody and rhythm are faithfully reproduced by instruments. Musicalised spoken phrases also determine the tempo and tonal sphere of a particular section of the piece.

Video opera The Cave was a collaboration between Reich and visual artist and director Beryl Korot, the composer’s wife since 1976. Subject of Reich’s work is again Jewish issues; this piece presents the story of Abraham and his family. During the performance, five screens are placed on the stage, on which the faces of various people appear alongside artistic motifs. The figures appearing on the screens are Jews, Arabs and Americans who gave interviews to the composer and director. Sentences and phrases spoken by the interviewees are repeated canonically by a string quartet, faithfully imitating the melody and rhythm of the speech. The screens also show the text from the Book of Genesis in 3 modern languages and the original version in Hebrew. The vocal ensemble performing on stage sings biblical texts, always in a duet or quartet. In City Life Reich continues to use the sounds of the outside world, using both speech and the sounds of New York, including the sounds of car alarms, pile driver, sirens, and aeroplane brakes. Reich in his video opera Three Tales adopted the principle of adapting spoken fragments to music by means of two new techniques. The first he described as “slow motion sound”, which means slowing down the tempo of the used part of a person’s speech without changing the pitch and timbre, while the second involves lengthening the duration of one vowel in the speech. In the visual layer, B. Korot used videos, photographs, texts, and interviews recorded on video tape. In the following parts of the work, the authors covered topics such as the crash of the German zeppelin Hindenburg in 1937 in Lakehurst, New Jersey, nuclear testing at Bikini Atoll in 1946–52 and genetic engineering (among others, cloning of Dolly the sheep in 1997 in Scotland). Both Three Tales, and The Cave are examples of innovative musical genres between “musical documentary” and opera.

Experimental tendencies are clear in Reich’s works composed in the first decades of the 21st century. For instance, in the single movement work Runner, which consists of 5 internal parts, the idea of symmetry in formal structure emerges. The composer, while maintaining a constant tempo, introduces in the first three parts of the work as the dominant rhythmic values in the musical progression, successively, semiquavers, quavers, crotchets and longer note values than these, and in the fourth and fifth movements successively quavers and semiquavers. Social themes are brought up again in some works from this period. In the 2nd and 4th movements of Daniel Varations, the composer used the words of the American journalist Daniel Pearl, who was kidnapped and murdered by terrorists in Pakistan, and juxtaposed them with a text from the biblical Book of Daniel, introduced in movements 1 and 3. Reich’s WTC 9/11 is a piece composed nine years after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. Composer used in it, among others, recordings of conversations conducted by North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), fragments from interviews conducted by the composer in 2010 with people who were in buildings nearby during the attacks, a firefighter, and an ambulance driver who participated in the rescue operation, it also includes a recording of a singing cantor from a synagogue in New York.

The artistic personality of Reich is expressed both in conducting musical experiments and in creating new theoretical concepts of contemporary music. The strongest connection to minimal music in his compositions can be found in those that use the phase shifting technique, and those based on musical material with motifs which consist of several notes. However, even in later works, the idea of repetition of small musical motifs associates these works, extended in ensemble and compositional resources, with minimalism. The creation of an original and inspiring musical style, despite the variety of influences it contains, places Reich among the most outstanding creators of contemporary music.

Literature: Reich, S., Conversations, conversations conducted by Reich with composers, visual artists, performers of his works and collaborators about his work, Toronto 2022; interviews with the composer: Nyman, M., “The Musical Times” CXII, 1971, E. Wasserman Interview with Steve Reich, “Art Forum” X, 1972, Nyman, M. Steve Reich, “Musie and Musicians” XXV, 1977, Lohnet, H., Musik ist immer ethnische Musik. Ein Gespräch mit Steve Reich, “Neue Zeitschrift für Musik” CXLVII, 1986, Gronemeyer, G., Vorwärts und zurück, “MusikTexte” No. 26, 1988, Steve Reich (b. 1936), published in: McCutchan, A., The Muse that Sings. Composers Speak about the Creative Process, Oxford 1999, Steve Reich (b. New York, 1936), published in: Duckworth, W., Talking Music. Conversations with J. Cage, Ph. Glass, L. Anderson, and Five Generations of American Experimental Composers, New York 1999, Steve Reich. Taking A Different Train, published in: Th. Rain Crowe & Watkins, N., Rare Birds. Conversations with Legends of Jazz and Classical Music, Jackson 2008; Nyman, M., Steve Reich – Mysteries of the Phase, “Music and Musicians” XX, 1972; Gottwald, C., Signale zwischen Exotik und Industrie. Steve Reich auf der Suche nach einer neuen Identität von Klang und Struktur, “Melos/”Neue Zeitschrift für Musik”” I, 1975 and Steve Reich. Signale zwischen Exotik und Industrie (II), published in Avantgarde, Jazz, Pop. Tendenzen zwischen Tonalität und Atonalität, edited by Brinkmann, R., Mainz 1978; Schwarz, K.R., Steve Reich. Music as a Gradual Process, “Perspectives of New Music” XIX, 1980 i XX, 1981/82; Mertens, W., De amerikaanse repetitieve muziek, Bierbeek 1980, English edition American Minimal Music, translated by Hautekiet, J., London 1983; Ch. Fox Steve Reichs “Different Trains”, “Tempo” No. 172, 1990; Strickland, E., Minimalism. Origins, Bloomington (Indiana) 1993; Skowron, Z., W kręgu postmodernizmu, published in: Skowron, Z., Nowa muzyka amerykańska, Kraków 1995, 2nd edition 2011; Schwarz, K.R., Minimalists, London 1996; Potter, K., Four Musical Minimalists. L.M. Young, T. Riley, S. Reich, Ph. Glass, Cambridge 2000; Nyman, M., Muzyka minimalistyczna, nowa tonalność i zdeterminowanie (original title Minimal music, determinacy and the new tonality), published in: Nyman, M., Muzyka eksperymentalna. Cage i po Cage’u (original title Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond), translation into Polish Mendyk, M., Gdańsk 2011; Atkinson, S., Canons, Augmentations, and Their Meaning in Two Works by Steve Reich, “Music Theory Online” XVII, 2011 No. 1; Kvistad, G.M., Rhythmic techniques and psychoacoustic effects of the percussion music of Steve Reich, “The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America” CXXXIV, 2013 No. 5; Miklaszewska, J., Contemporary Music Documenting the Nazi Terror: Steve Reich’s ‘Different Trains’, “The Polish Journal of the Arts and Culture” No. 8 (5/2013); Hartenberger, R., Performance Practice in the Musci of Steve Reich, Cambridge 2016; Pitrus, A., “Three Tales” by Steve Reich and Beryl Korot – Sounds, Samples and Representations, “Ars et Praxis” No. 6, 2018; Rethinking Reich, edited by Gopinath, S. & ap Sion, P., New York 2019; Bakker, T. & ap Sion, P., The Order of Things. Analysis and Sketch Study in Two Works by Steve Reich, “Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft für Musiktheorie” XVI, 2019 No. 1; Duplay, M., Le lyrisme du détail dans “The Cave” de Steve Reich et Beryl Korot, „Revue française d’études américaines” CLX, 2019 No. 3; Văidean, V., Hearing Voices. Speech Melody in the Music of Steve Reich, published in: A Tribute to György Ligeti in His Native Transylvania, No. 1–2, Book 2 of the conferences organised within Cluj-Napoca festivals of G. Ligeti’s music in 2016 and 2018, edited by Temeş, B. Ţ. & Agawu, K., Cluj-Napoca 2020.