Rethinking Reich 9780190605285, 0190605286

Table of contents :
Cover
Rethinking Reich
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgments
Copyright Permissions
List of Contributors
Introduction
I Political, Aesthetic, and Analytical Concerns
1 “Departing to Other Spheres”: Psychedelic Science Fiction, Perspectival Embodiment, and the Hermeneutics of Steve Reich’s Four Organs
2 “Moving Forward, Looking Back”: Resulting Patterns, Extended Melodies, Eight Lines, and the influence of the West on Steve Reich
3 Different Tracks: Narrative Sequence, Harmonic (Dis)continuity, and Structural Organization in Steve Reich’s Different Trains and The Cave
4 “We Are Not Trying to Make a Political Piece”: The Reconciliatory Aesthetic of Steve Reich and Beryl Korot’s The Cave
II Repetition, Speech, and Identity
5 Repetition, Speech, and Authority in Steve Reich’s “Jewish” Music
6 Steve Reich’s Dramatic Sound Collage for the Harlem Six: Toward a Prehistory of Come Out
7. From World War II to the “War on Terror”: An Examination of Steve Reich’s “Docu-​Music” Approach in WTC 9/​11
III Reich Revisited: Sketch Studies
8 “Save as . . . »”: Hybrid Resources in the Steve Reich Collection
9 Sketching a New Tonality: A Preliminary Assessment of Steve Reich’s Sketches for Music for 18 Musicians in Telling the Story of This Work’s Approach to Tonality
10 Improvisation, Two Variations on a Watermelon, and a New Timeline for Piano Phase
11 Steve Reich’s Counterpoints and Computers: Rethinking the 1980s
IV Beyond the West: Africa and Asia
12 Afro-​Electric Counterpoint
13 That’s All It Does: Steve Reich and Balinese Gamelan
14 “Machine Fantasies into Human Events”: Reich and Technology in the 1970s
Works Cited
Index

Citation preview

Rethinking Reich

Rethinking Reich EDITED BY

Sumanth Gopinath Pwyll ap Siôn

1

1 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © Oxford University Press 2019 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Gopinath, Sumanth S. | Pwyll ap Siôn. Title: Rethinking Reich / edited by Sumanth Gopinath and Pwyll ap Siôn. Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018041188 | ISBN 9780190605285 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780190605292 (pbk. : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Reich, Steve, 1936—Criticism and interpretation. | Minimal music—History and criticism. Classification: LCC ML410.R27 R47 2019 | DDC 780.92—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018041188 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Paperback printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America Hardback printed by Bridgeport National Bindery, Inc., United States of America

To Beth and Nia, and dedicated to John Thomas Becker (1986–2017) and Dafydd Tomos Dafis (1958–2017)—two close friends who were also very talented musicians. They will be missed.

Contents

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Acknowledgments Copyright Permissions List of Contributors Introduction: Reich in Context Sumanth Gopinath and Pwyll ap Siôn

1

I Political, Aesthetic, and Analytical Concerns

1 “Departing to Other Spheres”: Psychedelic Science Fiction, Perspectival Embodiment, and the Hermeneutics of Steve Reich’s Four Organs Sumanth Gopinath

2 “Moving Forward, Looking Back”: Resulting Patterns, Extended

Melodies, Eight Lines, and the influence of the West on Steve Reich Pwyll ap Siôn

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3 Different Tracks: Narrative Sequence, Harmonic (Dis)continuity, and Structural Organization in Steve Reich’s Different Trains and The Cave Maarten Beirens

4 “We Are Not Trying to Make a Political Piece”: The Reconciliatory Aesthetic of Steve Reich and Beryl Korot’s The Cave Ryan Ebright

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II Repetition, Speech, and Identity

5 Repetition, Speech, and Authority in Steve Reich’s “Jewish” Music Robert Fink

6 Steve Reich’s Dramatic Sound Collage for the Harlem Six: Toward a Prehistory of Come Out John Pymm

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7. From World War II to the “War on Terror”: An Examination of Steve Reich’s “Docu-Music” Approach in WTC 9/11 Celia Casey

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III Reich Revisited: Sketch Studies

8 “Save as . . . »”: Hybrid Resources in the Steve Reich Collection Matthias Kassel

179

9 Sketching a New Tonality: A Preliminary Assessment of Steve

Reich’s Sketches for Music for 18 Musicians in Telling the Story of This Work’s Approach to Tonality Keith Potter

10 Improvisation, Two Variations on a Watermelon, and a New Timeline for Piano Phase David Chapman

11 Steve Reich’s Counterpoints and Computers: Rethinking the 1980s Twila Bakker

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217 239

IV Beyond the West: Africa and Asia

12 Afro-Electric Counterpoint

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13 That’s All It Does: Steve Reich and Balinese Gamelan

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Martin Scherzinger Michael Tenzer

14 “Machine Fantasies into Human Events”: Reich and Technology in the 1970s Kerry O’Brien

Works Cited Index

323 345 369

Acknowledgments The two editors of this volume would like to thank the following: The Paul Sacher Stiftung, Basel, and all the scholars and staff there, especially Matthias Kassel (curator of the Steve Reich collection), Tina Kilvio Tüscher, and Isolde Degen; Oxford University Press, especially Suzanne Ryan, who provided much-needed guidance, advice, and encouragement from our initial, tentative proposals to the final publication; also Vika Kouznetsov, Lauralee Yeary, Jamie Kim, Adam Cohen, Dan Gibney, Eden Piacitelli and all those at Oxford University Press who have assisted with copyediting and indexing; Christina Nisha Paul (Project Manager for Newgen Knowledge Works), Sangeetha Vishwanthan, Susan Ecklund, and Pilar Wyman; Janis Susskind, Mike Williams and Tyler Rubin at Boosey & Hawkes; Katie Havelock and Matthew Rankin at Nonesuch Records; Livia Necasova at Universal Edition; Philip Rupprecht, Laura Tunbridge, and Marianne Wheeldon, as editors of previous volumes in the Rethinking series for readily sharing valuable advice; Lynda Corey Claassen (Director of Special Collections & Archives at UC San Diego Library), Shelley Freeman; Josh Rutter for his willingness to participate in this project and his contributions to it. The editors also wish to thank all the contributors to this volume for their willingness to respond to requests for changes, corrections and additions; and for their patience throughout the publication process. Sumanth Gopinath wishes to thank friends and family, especially his partner Beth, his parents, Sudhir and Madhura, and his brother, Shamin, for their unwavering support and love; Pat McCreless, Michael Veal, Michael Denning, Hazel Carby, Paul Gilroy, Robert Morgan, Jim Hepokoski, John MacKay, Greg Dubinsky, Michael Friedmann, Matthew Suttor, and other faculty members who were important influences on his work on Reich while in graduate school; Beth Hartman, Robert Adlington, Jonathan Bernard, Trevor Bača, Seth Brodsky, Thomas Campbell, Michael Cherlin, Eva R. Cohen, James Dillon, Eric Drott, Gabrielle Gopinath, Ted Gordon, Russell Hartenberger, Michael Klein, Matthew McDonald, Leta Miller, Ian Quinn, Rob Slifkin, Jason Stanyek, Vic Szabo, his co-editor and all of the contributors to this volume, all graduate students participating in his “Musical Minimalisms” seminar between 2005 and 2018, his colleagues in the music theory division (Matt Bribitzer-Stull, David Damschroder, and Bruce Quaglia) and School of Music at the University of Minnesota, and many other interlocutors on Reich and minimalism over ix

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the years, for their innumerable insights; the Paul Sacher Stiftung, Basel, for a fellowship to study there for a month in August 2015; and the University of Minnesota, for a research grant from the Imagine Fund. Pwyll ap Siôn wishes to thank friends and family, especially his partner Nia; his parents Morwen and John; Tomos and Osian, staff and colleagues at the School of Music, Bangor University; doctoral students who helped in various ways with this publication, especially Twila Bakker and Tristian Evans; Bangor University for granting a period of research leave during 2015–16; the British Academy for the award of a Small Research Grant in 2014–15 to visit the Paul Sacher Stiftung, Basel; the Leverhulme Trust for the award of a Research Fellowship in 2016– 17 to carry out further research on the music of Steve Reich, especially Anna Grundy; Nikki Morgan and Martin Rigby for providing English translations to German texts; Rafael Prado and the Fundación BBVA in Madrid; and belated thanks to Bryony Dawkes for the Grainger excerpts.

Copyright Permissions The following figures, tables and examples have been reproduced with kind permission from the Steve Reich Collection, Paul Sacher Foundation (PSS), Basel Figure  1.1 An approximate transcription of Reich’s sketchbook doodle, August 14, 1969, Sketchbook [1]. Table  3.1 List of harmonies attributed to each scene of act 2 of The Cave, transcribed from the composer’s Sketchbook [42]. Example 3.1 Speech melodies in The Cave from the first Hagar scene, act 1 (1993 version). Example  3.2 Sample and harmonies from The Cave, act 1 (“Isaac” scene) as notated in Reich’s sketchbook, Sketchbook [41]. Example 4.1 Transcription of entry dated July 22, 1990, in Sketchbook [41]. Table 4.2 Fragment from “Abraham & Nimrod” computer document. Table  6.1 Arrangement of tape transcription, sourced from SR CD-3 Track 5 entitled Harlem’s Six Condemned. Table 7.1 Steve Reich’s list of interview questions for WTC 9/11 (2010). Example 7.1 Compositional sketch dated “7/28/10”. Figure 8.1 Steve Reich, Different Trains (1988), screenshot of the folder structure in list form. Figure 8.2 Steve Reich, Different Trains (1988), screenshot of the folder structure in expanded list form. Example  9.1 February 1, 1989:  untitled sketch for Music for 18 Musicians, recopying of “cycle of 11 chords,” dated “2/1/89,” Sketchbook [39], whole page. Example  9.2 February 20, 1975:  “Work in Progress for  .  .  .  18 Musicians,” ten pulsing chords, treble only, dated “2/20/75,” Sketchbook [15], first two staves only. Example  9.3 March 14, 1975:  “Opening Pulse—revision & expansion,” dated “March 14,” Sketchbook [15]. Example  9.4 April 28, 1974:  untitled sketch for pulse and oscillating chords, dated “4/28” Sketchbook [13] whole page.

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Example  9.5 December 4, 1974:  untitled sketch for a sequence of four-part chords, on page dated both “12/2” and “12/4” Sketchbook [14] whole page. Example 10.2 Transcribed selection from Reich’s first Variation on a Watermelon (digitized archival recording of March 19, 1967 performance at Park Place Gallery). Table 10.3 Fairleigh-Dickinson University Program, January 5, 1967, in folder “Programme Jan 1967”. Chapter 10, Appendix 1 Transcription of the March 1967 Performance of the second Variation on a Watermelon (digitized archival recording of March 19, 1967 performance at Park Place Gallery). Chapter 10, Appendix 2 The Piano Phase improvisation, January 1967 (digitized archival recording of January 5, 1967, performance at Fairleigh-Dickinson University Art Gallery). Table 11.2 Comparison of select early Electric Counterpoint computer files. Figure 12.1 Reich’s sketch for Clapping Music and Music for Pieces of Wood. Example 12.12 Transcription of Reich’s final sketch for Electric Counterpoint. Table 13.1 List of recordings of Balinese gamelan in Reich’s collection. Example 14.1 Reich’s Four Log Drums, mm. 4–5. Example 14.2 Music for 18 Musicians manuscript [2/10], p. 1, mm. 1–8. Example 14.3 Music for 18 Musicians manuscript [2/10], p. 84, mm. 577–82. All text references, transcriptions of (or from) interviews taken from sources kept at the Steve Reich Collection, including the composer’s own comments and/or annotations, have been used with permission from the Paul Sacher Foundation.

Copyright permissions from other sources: Front Cover: Steve Reich during a rehearsal of Music for 18 Musicians, New York, March 1976. Photograph by Betty Freeman © Copyright Shelley Freeman (with thanks to Lynda Corey Claassen, Director of Special Collections & Archives, Mandeville Special Collections, UC San Diego Library, and Matthias Kassel at the Paul Sacher Stiftung). Example 1.4 Reduction of Four Organs, m. 11. © Copyright 1980 by Universal Edition (London) Ltd., London/UE16183. Reproduced by permission. Example  2.2 Flute melody and piano 1 part in Eight Lines, rehearsal 74A © Copyright 1980 Hendon Music, Inc., a Boosey & Hawkes company. Reproduced by permission of Boosey & Hawkes Music Publishers Ltd.

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Example  2.4 Extended melody in flute in opening section of Eight Lines, rehearsal 11. © Copyright 1980 Hendon Music, Inc., a Boosey & Hawkes company. Reproduced by permission of Boosey & Hawkes Music Publishers Ltd. Example  5.1 Reich, The Cave, act 1, scene 1, mm. 10–30. The Cave by Steve Reich and Beryl Korot © Copyright 1993 by Hendon Music, Inc., a Boosey & Hawkes company. Reproduced by permission of Boosey & Hawkes Music Publishers Ltd. Example 5.2 Reich, The Cave, act 1, scene 7, mm. 1–16. The Cave by Steve Reich and Beryl Korot © Copyright 1993 by Hendon Music, Inc., a Boosey & Hawkes company. Reproduced by permission of Boosey & Hawkes Music Publishers Ltd. Figure  10.1 Reich demonstrating the “stacked-hand” disposition in Piano Phase (source: Steve Reich: Phase to Face, dir. Éric Darmon and Frank Mallet). Illustration by Stephanie Fitzgerald. Used with permission. Figure  14.1 Four Log Drums at the Whitney Museum of American Art (May 27, 1969). Photograph © Richard Landry Figure  14.2 An image from the documentary Wasserpfeifen in New  York: Musikalische Avantgarde zwischen Ideologie und Elektronik [45:46] (reproduced in New Music:  Sounds and Voices from the Avant-Garde [44:32]). © Michael Blackwood Productions Inc. The format for indicating minutes and seconds in this volume is as follows: 04:33

Contributors Pwyll ap Siôn is Professor of Music at Bangor University, Wales. His publications include The Music of Michael Nyman (2007) and Michael Nyman:  Collected Writings. He coedited The Ashgate Research Companion to Minimalist and Postminimalist Music (2013) with Keith Potter and Kyle Gann, and has contributed articles and reviews to Contemporary Music Review, TwentiethCentury Music, and Performance Practice Review. In 2016, he received a Leverhulme Research Fellowship to focus on the music of Steve Reich. He also contributes regularly to Gramophone music magazine. Twila Bakker completed her doctorate in musicology at Bangor University, Wales, in 2016, focusing on Steve Reich’s Counterpoint pieces. Her current research, supported by a 2018 Paul Sacher Foundation research grant, addresses digital sketch studies utilizing Reich’s compositional output as a case study. Bakker is a committee member of the Society for Minimalist Music and holds previous degrees in music and history from the University of Victoria and the University of Alberta, Canada. Maarten Beirens studied musicology at the Catholic University of Leuven (KU Leuven), Belgium, where he was awarded a PhD in 2005 for his thesis on European minimal music. He then held a postdoctoral fellowship awarded by FWO Flanders at KU Leuven, conducting research on the music of Steve Reich, before being appointed lecturer in musicology at the University of Amsterdam. He contributed a chapter to The Ashgate Research Companion to Minimalist and Postminimalist Music (2013). Other publications have appeared in the Revue Belge de Musicologie, Tempo, and Contemporary Music Review. Celia Casey submitted her doctorate in musicology at the University of Queensland, Australia, in 2018, researching the creative process in Steve Reich’s speech works. Prior to this, her first-class honors thesis investigated aspects of Erik Satie’s contribution to conceptual art. Her research has benefited from interviews with Reich and from the support of a Paul Sacher Foundation research grant and travel awards from the University of Queensland, allowing several visits to the Paul Sacher Foundation, Basel, to undertake sketch studies. She has performed widely as a cellist and vocalist and is currently employed by the Queensland Symphony Orchestra. David Chapman is Assistant Professor of Music at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology in Terre Haute, Indiana, where he teaches music history and theory to engineers, mathematicians, and scientists. His research focuses primarily xv

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on the role of performance, improvisation, and ensembles in the downtown New York avant-garde music scene of the 1960s and 1970s. He holds degrees in piano performance and in musicology from Kennesaw State University, Georgia, and the University of Georgia, respectively. He received his PhD from Washington University in St. Louis in 2013 for a thesis on Philip Glass and the downtown New York scene between 1966 and 1976. Ryan Ebright serves as an Instructor of Musicology at Bowling Green State University. He earned his PhD in musicology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2014 and holds a masters’ degree in musicology and vocal performance from the Peabody Conservatory. His research includes music for the voice, stage, and screen, with an emphasis on contemporary opera, minimalism, and nineteenth-century lieder, and has been published in American Music, Notes, and the online publication on contemporary music NewMusicBox. Robert Fink is Professor of Musicology at the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music and author of Repeating Ourselves: American Minimal Music as Cultural Practice (2005). His publications on minimalism and repetition, popular music, the fate of the classical canon, and problems of musical analysis have appeared in Rethinking Music (1999), Beyond Structural Listening? (2004), and The Ashgate Research Companion to Minimalist and Postminimalist Music (2013), and in journals including Cambridge Opera Journal, Journal of the American Musicological Society, and American Music. Along with Cecilia Sun, he is the collator of Oxford Bibliographies Online’s substantial entry on “Minimalism.” Sumanth Gopinath is Associate Professor of Music Theory at the University of Minnesota. He is the author of The Ringtone Dialectic: Economy and Cultural Form (2013) and coeditor, with Jason Stanyek, of The Oxford Handbook of Mobile Music Studies (2014). His research ranges widely from Steve Reich and musical minimalism to Marxism and music scholarship, sound and digital media, Bob Dylan, Benjamin Britten, the aesthetics of smoothness, and the music of contemporary Scottish composer James Dillon. Matthias Kassel studied musicology and German language and literature in Freiburg im Breisgau. He has been a curator at the Paul Sacher Foundation, Basel, since 1995. His publications and articles focus mainly on composers’ collections in the archive. Recent interests include the work of Mauricio Kagel, and the Steve Reich collection, as well as the performance practice and archival aspects of new music. Kerry O’Brien is an Instructor at the Cornish College of the Arts, Seattle. She received her PhD from Indiana University in 2018, having written a dissertation on the history of the arts organization Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), 1966–1971, which includes a chapter on Steve Reich. Her work on postwar experimentalism, minimalism, and countercultural spirituality has

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been supported by a Presser Music Award, a Paul Sacher Foundation research grant, a Getty research library grant, and an American Fellowship from the American Association of University Women. Her research has been published in the Mitteilungen der Paul Sacher Stiftung and NewMusicBox, and in articles in the New York Times and the New Yorker online. Keith Potter is Professor of Music at Goldsmiths, University of London. Active as both musicologist and music journalist, he was for many years chief editor of Contact: A Journal of Contemporary Music, the thirty-four issues of which will be republished online in 2019. For a decade, he was a regular music critic for The Independent daily newspaper. A founding committee member of the Society for Minimalist Music, he was its Chair from 2011 to 2013. His publications include Four Musical Minimalists: La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass (2000) and The Ashgate Research Companion to Minimalist and Postminimalist Music (2013), coedited with Kyle Gann and Pwyll ap Siôn. Recent publications on Reich, arising from research carried out at the Steve Reich archive at the Paul Sacher Foundation, Basel, have appeared in Tonality since 1950 (2017) and Contemporary Music Review (2018); and the outcome of collaborative projects on musical perception and cognition, involving music by Glass as well as Reich, appeared in Music and/as Process (2016) and the journal Time and Time Perception. John Pymm is Dean of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Wolverhampton. He is a founding member of the Society for Minimalist Music and was elected three times as the Society’s President between 2013 and 2017. He has given numerous international conference papers on the music of Steve Reich, based on archival research carried out at the Paul Sacher Foundation, Basel, contributing a chapter to The Ashgate Research Companion to Minimalist and Postminimalist Music (2013). He received his PhD from the University of Southampton in 2013. Martin Scherzinger is Associate Professor of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University. His research focuses on the relationship between sound, music, media, and politics, and his work has appeared in publications including Postmodern Music/Postmodern Thought (2002), Beyond Structural Listening? (2004), and The World of South African Music:  A Reader (2005) and in the journals Current Musicology, Perspectives of New Music, and Cultural Critique. Michael Tenzer is a performer, composer, scholar, and teacher. He has been active in the international proliferation of gamelan music since 1977, undertaking years of fieldwork in Indonesia and cofounding Gamelan Sekar Jaya in Berkeley in 1979. He was the first non-Balinese composer to create new works for Balinese ensembles in Bali. His book Gamelan Gong Kebyar:  The Art of Twentieth Century Balinese Music (2000) received the Alan P. Merriam Prize of the Society for Ethnomusicology and the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award. He has a PhD in music composition from UC Berkeley and has been Professor of Music at the University of British Columbia since 1996.

Rethinking Reich

Introduction Reich in Context Sumanth Gopinath and Pwyll ap Siôn Now we were home again, sitting among the colors of the living room. I started to put Van Morrison on, and she said, “Hey, have you ever heard Steve Reich?” I told her no. I told her I’d been living outside the music zone, catching whatever happened to blow through. She said, “I’m going to put him on right now.” And she did. Steve Reich’s music proved to be a pulse, with tiny variations. It was the kind of electronic music that doesn’t come from instruments—that seems made up of freeze-dried interludes of vibrating air. Steve Reich was like someone serenely stuttering, never getting the first word out and not caring if he did. You had to work to get the point of him, but then you got it and saw the simple beauty of what he was doing—the lovely unhurried sameness of it. It reminded me of my adult days in Cleveland, those little variations laid over an ancient luxury of replication.1

The narrator in this passage from Michael Cunningham’s novel A Home at the End of the World (1990) is Bobby Morrow, a young baker from Cleveland. Bobby has recently moved in with Jonathan Glover, his gay childhood friend, and Jonathan’s female roommate, Claire, who are living in the East Village in Manhattan during the early 1980s—“the dead center of the Reagan years.”2 A  knowledgeable and passionate rock listener, Bobby is soon introduced to Reich’s music by Claire, who provides him with a cultural education and, eventually, a sexual one. The eventual outcome is an asymmetrical, bisexual ménage à trois between the three main characters and the resulting, unconventional family household, which devolves by the end of the novel. Music was central to the novel’s creation, and rock songs and references to them are threaded through it, performing a certain affective immediacy. For Cunningham, rock music “insists that our loneliness and confusion, our wild nights and our love affairs gone wrong, are significant subjects, worthy of guitar riffs and drum solos. As a writer, I’ve tried to put a measure of that reckless generosity onto the printed page.”3 Reich’s music is, in contrast, not as self-evident to its fictional listeners, for one had to “work to get the point.” The music is not 1

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only reminiscent of Bobby’s inertial existence in Cleveland; it is also a part of his makeover by Claire into a cosmopolitan New Yorker. In the novel, Reich effectively acts as a sign within a tiny community, a pair of downtown Manhattanites on the margins of art worlds—Jonathan is a food critic for a successful weekly news publication, Claire is a trust-funded bohemian jeweler and was formerly married to a touring dancer. Their tastes crisscross the brow spectrum: in addition to being music aficionados, they attend parties, plays, and especially film screenings at various theaters, and they frequent dive bars and hole-in-the-wall restaurants (because of Jonathan’s work) and watch TV together, when Jonathan isn’t seeing his lover, Erich. Reich’s music accompanies many other cultural products and forms that bind Bobby to this new household, the wider milieu of downtown Manhattan, and, ultimately, the familial arrangement between the three characters that will soon emerge—three interconnected characters raising a baby in remote, symbolically-charged Woodstock. Music scholars may well wonder which Reich piece is being referenced here. The description “a pulse, with tiny variations” recalls the opening and closing “Pulses” sections of Music for 18 Musicians (1976). The 1978 ECM LP recording of that piece famously sold more than one hundred thousand copies within a year of its release, making this crossover hit the most likely possibility. And yet, the descriptions of the music as “electronic [sic]” and the composer as “serenely stuttering” are perhaps more reminiscent of Reich’s tape pieces It’s Gonna Rain (1965) and especially Come Out (1966), both released on LP by Columbia in the late 1960s, and also of their “sampling” techniques to which Reich would return later that decade, beginning with Different Trains (1988).4 But perhaps the most telling word in Cunningham’s description is one of the most banal: “variations.” The term is a marker of what one might think of as Reich’s turn toward more conventional forms and musical forces (commissioned solo compositions, works for full orchestra, choral pieces). It first appears in Variations for Winds, Strings, and Keyboards (1979) and then resurfaces in a trio of post–video opera compositions written in the first decade of the twentieth century:  You Are (Variations) (2004), Variations for Vibes, Pianos and Strings (2005), and the Daniel Variations (2006). While Cunningham’s description— “little variations laid over an ancient luxury of replication”—might sound like a characterization of music with a more ambient sensibility than Reich’s, “variations” indexes a more traditional temporality, of longer phrases and lines that are then subjected to transformation, perhaps in the manner of a theme and variations.5 Reading against the grain of Cunningham’s rock-based understanding of Reich, we can appreciate that a new traditionalism emerges with the onset of this period of the composer’s music, including the composer’s own rediscovery of text-setting and extended melodic composition in Tehillim (1981). That traditionalism resonates with his own description of the “conservative 1980s,” to which he bade farewell by the end of the decade and to which he seemingly returned after his last video opera with Beryl Korot, Three Tales (2002).6

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In retrospect, what we might call Reich’s “long 1980s”—beginning in the late 1970s, after his post–Music for 18 Musicians crisis, when he considered giving up composition and becoming a rabbi7—launched him on a path toward legitimacy in the world of mainstream classical music. Indeed, it was during the “dead center” of the Reagan/Thatcher era that Reich firmly established himself as one of the most important composers of the late twentieth century. Claims such as “America’s greatest living composer,” or accolades that placed him as one of “a handful of living composers who can legitimately claim to have altered the direction of musical history,”8 were still some way off (after all, Reich would only turn fifty during the decade), but his music was spreading much farther outside rather than within degree programs in music departments and schools, where undergraduates’ staple diet of the Three Bs (and the canon more broadly) would be supplemented by contemporary modernist music—Berio, Boulez, Babbitt, or Birtwistle, perhaps. In fact, one was more likely to hear strains of Music for 18 Musicians or Tehillim emerging from the room of a philosophy, art history, or English literature student—a relaxing sonic technology of the self-applied long after the day’s classes had finished, and not as the object of analytical or historical study within the classroom. Even during the 1980s, Reich’s music was still only grudgingly accepted by many members of the music “establishment.” Other than the ubiquitous Clapping Music (1972), or occasionally Music for Pieces of Wood (1973), which also required limited instrumental resources, his music remained rarely performed. One usually had to get to New York or London to hear performances of true quality, or hope that the composer and his ensemble would make a rare visit to town, which was, of course, more likely in the United States. Even performers of contemporary repertoire were reluctant to embrace his music, put off perhaps by its rhythmic demands and austere aesthetic challenges. There were even slimmer pickings for those who wished to research it. A  stubborn view remained that music of the so-called minimalist school of composers—into which Reich had been unwittingly (and unwillingly) coopted—resisted standard forms of analysis. After all, what hidden mysteries could be revealed in an aesthetic that was so self-reflexively transparent? A  music that, according to the composer himself, possessed no “secrets of structure that you can’t hear”?9 Of course, Reich’s music did, in fact, possess “secrets of structure,” as visibly demonstrated in Paul Epstein’s revelatory analysis of the phase relationships in the first section of Piano Phase, published in Musical Quarterly in 1986.10 K. Robert Schwarz’s nuanced two-part introduction to Reich had appeared in the pages of Perspectives of New Music some six years previously,11 followed a few years later by the English-language translation of Wim Mertens’s influential American Minimal Music: La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass,12 but on the whole it was left to music critics to weigh up the merits of Reich’s works in their weekly dispatches, where opinions veered from knowledgeable (Tom Johnson), supportive (Alan Rich), or both

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(Kyle Gann), to dismissive and hostile (Donal Henahan, Harold C. Schonberg). No wonder Reich himself became deeply suspicious of critics and their motives. Still, Epstein’s article opened the door for a generation of academics who were interested in studying Reich’s music. It also marked one of the first attempts to rethink the nature and scope of the composer’s oeuvre—to delve beneath its outer surface in order to examine and uncover what was going on underneath, or even to demonstrate that there was something underneath that surface to uncover in the first place. Other articles from around the same time, including Dan Warburton’s “A Working Terminology for Minimal Music,”13 added further weight to the argument that minimalist music deserved scholarly study, while others around this time looked to draw parallels between Reich’s music and broader concerns, such as Rob Cowan’s short but insightful article on Reich and Wittgenstein.14 It was only during the 1990s that minimalist musicology in general, and Reich’s music in particular, fully gathered pace, however. Publications proliferated as the decade (and century) drew to a close, and during the intervening years the scope of Reich studies has extended to include everything from beat-class set and information-dynamic analysis to race, gender, desire creation, and mood regulation.15 Out of this welter of scholarly activity three main strands have emerged. The first remains more consolidatory in approach, building and developing on primary research conducted throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Edward Strickland’s Minimalism:Origins, published in 1993, was the first in-depth account of the movement in relation to both the fine arts and music. This was soon followed by K. Robert Schwarz’s Minimalists, which offered an extended treatment of Reich’s “minimalist” and “maximalist” periods. Keith Potter’s Four Musical Minimalists:  La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass,16 published in 2000, bore the fruits of more than twenty years of dedicated and detailed research, immediately establishing itself as the area’s authoritative textbook. The second strand treats minimalist music, including Reich’s, as a topic of involved analytical and theoretical study, often drawing on various forms of mathematics and examining rhythmic-structural features of which the composer himself was almost certainly unaware. This was the argument of Richard Cohn in his pathbreaking essay, “Transpositional Combination of Beat-Class Sets in Steve Reich’s Phase-Shifting Music” (1992).17 In contrast to the previous two strands, the third drew inspiration from the “new musicology” of Susan McClary, Ruth Solie, Lawrence Kramer, and others. Like the second strand, it sought to understand Reich’s music less, perhaps, in relation to what the composer was stating, but unlike both other strands, it prioritized the rich layers of meaning and signifying potential the composer’s music offers to interested listeners. One early example of the third scholarly tendency was Robert Fink’s “Going Flat: Post-hierarchical Music Theory and the Musical Surface,” which provided the would-be researcher with new tools for analyzing twentieth-century music, including minimalism. Like Epstein some ten years previously, Fink also looked

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to Piano Phase. However, this time the piece was used to support an argument that revolved around questions relating to the relevance and usefulness of established analytical methods, with their emphasis on hierarchical structures, linear descents, levels of contrapuntal stratification, and implied distinction between surface and depth. Such methods did not hold sway when it came to analyzing minimalist works like Reich’s piece, which served as an object lesson on the problem of musical analysis in general: “The virtual coincidence of background and foreground progressions makes the voice-leading structure of Piano Phase almost totally non-hierarchic, totally flat. The backdrop has become the curtain.”18 Fink’s “Going Flat” appeared in Nicholas Cook and Mark Everist’s edited volume, Rethinking Music, which could be said to have set in motion Oxford University Press’s “rethinking” quasi-series. Whether stated or implied, much of what is contained in this latest collection in the series is informed by developments in musicology that took place around this time. By the early twenty-first century, the rate of productivity in Reich studies merited a biobibliography by David J. Hoek (2002), which included an annotated list of publications in English, French, German, and Italian. Hoek’s book certainly offered an important snapshot of the then current state of research on Reich, but one imagines that it would now be at least twice its original size were it updated to include research completed in the following seventeen years, from doctoral dissertations to journal articles, many of which appear in the works cited at the end of this volume. However, pace the composer’s own Writings on Music, 1965– 2000, edited by Paul Hillier, only one book-length account focusing entirely on Reich’s music has been produced to date.19 This volume attempts to redress this imbalance. It remains true that practice often precedes theory, and musicology represents only one area where Reich’s music has been rethought, reappraised, and reinterpreted. True, his music has always connected beyond the concert hall and lecture theater, but few would have predicted back in the 1970s or 1980s the extent to which it has penetrated aspects of today’s media and popular culture. Reich is now frequently heard on television and film, in dramatic contexts and situations that might shock and intrigue the composer and regular listeners of his music.20 To take three examples, we first return to the Cunningham passage discussed earlier, but as it appears in the 2004 film version of A Home at the End of the World. In the film, Claire (played by Robin Wright) puts on the Reich recording, and she and Bobby (Colin Farrell) hear section VI of Music for 18 Musicians. After about ten seconds of a medium close-up shot of Bobby reacting to the music, the film dissolves to another scene in which Jonathan (Dallas Roberts) is walking home, on the sidewalk. He passes a man who is walking his dog, and both cross in front of a third man sitting on a stoop. The two walking men make measured, balletic turns back toward each other and stare—they are checking each other out—while the seated man watches Jonathan. Having transformed from diegetic to nondiegetic music, the pulsating

6

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maracas, the syncopated F♯ minor groove, and especially the throbbing chordal piano parts21 of Reich’s composition here animate and express the queer sexual desire represented in the scene, which prefigures the erotic undercurrents that will affect the lives of the three principal characters and hints at the histories of promiscuity and lack of exercising “bodily precautions” that will result in Jonathan’s contraction of AIDS.22 A second example is found in a scene from episode 9 of the third series of British teen drama series Skins, first aired in 2009, in which the opening pulses from Music for 18 Musicians play underneath a heated argument between twin sisters Katie and Emily (Megan and Kathryn Prescott) about each other’s sexual identity and inability to form and sustain long-term relationships. The music ends suddenly during the following scene when Naomi, Emily’s onetime girlfriend, arrives at the sisters’ house. On the surface, the music signifies the “passing of time,” acting as a transition from one scene to the next, but on a deeper level it implies something more:  the tangled internal thoughts of Katie and Emily and their ongoing psychological battle. Each chordal repetition—signifying its original and copy, statement and duplication—emphasizes the siblings’ struggle and sense of striving for identity (made even more obvious at the beginning of the episode when Emily goes to college disguised as her sister), as the two are again confronted by mirror opposites of themselves, both strangely familiar yet irreducibly different. The music’s continuous weave of interlocking patterns also adds to the scene’s physical and psychological entanglement. The third example, from the initial chase and fight scene in the main event of The Hunger Games (2012), also uses Reich’s trademark pulsing technique, this time from the opening of his Three Movements for orchestra. As the games officially begin, the heroine, Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence), observes the combatants around her fighting and killing one another, while others attempt to grab supplies before fleeing. The nondiegetic music is initially sparse: it consists of a few ringing tones—carefully sculpted sonorities reminiscent of bowed cymbals or the decay of a rung bell. The pulses enter only once Katniss’s adrenaline kicks in, and she gets into a kind of survival-mode “flow” state, doing what she can to stay alive, gain valuable resources, and escape the bloodcurdling slaughter taking place around her. The scene presents a clearly dysphoric use of the composer’s music and thus makes one think about the disquieting and discomfiting pulses in that piece, or others, such as the openings of the closely related Sextet (1985) and the comparable large-scale composition The Desert Music (1984). It also suggests a sense of altered time consciousness, in which time both slows down and speeds up for the characters at that moment, and hence links up with the extensive meditations—including Reich’s own—on the perception of temporality in minimalism.23 Both examples tap into the dark undertow of Reich’s harmonic language, going against more common employments of his music that emphasize ecstatic or pleasurable modes, especially those of advertisements or film scores

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that often imitate his pulsing technique. They also connect with broader tendencies in recent Hollywood cinema to employ postminimalist styles to signal modalities of mourning, profundity, closure, sublimity, and (in the case of spiritual minimalism) enlightenment and transcendence.24 Indeed, both indicate more complex and varied responses to Reich’s work in general, as shown in projects such as Reich Remixed, released in 1999, which features arrangements of the composer’s back catalog by electronic dance music producers such as DJ Spooky and Coldcut, and the composer’s more recent Radio Rewrite, which takes preexisting material from two songs by British rock group Radiohead as its starting point. * * * You had to work to get the point of him. Cunningham’s words—as Bobby’s— at the opening of this introduction also offer an opportunity to reflect on the contributions in this volume. At second glance, those words remind us that Reich’s music is, ultimately, not easy-listening fare, irrespective of how it can be used or of its partly meditative affordances. One thinks of Michael Tilson Thomas’s infamous statement prior to the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s first performance of Four Organs in 1971: “it’s a piece . . . for virtuoso listeners.”25 Indeed, and taking Bobby’s formulation as a cue, we should consider the work (labor, methodology, sources/materials) involved in understanding the point (meaning, purpose, ideas, goal) of Reich’s music, as gleaned by any individual listener, virtuoso or not. With respect to its “point,” we want to underscore that the composer’s music cannot be reduced to single, simple meanings or be used in uniform and wholly consistent ways, as the filmic and televisual repurposings discussed here clearly illustrate. That is, there isn’t just one point. In the chapters that follow, a variety of perspectives and purposes can be found, ranging from those drawing on critical musicological standpoints (to which we alluded earlier) to more traditional efforts to reconstruct aspects of the composer’s creative process. All of these perspectives are welcome and vitally important, for they contribute a wealth of knowledge and learning that complements Reich’s own. This is crucial, not only because Reich is the most critically esteemed composer emerging from the minimalist tendency but also because he is minimalism’s most authoritative theorist, as well as one of the most lucid writers about his own work (widely apparent since the publication of his Writings about Music in 1974, a collection of essays that was later republished as part of a larger collection in 2002 called Writings on Music, 1965–2000).26 His landmark text “Music as a Gradual Process” (1968) is an eloquent and persuasive quasi-manifesto that has, often wrongly, come to stand in as a descriptor of the entire practice of musical minimalism, and his nononsense accounts of his compositions and comments in published interviews leave the reader with the impression that little, if anything, remains to be said about his music.

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Nothing could be further from the truth. As many of the chapters in this book demonstrate, the gap between Reich’s discourse and his practice is sometimes extensive, and at times his words can obfuscate more complex realities and contentious ideologies that lie under the surface of his music. Of course, many artists develop idiosyncratic rationales for their creative practices and often feel the need to conceal aspects of their work and personal lives, in order to maintain their privacy, confirm their stature, and reinforce or advance their position within the cultural field; as Walter Benjamin famously (and hyperbolically) noted of Goethe, “To wish to gain an understanding of [his novel] Elective Affinities from the author’s own words on the subject is wasted effort. For it is precisely their aim to forbid access to critique.”27 With this caveat in mind, Reich should be viewed as no different from many other artists, and yet the lack of an established critical discourse has meant that Reich’s own words have effectively filled and continue to fill the gap. As for the “work” involved in this book’s contributions, this, too, ranges widely, encompassing sketch studies (including their digital variants), discourse analysis and reception history, hermeneutic investigations, intertextual studies (incorporating non-Western, popular, and Western art musics), the clarifying of historical timelines and contexts, harmonic and formal analysis, philosophical and religious ruminations, and deep archival digging. The last of these scholarly activities requires mention of the acquisition of the Steve Reich Collection by the Paul Sacher Foundation (PSS), Basel (since 2008), which has greatly facilitated and inspired new research on Reich. Most chapters in this volume have benefited in some way from access to sketchbooks, letters, program notes, article reviews, computer files, and other materials housed at the PSS. One imagines that its contents would have been very different without this invaluable resource, and we are grateful for its continued support of our efforts. Rethinking Reich is divided into four parts, each containing three or four chapters broadly relating to the area (or areas) in question. Part I  focuses on political, aesthetic, and analytical concerns from a number of perspectives. Sumanth Gopinath’s chapter takes as its starting point the infamous Carnegie Hall performance of Reich’s Four Organs on January 18, 1973. Reading against the backdrop of the late 1960s social, political, racial, and artistic climate, Gopinath provides a range of hermeneutic readings of the work’s rhythmic, coloristic, and formal dimensions, including the notion that its augmentation process functions as a trope for—among other things—space travel and exploration. Ap Siôn’s chapter looks at a work written near the end of the 1970s, suggesting that Octet (or Eight Lines, as it subsequently became known) represents a shift in Reich’s aesthetic toward a more European way of thinking, which has been partly obscured by the composer’s wish to foreground the importance of Jewish influences and Hebrew chant. The other two chapters in this part offer different perspectives on Reich’s more politically motivated works, with Maarten Beirens drawing on sketch materials at PSS to try to make sense of the complex structure of Different Trains and The Cave, while Ryan Ebright’s chapter contextualizes the

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latter work in terms of its attempts to produce an Americanized vision of ArabIsraeli reconciliation. Part II draws together three contrasting responses to issues of speech, repetition, and identity in Reich’s music. Robert Fink’s chapter uses the composer’s musical logocentrism in The Cave—or a compositional preoccupation with the word as a kind of ideal—to tease out broader issues relating to religious identity and meaning, complexified by the composer’s word-saturated operatic language. Speech of a different kind informs John Pymm’s survey of the prehistory of Come Out, where he seeks to show how a more nuanced understanding of this important early work can be aided by studying the composer’s sound collage Harlem’s Six Condemned, which was also performed at the tape piece’s premiere in 1966. More than forty years separate Come Out and WTC 9/11, which forms the basis for Celia Casey’s investigation of Reich’s “docu-music” style, yet both Pymm’s and Casey’s chapters draw on a range of recorded sound materials housed at PSS in order to rethink the music’s original function and intention. Part III consists of four chapters whose findings rely primarily on research conducted at the archive. Matthias Kassel, director of the Steve Reich Collection, outlines the diverse range of resources kept there, and the challenges facing both scholar and archivist in dealing with “hybrid-analog” and “hybrid-digital” materials, followed by three chapters that concentrate mainly on the composer’s sketchbooks and e-sketches. Keith Potter reconsiders the harmonic content of Reich’s breakthrough work, Music for 18 Musicians, in the light of various sketches of its opening chord sequence. David Chapman traces the evolution of Piano Phase from an essentially improvised piece to a fixed work through a comparison of draft sketches, sound recordings, and other data relating to early performances, while Twila Bakker reviews Reich’s work in the 1980s by focusing on the composer’s set of Counterpoint pieces as seen through rhetorical shifts and reception tropes, on the one hand, and computer files and e-sketches, on the other. Part IV moves away from matters of compositional strategy to questions about the numerous non-Western influences on the composer’s music. Reich has been quick to acknowledge his debt to African and Balinese music and cultural practice, maintaining at the same time that his intention was never to imitate them but to create a music with its own, unique sound that was nevertheless “constructed in the light of one’s knowledge of non-Western structures.”28 Martin Scherzinger’s chapter both maps out a detailed ethnographic context in which to understand Reich’s extensive appropriation of African influences—including the very notion of phasing itself—and examines how these elements are shaped together in Electric Counterpoint. Michael Tenzer offers parallel reflections in relation to Balinese music, with which the composer did not engage to the same degree as music from the African continent. Kerry O’Brien’s concluding chapter addresses the inherent paradox between freedom and control that lies at the foundations of the composer’s musical language, revealing how yogic principles

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and practices during the early 1970s directed Reich toward a new compositional aesthetic that was to manifest itself in Music for 18 Musicians. Cutting across these divisions is a concern central to many, if not all, of the chapters in Rethinking Reich: namely, the problem of musical meaning and hermeneutics. The subject is a troublesome one for the composer, who, as both ap Siôn and O’Brien remind us, received and responded to interpretive critiques during the mid-1970s from German-language writers like Clytus Gottwald and others who were influenced by the work of the philosopher and musicologist Theodor Adorno. Well before that experience, Reich seems to have been already disinclined to cognize music through imagistic ideation and favored a certain Wittgenstein- and process-art-influenced manner of straightforward, unadorned description in lieu of the hermeneutics language game; as he put it in one interview, music “doesn’t have a verbal translation.”29 But the German experience left a bad taste in his mouth, which may resonate with his later critique of Adorno’s Philosophy of New Music:  “One could say of Adorno, he invents meaningless intellectual jargon to justify the simple fact that he likes Schönberg and doesn’t like Stravinsky.”30 The hermeneutics on offer in this volume, however, are largely not Adornian in tone or perspective (perhaps with the exception of Tenzer’s Balinese expert listeners, who seem to disdain slow repetition just as much as the philosopher did) but rather orient themselves to particular musical geographies and creative practices (Africa for Scherzinger, Bali for Tenzer, Europe for ap Siôn, experimental improvisation for Chapman, documentary-cinematic auteurism for Casey), to specific historical contexts (1960s space travel and political upheavals for Gopinath, 1980s US political conservatism for Bakker, the Israel-Palestine conflict in the 1980s and early 1990s for Ebright), and to alternative philosophical perspectives (Hindu-yogic for O’Brien, Derridean for Fink). In some cases, the same musical examples are interpreted from strikingly different perspectives, offering a textbook demonstration of the Althusserian idea of “overdetermination,” or that there are multiple points of origin or causality for a given phenomenon.31 And even when the word “hermeneutic” doesn’t really apply to particular chapters, as might be the case for Potter’s and Beirens’s harmonic analyses and sketch studies, Kassel’s archival reflections, or Pymm’s historical contextualization, we still find moments that surprise us: Reich’s conceptualization and working-out of the harmony for Music for 18 Musicians from the top and middle downward, rather than up from the bass, or his conscientious royalty payment arrangement with Daniel Hamm for using his recorded voice in Come Out. In the last instance, that should be the purpose of the necessarily speculative art of musical hermeneutics: to surprise us, to help us reimagine what we thought we knew well, to shake our foundations and leave us with new ideas and ways of forming them—and, if we’re lucky, newly attained wisdom. Whether or not we want to follow Lawrence Kramer and argue that hermeneutics is foundational to the formation of the modern subject, a fundamental mode of

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post-Enlightenment knowing that provides an alternative to both dogmatism and empiricism, we can agree with Reich that its purpose should not be to rationalize mere polemics of taste.32 Rather, the goal is to deepen one’s understanding of and engagement with music. Conducted with both critical integrity and the spirit of generosity, the interpretation of musical meaning can provide a powerful means of rethinking music, including Reich’s, without indiscriminately wielding words as weapons or confusing personal tastes with politics. * * * An ancient luxury of replication. This phrase in Cunningham’s passage is poetic but also puzzling. One the one hand, it refers explicitly to a seemingly long-ago period of slowness in Bobby’s life in Cleveland, in contrast with the new speed and intensity of his New York existence. As a description of Reich’s music, however, it is suggestive. “Replication” is a homological equivalent of musical repetition, which maps onto Bobby’s earlier, repetitive work as a baker; “luxury” is tied to beauty, comfort, and pleasure, applied here to the now-elusive slowness of time in fast-paced New  York; “ancient” refers to the distant past, although given Bobby’s recent relocation as narrated in this novel it might be read as “(seemingly) ancient.” What is, then, seemingly ancient about Reich’s music? Possibilities might include his abjuring of complex electronic technologies during the 1970s in favor of familiar acoustic instruments, and, more broadly, his reliance on older musical reference points, both Western and non-Western, which weave their way into his music and rationalizations about it.33 An ideal of ancientness, of rooting one’s practice in something that is very old and therefore arguably durable, is one dimension of what Reich understands as his contribution to his generation’s musical counterrevolutionary “restoration.”34 And a related component of that restoration is his commitment to the aesthetic discourse of beauty and the apparent concomitant belief that Western art music, historically, was once beautiful and then—due to twelve-tone and serialist modernism—became ugly.35 Reich knows, of course, that beautiful and ugly are “political words.”36 And one might argue that, with the increasingly conservative critical impetus of some of his later music, Reich has at times embraced a certain aesthetic ugliness for communicative effect.37 All of this notwithstanding, both the power and the attraction of Reich’s music are indelibly bound up with its ability to afford listening pleasure—which, as Fredric Jameson reminded us long ago, is a complex political issue.38 In light of which, our ambition is for this book to stimulate both critical and hedonistic impulses and, ideally, their dialectical intertwining. We encourage the reader to luxuriate in listening to Reich’s music, returning to old favorites, exploring less familiar works, and discovering relatively obscure compositions, many of which deserve careful study but have not received it in this volume—such as Reich’s Duet (1993), a beautiful, pastorally inflected piece dedicated to Yehudi Menuhin and the composer’s take on the barococo string concerto that had a hand in inspiring minimalist music in the first place.39 We are confident that

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reading, expounding upon, and arguing with the fourteen chapters of this book will instigate new critical understandings of Reich’s music, perhaps including insights into the very pleasure that it offers. The recent wave of scholarship enabled by the Sacher archive demarcates a turning point for those interested in examining and evaluating Steve Reich’s music anew, but if there is truth in the claim that he is “America’s greatest living composer,” then part of his music’s greatness must surely lie in its ability to elicit a rich and diverse range of responses from critics, scholars, listeners, and performers alike. We hope that the present volume will achieve its modest aim of offering a thoughtful and provocative aid in rehearing, revisiting, and rethinking a body of music that will continue to seize the imaginations of listeners for years to come.

Notes 1. Cunningham 1998, 147–48. 2. Ibid., 126. 3. Michael Cunningham, liner notes to the film soundtrack to A Home at the End of the World (2004). 4. A more explicit example of “serene stuttering” can be found in Alvin Lucier’s I Am Sitting in a Room (1969), in which the composer famously uses a repetitive, recursive process to “smooth out [the] irregularities” of his speech impediment. Lucier’s work is likely influenced by Come Out, a work he heard and admired early on. See Lucier 2012, 103–5. Also, see Robert Fink’s chapter in this volume for a discussion of the stuttering effect in Reich’s The Cave (1993). On the composer’s sampling practice, see Reich 2002b, 201; Potter 2000, 169. 5. Reich generally is displeased by characterizations of his music as ambient; one of the editors recalls a testy answer by Reich to a question about the relevance of ambient music to his own work at the 2005 Mannes Institute at the Mannes School of Music, New York, on June 26. Many thanks to Wayne Alpern for facilitating that editor’s attendance at the event. In relation to this, see the following quote from an interview with Jonathan Cott: “You know, some critics of my earlier pieces thought I was intending to create some kind of ‘hypnotic’ or ‘trance’ music. And I always thought, ‘No, no, no, no, I want you to be wide awake and hear details you’ve never heard before!’ People listen to things any way they wish, of course, and I don’t have anything to say about it, even if I have written the pieces. But I actually prefer the music to be heard by somebody who’s totally wide awake, hearing more than he or she usually does, rather than by someone who’s just spaced-out and receiving a lot of ephemeral impressions” (Reich 2002b, 129). In contrast, Reich frequently invokes the discourse of and term “variation”; for example, in his discussion of Variations he notes that the piece is based “on an harmonic progression somewhat in the manner of a chaconne” (2002b, 99). Also see Ivanovitch 2010 for

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a discussion of the notion of variation and a nonstatic reconceptualization of the theme-and-variation form. 6. Schwarz 1996, 93. On Tehillim’s traditionalism, see Reich 2002b, 101. 7. See Reich 1987a, 67; Potter 2000, 152. 8. The first, by Kyle Gann, was first published in an article in the Village Voice in 1999. The second, by Guardian critic Andrew Clements, prefaced Reich’s appearance as “Composer of the Week” on BBC Radio 3 in October 2010 (both quotes feature prominently on the composer’s wiki page). Citations describing Reich as the United States’ “greatest living composer” can also be found in the “Biography” section of his website, at http://stevereich.com (accessed August 2, 2017). 9. Reich 2002b, 35. For a thought-provoking series of reflections on this problem, see Quinn 2006. 10. Epstein 1986, 494–502. 11. Schwarz 1980–81, 373–92; 1981–82, 225–86. 12. Mertens 1983. 13. Warburton 1988. 14. Cowan 1986. 15. For an overview of the analysis of minimalist music, see T. Evans 2013, 241–58. 16. Potter 2000. 17. Cohn 1992. 18. Fink 1999, 126–27. Fink’s perspective here contrasts with previous analytical attempts by Epstein (explicitly) and Cohn (implicitly) to find analytical “depth” in minimalist music, as part of a broader attempt to “retire the surface–depth metaphor” (102). Our provisional and incomplete solution, discussed later in this introduction and consonant with Fink’s other work on minimalism (especially Fink 2005), is to coax the debate away from analysis alone and towards hermeneutics (with both being intimately related as “gnostic” undertakings, as argued in Abbate 2004). In his measured defense of gnostic inquiry vis-à-vis minimalist music, Quinn (2006) notes, “if we are to get anywhere, we will need to fantasize” (293). We couldn’t agree more; among other things, this volume is a collective effort of informed, studious fantasy in response to Reich’s music. 19. Hartenberger 2016; Reich 2002b. 20. Rebecca Eaton (2013) points out that the experimental films the composer was involved in during the 1960s “effectively marked the end of Reich’s fledgling career as a film composer” and that, given his lack of interest in scoring films, directors have increasingly “embraced [the] option [of] licensing Reich’s music for film and television shows” (183). In the latter capacity, she also mentions two films using Reich’s music, A Home at the End of the World (2004) and The Dying Gaul (2005), as well as the show So You Think You Can Dance (2009). 21. See the repeated i4/3–v7 Aeolian mode progression in mm. 396–97 (Reich 2000, 119). The piano chords enter just as the two walking men see each other, and their turns and stares coincide with the chords’ crescendo—creating a striking depiction of sexual arousal and waxing desire, along with a tinge of foreboding.

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22. Cunningham 1998, 174. Two other films, The Dying Gaul (2005) and C.O.G. (2013), also employ Reich’s music while directly exploring problems of gay male sexuality and identity. For more on Reich and film, see Gopinath and ap Siôn 2017. 23. For two very different reflections on time in minimalist music, see J. Kramer 1988, 375–97; Fink 2005b, 25–61. 24. See, for example, Dies 2013; Maimets-Volt 2013. 25. Cited in Strickland 1993, 221. The BSO’s second performance of Four Organs, at Carnegie Hall in 1973, led to an infamous riot. For more information on that event, see Gopinath’s chapter in this volume. 26. See Reich 1974 and Reich 2002b, respectively. 27. Walter Benjamin, “Goethe’s Elective Affinities,” in Benjamin 1996, 313. 28. Reich 2002b, 71 (emphasis in original). 29. For the full context of this quote, see the following, from Kessler 1998: “When I  was first giving concerts in Germany in the early to middle seventies, people attacked [my] music as mechanical and said it didn’t have a language, in a sense of a discursive language. I remember a letter I wrote to this guy in Stuttgart about it. I said that I don’t think that (Beethoven’s 5th motive) ‘da da da daaa’ is fate knocking at the door, I think that it’s an incredible four-note motive, that what’s remarkable is that it continues through the scherzo and into the last movement. It’s the motive; it’s not really a melody, it’s a beginning of motivic organization, as opposed to introducing an imaginary text into music, and saying ‘Well, what does it mean?’ The opening motive in the Fifth Symphony is four notes followed by four more. That’s what it means. It doesn’t have a verbal translation. Some people would say that it had a philosophical idea which he then translated into music. I think that’s absurd.” In other interviews, including Duffie 2010, Reich emphasizes his relative inability to think imagistically, particularly in relation to music. 30. Reich 2002b, 185. Also see Adorno 2006. 31. See the essay “Overdetermination and Contradiction,” in Althusser 1969. 32. Kramer’s point here is nonetheless quite compelling. See L.  Kramer 2011, 2–3, 6, and passim. And, of course, for Adorno, the stakes were much higher than taste polemics, which is why music scholars still care about what he had to say about music, even when he was at his most tendentious. For a useful overview of these matters, see Richard Leppert’s introduction to Adorno 2009. See also Paddison 1997. 33. See, for example, Reich 2002b, 107, in which he speaks of his “desire for ancient tradition and religious practice”—ancientness and spirituality also being profoundly connected for Reich. 34. “I constantly say to people, ‘What we did was not a revolution—this was a restoration.’ The music we were brought up in school to imitate—the music of Boulez and Stockhausen—had become what we call mannerist. That doesn’t mean the music was bad. It just means that it had gotten so recherche that it put itself off in a corner. With just a tiny coterie listening to it” (Harris 2016). 35. For example, as he famously notes in a 1973 essay on his ensemble, “The main issue is what’s happening musically; is this beautiful, is this sending chills up and down my spine or isn’t it?” (Reich 2002b, 80).

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36. “One could also say, with some justification, that frequently ‘beautiful’ and ‘ugly’ are political words.” In Reich 2002b, 186. 37. One starting point for this trend might include the second movement of Different Trains, and the sonic harshness of parts of City Life also comes to mind. Both foreshadow comparably nonbeautiful passages in Three Tales and WTC 9/11. 38. See Jameson 1989, 61–74. Following Jameson, we might see Reich’s invocation of beauty as a form of aesthetic hedonism analogous to left hedonism during the long 1960s (as per the New Left and poststructuralist theory, particularly after Barthes); the aesthetic puritanism of musical high modernism would then correlate to left puritanism (which is the dominant strain in the Marxist tradition). 39. See Fink 2005b, 169–207; Reich 2002b, 183, in which the composition seems to be misdated to 1994. Numerous fine performances of Duet can be found on YouTube as of this writing.

I POLITICAL, AESTHETIC, AND ANALYTICAL CONCERNS

1 “Departing to Other Spheres” Psychedelic Science Fiction, Perspectival Embodiment, and the Hermeneutics of Steve Reich’s Four Organs Sumanth Gopinath A quartet of four tiny electric organs, backed by the unvaried pulse of four maracas players, is the scoring. Reich has, for this ensemble, taken a chord, played by the four organs, and kept it going for some 20 minutes[.] Presumably the idea is for the listener to saturate himself in the pure sound, concentrating, departing to other spheres on a cloud of musical Zen.[ . . . ] What Reich has done is confuse an acoustic phenomenon with music. As such, “Four Organs” is non-music, just as so many minor baroque compositions, written in tonic-dominant formulae without a trace of personality, are non-music. Or as so much modern art is non-art—three white triangles against a white background, or something like that. But it fools a lot of people because all of this comes under the general heading of “art.” Really it is “art” for people who are afraid of “art.” Or do not understand what art really is. Or who are too emotionally inhibited to want to share the emotional and intellectual processes of a real creator’s mind. “Four Organs” is baby stuff, written by an innocent for innocents.

So pronounced the eminent New  York Times music critic Harold Schonberg only a couple of weeks after attending, and then reviewing, one of the most infamous concerts in the history of musical minimalism.* Having received the

* Versions of this essay were given as talks. Thanks to faculty and graduate students at the Ohio State University; scholars at a one-day Reich study session at Kings Place, London; Ron Rodman and his students at Carleton College; faculty and graduate students at Harvard University; Matthew McDonald and his students at Northeastern University; Rob Haskins; and faculty, graduate students, and other attendees at the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Michigan, the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Chicago, the University of Minnesota, and Yale University. Thanks to Bridget Carr at the Boston Symphony Orchestra archives and Rob Hudson at the Carnegie Hall Archives. Thanks to Benjamin Givan for a 19

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Pulitzer Prize in the previous year for his music criticism, Schonberg was surely emboldened when writing snide dismissals of late modernist and experimentalist US-American composers like Elliott Carter, John Cage, and Steve Reich; in the same article, he advocates for the future of art music as represented by British composer Peter Maxwell Davies’s polystylistic and multimediatic work Vesalii Icones (1969).1 The performance at which Schonberg had heard Four Organs (1970) was part of a series of “Spectrum” concerts with a casually attired Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO). The music on the program spanned the centuries and was conducted by rising star Michael Tilson Thomas. It was a milestone for the series, which would make this concert its first in Carnegie Hall, in New York, on Thursday, January 18, 1973. The theme was “a concert of musical multiples,” and the program included Hexaméron (1837), a virtuoso collaborative work of six variations on Bellini’s “March of the Puritans” from I puritani (1835) that was composed by Liszt and by five of the other greatest pianists of the early to mid-nineteenth century. Each composer-pianist contributed a variation (including Thalberg, Czerny, and Chopin), and Liszt subsequently also wrote an introduction and finale, as well as connecting interludes. Although the work was originally written as a solo piano composition, on this occasion six pianists performed Liszt’s arrangement for piano and orchestra—at times separately, at others together, and all while accompanied by the BSO—and perhaps sought to embody the meeting of piano heroes that never took place in the composition’s contemporaneous moment.2 As Reich ruefully later noted, “[For] the kind of listener who’s going to get off on that, and who’s coming to the BSO subscription series[,] the last thing in the world that person is going to want to hear is my Four Organs . . . but there it was.”3 Almost predictably, the audience—at least, its experienced rather than “innocent” members4—began to sound their displeasure about five minutes into the performance, and the noise grew over the remaining three quarters of this slow rendition (the piece is usually about fifteen to sixteen minutes long), with a variety of audience members’ responses entering unconfirmed into the mythology surrounding the concert. Some audience members were seen “brandishing” their “umbrellas,”5 and some yelled for the music to stop. Some booed while others cheered. Infamously, an elderly woman supposedly banged

tip on searching the Boston Symphony Orchestra players, and to BSO percussionist Frank Epstein for his generous responses to my inquiries. Many thanks to Russell Hartenberger for his insights on and support for my work, and thanks to Will Robin, Phil Kline, Arthur Press, Joan La Barbara, Greg Dubinsky, and Judy Sherman for further help. Thanks to the Oral History of American Music at Yale University for continuing to support my studies of Reich. Whenever possible, in this chapter I’ve also included thanks to commentators on specific points; I  apologize for any omissions, which are unintentional.

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her shoe on the stage in protest, and another person (possibly the same woman) screamed, “All right—I’ll confess!”6 Tilson Thomas, who performed the work along with Reich and other BSO members, had to wrest order from the growing chaos; as he recently commented:  “I was playing away, and at the top of my voice I was yelling ‘19, 20, 21, 22’. . . Seriously, that’s in no way an exaggeration.”7 Reich was crestfallen after the experience and wondered if the ensemble had been able to stay together, but Tilson Thomas told him: “Forget about that. This has been a historical event.”8 In his article, Schonberg was clearly on the side of the detractors. Still, in his earlier concert review he admitted that Reich’s composition had touched a nerve, which led Schonberg to muse, “At least there was some excitement in the hall, which is more than can be said when most avantgarde music is being played.”9 The event has been likened to the riot in Paris at the premiere of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring almost sixty years earlier (on May 29, 1913), with Nijinsky’s attempts to keep the dancers together in the face of the noise by shouting out numbers being uncannily recalled by Tilson Thomas’s efforts; one might also think of the protests at the Newport Folk Festival against Bob Dylan’s electrified blues band on July 25, 1965, only seven and a half years beforehand.10 Although no audio apparently exists of the Carnegie concert, the combination of cheering and boos captured on the recording of the “trial run” for it in Boston, on October 9, 1971, clearly demonstrates that, as the speaker puts it, there was “a difference of opinion in the audience.”11 Schonberg and his audience have, in retrospect, been swept aside by the inexorable march of historical “progress” as musical minimalism, and particularly Reich’s brand of it, have entered the increasingly capacious and seemingly irrelevant canon of Western musical history, especially that of an implicitly nationalist history written with an American accent.12 Four Organs is pivotal in this development. As Tilson Thomas predicted, the extremity of reaction to the piece at the Carnegie concert led to it being far and away the most commentedupon composition by the composer to that date, and the controversy thus virtually guaranteed him a foothold in the art-musical canon, which would be confirmed by a series of important compositions produced during the same decade:  the lengthy and ambitious Drumming (1971); Clapping Music (1972) for its eminently performable and anthologizable one-page simplicity; and his most-praised composition, Music for 18 Musicians (1976). Reich subsequently began composing for known soloists and ensembles besides his own, soon received commissions, and by the late 1980s was an established and much-lauded US art-music composer. Despite all of this, Four Organs has yet to receive an extended scholarly interpretation. The work’s presumed radicalism appears to have encouraged formalist descriptions and readings, and scholars have largely followed Reich’s lead in discussing the work’s most obvious technical details: that is, an extended dominant chord, rhythmically augmented and transformed into a sequence of single notes. Indeed, as Virginia Anderson argues, the work was taken up as an exemplar by British systems composers in the 1970s precisely

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“because they understood it as a structural game.”13 And yet, taking a cue from Robert Fink’s eliciting of interpretive meanings from hostile journalistic reactions to minimalism,14 we might note that Schonberg’s criticism was not entirely inapt. He emphasized that the ensemble was a self-described “rock organ quartet” (a descriptor that has figured less prominently in recent discussions of the work), he interpreted it as being detached from an individual creator’s mind, and he characterized its effect in distinctly aerial terms. In the remainder of this chapter, I will examine a series of signifiers in the composition, including some specific, if hypothetical, intertextual linkages that might help to generate a plausible, historically informed reading of the piece, representing a line of inquiry that resonates with Schonberg’s observations. One may attempt a speculative recovery in part by listening to the 1960s US/UK pop/rock music indexed by the ensemble’s composition; to contemporaneous post-bop jazz with which Reich was certainly familiar; and, in one case, to a television soundtrack whose score would ultimately transform into a chestnut of popular culture. In attending to the composition’s peculiar instrumentation, its rhythmic-metrical patterns, and its overall trajectory, we might emerge from the endeavor with a narrative of interest and, ideally, adequate to the strong reactions the work evoked more than forty years ago. I will proceed by breaking the score down into constituent moments, contextualizing and provisionally interpreting them one at a time, before synthesizing these observations at the end.

Moment 1: Measure 0, 0:00–0:02 The piece begins with eleven eighth-note beats on the maracas (usually a single player), at ♪ = 200.15 Russell Hartenberger and Jim Cotter both argue that the constant maracas pulse may have been influenced by its presence in the music of the blind experimental composer and musician Moondog (Louis Hardin), who knew and made recordings with Reich and Philip Glass in the late 1960s.16 But in the context of popular music, the maracas signify the sound of much 1960s pop/rock, which had absorbed it from Latin musical influences (often to imitate or reference them), particularly the Cuban and Puerto Rican rumba, and from Mexican mariachi bands (the latter also a topos in country music). Few top 20 hits of the 1950s included it, although Bo Diddley’s “Say Man” was a notable exception.17 Intriguingly, the Rolling Stones picked up on Diddley’s maraca use in their cover of Buddy Holly’s “Not Fade Away,” which uses the Bo Diddley beat; from there on, a number of their 1960s hits, including “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” (1968) and “Sympathy for the Devil” (1968), featured the maracas—perhaps leading other bands to get in on the act, like The Who in “Magic Bus” (1968).18 Although Western art composers certainly incorporated the maracas in the twentieth century, again often for exotic effect, classical percussionists typically hold the instrument horizontally, with

“Departing to Other Spheres”

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their hands on top, maximizing control for differentiated attacks.19 In contrast, both in Four Organs and in rock, the maracas are held vertically, with relatively quickly repeated eighth notes that are articulated consistently, so that the quieter half-divisions of these beats are heard as well. (By way of contrast, it’s worth attending to the way that the BSO percussionists played Four Organs in 1971, at a slower ♪ = 193 and the resulting mushiness in articulation, caused by tempo, part doubling, and technique.)20 With this use of maracas being most characteristic of auxiliary percussion in rock, the music that opens Four Organs seems to be a synecdoche of rock, a part standing for the whole, and the maracas function mainly as a signifier of rock, much more than as an ethnic or exotic signifier within rock. But even though the rock reference seems to be the primary one, when we keep in mind the prevalence of constantly pulsing shaker parts in many sub-Saharan African musics, distinct points of reference for this kind of maracas playing may be subsumed into a broadly African/African-diasporic rhythmic practice that has had a wideranging impact on music across the globe.21 That said, Michael Veal has also argued that the maracas pulses may be interpreted as reminiscent of Native American rattles in initiation rites like vision quests—suggesting a different ethno-racial lineage for this musical element.22

Moment 2: Measure 1, 0:02–0:05 The four organs enter in the first proper measure of the composition. Three dimensions of this measure stand out in some respect. The first, and following Schonberg’s emphasis on sound, is the organ timbre—a loud (forte) and especially reedy, trebly sound emanating from four amplified Farfisa Mini Compact combo organs that Reich had bought used in New  York.23 Farfisa, an Italian company, produced its electronic organs initially as electronic accordions, before changing their housing in 1964 to compete with other electronic combo organ manufacturers (including Vox organs). The Vox Continental was a better-known organ used by most of the major rock bands at the time, but the Farfisa models were cheaper and therefore favored by garage bands.24 In its transistor accordion version it was used as early as Del Shannon’s “Ginny in the Mirror” (1962), and in this case as well as later songs that use the instrument, we hear it primarily in an upper line embellishing or doubling the melody, although chordal passages are present as well.25 (For example, “Mirage” [1967] by Tommy James and the Shondells presents only such an upper line, whereas Sam the Sham and the Pharoahs’ “Wooly Bully” [1965] includes only chords.) The low quality of the keyboards Reich initially used in performance is evident in the 1970 Shandar recording of Four Organs, in which one can hear tuning inconsistencies and extraneous keyboard sounds (such as volume swells after the first few attacks, as at 0:05 and 0:08).26

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The second aspect of the music is the pitch material that the organs collectively play, which can be labeled as an E dominant-eleventh chord, since it includes the pitch classes of all A  major diatonic thirds above the bass E up to the tonic (E–G♯–B–D–F♯–A), with every pitch except B3 doubled once or twice; this is Reich’s preferred labeling (which I  generally use later). Because that labeling implies a voicing featuring stacked thirds and the actual chord is voiced as a cluster chord, it may perhaps be better described as an E9sus4 with an added third (see Ex. 1.1a–c).27 The voicing highlights the clash between G♯4 and A4, with the notes sometimes sounding simultaneously and at other times oscillating, the A4 resolving down to G♯4 and then returning to the A4 dissonance. One could also simply describe it as a diatonic cluster chord—say, as [24689E], hexachordal set-class 6-33 (023579), or even a three-sharp diatonic (or Mixolydian) cluster—with an E or [4] in the bass (Ex. 1.1d). As the progression expands in duration, the music takes on the character of an extended cadential resolution, making the piece amount to what Reich jokingly has called “the longest V–I cadence in the history of Western music.”28 A variant of this chord was found in the middle section of Reich’s now suppressed film soundtrack to Robert Nelson’s film Oh Dem Watermelons (1965), in which appears a dominant-seventh chord (this one in D major) that includes the third and fourth above the bass, closely spaced so as to produce a harsh minor-second dissonance (see Ex. 1.1e, transposed to A major for comparison). Reich claims that this chord was used frequently by Thelonious Monk and interprets it as based on a conflict between tonic and dominant harmonies of a key (the eleventh or suspended fourth being the tonic of the key), and in this capacity, the third, as a leading tone, adds a certain amount of dominant-ness.29 Indeed, as Ian Quinn notes, Reich used the word “watermelon” to refer to exactly this type of harmony in his sketchbooks prior to the composition of Four Organs.30 One canonical example of such a chord in post-bop jazz can be found in the opening of Wynton Kelly’s piano accompaniment in Miles Davis’s recording of “Someday Example 1.1 Four Organs (1970), m. 1 chord comparisons: (a) as written, B3 the only undoubled pitch; (b)  as E dom11; (c)  as E dom9-sus4-add3; (d)  as [24689E] with [4] in bass, set-class 6-33 (023579), or 3♯-diatonic/E without C♯; (e) Oh Dem Watermelons (1965), watermelon-canon chord, transposed to A  major; (f)  Wynton Kelly’s chordal opening in “Someday My Prince Will Come” (1961), transposed to start on E3; (g)  E dom9-sus4, “Maiden Voyage” chord, transposed from D. (a)

(b)

(c)

(d)

(e)

(f)

(g)

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My Prince Will Come” (1961), in Example 1.1f, although here the tonic scale degree is not on the top, and the voicing avoids the minor second clash between the leading tone and tonic degrees.31 A related type of harmony, a minor ninth or dominant-ninth chord with a suspended fourth, has a similar effect and is also common in post-bop jazz of the 1960s; one influential example is Herbie Hancock’s “Maiden Voyage” (1965), which is made up almost entirely of these chords (see Ex. 1.1g, transposed to an E bass, for comparison).32 Although such chords appear on occasion in 1960s rock and popular music, for the most part they are foreign to that music’s chordal vocabulary, and so we might think of this harmony as essentially ensconced in postwar jazz.33 The third, and perhaps most important, aspect of this moment is the duration of the measure, which is an unusual eleven beats—in contrast to the predominance of twelve-beat and eight-beat measures in Reich’s pieces during the 1960s and 1970s. Richard Taruskin’s Oxford History of Western Music, which devotes a lot of space to Reich’s music, claims, “For minimalist purposes [eleven] is a magic number, because it is a prime number. Divisible neither by two nor by three, it remains always subtactile; it cannot be grouped mentally into a regular tactus or felt beat.”34 Taruskin’s emphasis on subtactile pulses, or steady, foundational rhythmic units shorter than the perceived beat, is not unreasonable in this piece: the music clearly has a kind of hiccup and feels unsteady due to the 11/8 (3/8 + 8/8) meter heard in the first fifteen measures (which are repeated a relatively free number of times as determined in an individual performance), and the maracas do indeed present a rock-solid stability at a lower level within that broader metrical instability (see Ex. 1.2a). Nevertheless, one does settle into a kind of additive-metrical groove (an experience not unfamiliar to musicians within traditions that regularly use such meters), and the music stays mostly consistent for about two minutes of the original recording, allowing one to Example 1.2 Rhythmic groupings in Four Organs, m. 1: (a) as written; (b) recalls simpler 3 + 5 groove in 4/4; (c) rewritten m. 1 as 3 + 5 + three-beat pickup (or 8 + 3).

(a)

(b)

(c)

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acclimate to the odd meter. More importantly, however, Reich has constructed this music cleverly, so as to evoke the feeling of a simpler groove, namely, a 3 + 5 division of a 4/4 meter—and one could imagine a simpler version of the music that feels more “natural” and certainly more like rock music, if less interesting (Ex. 1.2b).35 Reich’s composition, then, might be heard as appending a threebeat pickup to a 4/4 measure. This makes for a 3 + 5 + 3 division of 11/8 or, more simply, an 8 + 3 division of 11—that is, the opposite of the way in which Reich notated it (Ex. 1.2c).36 As will be shown shortly, the extra three beats pose a metrical “problem” that Reich then “solves” over the course of the composition. But they also allow him to obscure the music’s apparent origins in an unevenly divided 4/4 groove that was common in rock music of the 1960s (and beyond) and which found its origins in African-diasporic clave patterns in Cuba and elsewhere. The first half of the “3-2” clave (Ex. 1.3a), found in Cuban son, mambo, salsa, and many other musics, originally made its way in various shapes to North America in the form of the tresillo rhythmic figure or 3 + 3 + 2 pattern (Ex. 1.3b); it could also be found in specific derivations from the habanera and danzón dance forms.37 Richard Cohn notes that the tresillo was “self-consciously imported into notated American music by the middle of the nineteenth century, where it serves as an ostinato in Caribbean-themed compositions of Louis Moreau Gottschalk.”38 Postwar R&B in New Orleans made extensive use of this pattern, especially in the music of Professor Longhair, who was influenced by Pérez Prado’s mambo records, and others who produced songs featuring “mambo” in the lyrics (as in the Hawketts’ “Mardi Gras Mambo” [1955]),39 as well as songs like the Dixie Cups’ “Iko Iko” (1965), a popular version of James “Sugar Boy” Crawford’s song “Jock-A-Mo” (1953).40 Through the influence of New Orleans R&B on early rock music, soul, and funk, as well as the alternate route of the 3-2 clave rhythm via Bo Diddley’s own appropriation or coincidental recreation of Cuban musical rhythms (via black diasporic rhythmic continuities), this rhythmic pattern became a foundational structure in much 1960s rock.41 Example 1.3 3-2 clave and tresillo patterns in Four Organs: (a) 3-2 clave; (b) tresillo, same as “3” in 3-2 clave; (c) 3 + 5, simplified tresillo, common in rock. (a)

(b)

(c)

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27

A clear example of a simplified 3 + 5 rock tresillo (Ex. 1.3c) is the guitar solo section (starting at 3:00 in) of Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love” (1969), which features the lead guitar responding to the calls of the 3 + 5 groove, with punched-out chords recalling Reich’s, and the hi-hat, which serves a similar subtactile function as Reich’s maracas.42 This song, of course, is much faster than Reich’s composition, and the main pulses of drummer John Bonham’s hi-hat are quarter notes (although one can hear the offbeat eighths as well—in a way similar to the maracas’ offbeat sixteenths in Reich’s work). Songs featuring a slower 3 + 5 figure might include the horn hits at the opening of James Brown’s “Super Bad” (1970),43 or the Rolling Stones’ “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” (1968), the middle, instrumental section (at about 1:30) of which features eighth-note maracas and the 3 + 5 and tresillo rhythm prominently in the bass (played here by guitarist Keith Richards).44 A final example is suggested by a lightly drawn melodic figure written by Reich in his sketchbooks during the gestation of Four Organs; it recalls the main riff from The Kinks’ highly influential “You Really Got Me” (1964).45

Moment 3: Measure 11, 1:34 At this point in the piece, the two chords have begun their process of gradually merging into a single chord, while a pickup figure has grown from a single eighth note in measure 4 into a three eighth-note figure by measure 11 built on the root and fifth of the E extended dominant chord (specifically, E4 and B4; see Ex. 1.4). The figure has now filled in the three-beat pickup, as if to confirm our suspicions that the meter was in fact to be subdivided into 8 + 3. The three-note figure, however, also recalls a kind of three-note postbop jazz pickup figure in famous compositions like “Maiden Voyage,” which also uses the root and fifth in the piano and bass parts (see Ex. 1.5), or saxophonist/composer Wayne Shorter’s “Speak No Evil” (1966), which puts the pickup in the melody line played by the horns. The three-note pickup persists

Example 1.4 Reduction of Four Organs, m. 11, with three-note pickup identified.

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Example 1.5 Opening riff of Herbie Hancock, “Maiden Voyage” (1965).

for several measures: in fact, it does so as the chord elongates toward measure 18, where it now is a single chord occupying four whole beats, followed by a four-beat rest and the three-beat pickup figure. This bar, which Reich notates as being 4 + 4 + 3, is the endpoint of a process to eliminate the 3 + 5 tresillo figure into a squarer, simpler unit, which then kicks off a further process of expanding the pickup into four-beat pickup (at m. 22, 3:24), rearranging the eleven-beat measure into a 4 + 3 + 4 grouping (explicitly notated by Reich) and anticipating the bass note’s arrival one eighth note beforehand (starting in m. 19) so as to blur the downbeat attack. The solidity of the groove gradually melts into air.

Moment 4: (a) Measure 23, 3:38 and (b) Measure 26, 4:11 Now the work undergoes its most significant transformation. From this measure on, Reich incrementally lengthens the duration of each measure, adding a few beats here and there until, by the end of the piece, the last full measure includes 265 beats in total. The composer treats this augmentation process first by adding time to the sustained E dom11 chord—two beats in measure 23, two more in measure 24, three more in measure 25, and so on. Beginning in measure 24, while adding these beats, he also notates the selective release of individual keys in the sustained chord, so that it gradually reduces to a few notes. By measure 26, the effect is quite noticeable, and this remains the case for the remainder of the work. Four Organs’ method of transforming a chord into individual attacks via recomposition and augmentation is the most frequently treated aspect of the piece in scholarly and journalistic literature and is usually linked to a number of influences, including (1) the composer’s failed technological experiments with what he called the Phase Shifting Pulse Gate, a device that would precisely control the timings of pitched pulses and thus allow for the gradual transformation between a chord and melody (as in his now withdrawn work Pulse Music);46 (2) a concept piece called Slow Motion Sound (1967), in which a sound would maintain its pitch while slowing down (using computational methods that are nowadays commonplace);47 and (3) Reich’s frequently expressed interest in the

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medieval organum composers of the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, Léonin and Pérotin.48 While all these reference points for Reichian augmentation are surely relevant, an obvious one linked especially with the second was the rise of tape manipulation in both experimental and popular musics; the former was part of Reich’s training, his having studied at Mills College under Luciano Berio—who had composed some highly regarded tape works—and in his compositional practice, after having gained access to inexpensive tape recorders and then beginning the process of composing for tape between 1963 and 1966 (including The Plastic Haircut, Livelihood, It’s Gonna Rain, Come Out, and Melodica), initially under the auspices of the San Francisco Tape Music Center. Tape slowdown effects are perhaps more common in experimental and avant-garde tape music than in popular songs, although the latter famously benefited from the influence of the former thanks to the Beatles, their producer George Martin and engineer Geoff Emerick, and many other groups, producers, and engineers, and helped to inaugurate various forms of art and psychedelic rock.49 But the augmentation and reduction of the E dom11 chord produce another strange effect accentuated by the Farfisa organ key releases, one that sounds somewhat reminiscent of the rapid cutoffs of tape-reversed recordings, especially around 4:11, corresponding to measure 26.50 Used extensively by the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, and numerous other artists, tape reversal was perhaps the single most characteristically psychedelic studio effect used during the decade, so much so that its popularity quickly waned in the 1970s.51 Signifying an otherworldly sound or an altered and/or drug-induced state of mind—such as the semiconscious state of mind in the Beatles’ “I’m Only Sleeping” (about 1:30 in)—tape-reversal effects in Reich’s recording lead Four Organs to accrue such associations at this point, with the releases often occurring with doubled pitches and at irregular timings so as to perhaps evoke the sometimes unusual rhythms caused by the technique. One more aspect of the composition merits mention. As the E chord is elongated over the remainder of the composition, Reich includes numerical counts within each measure showing explicitly how and where the elongations take place, presumably with the goal of facilitating synchronization between the performers. At first, as mentioned previously, beats are added to the end of the chord, until it achieves a point of seven distinct subsections, each marked by one or more key releases (so, in m. 28 we have 4 + 3 + 2 + 2 + 3 + 2 + 3). But by measure 29, the durations of the subdivisions have begun to grow (thus, m. 29 begins 5 + 4 + 3 + 2 + 3 + 2 + 3), and both processes continue irregularly while revealing the same pattern: a gradual numerical countdown, then a less regular oscillation in the range of the lower numbers of that countdown. (By the penultimate and longest measure [m. 42], the chord countdown reaches 24 + 20 + 16 + 14 + 12 + 10 + 9 + 8 + 9 + 10 + 7 + 8 + 9, reflecting roughly the same contours on a longer and more varied scale.)52

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Moment 5: Measure 37, 7:37 Toward the midpoint of the piece, another process that had begun in measure 29 becomes increasingly apparent: not only has the initial chord been elongated, but the four-note pickup (or three-note pickup + anticipation of the downbeat’s full chord) undergoes a similar augmentation process. It is the exact opposite of the chordal augmentation in that it begins with a single held note and gradually accumulates pitches until it reaches an also-augmented downbeat-chord anticipation; as early as measure 19, that anticipation has been channeled to the right half of the stage, while the left half gets the remaining attacks for the downbeat, and with the slowdowns the spatialization effect becomes more evident. As the attacks slow down in frequency with the increasing durations of individual measures, a slow, spacious melodic motive emerges, beginning on E4—as the only key in the texture—and continuing to B4 and then D4. This figure grows more adorned as the piece continues. At measure 39 (8:38), an almost epiphanic arrival occurs: the opening E dom11 chord, which had been reducing down to two pitch classes (E and A, as E4, A4, and A5) before cutting out, now sustains that last remaining set of notes, which it will do all the way until the anticipatory pickup attack of the full chord at the end of the measure (see Ex. 1.6). The composite effect is that the sound of A (A4, mainly) emerges from a fuller texture and then serves at the beginning of the expanded pickup’s melodic fragment to yield A(4)–E4–B4–D4 (with repeated attacks on the E and B), with other notes, A4 and F♯4, now being appended to these four. The slowness and spatial quality of the passage are highly reminiscent of another slow, quasi-Mahlerian four-note motive beginning with a descending A-E and built on accumulating sustained pitches that was part of an important cultural phenomenon during the 1960s: Alexander Courage’s title cue music to the television show Star Trek (1966–69), which coincided with and both critically and uncritically commented upon the Cold War and the space program, the black liberation struggle, the Vietnam War, and other political themes of the period (see Ex. 1.7a–c). As Jessica Getman argues, the title cue’s internal stylistic shifts reflect the social tensions found in the series;53 crucially, it is only the first section of Courage’s theme that is

Example 1.6 Four Organs, m. 39 (93 beats in), melodic theme, now tied to sustained A.

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Example 1.7 Comparison of pitches in Four Organs; in (a) Four Organs melody; (b) Star Trek title cue music (1966), opening; and (c) Mahler, Symphony no. 1, mvt. 1 (1887–88), opening melodic figure, complete statement (mm. 18–21). All notes are sustained in the Reich, only the first four are sustained in Star Trek, and a sustained A (in multiple registers) precedes the melody in Mahler. Bar lines do not correspond to original scores, and rhythmic distributions are approximate. (a) (b) (c)

evoked, which in the television theme figures “space,” in contrast to the exploration of a final frontier by the heroic captain and crew of the Enterprise (as figured by the theme’s trumpet fanfare, corresponding to the last eight notes of Ex. 1.7b). As Four Organs progresses further, the melody adds two more notes within the A major diatonic scale, B3 and G♯4, all the while maintaining its celestial quality, which is itself intensified as the increasingly sustained chords produce slow, throbbing beating effects.54

Interpretation Of all the signifiers just discussed, the gradually emerging melody in Four Organs may prove to be the decisive “hermeneutic window”55 in any reading of the piece, but before jumping to conclusions we should list the different signifiers found thus far. They include the following: • rock-music maracas playing even eighth notes, recalling African/ African-diasporic maracas and shakers or Native American rattles; • cheap, garage band Farfisa Mini Compact combo organs;56 • jazzy E dominant-eleventh chord or sus4 with added third (including alternations between apparent dissonances and resolutions); • 3 + 5 rock tresillo pattern, with an extra three-beat pickup; • filled-in pickup, possibly evocative of a post-bop jazz pickup trope; • loud volume and spatial treatment of the organs via left/right channels (bass surrounding listener, chord oscillations after m. 19); • metrical shifts smoothing out the tresillo allusion in favor of a 4 + 4 + 3 or 4 + 3 + 4 pattern; • augmentation technique (expanding from 11 beats to 265 in a single measure—an order-of-magnitude shift), inspired by electronic technologies and medieval organum;

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• key releases, somewhat reminiscent of tape reversal (when combined with beating-induced swells); • nested countdown built into the E dom11 chord; • the pickup’s transformation into a melody, one that increasingly sounds akin to the space evocation portion of the Star Trek theme; • throbbing beating effects of sustained chords, in part due to the Farfisas’ tuning inconsistencies. A series of potential readings might follow from this trajectory, the most selfevident of which arises from the penultimate point, as well as the prominent numerical countdowns,57 the slowing-down effect of the augmentation, and our tip from Schonberg that the piece’s sympathetic listeners depart “to other spheres.” At the manifest level, the piece suggests a homology to space travel or at least a perspectival shift from one on the Earth to one viewing it from afar or viewing other worlds altogether.58 In this sense, Four Organs might work in a similar way to the Charles and Ray Eames’s documentary film Powers of Ten (1977; prototype versions were made in 1963 and 1968), and it is curious to consider that Reich’s augmentation process does literally expand by more than an order of magnitude (or power of ten) during its course.59 A perspectival shift caused by imaginary space travel resonates with the Apollo space program of the 1960s, the big successes of which included the Apollo 8 lunar orbit mission in 1968, which allowed humans to see the Earth from much greater distances than had hitherto been possible, and of course the famous Apollo 11 lunar landing mission of 1969, humanity’s maiden voyage to the moon occurring in mid-July of the summer during which Reich first conceptualized Four Organs (in August). Indeed, with this in mind, we might consider a strange, surrealistic doodle that Reich drew in his sketchbooks around the time that the work began gestating in his mind (see Fig. 1.1).60 It is difficult to interpret, but it appears to be some kind of uniformed or robed figure (or perhaps an animal or a face) departing into space and releasing polygons underneath it, in a way reminiscent of the Apollo rocket and spacecraft’s detaching modules. Perhaps this figure is a kind of monk, ghost, or spacesuited individual escaping into orbit, and thus arguably a self-representation by Reich at this time in his career. One might add to this interpretation by reading the arrangement of Four Organs’ performers, which has an almost cockpit-like appearance, with keyboards taking on the semblance of flight consoles;61 the trope of the recording studio as flight system and/or spaceship resonates both with popular culture imagery and with discourse about it of the time—consider the work of George Clinton, Silver Apples, and King Tubby, among others—as well as Reich’s participation in quasi-scientific artistic endeavors like his work in Bell Labs or with Yale’s Pulsa group.62 Much more, of course, could be said about the imaginaries and imagery of space exploration and their attendant ideologies during the late 1960s, but one

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Figure 1.1 An approximate transcription of Reich’s sketchbook doodle, August 14, 1969.

Reich’s doodle is more perfectly vertical, with the figure at the top bending slightly to the left.

additional point helps to enrich our reading: specifically, the way in which the bumpy rock-based music is smoothed out during the first part of the piece, suggesting a process in which entrainment is gradually undone over the course of the work.63 It is as if one were literally, if not entirely comfortably, “grounded”

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by the work at first, only to become increasingly ungrounded as it unfolds.64 One might think, then, not only of the physical dimensions of flight but also of an experience of floating—in zero gravity, or even in the sensory deprivation floatation tanks used to test training astronauts at the time. Sensory deprivation tanks have also been known to generate hallucinations, including out-of-body experiences—as in the way that Richard Feynman described in his famous memoir, “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!” (1985).65 As have, of course, psychedelic substances, which were bound up with the history of 1960s rock (even if many investigations of that relationship have been overly preoccupied with simple mappings between somatic experience and musical effects).66 Nonetheless, the subtle suggestions of tape reversal in the piece point not only to other forms of imagined bodily projection but also to the generational animus with which Schonberg lambastes Reich’s listeners, who float “on a cloud of musical Zen.” The critic’s comment, explicitly directed at the followers of John Cage, remains one step shy of explicitly criticizing the counterculture and younger artists like Reich who were involved in it; for skeptics, this was a social world involving a narcissistic conjunction of meditation and Eastern spiritual practices (one must not forget that Reich was a serious practitioner of hatha yoga and pranayama at the time), psychedelic drugs and their hallucinations, and an escape from the emotional and communicative realities of the present world and its human inhabitants (as well as its wearying world of labor and employment).67 Schonberg, however, is not wrong to allude to the antihumanist aspects of this work—it does not seem to represent a subjectivity except in the barest sense, the subject as observer of a process, albeit one that appears to have an ecstatic or epiphanic endpoint. The experience of escape by floating out of one’s body and above the Earth might well be figured as a psychedelic one, but in Four Organs it gives the listener a sense of omniscience, of being— rather than ear-witnessing—the sublime. What, then, is the omnisciently observing narrative subject escaping while experiencing Four Organs? In part, we might propose, it is the signifiers of blackness, of African America coalesced into a snapshot groove encompassing a panorama of black and black-derived cultural practices—Latin dances, New Orleans grooves, jazz chords, rock music—and sublimates them into an experience intended to be “beautiful,” to send “chills up and down [one’s] spine,”68 to paraphrase Reich’s famous critique of improvisation (a critique implicitly laden with essentialized racial affiliations and positionings).69 Reich, as compositional antisubject, achieves liftoff in Four Organs, escaping the political and racial tensions and traumas of the 1960s by hearing them at a distance, an order of magnitude away from their source—and thus perhaps the work should be heard in counterpoint to Gil Scott-Heron’s “Whitey on the Moon” (1970), which offered a pointed critique of the racial dynamics and imaginaries of the space program.70 Such, however, was not the case for the 1973 Carnegie Hall audience

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members who took umbrage at the idea of a composer subjecting them to an unending chord and relatively loud volume coming from a pseudo–rock band onstage. They comprised a constituency that was, in all likelihood, not clued in to the technologies of the self peddled and consumed by Reich and other artists of his moment, and the composing subject’s omniscience—in contrast to the performing composer’s sheer terror—was surely an affront to the portion of the audience that was looking for relatively elite, humanist entertainment and not, as Tilson Thomas put it at the previous iteration of the program in Boston, “a piece . . . for virtuoso listeners.”71 Their moment, after all, was one of escape, too—in this case, from the calamities of American society that came knocking in January 1973, including the resignation of President Nixon and a stock market crash that presaged an OPEC oil embargo that would cripple the world economy, setting it on its decades-long downturn from which it has yet to recover.72 Given that Reich ultimately benefited greatly from this audience’s displeasure on that one occasion, perhaps it is worth attempting to ponder exactly what they lost in the transaction. And yet, one may also argue that the logics of racial-political escape do not fully capture Four Organs’ modes of making meaning, even while accepting the basic premises of this science-fictional interpretation. Two reasons come to mind. First, despite the considerable distance from the initial moments of the work that the auditor perceives by its end, there is an element from the outset that remains:  the maracas. Continuing steadfastly until the very end, the persistence of a percussion stream indelibly tied to the logics of an African/African-diasporic or Native American musical practice might make us appreciate a certain resistance within the work itself to a depoliticizing narrative of transcending the social. Second, due to the increasing saturation of the sonic space with sustained organ tones, as well as the enlarging metrical contexts in which one hears the maracas, the aural experience of that percussive layer changes over the course of the piece, transforming from a crisp, rhythmic groove element (clearly perceptible due to the presence of considerable textural gaps) into what sounds much more like a machinic set of whitenoise pulses, reminiscent of the end of Reich’s dystopian tape piece, Come Out (1966).73 In Four Organs, however, these pulses’ affective resonance is more ambivalent, retaining something of their uncanny edge in the earlier tape piece and yet at the same time oddly contributing to the major-mode diatonic, quasi-cadential radiance of the later composition.74 To propose one possible affirmative reading, are they hopeful (if unrealistically sonified) machinic, mechanical-engine-like chugs that transport us as listening subjects into the beyond?75 The ambiguous meanings and valences of those maraca pulses offer us an object lesson in the dialectical transformation of quantity into quality discussed by Friedrich Engels and so often treated by Fredric Jameson: heard enough times and in a slightly different context, these pulses become something else entirely.76 As elements subjected to a scalable process of expansion,

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the pulses demonstrate the fundamental nonscalability of rhythm, transmuting a thing, through repetition, into something else.77 Instead of being infinitely addable ticks in a digital counter, maraca pulses—like everything else in Four Organs—tell a story.78

Epilogue Hermeneutic readings of musical compositions/performances are personal undertakings that, in the last instance, have relatively little to do with the recovery of intention—a notion that has been frequently critiqued, reaffirmed, and problematized within English-language musicology, especially since the 1980s.79 Given my own preoccupations with racial politics in the United States during the long 1960s and its relevance to Reich’s music, the interpretive turns outlined in this chapter should not be terribly surprising.80 And while my approach maintains the goal of pursuing interpretive plausibility,81 seeking, at some level, to engage in an imaginary interpretive conversation with the textual horizon of Four Organs, as defined within Gadamerian hermeneutics,82 I remain sympathetic to the critique of the hermeneutic circle and the persistent advocacy of interpretive freedom by Lawrence Kramer.83 (Indeed, such interpretive lines of flight could well be justified by Schonberg’s aerial metaphor.) But written interpretations can unintentionally congeal into quasi-truths; so, with this in mind, it might be worthwhile to propose an alternate reading of the piece that aligns more closely with the composer’s priorities and published statements. That reading would begin by foregrounding the maracas connection to Moondog—one of Reich’s musical associates and contemporaries during the time of the work’s composition, his lunar moniker notwithstanding. It would then acknowledge the African American and African American– derived vernacular musical sources that Reich himself identifies (Monk, rock) while also noting that the opening harmony and rhythmic gesture is strikingly Stravinskian (see, for example, the punctuated G dom11 chords in the “Russian Dance,” measure 47 and after, from Petrushka).84 This reading could then interpret the work’s ending melodic line as inspired neither by Star Trek (by interpreting its similarity to the television show’s title cue music as an aural pseudomorphism) nor by the Apollo program (by appreciating the rift between the counterculture’s and the establishment’s understanding of the space program85) but rather by medieval chant and organum, in accordance with the composer’s own description of his inspiration for the augmentation process.86 Even the psychedelic effects of the Farfisa key cutoffs may evoke comparable key cutoffs in Baroque organs rather than tape reversals, or they may even recall a similar key-release technique in measure 74 of the finale of Schumann’s “Abegg” Variations, op. 1.87 In light of which, one could interpret the departure

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not as one into space but as one back in time, in which the modernist and vernacular twentieth century gives way to the premodern (or early modern), largely leapfrogging the era of “middle-class favorites” of Reich’s childhood that he subsequently abjured.88 Four Organs, in this reading, narrates the development of Reich’s own aesthetic preferences, as a strange kind of Bildungsroman. These two distinct readings can, however, be synthesized. One could consider, for example, the peculiar racial politics of Petrushka;89 the fad for Baroque keyboard styles in 1960s rock organ playing (as in Matthew Fisher’s organ part in Procol Harum’s “A Whiter Shade of Pale” or Ray Manzarek’s organ part in “Light My Fire” by the Doors);90 and, more generally, the blending of the futuristic (modern drug technologies, tech-utopianism) and distantly past (such as medieval and early modern aesthetics, the study of ancient civilizations and religions, etc.) in the aesthetic tastes and intellectual lives of the counterculture, not to mention familiar artistic precedents for such admixture—as in the longstanding, overlapping literary and cinematic genres of space opera, planetary romance, and sword-and-planet.91 But a more pointed sublation of these readings can be characterized simply in terms of flight-as-escape: flight from a troubled present and toward a future anchored by durable traditions. A restless search for origins animated Reich’s exploration of traditional musics from Africa and Indonesia and, eventually, his embrace and study of Judaism and Jewish cultural practices (including Hebrew biblical cantillation).92 The political implications of that flight, which reverberate in the markedly different experiences of black, other nonwhite, and white lives in the United States during the five decades after Four Organs was conceptualized and composed, make urgent the imputation of plausible markers of the work’s contemporaneity.93 And yet, Reich remains elusive when discussing many of his vernacular influences. In contrast to his ethnographic source material, which he often identifies either in publications or to himself in sketchbooks, the composer has tended to discuss popular musical influences only in general terms, describing the transmission of ideas with the phrase “in the air.” For example, he notes, “In rock and roll Junior Walker had a tune called ‘Shotgun,’ which had one repeating bass line through the whole tune. This kind of harmonic stasis was in the air.”94 In contrast, Reich clearly recognized early on during the conceptual phase of his work on Four Organs that gradual augmentation would produce long tones in the manner of La Monte Young’s music, producing humorous comments to that effect in his sketchbook.95 The striking difference in precision and specificity in these two examples demonstrates the tangible consequences of Reich’s brand of Zeitgeistgeschichte: while certain instances of intertextuality in the composer’s music are explicitly named and attributed, others exist only in a state of liminal potentiality, hovering on the edge of musical ineffability that threatens to engulf their being and, with them, the hermeneutic impulse altogether.96 This interpretive maneuver, however, does an injustice to the communicative richness of Four Organs, a conversation about which I hope to initiate

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with the foregoing study. Upon further collective reflection, perhaps it may be possible to reimagine and recenter the vernacular inheritances of this pivotal work, thereby pulling it out of the air where it floats and back onto the ground, at least for a moment.97

Notes 1. Schonberg 1973a. 2. Hexaméron exists in three versions: one for solo piano, one for piano and orchestra, and one for two pianos. For an informative discussion of it, see Rosenblatt 2002, 309–13. The concert also included J. C. Bach’s Symphony for double orchestra in E-flat major, op.  18, no.  1 (published in 1781), and Bartók’s Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta (1936). 3. Duckworth 1999, 303. 4. It is crucial to reiterate explicitly that there were likely internal contradictions within this audience, including the divide between new music fans and Boston Symphony Orchestra enthusiasts who attended the concert series. Age divisions were probable as well:  Frank Epstein, BSO percussionist, thought that the concert “attracted our normal audience” but might also have included “more young people than normal,” given that the concert seemed to be created for and pitched to “a younger crowd.” Aside from Epstein’s comments, however, I was unable to obtain more precise information about the series subscribers or concert attendees. Email exchanges with the author, January 31 through February 1, 2016. Thanks to Anna Zayaruznaya for asking me to further clarify the lack of homogeneity in the audience. 5. Potter 2000, 208. 6. See Strickland 1993, 221–22; Schwarz 1996, 70–71; Rich 2006; Weininger 2014. 7. Weininger 2014, G9. 8. Duckworth 1999, 304. 9. Schonberg 1973b. 10. See Schwarz 1996, 70; Cross 2015, 50; Wald 2015. Thanks to Steve Rings for mentioning that Dylan himself has recently likened his experience at Newport to the famous riot over The Rite of Spring in Paris. Tilson Thomas seems to be the primary narrator of the Rite-like version of this event, apparently informing Reich of much of what happened after the fact (since, unlike the conductor, the composer wasn’t positioned to be able to pay close attention to the crowd and was instead concentrating on performing; see Strickland 1993, 222). Whether intentionally or not, however, Tilson Thomas may have misremembered some of the details or exaggerated for effect. Sedgwick Clark, who was at the concert, noted that the piece “provoked a mass walkout, with audience members shouting at each other and at the performers,” and then stated, “Tilson Thomas recalled that ‘One woman walked down the aisle and repeatedly banged her head on the front of the stage, wailing

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“Stop, stop, I  confess.’ ” Another quote had her banging a shoe. I  wonder how he could have heard her: I was sitting about a third of the way back from the stage in the left parquet section with Joan La Barbara, who performed in two of these current Maverick concerts, and can attest that after 10 minutes it was impossible to hear the music over the uproar.” Clark’s comments appear on the Musical America blog at www.musicalamerica.com/mablogs/?p=4449, accessed July 13, 2017. La Barbara stated that Tilson Thomas’s description of the concert may have been slightly “amplified” (personal communication, October 28, 2016) and later confirmed that Clark “gave an accurate commentary. MTT’s comment most likely came after the fact as he was describing the event and the outrageous reactions. If a woman came down and banged her head or a shoe on the stage, I’m sure we would have noticed (even if she couldn’t be heard). People marching up and down the aisles, enraged, with umbrellas was de rigueur for concert protests. I recall similar reactions to the Avery Fisher Hall premiere of John Cage’s Renga with Apartment House 1776 [in November  1976]” (personal communication, August 6, 2017). If minor untruths were involved here, however, one can only imagine they were well-intended, with the goal of promoting Reich’s music at a crucial juncture in his emerging career. Thanks to Will Robin and Alex Ross for tracking down and sharing Clark’s quote; many thanks to La Barbara for corresponding with me about this concert. For a contemporaneous article describing the Cage concert protest mentioned by La Barbara, see Hughes 1976. 11. This comment was also mentioned by Strickland 1993, 221. Barry Shank, Edmund Campion, and Richard Taruskin emphasized to me that the uproar was likely provoked by the out-of-place context of the work’s performance on this occasion (it was usually performed in the gallery/downtown scene, with audience members often stoned or tripping, etc.). 12. For the most impressive examples of US-centric, minimalism-directed histories of late twentieth-century music, see Taruskin 2005, 351–410; Ross 2007, 515–91. 13. Anderson 2013, 106. 14. See Fink 2005b: “Rather than abuse these critics, I want to use them, to gather clues about minimalism as a powerful cultural practice from those who would prefer to see it as a pathological cultural symptom” (19). 15. Timings in this and later section headings in this chapter refer to the recording Reich 2009 (1970); measure numbers to Reich 1980a. 16. Hartenberger 2016, 13; Cotter 2002, 388. Indeed, Hartenberger includes an interview comment by Reich in which the composer agrees that this may be the influence on him and discusses Moondog’s performances with his invented percussion instrument, the “trimba,” and a single maraca, which he played simultaneously while accompanying his singing. In several recordings of Moondog’s “madrigals” by the composer, Reich, Philip Glass, and Jon Gibson made in either 1967 (as per Reich and Hartenberger) or, more likely, in the summer of 1969, on June 4 (Scotto 2013, 171), we hear a constant maraca pulse throughout, as part of a syncopated groove in 5/4 (“Be a Hobo,” “I Came Alone into This World,” “Trees against the Sky,” “Why Spend

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the Dark Night with You,” “All Is Loneliness”) or 7/4 (“My Tiny Butterfly”). (Four of these recordings are reproduced on the musical album accompanying Scotto’s book.) Interestingly, Reich also initially notes in his sketches for the piece that would become Four Organs on August 25, 1969, that a single maraca should be used—akin to Moondog’s practice—and then suggests two maracas might be used in a hocketed way. (The final composition combines both approaches—two maracas doubling the same pulsed part.) Paul Sacher Stiftung (Basel, Switzerland), SSR, Sketchbook [1], August 25, 1969, entry, p. 78. Thanks to Pwyll ap Siôn for first alerting me to the reference in Hartenberger’s book, and thanks to Robert Scotto and Hartenberger for corresponding with me on these matters. 17. Everett 2009, 20. 18. “Magic Bus” is also based on the Bo Diddley beat. The opening of Four Organs also recalls rock percussion introductions with quarter-note attacks more generally, a good example of which is Love’s rendition of “My Little Red Book” (1966), which begins with a tambourine opening quite similar to the opening of Four Organs. Thanks to Anthony Kaczynski for this comment. 19. Thanks to Russell Hartenberger for this observation. 20. BSO percussionist Frank Epstein noted that Reich himself requested that four maracas players should perform the piece, that the percussionists did hold the maracas horizontally to eliminate the backbeats, in accordance with the score, and that the tempo was set by the conductor with input from the composer. All of which points to the likelihood that the results of the BSO performance were in accordance with Reich’s wishes at the time; the composer may have been accommodating given the new circumstances (i.e., new performers and a different performing arrangement), and/or he may have used the opportunity to experiment with different approaches to the piece. Email exchanges with the author, January 31 through February 1, 2016. 21. Thanks to Jocelyne Guilbault for reminding me that the maracas could also be read as African/African-diasporic shaker instruments, rather than rock maracas. 22. Michael Veal, personal comment during a question-and-answer session, 1 December 2017. Providing contexts for some of Reich’s encounters with Native American cultural practices, Kerry O’Brien has also noted that the composer visited the American West and Southwest during the 1960s, including a four-day trip to Colorado with Dean Fleming and John Baldwin in the summer of 1966 and visits for several weeks in subsequent summers to the New Buffalo commune in Taos, New Mexico, co-founded by his ex-wife Joyce Barkett and poet Max Finstein. (One important motivation for Reich was to spend time with his and Barkett’s son, Michael). Indeed, his lengthy stay in New Mexico in 1968 provided the opportunity for his collaboration in Over Evident Falls with William Wiley and other artists in Boulder, CO, resulting in Pendulum Music. See Potter 2000, 174–75. In a personal communication (on October 25, 2018) O’Brien mentions correspondence from Dean Fleming that “describes spending four days in Colorado (with John Baldwin and Reich in the summer of 1966), dancing with members of Ute tribe, and handing out Park Place buttons.” A letter from Dean Fleming to Paula Cooper, July 1966, is in the Park Place

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Gallery Art Research records and the Paula Cooper Gallery records, 1965–1973, Archives of American Art, Washington, DC. 23. Grimes in Reich 1987a, 31. 24. Trynka 1996, 33. Indeed, one might fairly describe the ensemble as Reich’s garage rock organ quartet. Reich (in Cott 1997) does mention that younger musicians describe this composition as his “punk piece” (34) and also points out that the piece “does have a wake-up quality. First of all, the piece is played on four screaming rockand-roll organs, so the timbre is like talons on your ears. The high frequencies assault you” (33). That said, Steve Rings has pointed out to me that the use of the electronic organ, particularly by 1970, can’t help but evoke the other, more explicitly psychedelic appearances of organs in instrumental freak-out jams of the late 1960s— one immediately thinks of the Doors and Ray Manzarek’s Vox in tracks from 1967 like “Light My Fire” and “Break On Through (To the Other Side)”; Iron Butterfly’s Doug Ingle’s Vox in “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida”; or even the Hammond organs played by Booker T. Jones in Booker T. and the M.G.’s, Jimmy Smith, Georgie Fame and The Blue Flames, and numerous others. Although some of these tracks and passages (especially those by the Doors) also feature modal two-chord progressions that are not so different from Reich’s, the instrumental jams here are nonetheless quite different in effect when compared with Four Organs: specifically, the improvisational and ecstatic temporality of examples like the Doors’, which use short riffs that vary as part of quickly intensifying passages lasting a minute or two, is quite different from the much slower, systematic, and almost machine-like transformations of Reich’s music at this time. 25. It is worth considering that this work involves the first appearance of the bass register in the composer’s music since Oh Dem Watermelons; the works of the middle to late 1960s were decidedly midregister music. Interestingly, the bass keys on the Farfisa (which can be octave-shifted down for a deeper bass range) are limited in range to just under an octave—although Reich’s mobile bass lines even well after this composition were relatively restricted, often holding onto notes for a long time. Nonetheless, perhaps the organ’s range restriction encouraged a very simple use of the bass register. 26. It may be that these artifacts were caused by slow warming up of the keyboard’s transistors. Admittedly, the Farfisas may not be at fault: the effect could be a result of the interaction of the keyboards with the amplifiers and the acoustics of the performance space, or, most probably, the result of tape print-through. Thanks to Walter Everett, Neil Newton, David Novak, and Ed Sheehan for their comments on this point. 27. Jazz composer and arranger Dean Sorenson described the Oh Dem Watermelons chord as an “A7 sus add 3,” and hence might describe the Four Organs chord as “E9 sus add 3.” Email exchange with author, January 19, 2009. 28. Cott 1997, 33. 29. Ibid. Aaron Johnson has pointed out to me Monk’s “second and lift” technique: of his playing a dyadic second, perhaps as the upper part of a larger chord (especially with the upper fingers of the right hand), and rotating the hand to the left to

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sustain the lower note of the dyad—so, for example, sustaining the fourth finger while releasing the fifth. This suggests that Monk’s influence may have been relevant not only to the construction of Reich’s chord but also to the treatment of the G♯–A dyad and its quasi-resolution. Not knowing Monk’s music especially well, I haven’t encountered many versions of the chord in his recordings. It does appear in versions of “Lulu’s Back in Town,” including that on the album It’s Monk Time (1964) at roughly 2:56, as a cadential chord before the resolution to the dominant flat-ninth at the end of the solo piano introduction. (Here, it is heard in a cluster version similar to Ex. 1d.) 30. Quinn 2014. The “talismanic” role he attributes to the word “watermelon” in Reich’s sketchbooks might also be an elaborate (and racially problematic) in-joke, given its source: his music for Oh Dem Watermelons, a short, somewhat surrealist experimental film which treats the watermelon as a racially charged signifier and which was originally screened as part of the San Francisco Mime Troupe’s A Minstrel Show, a politically and racially confrontational reworking of the nineteenth-century blackface minstrel show (see Gopinath 2011). 31. See the discussion in Levine 1995, 46. Levine notes, “In the 1960s, a growing acceptance of dissonance led pianists and guitarists to play sus voicings with both the 3rd and the 4th.” But, as with Kelly’s chord, Levine states that in these chords “the 3rd is always above the 4th,” unlike Reich’s chord. Many thanks to Benjamin Givan for this reference. 32. Although my prose description of the “Maiden Voyage” chord can be abbreviated as Mm7/9sus4 or m7/9sus4, it is typically given the simplified jazz-theory label sus4 or sus or is otherwise described as a “slash chord” (using the formula “[chord]/ [bass-note]”). Apropos of the latter case, the chord in Ex. 1.1g could be labeled as D/E, because is voiced like a D major triad in the right hand subposed by E in the bass (which is reinforced by B, the fifth above E) and played by the left hand. (See Levine 1995, 45–46.) Indeed, the use of these chords in the pulsed chordal attacks in “Maiden Voyage,” as well as the pickup figure discussed later, make it a particularly strong reference point for Four Organs. 33. That said, Santana’s “Oye Como Va” makes use of repeated Dorian i7 organ attacks (as part of a i7–IV7 harmonic loop; this could also be heard as a repeated, unresolving tonal ii7–V7) quite comparable in effect to the opening of Reich’s composition. (Santana’s recording is from 1970, released after the completion of Four Organs, although Tito Puente’s original, which maintains the same harmonic gesture, is from 1963.) Thanks to Henry Spiller for this observation. And, lengthy, suspended extended tertian sonorities (with an initially descending half-step oscillation), comparable to the Four Organs chord and performed on a Vox electronic organ, can be heard in the first six minutes of John Cale’s Sun Blindness Music (1965). 34. Taruskin 2005, 378. It is worth mentioning that higher prime number metrical groupings (i.e., above three) are rare in Reich’s music in the 1960s through 1970s. After It’s Gonna Rain (1965) and up to (and including) Music for 18 Musicians (1976), consistent higher prime number divisions can only arguably be found in Come Out (1966), which can be transcribed in 7/8 (but need not be). See Gopinath 2009, 128–30. This changes in the late 1970s, however; for example, Octet (1979) is consistently in 5/4 (or 10/8); see Pwyll ap Siôn’s chapter in this volume for an extended discussion of that piece.

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35. It is worth mentioning that Russell Hartenberger, one of the early performers of the piece, did not hear the opening groove this way, although he emphasized that the performers were mainly concentrating on getting the rhythms correct and staying together (personal conversation, August 2015). 36. It may be possible that the meter was partly inspired by the Grateful Dead’s “The Eleven,” which was released on Live/Dead (1969)—about which Phil Lesh, Reich’s long-time friend and erstwhile musical collaborator, had corresponded with the composer. Recorded in January through March 1969, Live/Dead was released on November 10, 1969. Reich’s first sketch for Four Organs, called “The Gradual Stretch,” dates from October 19, 1969, and it includes the opening eleven-beat pattern. Reich may have known about the song and/or received an advance copy of the album (or recording); or, it may simply be a coincidence. Interestingly, the 11/4 parts of the song are divided as 3 + 3 + 3 + 2, suggesting a triple meter with one beat cut off on the fourth measure. This is rather different from Reich’s piece, with its implicitly duple subdivisions. Much of the Grateful Dead track, however, is in 4/4; it may therefore be that Reich’s metrical scheme recombines and rethinks “The Eleven.” Thanks to Neil Newton for reminding me of this track. 37. Manuel 1985, 252–54. Manuel shows transformations of the habanera’s contredanse rhythm and danzón’s cinquillo rhythm into the tresillo (250–52). 38. Cohn 2016, 4.3. 39. The tresillo figure, however, is much more explicitly presented in the bass part of the Meters’ 1975 version of the song, on their album Fire on the Bayou. For a more recent example, the theme song to the television show Treme is also based on the tresillo rhythm—explicitly signaling the song’s New Orleans-ness. 40. Stewart 2000, 306–7. One crucial factor that makes these rhythmic patterns comparable to those in minimalism is the fact that this music is unswung and, as Stewart argues, was part of a trend in the 1960s away from swing in US popular music. Reich’s music (as well as Glass’s, most of Riley’s, etc., and most classical music) is not swung. 41. The continuities between various Afro-Caribbean rhythms, including the tresillo, are discussed by Washburn 1997; using a geometric music-theoretical apparatus, Toussaint (2013, 214–15) connects the tresillo to a broader swath of world rhythms (including African and African-diasporic ones). 42. Synthesizing numerous sources, Biamonte 2014, 6.4 (example 8) distinguishes between the 3 + 3 + 2 tresillo rhythm and the 3 + 5 Charleston rhythm (from Cecil Mack and James P. Johnson’s “The Charleston” [1923], which helped to inspire the dance craze of the same name). Clearly, in the abstract, the two rhythms are very closely related, with the latter lacking the final attack of the former (although that attack can remain implicit). (Washburn 1997 also makes this connection [67–68, 71].) Because of the specific associations of the Charleston with that song and the 1920s dance craze, as well as its performative particulars, it seems preferable to call this rock 3 + 5 pattern a “simplified rock tresillo” rather than a “rock Charleston.” (The Charleston requires a relatively fast tempo—usually well above ♩ = 200 if one were to count 3 + 5 in one measure of a normative 4/4 meter—and is very frequently if not always swung.) For several examples of simplified and unsimplified rock tresillo patterns in 1980s pop/rock, see Traut 2005.

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43. Although it does not serve as an influence on the composition due to its release date later in 1970, the potential parallel is nonetheless worth mentioning, particularly in light of Starr and Waterman’s (2003) trenchant comment on Brown’s own minimalist approach to R&B/soul music: “One additional and fascinating aspect of Brown’s work is the relationship it suggests to the ‘minimalist’ music by avant-garde ‘art-music’ composers, such as Philip Glass and Steve Reich, that was developing simultaneously if independently in the late 1960s in New York. This was also music based on repetitive rhythmic patterns with a de-emphasis on traditional harmonic movement. There is no issue of direct influence here, one way or the other. But it could be argued that only old cultural habits and snobbery have kept James Brown out of discussions of minimalism in scholarly forums and journals” (273). If there was an influence, however, it’s more likely that Brown’s early funk tracks affected Reich’s music, rather than the other way around. Thanks to Robert Fink for suggesting this James Brown song as a reference. 44. A  significant difference between these examples and the Reich owes to the fact that the former fit within a clear meter (4/4), leading to accent patterns in playing, whereas the maracas in Four Organs are probably not supposed to impose or reinforce accents in the organ parts (in performances I’ve seen and participated in, the maracas player has always striven not to add extra accents). 45. Paul Sacher Stiftung, SSR, Sketchbook [1], October 28, 1969, entry, p.  84. Underneath some completed sketch measures of Four Organs appears the incomplete melodic fragment A5/A4 A5/A4 G4 A4—A4 G4. They are all eighth notes, the last two separated from the first group by a blank gap, and all appear on the same nearly empty treble staff after a bar line (there is a three-sharp key signature, as with the preceding music). If we hear it in 4/4, it is reminiscent of “You Really Got Me,” except that it is a half-step sharper (The Kinks’ song is in A♭/G♯) and the last A4 should be an eighth rest (although a prominent snare attack appears there). That said, this sketch is more likely an unfinished measure, resultant pattern, or other notated musing. 46. For more on the background to the Phase Shifting Pulse Gate, see Kerry O’Brien’s chapter in this volume. Thanks to Sam Pluta for pushing me to clarify that the Phase Shifting Pulse Gate does not perform augmentation—it just rearranges attacks within a consistent metrical unit. 47. Although Slow Motion Sound remained a concept piece until it was later incorporated into Three Tales (2002), Reich did create a test version of it with technical assistance (involving a vocoder program at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory) in the late 1960s. The test version, which can be heard at the Sacher Foundation, must be included among Reich’s “race” pieces—for it includes the voices of a Ghanaian teacher and student in an English class (taken from the 1967 ABC television documentary Africa), reiterating the sentence “my shoes are new,” gradually slowing down and transforming into discrete pitches, in accordance with the vocoding process. The composer describes the results of that test (and his dissatisfaction with them) in some detail in Reich 2002b, 26–29. It shows, once again, that a foundational technique for the composer (augmentation) initially emerged from his exploration of black voices.

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48. Henahan 1971 includes one contemporaneous example of Reich’s mention of this enthusiasm in print; also see the 1970 program note in Reich 2002b, in which the composer writes, “This process of augmentation was suggested by the enormous elongation of individual tenor notes in Organum as composed by Perotin and others in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in Paris at Notre Dame Cathedral. Tenor notes that in the original chant may have been equivalent to our quarter- or half-notes can take several pages of tied whole-notes when augmented by Perotin or Leonin” (50). Thanks to Charles Atkinson for his queries on this point. 49. Tape speed-up effects were very common, but there are also a few examples here and there of slowdowns, such as the tape slowdown–induced glissando toward the end of the Hollies’ “Dear Eloise” (1967); mentioned in Everett 2009, 351. 50. As heard on Reich 2009 (1970). The mechanism for each key in Farfisa Mini Compact organs involves a tiered series of contacts that touch freestanding wires arrayed vertically for each key’s organ stop or harmonic. Because the contacts don’t touch the stop wires at the same time, a very slow key depression can produce separate onsets for each harmonic. One might say that the attack and release events of a Farfisa Mini Compact organ have a certain “thickness,” which might contribute to the perception of tape reversal or back masking in key releases (particularly in combination with swells caused by slow beating—see endnote 54 in this chapter). Thanks to Michael Gallope for sharing his knowledge of Farfisa keyboards with me. The Farfisa Combo Compact user’s manual is available at www-personal.umich.edu/~damont/ FarfisaComboCompactCompleteUserServiceManual.pdf (accessed July 18, 2016). 51. See Ryan and Kehew 2006, 302–4. 52. In the sketches for Four Organs, Reich frequently includes countups and countdowns for the augmenting measures, and at times includes counting “pyramids” (stacked countups/countdowns) with each lower tier increasing by one count and slightly displaced to incorporate new additive units (so, for example, 3 + 4 + 5 would appear above 3 + 4 + 5 + 6, wherein the event formerly corresponding to “4” would now correspond to “5,” and the lower level would introduce a new event with “3”—a key release or attack). This may suggest that Reich began structuring the augmentation with a quasi-systematic process and then altered the counts if he didn’t like the results. See Paul Sacher Stiftung, SSR, Sketchbook [2], passim. 53. Getman 2015. 54. Courage’s theme is evocative of the Mahler’s cosmic nature-space in the opening of the Symphony no. 1 (1887–88). The variability and difficulty of tuning Farfisas were emphasized to me by Walter Everett, and this has consequences for the long, sustained chords at the end of the piece, which seem to pulse and throb, sometimes quite slowly, thanks to the beating effects caused by those tuning differences (which are prominent on the original recording [Reich  2009]). The beating periodicities vary as different combinations of notes enter and exit, as well as with the listener’s physical location with respect to the loudspeakers (due to the stereo recording). I was first alerted to this phenomenon by Saccomano 2015, 13–14, which notes the discrepancies between the beating periodicities and the maracas periodicity; many thanks to Mark Saccomano for sharing his insightful thesis with me.

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55. See L.  Kramer 1990, 6; this example would be a likely unintentional “citational allusion” (10). 56. Walter Everett noted to me the sonic similarities between Farfisa keyboards and other electronic keyboard instruments like the clavioline, Jennings Univox, and Ondes Martenot, some of which were used for music with space travel associations— including the satellite-themed instrumental hit “Telstar” (1962) by the Tornadoes. The reedy, nasal sound of these instruments is also reminiscent of the closely related theremin, frequently used in both sci-fi and horror contexts (film, TV, thematically appropriate songs) during the 1950s and 1960s and also, of course, in the Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations” (1966). 57. Countdown or counting effects linked to both space travel and nuclear detonation are found in Philip Glass’s Einstein on the Beach (1976) and with nuclear detonation alone in Reich and Beryl Korot’s video opera Three Tales (2002). 58. Intriguingly, images of space flight are quite familiar in the annals of musical minimalism, signaling a generational preoccupation influenced by the Cold War space race. The appearances of spaceships and rockets in Glass’s Einstein and Koyaanisqatsi (1982) are quite well known, for example, and flight and outer space also figure frequently in the work of Meredith Monk, as in her “Astronaut Anthem” from The Games (1983). Brian Eno’s album Apollo:  Atmospheres and Soundtracks (1983) comes to mind as well. Also, John Adams (2009) describes a dream he had during the middle of a creative block; in the dream he saw an oil tanker that “rose up like a Saturn rocket and blasted out of the bay and into the sky” (130). The image served as an inspiration for the opening (“the powerful pounding E minor chords that launch the piece”) of his Harmonielehre (1985). What makes Four Organs especially striking in this company is that it significantly predates these other, better-known, and explicitly space-themed examples and stories. For a variety of cultural representations of the lunar landing and Apollo era, see Crotts 2014, 71–74; Tribbe 2014. 59. See Schuldenfrei 2015, 136–37. As Etha Williams pointed out to me, one could also read the perspectival shift as going in to the chord/Earth/material substrate rather than departing from it, as in placing Reich’s materials under a microscope. Indeed, Powers of Ten features not only an augmentation in order of magnitude, stretching from the image of picnickers at the Chicago lakefront to the widest expanses of the universe, but also a corresponding diminution, down to the subatomic level. Thanks to Joe Dubiel and Mary Ann Smart for comments that clarified the problem of transcendence versus immanence in the piece and the meaning of Schonberg’s “acoustic phenomenon,” respectively. Thanks to Gabrielle Gopinath, who first introduced me to the Eames film. 60. Paul Sacher Stiftung, SSR, Sketchbook [1], near August 14, 1969, entry, p. 74, bottom-right part of page, near spine. Richard Taruskin described it as a “shmoo” from the classic cartoon strip Lil’ Abner (1934–77). 61. See Reich 1980a, [iii], and Reich 2002b, 45, for images of the performance setup. Thanks to Christopher Swithinbank for his comments on the keyboard as a flight console, as figured in Afrofuturist work such as the music of George Clinton

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and writings of Kodwo Eshun, and the notion that the performers are arranged as if in a cockpit. Joe Dubiel also noted that the welter of cables, amplifiers, and assorted musical equipment also adds to the technological aura of the performance and might contribute to the sense of the performance space as a cockpit. 62. As discussed in O’Brien 2009. 63. This is the case when experienced by a listener who does not insist on counting pulses during the entire piece—which, I expect, would be the vast majority of listeners—in contrast to a performer, who must count assiduously throughout and thus stay attuned to the subtactile pulse stream. 64. In his 1981 essay “Crippled Symmetry,” composer Morton Feldman (2000) discusses the piece’s augmentation process and the rhythmically unmooring effect to consider when “the juxtaposition of asymmetric proportions (all additive) becomes the form of the composition” (135). He notes, “In Reich’s Four Organs, the rhythmic patterns are more acoustically oriented and are based on the pitch-components of a chord that never changes. The music begins with a 3 + 8 pattern in which certain pitches from the basic chord are then varied rhythmically. Reich’s first structural move is to . . . divide [the eleven-beat measure] into [different] patterns. What follows is the gradual addition of more beats to the structural frame of now longer measures . . . until Reich does away with the bar lines. As the measures grow progressively longer, the oscillation of the recurring pitches can no longer be said to have any marked rhythmic profile” (135–36). Thanks to Ryan Dohoney for reminding me of this reference. 65. Feynman 1985, 330–37. Thanks to Madhura Gopinath for this reference. We should also take note of Michael Veal’s argument (personal comment, 1 December 2017; also see endnote 22) that the Native American rattle-like character of the maracas indexes initiation rites like vision quests, the latter of which are also frequently combined with the use of hallucinogens like mescaline (in peyote) and can generate out-of-body experiences. Vision quests have a complex and political history for American Indians; they seem to have expanded significantly during the late nineteenth century, in response to the crushing and brutally violent defeats in the American Indian Wars. For a brief discussion of contemporaneous Comanche practices, which might be taken as representative, see Noyes 1999, 15–18. 66. For thoughtful examples of such mapping, see Whiteley 1992. In contrast, Bromell (2000) makes a very loose and general linkage between music and drugs (i.e., their physical immediacy), arguing, “The closely related phenomenologies of music and psychedelics help explain, I think, why millions of young people in the ’60s turned to these experiences as a way to work through and beyond their conditions” (73). Also, Veal’s Native American reading of the maracas encourages an indigenous perspective on psychedelic experience (as mentioned previously— see endnotes 22 and 65), and perhaps evokes images of and ideas about interethnic collaborations or conflicts—particularly as viewed from a white perspective. To put it bluntly, if Four Organs can be read as a white fantasy of an ethnically syncretic vision quest, what does it mean that the structuring rhythm of that quest persists, allowing the piece to maintain its indigenous-ritual character but lose its blackness?

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67. Demonstrating a now conventional linguistic link between the druginduced perception and the space program, Cott (1997) says of experiencing Four Organs’ argumentation process, “People associate this feeling with being spaced out” (34; emphasis mine). In addition, in a personal comment (December 1, 2017) Kerry O’Brien made a point about the language of ecstasy and the word’s roots in yogic philosophy. Reich’s thinking about somatic experience, as realized in Four Organs, may have been tied to his yoga practice and yoga-influenced thinking in the late 1960s, which is discussed in O’Brien’s chapter in this volume. 68. Reich 2002b, 80. 69. See Lewis 1996. More generally, one might argue that late 1960s/early 1970s America was being escaped from, with the signifiers of blackness also signaling the counterculture (and its absorption/appropriation of black music). 70. See Tribbe 2014, 37–39. Thanks to Dalton Anthony Jones for first alerting me to Gil Scott-Heron’s poem and recording. 71. Strickland 1993, 221. Although a simple mapping cannot do justice to who was present at the concert and their myriad reactions to it, the clash between detractors and musicians/supporters recalls the now mythologized 1960s–1970s division between “squares” and “hippies.” (Another homologous, but not equivalent, divide is the frequently bandied-about uptown/downtown opposition in New York art music of the period.) 72. Indeed, the economic decline of the long downturn was inseparable from declines in state spending, which include the downsizing of the space program in the 1970s. See Tribbe 2014, 221–23. On the long downturn beginning in the early 1970s, see Brenner 2006. 73. For more on interpreting Come Out, see Gopinath 2009; Potter 2000, 176–79. 74. I owe almost all of the interpretation from the beginning of this paragraph up to this sentence to Eric Drott. 75. With this interpretation, I take inspiration from David Valentine’s reading of Nikki Giovanni’s poem “Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea (We’re Packing for Mars)” (in Giovanni 2011, 1–4), in which he directly contrasts this text with Gil ScottHeron’s “Whitey on the Moon” (as part of Valentine 2017, 195–98). In Giovanni’s Afrofuturist interpretation of space flight and exploration, “the trip to Mars can only be understood through Black Americans” (3), and future space travelers will need to learn from the horrific experiences of the Middle Passage during the heyday of the transatlantic slave trade in order to cope with the difficulties of such extreme forms of transit. An Afrofuturist reading of Four Organs, after Giovanni, could interpret Reich’s metaphorical exploration of space as a collaborative (and possibly utopian) project fundamentally dependent on blackness and black music—or nonwhite subjectivities more generally, if the indigenous reading of the maracas is incorporated. (Although such a reading is potentially utopian, the maracas—as the obscured and incorporated black/nonwhite musical engine of a space vehicle, itself perhaps figured as a chugging train, and thus acting as proverbial “hidden figures” in this scenario—also reinscribe racialized divisions of labor in this metaphorical journey. They suggest that this reading needn’t be understood as uniformly affirmative.) As such, this reading provides a useful counterpoint to the hermeneutics of

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Four Organs as racial-social escape. Indeed, the escape interpretation exemplifies Valentine’s (2016) broader point that texts and performances like Scott-Heron’s resonate with midcentury philosophers’ arguments that “the move to space is . . . radically decontextualizing and depoliticizing. From this perspective, the view from space seems to concretize the generalizing and abstracting observational capacities of [the] modern subject by obscuring the observer’s interested attachments and conflating a subjective view of a containing atmosphere with an apparent rationalist objectivity” (512). Unlike these thinkers, we needn’t necessarily treat space as a depoliticizing escape from Earth alone—space being, after all, a political project inseparable from the Earth and its inhabitants—and should not reflexively assume the truth of this argument. Indeed, as Valentine astutely notes, “For critics of the human view from space, it is only by framing this view as free of context that humanness on Earth can be meaningful” (521). 76. See, for example, Jameson 2009, 13. 77. See Tsing 2012. Thanks to David Valentine for this reference. 78. Reich claimed he thought of the maracas as an acoustic substitute for the beat-counting “common digital clock” of his Phase Shifting Pulse Gate (Reich 2002b, 45). 79. This history is complex and cannot be recounted adequately here, but it would seem that Wimsatt and Beardsley’s (1946) notion of the “intentional fallacy” has been applied to considerations of musical analysis (at least as early as Treitler 1966, 80; see Haimo 1996), performance interpretation (Taruskin 1982; Tomlinson 1988), and hermeneutics (Taruskin 1997a, especially xx–xxxi), to cite a small number of interrelated examples. 80. See, especially, Gopinath 2005, 2011. 81. See Pontara 2015. 82. For the central text, see Gadamer [1975] 2004. I  am influenced here in particular by one of my teachers, James Hepokoski; see Hepokoski 1991 for an important discussion of the relevance of Gadamer to Dahlhaus; and Hepokoski and Darcy 2006, 604, for a statement of Gadamer’s hermeneutics as relevant to the authors’ approach to the analysis and interpretation of sonata forms. Of course, for recently created music, the “Gadamerian fix” of tradition (L. Kramer 2011, 251) can hardly be said to exist in any great depth; hence my interest in constructing broader intertexts for interpretation (see Klein 2005). I  should additionally add that if my method is strongly influenced by Hepokoski, the specific interpretive observations in my arguments about Reich have long been strongly influenced by the work and suggestions of Michael Veal, whose interpretive sensibility has been an inspiration to me. Moreover, my approach also resonates markedly with Jonathan Bernard’s reading of Philip Glass’s Satyagraha “chaconne,” which he argues might be influenced by chord progressions in 1960s US/UK pop songs as much or more than by Baroque or flamenco music (see Bernard 1995, 281 [fn44]). Thanks to David Novak for prompting me to clarify my methodology here. 83. In Kramer’s (2016) memorable words, “Even if the hermeneutic circle does not absolutely determine the terms on which an interpretation is arrived at . . . the circle nonetheless does determine that only certain kinds of understanding, certain

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kinds of discourse, are possible. Meanings are acceptable only if their origin falls along the circular path, which inexorably closes in on itself, like a noose” (92). 84. Many thanks to Matthew McDonald for this observation. For helpful discussions of the influence of Stravinsky on Reich, see Cross 1998, 170–74; Potter 2000, 154–55; Reich himself describes the chord as being found in both Monk and Debussy (Cott 1997, 33). Richard Cohn (personal conversation, December 1, 2017) also reminds me that there were similar resonances in the European avant-garde—especially the dominant-ninth chord of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Stimmung (1968, first recording released in 1970) and the spectralist tendency that was influenced by it. Reich’s chord and composition could be further understood, alongside this European trend, as contemporary versions of what Daniel Harrison calls “overtonality” (see Harrison 2016, 17, 125–26 [on overtonality in the Octet], and passim). 85. I take the notion of pseudomorphism from the art historian Erwin Panofsky, for whom the term denotes “The emergence of a form A, morphologically analogous to, or even identical with, a form B, yet entirely unrelated to it from a genetic point of view” (cited in Bois 2015, 127). (Panofsky uses the term differently from Adorno, who describes Stravinsky’s music as a “pseudomorphism of painting”—a heteronomous, cross-medial impulse allegedly resulting in an expressionless, atemporalized, and ahistorical form of sonic spatialization. See Adorno 2006, 141–44.) And, despite countercultural sympathies for space travel in general, the Apollo program was largely viewed as a “triumph of the squares,” a culminating achievement of the technocratic rationality of the postwar US state that would become undone by “the rise of a neo-romantic turn in American culture” by the 1970s (Tribbe 2014, 130–31, 21). 86. See Reich 2002b, 50. 87. I  owe the observation about Baroque organs to Lauren Redhead and the Schumann example to Steve Rings. On the Schumann passage, see Rosen 1995, 10–12. Even though the Schumann work is obviously from the nineteenth century, one might consider that the sustained whole notes of this passage may invoke some version of the alla breve topic and, as such, suggest an early modern or premodern reference point at some level of mediation. 88. Strickland 1991, 35; see also 35–37, and Duckworth 1999, 314, for discussions of Reich’s aesthetic preferences. 89. Specifically, the beating to death of Petrushka by the Moor, on which Sjeng Scheijen (2010) comments, “It is remarkable how few commentators over the years have mentioned the explicitly racist character of the ballet” (227). 90. See Long 2008, 124–25. 91. On the point about literary/filmic genres, see Pringle 2000. Indeed, Star Trek’s own depiction of Vulcans as living rather monastic lives (wearing priestly robes, having highly disciplined and austere cultural practices, etc.) is one pertinent example. 92. See Puca 1997, 537–39. 93. Here I  am in part referencing the intrepid efforts of the Black Lives Matter movement and the police shootings of black individuals that it protests. For further study of this subject, see the Black Lives Matter syllabus by Frank

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Leon Roberts at www.blacklivesmattersyllabus.com/frankleonrobertsr/ (accessed August 17, 2016). 94. Grimes in Reich 1987a, 10 (emphasis mine). For more recent statements of this sort from Reich, see Wroe 2009; P. Johnson 2013. In my view, this statement is somewhat misleading, in that it refers to a song that was never explicitly quoted or otherwise employed by Reich and was, instead, used by Terry Riley in a tape composition, The Bird of Paradise (1965)—and it is by now well known that Riley’s tape compositions heavily influenced Reich’s own (see Potter 2000, 118, 164–65). 95. Reich demonstrates this awareness by parodying the lengthy and overly literal names of Young’s compositions, using the word “watermelon” to refer to his extended dominant chord. See Paul Sacher Stiftung, SSR, Sketchbook [1], August 12, 1969, entry, p. 71. 96. Reich’s “in the air” model of influence recalls theories of zeitgeist, or the “spirit of the age.” William Weber (1994) offers a critique of the latter in musical and cultural history, observing: “The cultural history written by Americans in particular has been dominated by a passion to see the arts as a set of cultural unities” (322), and proposes that this is an effect of history teaching. For a recent attempt to recover Zeitgeistgeschichte by critiquing methodological individualism and considering collective historical consciousness as an emergent property, see Førland 2008. A number of recent texts have reinvigorated discourse on the ineffability of music, including Abbate 2004 and Gallope 2017. For a critique of some of this discourse, see L. Kramer 2016. 97. Concerning intertextual connections to Western art music, Reich has explicitly commented on his awareness of the possible influence of Pérotin on Four Organs, even though it somewhat contradicts his earlier accounts of this influence:  “Most of these connections occurred to me after I  did what I  did in a very intuitive, nonintellectualized way, which is something I try to adhere to to this day. I’d heard Pérotin before Four Organs, of course, but if there was an influence it was unconscious.  .  .  . In general, you ought to revisit the literature and then throw it all out the window and write your piece. Forget about it, unless you’re doing what Stravinsky did with Pergolesi. After Four Organs, a very radical piece, I investigated Pérotin because I asked myself, ‘Wait, am I all alone here in the ocean, or am I really in someone else’s swimming pool?’ ” (in Strickland 1991, 37). My goal in this essay is to make comparable connections between Reich’s work and vernacular musics of the sort discussed previously, while at the same time recognizing the potential perils of doing so.

2 “Moving Forward, Looking Back” Resulting Patterns, Extended Melodies, Eight Lines, and the Influence of the West on Steve Reich Pwyll ap Siôn This chapter seeks to trace the influence of the Western classical tradition on Steve Reich’s musical language by the end of the 1970s.* While occasionally acknowledging the influence of European music, its composers and traditions— ranging from Pérotin in the twelfth century to Debussy and Bartók in the twentieth—Reich has nevertheless downplayed the impact of Occidental music on his style and aesthetic in writings and interviews, preferring instead to emphasize the influence of non-Western traditions, such as African drumming and Balinese gamelan music.1 Even during the mid-1970s, when Reich reflected at greater length on his own musical roots and background, he turned not to the music of Mozart and Beethoven for inspiration but rather to the history and development of Jewish music. Indeed, according to the composer, Jewish music provided the catalyst for his use of extended melodies in Eight Lines (1979/1983), which provides the focus for this chapter, rather than any Western classical considerations relating to melodic—or indeed harmonic and formal—constructions. Identifying Western influences in Reich’s music thus appears to go against the composer’s own view, as summarized in the following statement:  “My connections to Western classical music have little or nothing to do with music from Haydn to Wagner.”2 However, Keith Potter has suggested that the late 1970s, when Eight Lines was composed, marked a “watershed” in Reich’s development, reflecting the composer’s “rapprochement with the aims and intentions, as well as the forces, of Western classical music.”3 This is already found in works

* Research for this chapter was supported by a British Academy Small Research Grant awarded in 2015, followed by a Leverhulme Research Fellowship in 2016. Both awards enabled me to carry out research at the Steve Reich Collection, Paul Sacher Stiftung (PSS), Basel. I  wish to thank the PSS, especially Matthias Kassel and Tina Kilvio Tüscher, and Sumanth Gopinath and Robert Fink for comments, suggestions, and advice on earlier drafts of this chapter. Nikki Louise Morgan and Martin Rigby provided translations of German reviews and articles. 53

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leading up to Eight Lines, such as Music for 18 Musicians (1976), which shows an “increased debt to Western classical music in general, and its approach to harmony in particular.” But if 18 Musicians is, as Potter puts it, “crucially ‘on-theedge’ aesthetically, and technically speaking,”4 precisely what might this edge be, and where did Reich’s music go after this point? To assess the extent of this influence on Reich’s musical style during the 1970s, this chapter will be divided into three sections. The first section examines Reich’s relationship and engagement with Europe during this time against the backdrop of a reception history toward his music from critics and audiences. The second section analyzes Reich’s Eight Lines (originally titled Octet in 1979 but subsequently reorchestrated and renamed Eight Lines in 1983), starting off with the composer’s own exegesis, in order to demonstrate that its most innovative aspect—the use of extended melodic lines—is constructed around a largely goal-oriented harmonic (that is to say, Western) structure as much as through Reich’s own immersion in Hebrew cantillation music. The final section seeks to draw together both elements to show how the composer’s mature style from this point onward can be read as a kind of synthesis of Western and non-Western influences.

Overview: Reich in Europe during the 1970s On March 7, 1971, Steve Reich and his ensemble played at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London. In addition to Piano Phase (1967), Pendulum Music (1968), Four Organs (1970), and Phase Patterns (1970), the program also included the first part of the composer’s most recent work, Drumming (1971).5 The London concert was followed by performances at the Centre Culturel, Paris, the Lycée de La Source, Orléans, and the Théâtre de la Musique, Paris on March 13, 14, and 16. The dates, which also coincided with visits to West Germany and England by Philip Glass and his ensemble, marked the two composers’ first live appearances in Europe.6 Since these concerts were organized on a relatively small scale, it seemed sensible and practical for both composers to coordinate their visits to Europe, each utilizing the combined talents of musicians such as saxophonist Jon Gibson and keyboardists/percussionists Art Murphy and Steve Chambers.7 Glass himself also took part in some of Reich’s concerts. Such was the response to Reich and Glass’s short tour in 1971 that further concerts followed throughout the 1970s, each one increasing in size and scope as promoters, festival organizers, and radio stations featuring contemporary music took note of the new style emerging from America. Less than a year later, Reich and his ensemble visited France, Belgium, West Germany, and England in a tour that spanned January and February 1972, which included a concert sponsored by Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR) radio station in Cologne. The tour ended with the first full performance of Drumming outside the United States at the

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Hayward Gallery, London, on February 4, in which several English composers and musicians also took part, including Michael Nyman and Gavin Bryars. Reich returned to Europe later the same year, this time with dancer Laura Dean and her company in a tour that covered France, Belgium, Holland, Italy, and Spain between May and July. Concerts were given at the Pro Musica Nova festival, Bremen, sponsored by Radio Bremen’s new music director and composer Hans Otte, and at the Berlin Festival organized by Walter Bachauer. There was less activity in Europe during 1973, but Reich returned the following year to perform in several high-profile festivals, including the Musik unserer Zeit and Tage der Neuen Musik festivals in Stuttgart and Hannover in January 1974. The schedule was extended to cover concerts in Switzerland, Norway, and Sweden before the ensemble’s final appearance in Europe that year at Bachauer’s Metamusik Festival on October 15.8 Even from such a cursory overview of Reich’s concert tours in Europe between 1972 and 1974, one can clearly identify a shift from regional and national importance to international recognition during the middle to late 1970s. This shift was achieved in part through Reich’s activities in Europe. The broad narrative of this success may be summarized as follows: Reich’s reputation was first established locally during the mid-1960s in the San Francisco Bay Area through performances and collaborations with the San Francisco Mime Troupe and at the San Francisco Tape Music Centre. This was followed in the late 1960s and early 1970s in New York City’s downtown district with further recognition of Reich’s work, where he became part of an active community of like-minded artists, musicians, composers, sculptors, dancers, and filmmakers. The 1970s saw Reich’s music reach beyond San Francisco and New York to European audiences via several concert tours, festival performances, radio broadcasts, album releases, and—toward the end of the decade—festival commissions. During the 1980s and 1990s, Reich’s music attained a global reach, with tours extending beyond Europe and America to Australia, Japan, and South America. Europe’s role in bridging the gap between national coverage of Reich’s music in the United States in the early 1970s and global success in the 1990s is therefore an important one; but how far did this influence go, and to what extent can it be said to have worked both ways? To what extent did European performances of minimalist music serve to secure Reich’s international profile and popularity? What roles did European commissioning bodies and individuals play in supporting this music and legitimizing it both in Europe and back home in America? Was Reich influenced by Europe to the same extent that he influenced Europeans? Did the European tours, the record deals, and the festival commissions change Reich’s style or aesthetic in any way? Is it easy to overestimate the importance of Europe in Reich’s career? Certainly, by the mid-1970s the pendulum had swung toward Europe for Reich and Glass. Sumanth Gopinath even suggests that by this time Reich had “extricated himself from the neo-avant-gardist community,” with which he had

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been associated during the late 1960s, “in order to more fully establish himself as a professional composer, instead of being seen as a fringe experimental artist.”9 Reich’s need to assert his credentials as a composer coincides with his early success in Europe, and the support—ironic in the opinion of some critics—that soon followed from European institutions and promoters. For example, in his preface to Wim Mertens’s book American Minimal Music—the first book of its kind on the subject (translated into English in 1983)—Nyman, a tireless supporter and proselytizer of American minimalism during the early 1970s, wrote, “Paradoxically, such a quintessentially American and seemingly anti-European music has been largely supported and fostered by European institutions.”10 Americans were also picking up on the situation. In an article in Newsweek in April 1984, entitled “The Yanks Are Coming,” critic Alan Rich confidently proclaimed that it was a triumphant time for American composers in Europe. Rich rightly observed that many of Reich’s and Glass’s major works between 1976 and 1984 were “the result of European commissions,” going as far as to say that Europe’s lack of “hero-composers” was partly responsible for this situation.11 Rich’s article focused on the more or less simultaneous world premieres of three large-scale works in major European centers by Glass and Reich within the space of eight days (Reich’s The Desert Music and Glass’s operas Akhnaten and the “Rome” section of Robert Wilson’s epic the CIVIL warS)—a concatenation of events that demonstrates at a glance the extent to which American minimalism now dominated European contemporary music culture. Maarten Beirens has seen this process of commissioning new minimalist works by European institutions as marking the third “phase” in Reich’s popularity during the 1970s, with live performances and record releases issued by European labels forming the first two phases.12 Eight Lines was in fact one of Reich’s first European commissions. Evidently, by the end of the 1970s, Europe had become a source of substantial income and support for several American composers. But is there more to it than this? Not so, according to Reich, whose response on the matter over the years has remained unequivocal, having stated many times that “the difference then and now is the organization and sponsorship of the arts in Europe as opposed to the U.S.”13 If, by the 1980s, the demand for minimalist music from European audiences was pushing concert promoters and festival organizers to support it, back in the early 1970s critical reception to early Reich and Glass tours was more mixed. This music had its supporters, of course, including the aforementioned Nyman in England, Daniel Caux in France, and Hans Otte and Bachauer in Germany.14 There was praise from certain quarters of the music press, too. For example, reviewing Reich’s Pro Music Nova concert in 1972, which featured the German premiere of Drumming, Simon Neubauer wrote enthusiastically about “the magic of repetition” (“Die Magie der Wiederholung”), while Fritz Piersig

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referred to the work’s beautiful impression (“hübschen Eindruck”).15 Potter sums up the situation as follows: [Music] critics began to write more consistently about Reich in the early 1970s. Daniel Caux’s enthusiastic review of the composer’s 1971 Paris concert assisted the [Shandar LP recording of] Four Organs and Phase Patterns which helped raise his music’s profile, in Europe as well as in the USA. Michael Nyman championed his cause in Britain. Major exposure later that year at West German festivals in Bremen and Berlin helped consolidate Reich’s position, at least on the avant-garde scene, despite the hostility his works still sometimes created, including the psychological and social, as well as musical, difficulties some in Germany had with music so devoted to a regular pulse.16

But, as noted by Potter in his final sentence, Reich’s music continued to provoke some extreme responses, especially in the German-speaking press. Adjectives such as “primitive,” “boring,” and “monotonous” were often used to describe his music.17 These descriptions were not uncommon in English-language reviews too, of course.18 However, German critics also seized upon other aspects, including what they identified as the music’s mimetic representation of industrial production and machine-like processes. Worse still, some went further and accused Reich of creating a form of musical fascism that “suppressed social criticism and manipulated the listener’s emotions.”19 The composer was clearly aware of such unwelcome comparisons after his ensemble’s first European tour, stating the following in an interview with Donal Henahan in the New York Times in October 1971: Certain people look at music that is totally controlled, written out, as a metaphor for right-wing politics. But I’d suggest that the kind of control I try to exercise on myself and other musicians who play this music is more analogous to yoga. These are two different conceptions of control—the one imposed from without, the other maintained from within.20

Despite Reich’s own defense, some German critics continued to apply the term “Faschistisch” to his music. While Helmut Lesch, music critic for the Allgemeine Zeitung, merely implied it indirectly by referencing other critics (“ ‘Faschistisch’ ist allerdings in den Augen sogenannter Avant-garde-Kritiker auch die Musik von Steve Reich”),21 Dietmar Polaczek, writing in the Süddeutschen Zeitung, and other like-minded critics were more willing to voice their own views on the matter. In his 1972 review of the Pro Musica Nova festival, Polaczek frames the “problem of new American [minimal] music” in terms of its “mechanical precision,” which, he argues, renders its form meaningless. He goes on to say that its focus on psychoacoustic elements encourages a kind of “mindless” sound immersion (“Versenkung in den Klang”), concluding that its “totalitarian organisation”—through the music’s assault on the senses—turns anarchy into a

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form of “fascistic [or ‘fascistoid’] terror” (“die Anarchie in faschistoiden Terror umschlägt”).22 Polaczek’s comments may not have represented the majority view, although it is interesting to note that as early as 1966, Reich’s tape compositions had been compared to “the fan belts of large machines.”23 Such opinions gathered pace, however, before finally culminating in 1975 with the publication of Clytus Gottwald’s polemical essay “Signale zwischen Exotik und Industrie.”24 In essence, Gottwald’s claims contained nothing new, but they were given added impetus and legitimacy by being published in a scholarly journal and clothed in pseudophilosophical discourse.25 Drawing on the theories of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Gottwald maintained that Reich’s music was “antiintellectual,” it simulated “a continuous performing machine” (“lückenlosfunktionierenden Apparat”), and its processes “dehumanized” the performer. In sum, it exhibited fascist and totalitarian traits.26 Unsurprisingly (although also untypically, since it was uncommon for Reich to respond directly and publicly to such accusations), Gottwald’s diatribe prompted a swift and robust riposte from the composer in the pages of the same journal a few months later.27 In an open letter, Reich inferred that Gottwald’s critique could only be understood in terms of Germany’s attempts to make sense of its own identity as a nation during the postwar period, stating that his reaction was “principally rooted in Germany’s national ‘guilt complex’ resulting from the Second World War.”28 Furthermore, the composer strenuously denied any fascist-style coercion in his music. After all, performing and listening to any music is largely a matter of personal choice rather than necessity. The two eventually resolved their differences, with Reich even reworking an earlier composition for Gottwald’s Stuttgart-based Schola Cantorum ensemble in 1981.29 However, a sense of distrust regarding Germans’ perception of his music continued to rankle with the composer, as illustrated in the following comments given in an interview some years later: I would say my music is basically misunderstood in Germany, and still is. I think my music is as far away from the Germanic musical tradition as it is possible for music to be, and they have never, I think to this day, figured out what my music is really about.30

Did these criticisms elicit a response or reaction from Reich? Is it merely coincidental that at precisely the same time that Gottwald penned his controversial article on Reich’s “mechanical” music, the composer moved away from the rigid, process-based compositions of the late 1960s and early 1970s toward an aesthetic that liberated his music from such strict structures and gave precedence instead to beautiful sounds?31 Could the development of this new style— as illustrated in almost everything Reich wrote after Music for 18 Musicians—be seen as a response to these criticisms? And could such a response have subconsciously taken on more Western-style forms and influences to counteract

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such accusations of “dehumanization” and “totalitarianism”? These questions will now be addressed in relation to Reich’s Eight Lines, first by focusing on the composer’s own comments on the new function of melody in this work followed by an analysis of its harmonic and modal design.

Analysis: Eight Lines Commissioned by Radio Frankfurt and premiered by members of the Netherlands Wind Ensemble under Reinbert de Leeuw on June 21, 1979, Octet (now better known as Eight Lines, as mentioned earlier) was one of two European commissions received by the composer during this time, marking a departure from works written specifically for his own ensemble.32 Despite its moderate dimensions, Eight Lines has remained an important work from the middle period of Reich’s oeuvre.33 Reflecting on the work in an interview with Ev Grimes some eight years after its first performance, the composer stated that Eight Lines “[is] one of the most successful pieces I have ever done; period,” a view supported by many, including members of Reich’s own ensemble. In the same interview, the composer recalled how “Russ[ell] Hartenberger, who is much wiser than any music critic I ever met, said ‘Well, I think [Eight Lines] wins that batch [over Music for a Large Ensemble and Variations for Winds, Strings, and Keyboards].’ ”34 Potter also refers to Eight Lines as “the work which its composer singles out as representing possibly the major point of change,” in Reich’s thinking about structure, melody and harmony, in addition to “the new importance it gives to instruments of the standard Western classical orchestra and to variety of timbral resource.”35 As Potter’s comment suggests, Eight Lines’ more or less standard instrumentation of piano, strings, and winds—“shorn of Reich’s much-loved mallet instruments,” in K.  Robert Schwarz’s words—partly explains its appeal to musicians and ensembles.36 Its increased technical demands, especially for the ensemble’s two pianists, have also been noted. William Austin talked about the “need for stamina” in order to perform the piece; Schwarz went further, characterizing the work in terms of its “relentless virtuosity.”37 Certainly the two pianos’ function (whose dovetailing patterns, according to Reich, provided an indirect homage to boogie-woogie) radically extends the phase relationships first explored in the much earlier Piano Phase, also written for two pianos (see Ex. 2.1a and 2.1b).38 The former’s well-known opening pattern covers less than an octave (E4 to D5, a minor seventh higher; Ex. 2.1a), while its equivalent pattern in Eight Lines spans fully four octaves within the space of a mere four quarter-note beats (Ex. 2.1b).39 In fact, the opening ideas contained in both pieces are also closely connected in pitch content:  the five pitches that are heard during the first part of Piano Phase (reordered as B–C♯–D–E–F♯, suggesting either transposed Dorian or

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Example 2.1a and 2.1b Comparison of the opening piano lines in Piano Phase (1967) and Eight Lines (1979). (a)

(b)

Aeolian) are also found in the opening six pitches in the left-hand pattern of piano 1 in Eight Lines, this time transposed up a tone (C♯–D♯–E–F♯–G♯, with the addition of a B). The right-hand pattern comprises the same set of pitches as the left, transposed up a perfect fifth, therefore creating a series of parallel fifths between both hands.40 This brief comparison of the openings of Piano Phase and Eight Lines demonstrates at a glance how far Reich’s musical language had transformed between 1967 and 1979 in rhythmic complexity, virtuosity, and expansion of register, while also showing that he continued to draw on similar modal and tonal patterns. Eight Lines’ ability to balance existing techniques from earlier compositions with forward-looking elements is an important feature of the work. The combination of such “consolidatory” and “innovative” elements in Reich’s music have occasionally been the subject of the composer’s own reflections. In an interview with Nyman in 1976, Reich explained his creative development in terms of a kind of zigzagging motion, where an innovative piece might be followed by a consolidatory one:  “Having written Music for Mallet Instruments [Voices, and Organ], it was possible [for me] to go back and write [Music for Pieces of Wood, for five pairs of tuned claves]; once having written the claves piece, it was possible to wait for two years and come up with Music for 18 Musicians.”41 Other consolidatory and innovative features belong to Eight Lines. In its adoption of a two-tiered texture that pits busy, pattern-based motion in pianos and winds against more fluid, sustained motions in strings, Eight Lines’ consolidatory elements connect it with Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices, and Organ (1973), which also sets up similar binary oppositions between slow-moving chords in

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female voices, organ, and metallophone with more active movement in the marimba and glockenspiel parts. The process of substituting beats for rests, heard in the clarinet parts in various sections of Eight Lines, relates back to numerous compositions such as Drumming (1971) and Six Pianos (1973), while Eight Lines’ use of rhythmic augmentation in the string parts can be traced back to Four Organs (1970).42 However, by far the most discussed element in Eight Lines has been Reich’s use of extended melodies. This arguably represents the work’s most striking and innovative departure. Up until Eight Lines, melodic elements in Reich’s music were based on short patterns or musical cells, which—when combined contrapuntally—yielded longer patterns (or, at least, less repetitively obvious ones), which the composer referred to as “resulting [or resultant] patterns,” a discovery that went back to Violin Phase (1967).43 While these patterns were constructed more or less freely in the early works, they increasingly took on a more prescribed character of “composed melody” and were soon incorporated by Reich as part of the compositional process itself.44 The next obvious step was therefore to transform these resulting patterns into clearly discernible melodic lines. This is what Reich does in Eight Lines. The composer himself has added weight to the importance of melody in this work, especially in relation to the cantillation (or chanting) of Hebrew Scriptures. In his 1979 note on Eight Lines, Reich sums up the situation as follows: “[This] interest in somewhat longer melodic lines, composed of shorter patterns strung together, has its roots in . . . my studies in 1976–77 of the cantillation . . . of the Hebrew Scriptures.”45 In an article originally published in French in 1981 on Hebrew cantillation as an influence, Reich elaborates on these connections.46 Toward the end of the article he attributes the influence of cantillation to the melodies heard at various points in the flute and piccolo parts. This piece of “poietic” evidence will now provide the starting point for a more in-depth analysis of Eight Lines.47 Reich starts off by focusing on the last few measures of Eight Lines (beginning at rehearsal number 74 of the score), as heard in the flute and piccolo (see Ex. 2.2, which, for ease of reference, contains only the flute and piano 1 parts). As Reich explains, the flute line’s opening melody starts off by merely reinforcing the top line in piano 1 (“The first 2 bars of the Flute double Piano 1’s right hand more or less exactly”).48 By incorporating notes that already belong to the piano 1 part, the following two measures in the flute adhere to Reich’s technique of generating resulting patterns from a contrapuntal weave of already-existing lines. After this point, however, the relationship between the flute melody and repeated patterns in pianos 1 and 2 becomes less clear: The second two bars of the Flute begin with the first 4 notes again from Piano 1, but the Flute diverges from the rest of bar 3 and all of bar 4 into notes taken from Pianos 1 & 2, together with several that do not exist in either piano part.49

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Example 2.2 Flute melody and piano 1 part in Eight Lines, rehearsal 74A.

The final four measures of this section draw freely from previous patterns. Reich states that these extended melodies have not been generated by resulting patterns, however, but rather by applying the principle of Hebrew chant, which he explains as follows: Since the two piano part is only two bars long . . . the flute and piccolo take the two-bar piano part and, by putting shorter motives together, create 10bar melodies in counterpoint. Although the sound of this music is not at all like Hebrew cantillation, its construction in the flute and piccolo parts

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resembles the construction of motives in Hebrew chant. It is a small influence but a real one, and interesting in that it lends itself to further and unforeseen developments in the future.50

Nevertheless, the precise influence and function of Hebrew cantillation on Reich’s melodic construction have been more difficult to assess, since the composer’s own comments are applied only in a general sense. Some writers have simply taken Reich’s comments at face value, merely reproducing the composer’s description in their analysis.51 What would happen if the same section were analyzed not so much in terms of Reich’s own exegesis but rather according to the composer’s own tried-andtested compositional methods, namely, as a development of his method of creating resulting patterns? Example 2.3 represents the flute melody plus the combined lines of pianos 1 and 2 in this section (piano 2 plays the same pattern as piano 1 but starts three quarter-note beats after piano 1). Differences in register between piano and flute have been retained here. As Gopinath points out, “One extension of the resulting patterns technique is an assumption [by the composer] of octave equivalence, or its application to pitch-class instead of pitch, which was the primary determinant in earlier works.”52 Example 2.3 Combined piano 1 and 2 parts and flute melody in Eight Lines, rehearsal 74A.

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The first two and a half measures merely confirm Reich’s own analysis, but when he states that “the Flute diverges from [the piano lines for] the rest of bar 3,” it is possible at this point to relate all four pitches—E♭, A♭, F, and E♭—to pitch classes that appear in the combined piano parts. Reich states that “all of bar 4” diverges from “notes taken from Pianos 1 & 2, together with several that do not exist in either piano part,” but again it is possible to relate all the flute pitches to the piano parts, apart from the first two pitches in measure 4. These two pitches, which reverse the opening D♭–A♭ dyad in piano 1, are the only ones that don’t relate to a specific piano pitch, yet both pitches are heard in the violas, forming part of a continuous bed of sustained string textures heard throughout the work.53 Example 2.3 demonstrates that all the flute notes in this section can be related either to pitches in the combined piano parts or to notes sustained in the strings, as resulting patterns of one kind or another.54 From the analysis of this section, Reich’s use of extended melodies can be claimed to have emerged as an extension of the technique of generating resulting patterns from the combination of canonic lines as from his studies of Hebrew chant.55 However, if we now turn to the first iteration of melodic lines heard during the opening section of Eight Lines, it becomes more difficult to apply the same “resulting patterns” rule. As shown in Example 2.4, the first extended melody is heard at rehearsal 11, around two thirds of the way through the first section. Relating this flute melody to resulting patterns in the piano parts proves more difficult. Example 2.5 shows the flute’s melody in relation to the combined piano lines as was done earlier in Example 2.3. Many of the flute’s pitches can be derived from the combined piano lines, but by no means all of them. The following breakdown of the flute’s pitches in measures 1 through 4 illustrates the situation: no D♯ in the combined piano lines, B is there in the combined piano lines, no C♯ (but this pitch does appear in the violin part), no A♯; G♯, D♯, and B are there, and C♯ is present in the strings. In measure 2, no A♯ in the combined piano lines, G♯ is there in the strings, D♯ and B are there, and C♯ again is present in the strings. In measure 3, no D♯ in the combined piano lines, B, D♯, and C♯ are all there in the combined piano lines, A♯ is absent, C♯ and B are present in the combined piano lines. In measure 4, all the notes are there in the combined piano lines. In fact, in measure 5 (not included in Ex. 2.5), only two flute notes (A♯ on the fourth quarter-note beat and F♯ at the beginning of the fifth) correspond to pitches heard in any of the other parts. Clearly there are too many anomalous pitches here to suggest that Reich formed these melodic lines from the resulting patterns of lines generated in the two piano lines and strings. If these lines (and many others from Eight Lines) are not derived from resulting patterns, where do they come from? Now might seem an appropriate moment to reflect further on the role Hebrew cantillation played in generating the work’s melodic content, as Reich himself has claimed. Robert Fink suggests that Reich found confirmation of the principle of

Example 2.4 Extended melody in flute in opening section of Eight Lines, rehearsal 11.

Example 2.5 Combined piano 1 and 2 parts and flute melody in Eight Lines, rehearsal 11.

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generating continuous melodic lines from limited sets of short motivic units in Hebrew formulas for chanting the Torah through studying Jewish cantillation during the mid-1970s. Chants were assembled from small motivic units called “tam” (pl. ta’amim), which—using hand gestures given by the person leading the singing group—also resembled a fixed number of cell-like motives. Thus, cantillation appears to explain most accurately why these melodic lines diverged from the underlying harmonies. Furthermore, the short melodic figures of the Ashkenazic tradition that Reich encountered during his studies of Jewish sacred music sound not unlike the motivic units repeated in Eight Lines’ flute melodies. Fink has proposed that Reich systematically changed the order of the notes he took because that would make the local tam aspect work, and that aspect had become more important to the composer than the old “resulting melody” idea. A case of “this is a new motivic discipline, and it takes over from the old one.”56 However, if everything melodic functions as a trace of what is already acoustically present in the surrounding contrapuntal texture, what precisely is present in Eight Lines? To apply the principles underpinning Hebrew cantillation to his music, Reich still had to compose the work with some form of harmonic basis in mind. Example 2.6 sets out the work’s five main sections in terms of interconnected tonal or modal regions, providing a birds’-eye view of the work’s tonal motion while also considering the sudden harmonic shift that occurs just after the midway point of the piece, halfway through the third section.57 As shown in Example 2.6, Eight Lines’ overall harmonic motion establishes a thirds-based relationship that starts on C♯ and ends a minor third lower, on B♭. (This is indicated in the example by the large bracket that runs underneath all six chords.)58 The thirds-based relationship is also mirrored on a smaller scale. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, for a composer of tonal predilections, each harmonic region is constructed out of a series of stacked minor or major thirds, all of which relate to either a major or a minor thirteenth chord. The prominent role that minor thirds play in the overall harmonic makeup of Eight Lines may help explain the work’s dark, serious, and somewhat intense character. The only sections built on major thirds are at the beginning of part 3—whose sudden fall from G♭ major down a minor third to E♭ minor contains its most unexpected Example 2.6 Tonal regions in Eight Lines.

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moment—and then at section 4, which is based on D♭ major. However, the work starts and ends with two minor thirteenths, on C♯ and B♭ (their relationship, as already noted, being a minor third). Within these two polarities, thirds-based relationships are also articulated between sections 4 and 5 and, of course, quite dramatically within section 3, as mentioned previously.59 The work’s fifths-based relationships are also important, of course, on both micro and macro levels. The “open fifth” sound is the work’s fingerprint and is heard eight times in piano 1’s two-measure figure at rehearsal 4: in the left hand, twice ascending C♯–G♯, harmonized in the right hand G♯–D♯ an octave and a fifth higher, and both ascending then descending on the B–F♯ dyad (see Example  2.4 for all eight iterations of these fifths). Ronald Woodley has described these stacked fifths as “pivoting on central semitones,” and he goes on to suggest that “this symmetrical field gradually becomes destabilized” across the work’s five sections.60 Observed from a more traditionally tonal perspective, this fifth-based relationship suggests a kind of free “Rondo,” with section 4 representing an enharmonic return to the tonic (the C♯min13 of section 1 becoming D♭maj13 in section 4). Viewed in a slightly different way, these harmonic pillars also generate a network of modally derived scalar collections, which provide each section with its acoustical presence, as shown in Example 2.7. This example sets out each harmonic entity as linear, scale-like patterns that—through the canonic relationship established between the two piano parts in each section—create a series of interlocking modal combinations. (These canonic relationships are also found in the patterns that are built through rhythmic construction in the clarinet and bass clarinet entries in sections 1 and 3, respectively.) The first two seven-note combinations are at the fifth, reflecting a kind of tonic-dominant modality that, as observed previously, relates to the first two sections. The third shows a canonic relationship at the sixth—the furthest between the two pairs of interlocking parts—resulting in the greatest harmonic disruption when the relationship is “flipped around” halfway through the section. The final two combinations—representing the canon at the fourth and third, respectively— bring the two parts closer together, effecting in the centricity of the material a kind of modal resolution.61 Example 2.7 Scalar combinations in Eight Lines.

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These modal regions are, respectively, transposed Dorian (down a semitone to C♯ from D) in section 1; transposed Dorian (up an augmented fourth to G♯ from D) in section 2; transposed Lydian (up a semitone to G♭ from F) in section 3; transposed Ionian (up a semitone to D♭ from C) in section 4; and, finally, transposed Aeolian (up a semitone to B♭ from A) in section 5. In effect, these modal regions provide each section with a kind of bimodality: section 1 combines the first five pitches of C♯ minor with the first five of G♯ minor; section 2 the first five of G♯ minor with the first five of D♯ minor; section 3 the first five of G♭ major with the first five of E♭ minor; section 4 the first five of D♭ major with the first five of G♭ major; and, finally, section 5 the first five of B♭ minor with the first five of D♭ major. Viewed in this way, the final section of Eight Lines does signal something of an enharmonic return to the opening section, with C♯ minor resolving onto D♭ major. How, then, do these scalar combinations help explain how Reich—via his immersion in Hebrew cantillation leading up to the composition of Eight Lines— came to construct the extended melodies found in it? While determining the melodic pitch content in relation to resulting patterns proved difficult in the analysis above, when the modal properties of each section is set out, as illustrated in Example 2.7, the work’s melodic material can now be seen to be generated out of the mode that constitutes each section. Example 2.8 shows this in relation to the first five measures of the flute’s melody in section 1. The flute melody is thus derived from a transposed version of the Dorian mode starting on C♯: every note in this melody can be related to the scale.62 In fact, drawing further from these observations, it is possible to see each mode as a subset that belongs to a larger nine-note set comprising the work’s entire pitch content (see Ex. 2.9).63

Example 2.8 Flute melody and matching mode in section 1, rehearsal 11.

Example 2.9 Nine-note set in Eight Lines.

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Example 2.9 highlights the inherent diatonic dichotomy that pulls Eight Lines back and forth between major and minor centers (especially in sections 3 and 5), providing the work with its ambiguous tonal color. The first five pitches of the nine-note set suggest F♯ major, while the final four belong to C♯ minor.64 The latter is also an octatonic tetrachord. Eight Lines’ innovative quality is not so much contained in the extended melodies themselves but rather in the way they are formed from a set of harmonic pillars—and a resulting “progressive” tonality—which generates a series of scalar combinations. These combinations are themselves formed out of a nine-note “Mother Mode,” part major and part minor in design. Such harmonic pillars are not unfamiliar to Reich’s thinking, of course—immediately calling to mind Music for 18 Musicians with its opening cycle of eleven chords—but the difference here is that these chords are implied rather than stated explicitly. The chords are linearized in Eight Lines—quite literally linearized in the case of the flute and piccolo’s melodic lines.65

Conclusion: Reich and the Western Classical Tradition Goal orientation and tonal resolution; modal shifts and modulations; extended melodic lines and abrupt harmonic shifts—all these elements suggest a composer willing to adopt and embrace Western classical principles rather than eschewing them. Reich’s early compositions reveled in relationships set up between figures and patterns on the surface, reflecting minimalist artist Frank Stella’s dictum, “What you see is what you see.”66 Nevertheless, while working on Drumming during the early 1970s, Reich started incorporating Western classical elements into his music. In an interview with Russell Hartenberger on composing Drumming, Reich concludes that he was “going to have to write a finale, an old Western finale,” adding that “moving forward from Drumming is really the beginning of moving back towards more traditional ways of thinking.”67 Eight Lines’ harmonic design, goal-oriented tonal construction, and melodic invention also indicate a move toward “traditional ways of thinking.” Still, Reich continued to maintain that his “connections to Western classical music have little or nothing to do with music from Haydn to Wagner.”68 He has readily acknowledged the influence of early and mid-twentieth-century composers, such as Bartók and Janáček, and the former’s regular use of the 5/4 time signature and of formal structures based on five sections, is perhaps one of Eight Lines’ most evident features.69 But the impact of the West appears to go deeper here, beyond the work’s surface appropriation of Bartókian features or its more traditional orchestration of pianos, strings, and winds.70 How should Reich’s appropriation of Western classical elements be read? Was it an unconscious response to the criticism his music received during the 1970s, especially from German quarters? Was it an attempt to form a kind of American-European synthesis? In his book The Anxiety of Influence, literary

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critic Harold Bloom proposes a method of reading poetic texts based on poets’ practices of consciously or subconsciously resisting poems that mark their place in the canon of poetic works.71 According to Bloom, poets and novelists—or indeed composers—mark out their own creative and aesthetic space through this act of resistance and creative defiance. Does Eight Lines—and other works by Reich dating from this period—represent a particular kind of Bloomian “anxiety of influence,” where the composer actively resists and represses the influence of the classical tradition, only for it to leave its trace on his music at a deeper level? What other tropes are articulated in this way? Gopinath has suggested that the shapes and contours of the flute and piccolo patterns in Eight Lines sometimes resemble Baroque patterns and figurations, while the sustained string lines, which shift seamlessly between perfect fourths or fifths, are chorale-like in effect, oscillating between B♭ and A♭ at the end of the work in what sounds like a prolonged “dominant” chord in D flat major.72 Thus the work’s intertextuality can be seen to embrace a number of Western traditional elements, from Baroque figuration and classical goal orientation to suggestions of octatonicism found in Stravinsky and Bartók. Where, then, among this “European” reading of Eight Lines, can we locate the influence of Hebrew cantillation? Reich’s decision at this moment to analogize his change of abstract instrumental techniques to Hebrew liturgical practice can be explained partly through his reconversion to Judaism, whose roots are buried deep in European history. Reich was clearly ambivalent about Europe. It was, on the one hand, the site of the Holocaust; but on the other, it demonstrated over and over a commitment to the arts that Reich valued and praised. In drawing his music closer to Jewish traditions and practices—albeit in terms of spirit more than sound—Reich again sought to draw himself away from Europe, the Western classical tradition, and its influence. The relationship between, on the one hand, the trope-like melodies, resulting patterns, and scalar combinations heard in Eight Lines and, on the other, Hebrew cantillation is possibly far closer. These fusions become blurred precisely because of their relatively high level of stylistic compatibility with each other. Reich’s utilization of the cantillation technique is more nuanced and integrated because it sits more comfortably within a style that is, by this time, fully formed and mature. Of course, Reich’s Oedipal struggle with a “precursor text” (or in this case a “precursor tradition”) should not be viewed negatively. He effectively transcends the Western tradition by actively resisting its power. He masks its influence by drawing equally on other non-Western traditions—African, Balinese, Jewish, jazz, and so on. In doing so, the very notion of a Western art-music style and tradition is questioned and interrogated. What emerges is not American, nonWestern, or European but a beguiling synthesis of each one.

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Notes 1. On the influence of European composers, see, for example, Reich 2002b, 160; on the influence of non-Western music, see Reich 2002b, 69–71; see also Martin Scherzinger’s and Michael Tenzer’s chapters in this volume. 2. Reich 2002b, 160. These comments are also echoed in an interview with Amy Beal (see Beal 2006, 201). 3. Potter 2000, 152. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid., 198. 6. In fact, Reich’s tape pieces had already received European premieres prior to these performances—It’s Gonna Rain in Bern, Switzerland, in March 1969, and Come Out in York, England, in October 1970. Reich’s Piano Phase had also been performed in London and Brussels in October 1969 by Frederic Rzewski and Alvin Curran, and as early as May 1968 in Tokyo, Japan (see Reich 1974, 73). 7. Potter 2000, 198. 8. For a detailed list of performances by Philip Glass and Steve Reich during the early 1970s, see, for example, Chapman 2013a, 247–90. 9. Gopinath 2011, 187. 10. Nyman in Mertens 1983, 8. 11. Rich 1984, 76–77. 12. Beirens 2005, 160. 13. Quoted in Beal 2006, 198. 14. Nyman’s first interview with Reich, conducted in May 1970, was published in the Musical Times in March 1971 (see Reich 2002b, 52–55). During this time, Nyman also wrote about Reich’s music in Time Out magazine, New Statesman, and Music and Musicians (see ap Siôn 2013, 119–20, 125–26, 222–25). 15. Neubauer 1972; Piersig 1972. 16. Potter 2000, 209. 17. See reviews written around this time by Schröder 1972 and Bach 1972. 18. In a particularly disparaging review in the New  York Times in 1973, Schonberg described Reich’s Four Organs as “non-music . . . baby stuff, written by an innocent for innocents” (1973a). 19. See Beal 2006, 200; on “machine music,” see, for example, Jungheinreich 1972. See also Kerry O’Brien’s chapter in this volume. 20. Henahan 1971. For more on Reich and Yoga, see Kerry O’Brien’s chapter in this volume. 21. Lesch 1972. 22. Polaczek 1972. Thanks to Sumanth Gopinath for drawing my attention to the ambiguous nature of “faschistoiden” here. 23. Moore 1966. 24. Gottwald 1975. 25. Shelley suggests that “Gottwald saw and heard features that Cage would likely have termed fascist” (Shelley 2012).

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26. For a detailed examination of Gottwald’s article, see Kutschke 2004; 2007, 260–87. 27. See Reich 1975. 28. Shelley 2012. 29. A recording of this work, Mein Name Ist . . . (Portrait der Schola Cantorum, 1981), which was based on My Name Is (1967), was released on Bauer Records in 1993. 30. Beal 2006, 201. One could, perhaps, understand Reich’s comments in relation to Gottwald, Polaczek, and other German critics writing in the 1970s, but to tarnish all Germans with the same brush seems dangerously close to notions of biological essentialism that could be related precisely to the kind of totalitarian ideology from which Reich was anxious to distance his own music. 31. For more on creating beautiful music, see Reich’s 1976 interview with Nyman (in ap Siôn 2013, 329). 32. The other work, Music for a Large Ensemble (1979), was also premiered at the same concert. 33. As its title suggests, Eight Lines’ companion piece, Music for a Large Ensemble, was for a larger group, while the Variations for Winds, Strings, and Keyboards (1979) was large-scale both in length and in instrumentation. 34. Grimes in Reich 1987a. 35. Potter 2000, 151. 36. Schwarz 1996, 86. 37. W. W. Austin 1991, 1300; Schwarz, 86. 38. In his interview with Ev Grimes, Reich states that Eight Lines “came out of the two piano writing which by the way struck me as a kind of boogie-woogie or a homage to boogie-woogie, and turned out to be the hardest piano parts I ever wrote, and I wrote myself out of the piece that way” (Grimes in Reich 1987a). Thanks to Sumanth Gopinath for pointing this out to me. 39. Those who have played the pattern, and others form Eight Lines, will have been immediately struck by the sheer physicality—the rapid shifts up and down the keyboard—involved in playing it. It is no surprise that Reich, more a percussionist than a pianist, effectively wrote himself out of the piece as a result. 40. Eight Lines’ modal makeup and fifths-based relationship will be discussed later, when its “tonal” trajectory is analyzed in more detail. 41. Unpublished passage from Michael Nyman’s transcript to his interview with Reich in La Rochelle, France, in June 1976. Thanks to Nyman for access to the transcript and permission to use it. 42. However, unlike Four Organs, which expands almost exponentially, the string augmentations in Eight Lines are all contained within a ten-measure, grid-like template. 43. For a discussion of the use of resulting patterns in Violin Phase, see Reich 2002b, 26; see also Potter 2000, 189–92. 44. This is confirmed to an extent in Reich’s sketches, where—in addition to writing out the audible lines of the music—the composer adds a “composite” part

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underneath the score, a kind of super-part containing all the notes from the individual parts. However, the notion of “writing out” these resulting patterns formed part of the performance practice behind Reich’s music from as early as Drumming. See Hartenberger 2016, 53–55. 45. Reich 2002b, 99. 46. Originally published in Reynaud 1981; first published in English in Reich 2002b, 105–18. 47. A term coined by Jean-Jacques Nattiez in his semiological model for musical analysis, “poietic” broadly refers to those aspects of a work that relate to the “process of creation.” See Nattiez 1990, 11–12. 48. Reich 2002c, 114. 49. Ibid. 50. Ibid. 51. See, for example, Puca 1997, 537–55. 52. Personal correspondence, December 28, 2016. 53. The idea of retrograding this dyad is in fact already implied in the piano’s two-measure pattern, which reverses the two sets of fifths in measure 2. 54. This is also the case with the other extended melodic line in the piccolo part, which is constructed along similar lines to the flute’s. 55. Further evidence of this is to be found in Reich’s sketchbooks, held at the Paul Sacher Stiftung in Basel. The most complete draft of Eight Lines, dated January 24, 1979, and entitled “Octet or Septet,” appears in Sketchbook [17]. Page 2 of the sketch includes, in addition to lines written out for two clarinets, two pianos, two violins, and two cellos, two staves that contain the resulting patterns emerging from these combined lines. The fact that Reich went to the trouble of including all these lines under one composite part indicates that he was fully aware of the various permutations that could be generated from the panoply of resulting patterns. 56. Email correspondence with the author, September 29, 2015. 57. My analysis differs slightly from the only other previously published harmonic analysis of Eight Lines by Woodley (2007, 468–70), to which I shall return shortly. 58. In fact, Woodley hears the ending of Eight Lines as “a nearly fully tonicized D flat major, though ultimately unresolved in its simultaneous sounding of tonic, dominant, and subdominant elements” (Woodley 2007, 470). Harrison sees the opening harmony of Eight Lines as based on an inherently stable and static ‘amplified tonic’ with added notes (or ‘colouring agents’ as he describes them). See Harrison 2016, 125–6. 59. Of course, it is possible to reconfigure these chords in such a way as to place emphasis on their major rather than minor characteristics, as each thirteenth is formed out of two simultaneously sounding minor and major sevenths, such as C♯ minor seventh and B major seventh in section 1. A similar feature emerges when the chords are treated as subsets of a mode, too, as shown later. 60. Woodley 2007, 470.

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61. I believe that this sense of tonal resolution does come across in performance, with the piece ending as opposed to simply stopping, as was often the case in earlier minimalist works. 62. The claim made here—that Reich’s melodic lines are built on the same diatonic material as the accompanying parts—is neither especially original nor entirely surprising. However, it does support the notion that Reich’s use of extended lines evolved from questions and concerns that had preoccupied him from at least Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices, and Organ (1973) and Six Pianos (1973) onward, therefore suggesting stylistic and aesthetic continuity rather than a sudden shift triggered by his studies of Hebrew cantillation. 63. It is interesting to note in relation to this nine-note scale that three pitches are entirely absent from Eight Lines: D, G, and A. 64. There is also a suggestion of the octatonic scale here, anticipating more overt examples of its use in works composed during the 1980s, such as The Desert Music (1983) and Sextet (1985). 65. Whether Reich conceived Eight Lines in such harmonic terms remains unclear. As far as I’m aware, the chords set out in Example  2.6 (or anything that might resemble them) do not appear in the composer’s sketches, while the chords appearing at the beginning of Music for 18 Musicians can be found there. (For more on the latter, see Keith Potter’s chapter in this volume.) It could therefore be argued that the modal generation of melodic material, as found in Eight Lines, is more in line with a Western classical understanding of musical form and structure. 66. Stella’s well-known quote may be found in Bernard 1993, 106. 67. Quoted in Hartenberger 2016, 84. Intriguingly, this is a comment that Glass also makes about the penultimate section of his opera Einstein on the Beach, which he describes as a “razzle-dazzle” finale (in Gagne and Caras 1982, 216). Thanks to Sumanth Gopinath for drawing my attention to the Einstein connection. 68. Reich 2002b, 160. 69. More recent examples of 5/4 appropriations in jazz and contemporary music may be found in the music of Moondog, such as “All Is Loneliness” (whose music Reich recorded with Moondog and others in the late 1960s) or saxophonist Dave Brubeck’s recording of Paul Desmond’s “Take Five.” Thanks to Sumanth Gopinath for these observations. 70. Gopinath has suggested that the presence of the flute, which does not appear in Reich’s music until the late 1970s (the only exception being the use of a piccolo in parts 3 and 4 of Drumming), does “conjure up the kind of pastoral associations linked to that instrument (and their frequent appearance in classical orchestral music).” He goes on to say that “one might think of its presence in late 1970s Reich as one marker of his rapprochement with Western classical instrumentation and orchestras, and sonically central to the sense that Reich from the 1970s on would sound less aggressively harsh and extreme.” Email correspondence with the author, July 21, 2017. 71. Bloom (1973) 1997. 72. Email correspondence with the author, December 15, 2015.

3 Different Tracks Narrative Sequence, Harmonic (Dis)continuity, and Structural Organization in Steve Reich’s Different Trains and The Cave Maarten Beirens Many consider Different Trains (1988) to be a pivotal moment in the evolution of Steve Reich’s music. The reasons for this are numerous. First, it uses a standardized “classical” medium—the string quartet—albeit not in a standard way. In its use of recordings of speaking voices, it also reconnects with an important feature of his early tape compositions. Perhaps more important, it is the product of Reich’s first encounter with the digital sampler, opening up possibilities of including all types of everyday sounds in his music and blending these into a musical texture involving speech, ambient sounds, prerecorded instruments, and live musicians in a kind of postminimalist musique concrète. The significance of Different Trains is encapsulated in Reich’s own words, that it began “a new way of composing” for him.1 On a deeper level Different Trains also provided some novelties: it included a remarkable autobiographical element and unfolded a narrative, constructed by joining together different statements. Reich has compared this approach to a documentary; indeed, subsequent works such as The Cave (1993) and Three Tales (2002) developed a similar approach of collecting statements from interviewees, combined with video images, weaving them together into a narrative sequence that has been described as “documentary music theater.”2 However, one of the most fascinating aspects of Reich’s turn toward sampled speech from Different Trains onward is the emergence of a different approach to harmony. The sudden modulations between often distant harmonic regions, coupled with brisk tempo changes, originated as a necessary by-product of Reich’s new compositional approach. These harmonic fluctuations followed the pace and pitch content of the sampled speech melodies but soon grew to become powerful musical devices in their own right. In this way, two elements lie in paradoxical relationship with each other. On the one hand, one sees Reich’s desire for harmonic coherence and even stasis, as exemplified in his output before 1987; on the other hand, one hears sudden shifts from one harmony to the next in the montage-like structures of his sample-based compositions from 1987 onward. One can safely assume that the particular challenge of those compositions for Reich was to shape 75

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an overall large-scale structure in which the narrative sequence of the individual samples, the piece’s dramaturgy, coincided with at least some degree of establishing coherence on the level of harmonic structure. The important question, then, is to what extent do harmonic and narrative elements provide separate (or perhaps parallel) means of structural organization? To what extent are they combined into a shared sense of unity? In other words, with the simultaneous arrival in Reich’s music of a narrative structure and greater harmonic variety, does the nature of the music’s dramatic structure now move more prominently to the surface? This problem—if one may call it such—as manifested in Different Trains, is actually the result of a single phenomenon. In taking speech fragments from interviews and using the inherent speech melodies as basic musical material, Reich was trying to find a way of combining the dramaturgy of the spoken texts with the pitch material (and tempo) contained within those words, exactly as they were pronounced. In the absence of time-stretching software, Reich was forced to adapt the overall tempo and harmony to match the pace and pitch content of each individual sample. From Three Tales onward, he decided to resort to time-stretching, which—through developments in computer technology—was more reliable and user-friendly, enabling the composer again to work in larger sections that remained in the same tempo and/or harmonic region. As Reich explained in an interview with Paul Hillier: The basic assumption in The Cave, and Different Trains, too, was that the music would follow the speech melodies of the speakers exactly. As they spoke, so I wrote. This was completely in keeping with the subject matter; the Bible and the Koran in The Cave and the Holocaust in Different Trains. I felt it would be inappropriate to electronically manipulate the speakers in those pieces. But when I finished The Cave, I felt I had gone far enough in the direction of having the music determined by speech melodies of those interviewed—so many fast changes of tempo and key. I wanted to use documentary material again, but make the music take the lead instead of following.3

Two significant points emerge from Reich’s statement. First, he describes the unaltered use of the samples as a matter of ethics. The integral use of the sample would preserve, as it were, the “integrity” of the speaker, whose statement/ melody was nonetheless integrated into the overall narrative of the piece. This approach connected with the concept of the documentary and the kind of objectivity associated with it. Yet the “testimonial aesthetics” involved were probably never as neutral or objective as Reich intended them to be. In an article that re-examines the statements from Jewish Holocaust survivors in Different Trains, Amy Lynn Wlodarski has shown that this purported objectivity can never be totally achieved, as layers of interpretation, preconceived ideas, leading or loaded questions, views and opinions, and so on inevitably crop up in documenting and shaping testimonials.4 The transfer of such highly personal statements into a larger narrative is bound to cause at least some friction.

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Secondly, Reich admits that the fast montage of samples with their different tempos and harmonic content necessitated a different approach, especially in relation to harmonic structure. Introducing a more rapid rate of harmonic movement led him to build a harmonic language based on change rather than stasis. This move was unprecedented in Reich’s music, and his return to a more evolved sense of harmonic continuity from Three Tales onward demonstrates the profound impact that working with sample-based material had on his musical thinking. This challenge is most apparent in Reich’s approach to form and structure, balancing between the narrative sequences of selected samples on the one hand and harmonic structure on the other, which was inextricably related to the pitch material of those very same samples. The question, when the music was not “taking the lead,” then, is as follows: How does the musical structure operate within this dramaturgically defined framework? In order to answer this, this chapter will examine two types of structuring devices in Different Trains and The Cave—two compositions in which the sample-by-sample fragmentation of harmonic material is most apparent. The first section of this chapter will briefly examine the narrative structure that results from the selection and ordered sequence of samples. The second section will look at the harmonic structure and propose some hypotheses on how certain small- and long-scale harmonic devices operate as structuring features, where the music is seen to be “taking the lead.” While some observations will rely on music analysis and close reading, this chapter will also draw on Reich’s sketch material and source recordings held at the Paul Sacher Stiftung, Basel (PSS). The PSS acquired the Steve Reich collection in 2008, thereby making a large number of sketch materials, recordings, and computer files available for scholarly study for the first time.5 However, the amount of material available for consultation varies from work to work. For Different Trains, the materials held at the Sacher collection cover the entire working process, from audio source recordings (out of which the samples were taken) to manuscript sketchbooks and draft scores (mostly computer printouts with or without handwritten corrections), in addition to computer files.6 This allows for a reasonably complete account of Reich’s working process. It covers the gradual shaping of the material and the form, from the composer interviewing his former governess Virginia Mitchell and retired Pullman porter Lawrence Davis right through to the finalized score. The situation is different regarding The Cave. The video recordings containing the source interviews from which the samples were drawn are not part of the Reich collection at the PSS. Unlike Different Trains, reconstructing the transition of the sampled phrases from raw interview material to the recontextualized narrative of the composition is not possible at present. Nevertheless, the sketchbooks and draft scores do provide a great deal of information about the shaping of the work’s structure on the level of musical material and harmony. One final word about the rate of harmonic change in Reich’s music. When admitting to the feeling that he had “gone far enough in the direction of having

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the music determined by speech melodies” the composer indicates that he found the experience of the music needing to follow the pitch content of the vocal samples a somewhat uncomfortable one. His expression of relief at the prospect of including time stretching to make “the music take the lead” again is immediately illustrated by a description of those two elements that would imply a musically satisfying outcome for the composer: steady tempo and harmonic continuity. While Reich’s approach to pitch or harmonic content in his early works is sometimes considered “minimalist”—the five pitch classes that make up the entire first part of Piano Phase (1967), for example, or the single dominant eleventh chord that occupies the entire duration of Four Organs (1970)—his later works do include a far greater sense of harmonic variety. Some have even traced Reich’s development from minimalist to postminimalist composer in terms of an increasing emphasis both on harmonic structure and on the prominence of chord changes.7 Music for 18 Musicians (1976), with its cycle of eleven chords underpinning the entire large-scale structure of eleven sections is often considered as the catalyst in the composer’s shift toward a harmony-based structure. With this work Reich also prioritized complex chords, involving—as Keith Potter has demonstrated—harmonic ambiguity as well as longer-term harmonic coherence through voice leading,8 which Robert Fink sees in terms of sexually grounded tension-release metaphors.9 Still, the interaction between tonal areas dates back at least to Six Pianos (1973), and even the four movements of the epochal Drumming (1971) can be said to use modulations in order to articulate a larger-scale plan.10 In retrospect, the treatment of pitch material in the earliest phase-shifting pieces may also be interpreted in terms of harmonic motion. Potter, for one, discerns an implied “ii-V-I” progression in A underpinning the three sections of Piano Phase (1967), although he adds that its harmonic structure is “heavily qualified by modal ambiguity.”11 From Octet/Eight Lines (1979) and onward through the 1980s, Reich’s harmonic language significantly expanded, with the composer placing greater emphasis on modulation and a faster rate of chord changes, leading to increasingly complex and ambiguous harmonies.12 Nevertheless, in works such as Tehillim (1981), The Desert Music (1983), Sextet (1984), and Electric Counterpoint (1987), there remained a sense of longer-term harmonic continuity or even some aspect of stasis. Neither the arrival of abrupt harmonic changes nor the types of chords involved in Different Trains were unprecedented in Reich’s music. However, they did stand out because of their suddenness, their relatively fast rate of change and less apparent sense of longer-term unity or consistency. Such harmonic changes also reflected the fragmentary approach found in Reich’s montage-like assemblage of short personal accounts into a compound narrative (Different Trains) or the retelling of a biblical narrative through a variety of commentaries (The Cave). It is the

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shaping of this narrative that becomes the most salient feature in articulating the piece’s structure. So before turning our attention to the harmony, a few remarks should be made about Reich’s selection of the words and voices.

Mapping Out a Plot Among the many early sketches and documents relating to Different Trains, the Sacher Foundation holds a computer file of a text document entitled “Kronos Piece Notes” in which Steve Reich collected diary-like dated entries with observations regarding the ongoing compositional process for this piece.13 Ostensibly, the document served a rather practical purpose, since it contained many short remarks that were clearly intended to list outstanding tasks. But at the same time the diary records several observations about the work, documenting Reich’s ideas, intentions, and even initial doubts, as well as providing the researcher with a good basic chronology of its progress. Tracing Reich’s thoughts can be particularly revealing at the very beginning of this process, when the composer was still figuring out the best way to integrate new sampling technology and deciding how to approach the narrative topic. As an insight into the composer’s first efforts at working with a plot-driven structure, based on documentary material, these notes, combined with the sketch material, are illuminating. The very first entry contained therein, dated December 28, 1987, describes the setting of what was to become the first text sample14 and continues with the admonition in capitals: “MOST IMPORTANTLY GET ALL AUDIO SOURCES AND ORGANIZE THEM INTO OVERALL FORM OF PIECE!” It serves as a strong indication that in the conception of Different Trains the selection of text fragments came first, organized into an overall form before actually setting them to music. How these samples might be combined musically is described in the next entry, dated January 4, 1988: “In 1939” begins to sound like something—at last! This suggests sections of each movement built around one or more speech (or sound) samples which suggest musical patterns, in case of speech, or just tempo and “character” in case of engine sounds. Train whistles become long tones over engine, rails or speech fragments.

The following entries all concern the selection of sources. At that point, Reich had only collected speech samples from his former governess Virginia Mitchell. The next few entries list possible sources for more material:  American and European train sounds, Holocaust survivors, a Pullman porter working the same lines that Reich had traveled on as a child. By January 28, a statement in Reich’s dairy indicates that he had collected all the sources required for the work (the final source being the interview conducted with retired Pullman porter

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Lawrence Davis in Washington, DC, the previous day). The entry concludes with a summary of the sources for the first movement, which he has to “start and organize.” These are both train sounds (identified as “engine, crossing bells, whistles”) and voices: “Me, Virginia, Mr. Davis.” These diary entries contain the only reference among the written sketches and other sources relating to Different Trains of Reich’s intention to include his own voice. As such, it should come as no surprise, since the piece originated in the autobiographical recollections of the young Reich, accompanied by his governess, traveling back and forth between his separated parents living in New York City and Los Angeles, respectively. In fact, one of the tape recordings held at the Sacher archive shows that Reich had taken the idea to include his own voice, and hence strengthen the autobiographical element. On that recording, Reich reads different phrases that could be used as autobiographical statements, ready for sampling, such as: “We took the train across the country,” “Back and forth. From Los Angeles to New York; from New York to Los Angeles; from New York to Chicago,” “From 1939 to 1942.”15 He recorded many variations of these statements by rephrasing the words but also by varying the speed and pitch of those phrases. The various possibilities in pitch and speed indicate that Reich was already anticipating a more flexible solution to joining different speech melodies and suggest the possibility of recording his own voice in an implied key (and tempo) that might fit in with the samples of the other interviewees.16 However, none of the written sketches or computer files indicate any further attempt by Reich to incorporate his own voice musically. Abandoning his own voice appears to be symptomatic of Reich’s approach to the autobiographical content of the piece. When looking at the final selection of samples used in the first movement of Different Trains, it is striking that they tend to contain rather neutral information. Although the voice of Virginia Mitchell provided the first material set to music, her statements in the piece reveal little about the particular facts surrounding Reich’s biography. In the final version, Virginia’s comments are limited to naming different trains, destinations, and years. Rather, it is Reich’s explanation of the piece’s context that informs the listener about the particular personal relevance of those voices and statements to the composer’s own experiences between 1939 and 1942—which he then contrasts with the horrifying experiences of Jewish people in Europe at the same time.17 Also, during the second movement’s description of the horrors of war and the Holocaust, the selected speech fragments focus on the generally known details of the Holocaust and reveal very little about the personal stories of the three survivors whose voices are used in the piece. Reich’s notes document how, in the course of working on the initial stages of the piece, the problem shifted from a narrative one (“which voices should I use?”) to a musical one (“how do I bring the samples together?”). The rest of the sketches seem to suggest that the selection of samples from that point onward was done merely on the basis of their narrative function. Although the “Kronos

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Piece Notes” occasionally mention musical properties of certain samples that “might go together well,” most entries simply refer to issues of musical detail, such as fixing problems, working out compositional solutions in order to turn the (by then) final selection and sequence of samples into a score. Reich’s sketches contain little evidence regarding how the selection of samples was made or what his criteria might be in selecting particular phrases. The relative absence of sketches or notes on this part of the process is somewhat surprising since the effort of reducing hours of source recordings to a relatively compact selection of forty-six concise sampled phrases must have been considerable. For The Cave, the source recordings of the fifty-four interviewees who were included in the final work far exceeded the amount of source material used in Different Trains. The selection of appropriate fragments alone must have been a difficult and—one may imagine—lengthy process. Ordering these fragments into a narrative structure would then be the next challenge, where one might expect to find traces of Reich “shortlisting” certain phrases, trying out different combinations, shifting samples around to other places in the sequence for either narrative or musical reasons. As for The Cave, Reich’s sketchbooks do contain transcriptions of a few samples that were abandoned during the working process and some other sketches that show traces of moving a sample to a different place within the same scene, but such instances are rare. Otherwise, the sketches, draft scores, and computer files largely correspond to the final form of the piece. The impression one gains is that once Reich had decided on the selection and sequence of the samples, he kept to this scheme, working out the phrases from beginning to end, roughly in the same order that they appear in the piece. If a more systematic process was involved in selecting samples and arranging them within the dramatic/narrative structure, then that process is not documented in the composer’s sketches. In general, he appears to work from a nearly complete sequence of samples selected mainly for their narrative purpose. The compositional process generally follows the development of the piece:  starting at the beginning and gradually moving along toward the end. This working process might seem to support the impression of a haphazard harmonic structure “following” the demands of the pitch material (and tempo) contained in the speech melodies of the samples—as Reich himself implied in the remarks quoted earlier, when comparing the unchanged samples of Different Trains and The Cave to the time-stretching approach of Three Tales. In reality, however, there is far more harmonic continuity involved in his first two sample-based pieces, as we shall see in the next section.

Harmonic Coherence and Fragmentation The metaphor of a journey is commonly used in many contexts, including the journey of life itself. In music analysis, it is often applied to tonal music,

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describing modulations and tonal movement in terms of departure, destination, arrival, or—when the latter remains out of reach—an ongoing journey. In the interviews surrounding the first run of The Cave in 1993, Reich often hinted at such a similar tonal journey, with each act “arriving” in A minor.18 Regardless of the tonal structure, The Cave can be considered a journey, even toward a particular destination: the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron. The journey there is made three times, each time with different fellow travelers:  Israeli Jews (in act 1), Palestinian Muslims (in act 2), and Americans (in act 3), highlighting the common connection Jews, Muslims, and Christians share with the biblical characters of Abraham and his direct relatives.19 In terms of the work’s musical journey, one can identify a difficult balance between harmonic coherence and stasis on the one hand and on the other the chaotic shifts from one harmony to the next in its montage-like structure. One can assume that a particular challenge of this work was to shape an overall large-scale structure in such a way that the narrative sequence of individual samples and the piece’s dramaturgy coincide with some degree of coherence on the level of harmonic structure. The idea that Reich simply selected his speech samples based on their text (and semantic meaning) alone seems naive, and it is safe to assume that harmonic considerations played an important part in his compositional process: first, in the selection of some samples based on their harmonic properties. It is conceivable that some samples were simply disregarded because they did not “fit” into the composition’s harmonic framework, although they may have seemed interesting to Reich from a narrative point of view. Secondly, arranging the selected samples into a particular order could have involved harmonic as well as narrative considerations. As mentioned earlier, Reich’s sketches offer some evidence of the former but surprisingly few examples of the latter, of “shifting around” samples to establish the large-scale harmonic structure. (There is—as with Different Trains—remarkably little evidence of a trial-and-error process in the written [sketch] materials.) The impression evinced from looking at the sketch materials is that Different Trains and The Cave consisted primarily of a patchwork of samples held together by the text rather than any underlying harmonic shape; but this contradicts Reich’s own assertion that—at least on a large-scale level— harmonic regions constitute an important structural function in The Cave. The unifying function of longer-range harmonic goals is evident only in the later work—in Different Trains, such a harmonic unity across the three movements is not present in any obvious way, nor is it mentioned by the composer. A closer look at the score of The Cave does indeed reveal several intricate ways in which the composer managed to bring about harmonic unity, in terms of the work’s macro- and microstructures, in material that at first glance appears strongly disjunct. First, there is the use of cyclic harmonic devices. As already mentioned, the arrival of each act at the actual place the title refers to—the Cave of the Patriarchs—is articulated by an A minor drone supporting images and ambient sound from inside the mosque in acts 1 and 2. The corresponding scene

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in act 3 offers a far more diverse harmonic course, ending in C minor, but the sketches reveal solid plans to include other large-scale harmonic devices. Table 3.1 is a rendition of the harmonic outline for act 2, as written down in one of Reich’s sketchbooks.20 In addition to the cyclic structure, with its solid beginning and ending in A minor, the attribution of key centers to each scene is obvious. In the sketch, Reich has even drawn an arrow triumphantly pointing out the correspondence between the beginning and ending, suggesting the importance he attached to this feature. Some of the selections seem to be devised in a way that may facilitate the connection between successive scenes, such as the transition between Sarah and Hagar or between Hagar and the sacrifice scene. Intriguingly, there are far more than two keys involved in each of the aforementioned scenes. How such connections with key centers are meant to operate in the sample-by-sample changes from one harmony to the next is unclear, however. The harmonies listed by Reich were probably intended to be those of the beginning and end, respectively, of each scene. Presumably, because the final score also clearly deviates from this outline. For instance, it shows at the end of the first scene (Abraham) that the final sample is indeed harmonized with the dominant of B♭ major but immediately reharmonized in D♭ major (or, more likely, B♭ minor), none of these really constituting a harmonic preparation for the G♭ minor, which—according to the sketch—was meant to follow. On a smaller scale, the organization of samples in such a way that certain harmonic regions recur, are articulated, or acquire a stabilizing function can be found throughout the piece. One of the most interesting examples is the almost mirror-like symmetrical outline of the first Hagar scene in act 1,21 with a Table  3.1 List of  harmonies attributed to  each scene of  act 2 of  The Cave, transcribed from the composer’s sketchbook* I. Abraham A [minor] II. Abraham G♭ [minor]

III. Sarah IV. Hagar V. Sacrifice G [minor] VI. Halil D [major] (G13 = IV) F [major]

Father B♭ [major]

First Muslim

Broke idols

B♭ [minor] (F [Dominant]) B [major] A [Dominant] (D [major]) Ishmael & Isaac

D [major] (A [Dominant]) G [minor]

B♭ [minor] Cave

A [minor]

* For the purposes of clarity, two redundant columns from the original sketch are omitted.

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Example 3.1 Speech melodies in The Cave from the first Hagar scene, act 1 (1993 version).

repetition of a sample in order to establish coherence, as well as the stringing together of several different samples that share a key of six flats (see Ex. 3.1). A second, more traditional harmonic device is Reich’s use of key centers to denote certain characters. A similar device is audibly present in the instrumentation (the oboe and cor anglais are reserved for Isaac, the clarinet and bass clarinet for Hagar), and indeed the composer’s sketches do make sporadic references to the link between biblical characters and certain keys.22 In his notes, Reich indicates certain keys associated with certain characters, using conventional harmonic relations to indicate connections between the characters on a dramaturgical level, the key word here being “relative,” indicating both relative key centers and family ties between Abraham and his sons as being each other’s relatives. Apart from identifiable key centers, the particular harmonic connections on a more local scale and the type of chords used in fact betray a quite elaborate approach to tonal harmony. Instead of resorting to conventional cadential formulas or even standard triadic or seventh-chord types, Reich shows a preference for more complex chords, mostly pentachords and hexachords drawn from the diatonic material available in any given key. The high number of pitch classes correlates with a higher level of dissonance—which often resolves only to another dissonant chord. When Reich does denote harmonies in his sketches, it is obvious that he conceives of them as tonal chords, their tonal function mostly determined by the movement of bass notes. Nor does the composer’s way of assigning a key to a passage rely on the presence of the tonic either, as illustrated by the succession of dominants from the “Isaac” scene in act 1 (see Ex. 3.2, which Reich identifies as “A major V,” “D minor V,” and “B♭ V,” respectively).23

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Example 3.2 Sample and harmonies from The Cave, act 1 (“Isaac” scene) as notated in Reich’s sketchbook (Steve Reich Collection, PSS).

On the other hand, the chords themselves are never clear triads or seventh chords and for that reason are inherently ambiguous. As a string of dominants not (immediately) resolving to their respective tonics, this example may seem odd from a functional perspective. However, the voice leading and especially the presence of common tones among the subsequent harmonies provide an element of continuity. In this case, the fifth D-A remains a constant presence, granting the entire progression a sense of D minor, the tonic and fifth already present throughout the successive dominants on E and A, resolving in the final chord when the third (F) becomes the root of the final harmony. This type of working is present throughout Reich’s chord changes in The Cave and Different Trains alike. It gives Reich the opportunity to “compose out” certain harmonic regions. This technique can be divided into two recurrent types: either oscillating between different bass notes that support the same chord (as was already evident in Reich’s sketch for the “Isaac” scene) or by alternating chords. Thus, the first two chords in Example 3.2 oscillate between the root V and what may be interpreted as ♭ VII, bringing in an almost blues-like G♮ as the bass note instead of the G♯, which would be the more obvious choice in a dominant eleventh chord on E. The latter type has a typical two-chord shape, often in combination with a bass line in fourths or fifths, or more elaborate ways of building harmonic movement between chords “working out” a single speech sample. Reich’s harmonic designations do help us understand these chords as a sequence of dominants dissolving into other dominants. However, these are altered chords that add to the harmonic richness of the material while making the functional identification of these chords as dominants less obvious, albeit still possible. These smaller-scale intricacies are interesting enough from the vantage point of harmonic language, but as such they operate on a more local chord-by-chord level and do not generate long-range harmonic direction. That such direction was a salient feature of The Cave has been mentioned previously, but also in

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Example 3.3 Harmonies in Different Trains, movement 1.

Different Trains an outspoken sense of harmonic continuity can be identified. How harmonies combine to create coherence on a larger scale may best be illustrated by discussing the set of chords from the first movement of Different Trains (see Ex. 3.3). Comparing these harmonies24 to the ones from The Cave in Example  3.2, it is striking that instead of working with one prominent bass note against a cluster-like diatonic chord, Reich uses a two-part bass line in parallel fourths (or occasionally fifths, as seen in chords 4, 10, and 12). The dyads in the lower register may be perceived as moving semi-independently from the chord’s upper register (also mostly set out as stacked fourths), especially when the upper harmony remains the same and only the two lower parts are moving, as is the case between chords 1–2 and chords 3–4, respectively (a harmonic technique that ensures an element of continuity between successive chords on different samples). This brings to mind the dyads that appear in the lowest register in Music for 18 Musicians, in the pulse sections played by the two bass clarinets. These are likewise written in fourths or fifths and similarly introduce harmonic ambiguity by not readily aligning themselves harmonically with the higher register chords above them. Keith Potter has argued that functional harmony in Music for 18 Musicians can be identified in relation to the bass dyads alone.25 In his sketchbooks, Reich similarly writes out the first six of these harmonies (up to “Different trains every

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time”), identifying them as “F [major] II,” “D♭ [major] I64 ,” “A♭ [major] I64 or C [minor] VI64,” “C [major] II,” “D♭ [major] I,” and “G♭ [major] I,” respectively.26 His way of assigning functional harmony to these chords reveals that—apart from the fourth one (which is in root position second degree)—all are considered by the composer as chords in second inversion, mainly on the tonic. Again, The Cave shows Reich using a wider variety of harmonic scale degrees, where the implied key center harmonizing a sample is most often not rooted on the tonic. In fact, it turns out to be easier to consider the harmonies in this example from Different Trains in their entirety and not as combinations of chords with semi-independent bass dyads, as in the case of Music for 18 Musicians. Nonetheless, there are some notable aspects in Reich’s harmonic language here. The first remarkable feature is the composer’s choice to repeat the first sample (“From Chicago to New  York”), dividing the text of the first movement into two sections: the first listing trains and destinations, the second listing the years these events took place. More than serving the text and bringing structural symmetry, its harmonic function in establishing D♭ major as a strong point of reference at the beginning and center of the movement is crucial. Moreover, Reich sets the fifth sample to the same chord, effectively connecting harmonically all the samples listing destinations: Chicago, New York, Los Angeles. Likewise, the chord underpinning “One of the fastest trains” is repeated for “in 1939” and in “1941.” Two chains (as indicated in Ex. 3.3) of recurring chords, the second of which sets different samples, effectively bring coherence and even steady points of harmonic reference.27 When taking the roots of the chords into account (to the ear, the bass notes do not always immediately sound like a second inversion, mostly because in the paradiddle pattern the root arrives on the downbeat, giving it structural priority over the fourth below, which then follows), the harmonic progression of the first movement even takes on a far greater sense of unity than merely because of the repetition of certain chords. Example 3.3 also makes obvious the fact that many chords share pitch classes with their neighbor: the shared top C–F–B♭ between the first and second chords, and similarly G–C–F between the third and fourth chords are obvious to the eye as well as to the ear. More “internal” exchange of pitch classes is evident elsewhere, for instance, A♭–C–F occurring (in different octave positions) between the second and third chords, or—more elaborately— the exchange between the two top notes and bass notes of the penultimate and ultimate chords (C–F in the eleventh chord becomes the bass dyad for the twelfth, and correspondingly, the E♭–A♭ bass notes of the former chord become the top notes of the final chord). Other intervals between successive chords are generally small, suggesting that parsimonious voice leading has been an important feature in connecting these harmonies. This combination of common notes and parsimonious voice leading also explains the progressions that appear on the surface to be more remote: the augmented fourth A♭–D between the third and fourth chord stands out, but it can

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Example 3.4 Different Trains, movement 1 (harmonic reduction).

be read as a tritone substitution (D substituting for A♭ as dominant, common in jazz harmony), so that the progression from the third to the fifth chord becomes A♭ (the real dominant)–D (the substitute dominant) to D♭ (the tonic). The tritone G–D♭ between the first two chords works in a similar way. This only leaves the ninth chord (on the second “1939” sample), which is a stepwise chromatic move from A♭–A♮ from the previous chord (with a B added), smoothly leading into C♯/D♭, thanks to the shared pitches E, G♯, B, C♯, and F♯. When one looks at voice leading in establishing larger-scale harmonic direction in Different Trains, this movement suddenly appears to be quite strongly unified, as illustrated by an alternative harmonic reduction set out in Example 3.4. The example reduces the harmony to the bass dyads (as mentioned before), with the highest-sounding notes playing the paradiddle patterns (highlow-high-high-low-high-low-low) that form the driving rhythmic force for the piece, compared by Reich to that of a train engine. Throughout the movement, the chord-to-chord movement at the extremities of the registral range establish powerful voice-leading properties that are obvious to the ear. This makes it possible to consider the upper notes as forming a chromatic line descending from F (for the first eight chords, with the C having a kind of prolongational function) over E (in chords 9–11) to the final E♭. This not only grants a strong sense of directionality but also confirms the division of the movement as being in two segments (as discussed earlier on the basis of the text):  the F makes its final appearance at the emergence of the years (“in 1939”) in the text, after which it descends chromatically. When rendered in this way, the continuity of movement revolving around D♭ major becomes obvious. The presence of the D♭ chords (and their enharmonic equivalent on C♯ as the tenth chord in the sequence) is unmistakable, as is the prominence of its dominant (A♭) and to a lesser degree its subdominant (G♭). As this example indicates, one could consider everything as prolongations of D♭ and A♭, with most chord changes occurring quite smoothly, which is no surprise given the combination of parsimonious voice leading and common tones involved. However, the progression does not end on D♭ major, but rather on an F minor chord, introducing (in addition to D♭ and A♭ major) a third harmonic region. The third-based relationship between these three keys is interesting, as the

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roots of each chord together constitute a D♭ major triad, which might even lead to the assumption that the entire movement is a composing out of this triad. A normal assumption to make would be that the move to F minor was designed to smooth the transition from D♭ to a more remote key at the first chord of the second movement. The opposite is true, however. The second movement begins again in D♭ major, so the shift toward F minor in fact serves to introduce harmonic contrast in the transition from the first movement to the ominous tone of the second. At the conjunction between these two movements, samples of train sounds suddenly give way to an air-raid siren, the tempo drops (or, more precisely, it accelerates from ♩ = 99 to ♩ = 104), but the note values are suddenly doubled, creating the impression of the tempo almost halving in speed). It is understandable that in order to underpin the striking effect of this transition, Reich opted for a sense of harmonic contrast instead of seamlessly continuing the implied D♭ tonality. Another reason to move to F minor at the end of the first movement of Different Trains is that it anticipates the final bars of the piece. There, in movement 3, the “Girl who had a beautiful voice” starts in F major and moves toward F minor (“more, more, and they applauded”), which hauntingly concludes the work. Based on the evidence in Reich’s sketches, it seems improbable that he already had a clear idea about the key center in which Different Trains would end, when he decided to use F minor as the final harmony for the first movement. But even if it was not planned in advance (as opposed to The Cave, where A  minor was conceived as a focal point throughout the piece from the very outset), the long-range structuring implication of this move to F minor does grant the piece a greater sense of coherence.

Conclusion From the foregoing discussion of Steve Reich’s use of harmony in his samplebased works Different Trains and The Cave, one useful approach might be to consider each work primarily on the merits of the topics it includes. These topics are numerous and closely relate to important recent historical and intellectual debate. If one also adds Three Tales and the more recent WTC 9/11 (2010, also for string quartet) then the following themes are addressed: the Holocaust, the intersections of monotheistic religions and Middle East politics, the impact of technology on twentieth-century life and society, and the 9/11 attacks on New  York’s World Trade Center. Praise for these works, by Richard Taruskin (regarding Different Trains) among others, has highlighted their moral qualities, considering them to be an adequate artistic response to such events.28 These approaches typically tend to stress the narrative content of the pieces: the use of speech fragments; the identity of the speakers; the meaning

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of the words they say; and all the biographical, political, and indeed moral issues such works touch upon. This is not so different from statements given by Reich himself about these works when discussing the choice of samples and the narrative topics that lie at the center of these pieces. At the same time, such comments seem to distract from the musical structures at work in them. Reich’s remark after completing The Cave, quoted at the beginning of this chapter, about wishing the music “take the lead again instead of following” the speech melodies, may suggest the image of a composer devising ways of piecing together a set of ready-made samples. The rate of harmonic change and the suddenness of those changes is indeed striking (though not unprecedented) in his music from this point onward, but a more in-depth look at both Different Trains and The Cave, as attempted here, does reveal the way in which two types of structure are utilized. A narrative structure comes first in the working process—provided by the selection of sampled speech, which then also furnishes the musical material with the speech melodies—as evidenced in Reich’s sketch materials. This is then followed by a harmonic structure. The latter is not simply derived from the ready-made sampled material, however, but rather takes on a very important structuring function in its own right. For this purpose, Reich employs a range of harmonic strategies and techniques, forging harmonic connections on both micro and macro levels. Even in Different Trains—his earliest “sampler” piece—the distribution of extended harmonic regions is done in such a way that larger-scale harmonic movement (and, more important, harmonic continuity) is at least to some extent established. Essentially, Reich’s statement about “following” the harmony as implied by each speech melody may be misleading, for a composer has a reasonable choice among possible chords with which to harmonize each sampled speech melody (the harmonization of the same samples with different chords in The Cave clearly demonstrates this). While Reich’s diary-style notes in Different Trains testify that the composer was still struggling with how best to approach the technique of setting samples, even there he demonstrates an immaculate sense of shaping and organizing the material: of bringing logical coherence and continuity to the structural level that matches these pieces’ dramatic power and narrative scope.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Reich 2002b, 151. Ibid., 152. Ibid., 238. Wlodarski 2010. Sacher 2009, 6–8.

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6. At the time I consulted the Steve Reich Collection, the Paul Sacher Stiftung was still in the middle of the process of making the computer files accessible for consultation. Inevitable problems of out-of-date software, incompatibility with new operating systems, and similar difficulties of accessing digital-born documents slowed down this process, so I  was able to actually “open” only a few Different Trains computer files. For The Cave and the later sampler pieces, there were fewer difficulties, partly because of Reich’s choice to switch to software that in retrospect provided fewer compatibility issues with more recent operating systems. But, in checking the list of file names and dates against the many printed draft scores, the impression one gets is that Reich printed out each music notation computer file for Different Trains. 7. For example, see Schwarz 1990; Bernard 2003. 8. Potter 2000, 234–36. 9. Fink 2005b, 50–55. 10. See Potter 2000, 219–24. 11. Ibid., 187. 12. For a theoretical discussion of harmonic features in New York Counterpoint (1985) and The Desert Music (1983), see Tymoczko 2011, 332–39. 13. In fact, different versions of the same file exist, resaved with later additions in a different location as the composition process went along, as well as a printout of that file. 14. These are referred to as a slightly longer phrase: “he came from Chicago to New York.” 15. Tape recording digitized on CD-R: PSS SSR (CD 11, track 3). 16. Unfortunately, the recording is undated, so it is not possible to deduce at what stage during the composition of the first movement Reich recorded his own voice. He does, however, interrupt his reading every now and then to play a few chords on the piano, which might indicate that he had some specific key centers in mind with which he wanted his voice to match harmonically. 17. Reich 2002b, 151–52. This is also included in the introduction to the published score of Different Trains. 18. Ibid., 174. 19. The Cave retells the biblical story of Abraham, his wife Sarah, his concubine Hagar, and his children Isaac and Ishmael. It does so by collecting many people’s observations about what these biblical characters signify for them. Since Abraham is regarded as a common “ancestor” of three religions—Jews, Muslims, and Christians— these remarks vary significantly as the interviewees project their different cultural backgrounds, opinions, and interpretations onto these symbolical characters. The commentaries are interspersed with selections from the Old Testament, the Koran, and similar sources presenting “original” versions on the story. 20. PSS SSR, Sketchbook [42]. 21. The 1993 version of The Cave included many scenes subsequently deleted in the 2005 version (the latter mostly complying with the CD release of the recording). The original work included two scenes devoted to Hagar in the first act—only the second of these made it into the later version.

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22. See also Ryan Ebright’s chapter in this volume on The Cave for more on the relationship between characters and key centers. 23. PSS SSR, Sketchbook [41], 19 (beginning): “Who is Isaac harmonic movement” (dated August 24, 1990). 24. In these reductions, octave doublings of pitch classes have mostly been eliminated; nonetheless, the reductions preserve the relative positions of the notes within the chord. 25. Potter 2000, 234–35. 26. PSS SSR, Sketchbook [39], 24–25. In Reich’s sketch, the first chord’s bass note is G and not the second inversion with D as the lowest note, as in the final score. 27. The opposite technique—setting the same sample with different harmonies— happens as well, for instance, in the “Who is Ibrahim” scene from act 2 of The Cave. There, the sample “peace upon him” is initially harmonized with the dominant of B♭ major but then immediately reharmonized in D♭ major or (more likely) a tonic in B♭ minor. 28. Taruskin 2008, 101–2.

4 “We Are Not Trying to Make a Political Piece” The Reconciliatory Aesthetic of Steve Reich and Beryl Korot’s The Cave Ryan Ebright On February 25, 1994, an American-born Jewish religious fanatic named Baruch Goldstein massacred dozens of Muslim worshipers in the mosque that sits above the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron—the same cave that serves as the subject of Steve Reich and video artist Beryl Korot’s 1993 opera, The Cave. While protests and riots sprang up across the West Bank of Israel-Palestine in the immediate aftermath of this event, the New York Times invited Reich and Korot— having recently completed an eight-month European and American tour of The Cave—to respond publicly to the massacre. In an article published two weeks later, the pair felt compelled to dismiss the idea that The Cave, a self-designated “documentary music video theater work” that explores the common ancestry of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity, could influence the Middle East peace process. Moreover, they explicitly disavowed art’s capacity to inspire any direct political or social change whatsoever, writing: “Pablo Picasso’s [painting] Guernica had no effect on the aerial bombing of civilians, nor did the works of Kurt Weill, Bertolt Brecht, and many other artists stop the rise of Hitler. These works live because of their quality as works of art.”1 Taken at face value, this disavowal of art’s efficacy is understandable—what artist would wish that the merit, success, or indeed failure of their work be determined by its ability to prevent atrocities? Their statement, however, belies the explicitly political genesis of The Cave, the development of which coincided with rising Arab-Israeli tensions in the 1980s. Early sketches, outlines, and descriptions of The Cave reveal that Korot and Reich, who are married, initially viewed their quasi-opera as a step toward “reconciling the family of man.” By the time of The Cave’s premiere, however, Korot and Reich instead attempted a more detached, apolitical stance, shying away from the fundamental question they had set out to answer: How can Jews and Muslims live together peacefully? Organized in three acts, The Cave tells the story of the biblical patriarch Abraham, his wife Sarah, her handmaid Hagar, and his sons Ishmael (from Hagar) and Isaac (from Sarah). The title derives from the Cave of the Patriarchs (also known as the Cave of Machpelah), where Abraham and his family are purportedly buried, and which is the only location where Jews and 93

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Muslims both worship, albeit at different times. The Cave recounts their story using texts drawn from the book of Genesis and the Koran, as well as accounts found in the Jewish Midrash and Islamic Hadith commentaries. These texts are presented musically—through various combinations of four singers and 13 instrumentalists—and/or visually, via five large video screens. Reich and Korot interweave these Abrahamic narratives with collaged sections of audiovisual fragments drawn from interviews with Israeli Jews (act 1), Palestinian Muslims (act 2), and Americans (act 3), who comment subjectively on Abraham and his family. Going a step beyond Reich’s much-lauded Different Trains, which utilized a similar sampling technique, these interview excerpts form both the musical and the visual basis for the entire work. Reich subjects the interviewees’ speech melodies to processes of fragmentation and imitation, using instruments to double or harmonize the melodies, while footage of the interviewees is projected onto alternating screens. In turn, the harmonies derived from these speech samples inform the harmonic progressions of the movements that convey the Abrahamic narrative. Korot, meanwhile, abstracts visual details from the interview footage onto various screens to create a sort of mise-en-scène for each interviewee. The long development of The Cave from 1980 to 1993 provides a window into Reich’s evolving approach to political art and how he and Korot reconcile their political and artistic motivations. Like its aesthetic predecessor, Different Trains, The Cave relies extensively on the rhetoric of witness to establish an aura of objectivity.2 By working within the sphere of recorded documentary material, removing the more politically volatile ideas, and refraining from suggesting a solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict, Reich and Korot preemptively attempted to circumvent any charges of political propagandizing. Even in its final form, however, vestiges of their underlying bid for reconciliation still remain in The Cave’s music, text, and narrative structure. Korot and Reich’s statement in the Times conforms to the latter’s professed attitude toward art and politics—what Sumanth Gopinath has termed Reich’s “theory of political impotence.”3 It echoes remarks that the composer made as early as July 1969 in the avant-garde music periodical Source. In the article “Events/Comments:  Is New Music Being Used for Political or Social Ends?,” which surveyed several contemporary composers, Reich affirmed that although he had never written music for political or social ends, “Certainly any kind of work of art that gets out into the public will be interpreted politically, if there is any possibility of doing it. I think that the politics are more successful when the music comes first.”4 Although not denying the possibility of politically engaged music, Reich posits a clear divorce between a work’s musical content—a product of its creator—and its potential political messages, which more often derive from audience perceptions than from an artist’s intentions. Central to Reich’s formulation of music’s political (non)utility is his insistence that artistic or formal ideas for his compositions should precede any ideas of content. In

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his numerous press interviews during the lengthy development of The Cave, Reich took pains to express that despite the contemporary, political nature of the opera’s subject, the aesthetic impetus—combining documentary video and music in a theatrical context—always came first.5 The documentary trail of The Cave’s creation suggests a more complex narrative than Reich has provided in his public statements. The origin of The Cave dates to June 17, 1980, when Reich lay in a hospital recovering from surgery (see Table 4.1 for a timeline of The Cave’s development). During his convalescence, Reich spoke with British music critic and minimalist composer Michael Nyman about “this idea for a big theater piece. It seemed very exciting, but very vague.”6 Shortly thereafter, Reich wrote to Betty Freeman, a longtime supporter of his work: I also have in mind to start a H*U*G*E project that will involve live music on stage plus multiple image film. By that I mean dividing a wide screen movie image into as much as 8 separate divisions all in rhythmic relation. I want to use the voices, images and sounds of the World War II period. It will go back to the kind of work I was doing with tape in the 60s (like Come Out) and will be my answer to what music theatre can be.7

While implicitly situating Reich’s project in relation to the burgeoning operatic career of his erstwhile colleague Philip Glass, whose Einstein on the Beach quickly became mythologized as having effected a paradigm shift in music theater following its American premiere in 1976, this early description of the project reveals several important facets of Reich’s long-term theatrical pursuit. Most significantly, Korot’s influence is immediately apparent. The division of a widescreen image into multiple partitions in rhythmic relation draws directly on Korot’s pioneering video art installations Dachau 1974 and Text and Commentary. The former utilized four screens to rhythmically interweave video footage of the museum that now occupies what was once a Nazi German concentration camp.8 The proposed subject also connects to Dachau 1974, and Reich’s letter to Freeman complicates his later assertion that the artistic idea for a theater piece—combining documentary video with music—always preceded the subject matter. From its conception, Reich’s bold artistic vision was matched by an equally ambitious—or, at least, a politically loaded—subject. Using documentary material, the composer later noted, allows Reich to deal with otherwise impossible subject matter. This documentary commitment is what ultimately connects much of his and Korot’s work: I respond to what I, on a gut level, believe is the truth. And I believe in the literal truth. If you want to talk about 9/11, I want to hear the voices of the traffic controllers, and the firemen who gave their lives, and the people who were living in that area and were affected by it directly. Not by somebody who’s thinking about it or writing an essay about it. In other words, to me, it’s impossible to deal with the Holocaust. But, you can have people who survived the

Table 4.1 Timeline of The Cave’s creation and related political events Date

Event

June 1980

Reich first records the idea for a documentary music video theater work The Desert Music uses World War II theme originally intended for theater work Jesse Jackson supports the formation of a Palestinian state during his first presidential run Reich develops idea for exploring the familial roots of Jews and Muslims (“Abraham & Nimrod” computer document) Periodic meetings and conversations with director Peter Sellars (through January 1988); commission from Betty Freeman for a Kronos Quartet piece (which becomes Different Trains) Reich acquires Casio FZ-1 digital sampling keyboard, which becomes a crucial technological element in Different Trains and The Cave First Intifada begins in Israel-Palestine; Reich and Korot view documentary material of Holocaust and World War II; Reich decides to use the Freeman commission as a test run for his theater piece; Reich listens to and conducts interviews for Different Trains Reich explores possible ensemble combinations and video equipment Renée Levine [Packer] signs on as producer Reich secures commission from Klaus-Peter Kehr of Stuttgart Opera Reich and Korot decide on subject matter for The Cave and begin searching for collaborators Early drafts of The Cave’s synopsis

1982–83 Fall 1984 1986 1987

May 1987

December 1987

March 1988 April–May 1988 Fall 1988 November 1988 Winter–Spring 1989 May–June 1989 Early 1990 April 1991 June 1991 Fall 1991–Winter 1992 March 1992 April 1992 February 1993 May 1993

Reich and Korot make two trips to Israel-Palestine to conduct interviews Korot and Reich decide to focus act 3 on interviews with US Americans Act 1 is completed Reich and Korot return to Israel-Palestine for further interviews Act 2 is completed Interviews in New York Interviews in Austin, Texas The Cave is completed Premiere of The Cave at the Wiener Festwochen

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Holocaust talking about their lives. That’s real. In other words, I’m opposed to acting. I don’t want to see a movie about the Holocaust. But I’ll see lots and lots of documentaries about it. . . [Beryl and I] share that interest, that fascination with dealing with documentary material, which is very often loaded.9

Reich made little headway on his project until the late 1980s, in part because the technology he needed to realize his vision did not yet exist. Prior to that time he was still considering World War II in general—and the atomic bomb in particular, according to director Peter Sellars—as a possible subject for his music theater piece, even though his interest in those subjects had already resulted in a large-scale choral composition, The Desert Music (1983), and would later resurface in his second video opera, Three Tales (2002).10 Rising Arab-Israeli tensions in the 1980s, however, increasingly attracted Reich’s attention, and the start of the First Intifada in 1987 likely cemented his interest in the Middle East conflict as a subject matter befitting his self-described “revolutionary” music theater work.

From the Middle East to America: The Political Evolution of The Cave When an Israeli military vehicle collided with Palestinian cars in the Gaza Strip on December 8, 1987, it triggered a wave of Palestinian protests that eventually transformed into a sustained, six-year struggle that thrust the Palestinian-Israeli conflict into the international spotlight once again. Against the global backdrop of this First Intifada, Reich and Korot conceived The Cave. The official narrative of The Cave’s birth—that its subject matter was first decided at Ellen’s coffee shop in November 1988—underplays the extent to which The Cave can be mapped against the geopolitical terrain of Israel and the United States in the 1980s. Reich had been casting about for a theatrical subject since the early 1980s, and the decisive steps he began to take toward the project in 1988 indicate that he had found one. In April of the same year, Reich met with Renée Levine [Packer], who would go on to produce The Cave; in the fall, he secured a commission from Klaus-Peter Kehr of the Stuttgart Opera.11 Reich’s interest in exploring the Middle East conflict, however, stretched back to at least the mid-1980s. In a Macintosh computer file titled “Abraham & Nimrod,” Reich had jotted down ideas of possible historical lineages that could illustrate the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (see Table 4.2).12 This document points to two key aspects of Reich’s perspective on the Arab-Israeli situation. First, the composer viewed the conflict—and perhaps its resolution—as rooted in religion; and secondly, he saw its effects being played out in the United States. In one untitled column, Reich placed Abraham and Maimonides, an eleventh-century Sephardic Jewish philosopher and Torah scholar who lived in Spain and Africa

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Table 4.2 Fragment from “Abraham & Nimrod” (Steve Reich Collection, PSS) Untitled Column

Untitled Column

Abraham

Nimrod

Maimonides????

Wagner - (Words of “Der Judentum in der Musik” sung to melody of Walkyrie, or other) Jesse Jackson/Farakan [sic]

under Muslim rule. In another column, Reich listed Nimrod, who—according to Jewish and Islamic tradition—was a sort of polytheistic foil to the monotheist Abraham. Under Nimrod, Reich also listed Wagner (a well-known anti-Semite), the outspoken American politician Jesse Jackson, and Louis Farrakhan, the leader of the Nation of Islam. Although the left-hand column lacks a figure to balance Jackson and Farrakhan, farther down in the document Reich noted the possibility of using American jazz saxophonist John Coltrane, writing, “Black contrast to Jackson—not King or Malcolm. Coltrane? Need to find interview of his to see what’s to be quoted.”13 The juxtaposition of Farrakhan and Jackson with Coltrane in Reich’s notes points to the composer’s awareness of the spillover effect of the Middle East turmoil in America. As intermittent violent clashes erupted in Israel and the Occupied Territories in the 1970s and 1980s, national discourse in the United States concerning Israel became inflamed, particularly in exchanges between African American and Jewish communities.14 Increasingly, some black communities began to view the Palestinian conflict as an anticolonialist Third World struggle by a darker, oppressed majority against a whiter, subjugating minority. The Six Day War in the spring of 1967 led to an anti-Israel statement by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (a leading Civil Rights Movement organization), and the 1977 election of the conservative Likud party in Israel— criticized by opponents as an inhumane regime—raised tensions between the two communities. Inflammatory, anti-Semitic rhetoric from black nationalists such as Farrakhan and Leonard Jeffries in the early 1980s marked a further disintegration of black-Jewish relations. During Jesse Jackson’s 1984 presidential run, Farrakhan’s remarks in particular exacerbated the former’s already strained relationship with the Jewish community as a result of the “Hymietown” controversy.15 And at the Democratic National Convention in 1988, during Jackson’s second run for presidency, his was the only campaign to endorse a resolution calling for Palestinian self-determination. Even in Reich’s earliest exploration of the Jewish-Muslim conflict, then, he framed it through an American lens. Reich’s growing interest in the Arab-Israeli conflict conforms to a larger trend in the 1980s of increasing Jewish American interest in the state of Israel. Whereas the vast majority of American Jews in the 1950s and 1960s did not consider support for Israel to be an essential part of their Jewish identity, after

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the Six Day War in 1967 and the Yom Kippur War of October 1973, American Jews’ relationship with Israel changed dramatically.16 Concerns over Israel’s vulnerability in the Middle East after its narrow 1973 victory, coupled with fading international support for the Jewish state, led to concerted efforts among many American Jewish leaders to mobilize support within the United States. At the same time, US politicians and government officials looking to revive flagging beliefs in America’s moral superiority and exceptionalism latched onto the Holocaust—and, consequently, America’s role as liberator—as an element of national identity.17 Although Reich’s first attention to Israel stemmed largely from a turn toward his Jewish roots in 1975 and a scholarly interest in the history and technique of Hebrew cantillation, through his visits to Jerusalem in the late 1970s he would have experienced firsthand aspects of Palestinian-Israeli tensions.18 Moreover, through his affiliation with the Lincoln Square Synagogue he likely would have been sensitive to religious Zionists’ continued role in the development of the state of Israel; the Modern Orthodox synagogue’s founding rabbi, Shlomo Riskin, left his position in 1983 to become the chief rabbi of the new West Bank settlement of Efrat.19 Despite the conflict’s contemporary resonance in the United States, Reich emphasized the importance of engaging with the Torah, Koran, New Testament, and Midrash, which he felt would allow him to “get [a] perspective on [the] roots of [the] problem in [the] Middle East.”20 In the same computer document, he reminded himself to “Go back to [the] original Midrash” and “Let ‘continuity’ come from there.” This focus on the religious roots of the conflict continued throughout the development of The Cave, giving Reich and Korot an opportunity to express their own views of the Jewish-Muslim conflict and, more important, its resolution. In framing the present-day clashes as the manifestation of what was once the familial conflict of a “broken” family, they shift the focus to what ultimately connects the two sides. “The bottom line,” Reich noted in 2016, “is that, yes, there’s a religious war going on in the Middle East, of which the chapter in Israel is played out by the Israelis and the Palestinians, but these characters [Abraham and his family] are very much progenitors. And over here [in the United States], people who don’t really understand that don’t really understand what’s going on in the Middle East.”21 Reich’s evolving descriptions of The Cave following his November 1988 meeting with Korot provide further windows into his goal of creating a revolutionary music theater work, as well as his shifting sense of what was politically viable in theater.22 Reich tied his exploration of Abraham to the modern history of the state of Israel in an undated outline of the work that is likely one of the earliest, based on its content. In it, he envisioned computer word screens that would convey sacred texts such as the Torah, Koran, and New Testament, and contemporary secular sources such as newspaper and magazine clippings. In addition, audio- and videotape would be used to provide a fuller account of Israel’s founding, Arab opposition to it, and—notably—German concentration

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camps. This outline, even more than other sketches and descriptions, reveals the strong thematic tie between The Cave and Different Trains, which Reich initially viewed as a trial run for his first music theater work. The juxtaposition of the Arab-Israeli conflict and the Holocaust suggests that Reich either viewed the latter as a key historical event in the creation of Israel or, more pessimistically, as a cautionary tale of what could happen if Arab opposition to Israel became overwhelming. In addition, by focusing on Israel from the moment of its modernday founding in 1948, Reich sidesteps direct engagement with the Zionism that informed the persistent small-scale Jewish immigration to then-Palestine in the first half of the twentieth century and growing Arab opposition to it. Despite the seeming emphasis on conflict found in this early outline, one of the first prose descriptions of The Cave, created in early 1989, suggests that Reich and Korot were explicitly invested in creating a work that would help to negotiate and reconcile Jewish-Muslim tensions. The pair subtitled their prose introduction to The Cave “Reconciling the Family of Man.”23 In a slightly different project description sent to the Brooklyn Academy of Music (an eventual co-commissioner), Reich and Korot wrote, “The present strife surrounding the cave and the conflicting views of Abraham / Isaac on the one hand and Ibrahim / Ishmael on the other leads us to search for a time and place when Jews and Muslims lived in relative harmony,” such as Cordoba, Spain, in the tenth and eleventh centuries, or large Western cities such as New York, London, and Paris in the present day.24 After exploring these historical sites of peaceful coexistence in act 2 of The Cave, in act 3 the team had planned to ask the Jewish and Muslim interviewees from act 1 “if there is a way for Jews and Muslims to live in close proximity without physical strife.”25 Along with documenting historically peaceful interactions between Muslims and Jews, Reich planned to explore the concept of dhimmi, a political status whereby non-Muslims living under Muslim rule are afforded certain rights and protections, such as independent, non-sharia courts.26 Using interviews with Palestinian Arabs and with Jews who lived in Yemen, Iraq, Morocco, and other Islamic countries prior to emigrating to Israel after its creation, Korot and Reich intended to examine one obvious precedent for largely peaceful—if not perfectly equitable—coexistence. Although the idea of exploring dhimmi status does not offer any firm insight into Reich’s political leanings, it is notable insofar as the historical Muslim-Jew power imbalance reified by the dhimmi concept inverts the asymmetric political relationship between Israelis and Palestinians in the 1980s. In the work’s final form, however, Reich and Korot left out this potentially provocative idea. The development of the third act reveals the greatest political transformation in The Cave between its conception and its premiere. In early descriptions of The Cave, the final act was to focus on the present-day situation, asking whether or not a resolution to the Arab-Israeli conflict was contained in the history and texts (the Torah and Koran) presented in the first two acts. In these descriptions,

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the repeated emphasis on the familial ties between both Jews and Muslims suggests that Reich and Korot, at least, believed that such a resolution was possible. Yet as they began the process of interviewing, transcribing, editing, and composing, the third act shifted away from directly addressing the question of Jewish-Muslim coexistence. Instead, by early 1990 the team had decided to turn their attention in act 3 to the United States and Europe, to metaphorically “turn the cameras back on the audience” with interviews that provided a “crosssection of Western opinion.”27 Tellingly, however, Reich and Korot refrained from exploring the hypercharged political manifestations of black-Jewish tensions in the United States that Reich had outlined in the mid-1980s. Instead, in its final iteration, the third act consists solely of wide-ranging American responses—sometimes uninformed, sometimes humorous—to the questions posed to Israelis and Palestinians in the previous acts. According to Korot, this American perspective was fundamental to The Cave: [Act 3 focused on America] because we’re Americans, because that’s where we’re from and that’s the culture we know best. We don’t know the culture in the Middle East like we know the culture here. We say we are a Judeo-Christian culture, but how many people know the roots of our story that lies in the Middle East, in that particular place? In 1993, the role of religion in culture was even further removed from common dialogue than it is now. I can’t even remember that we didn’t know somehow we were going to come back here and do that. We weren’t sure how or what or where we were going to do it, who we were going to ask, but . . . it was just unsatisfying as we developed the work that it [did] not [return to America]. We were greatly relieved when it did come back here, and that also added the fresh take that only America can offer. . . . For us, the third act opened up a door to how complex the sources are and where they go in time and how they travel and change.28

Given that the work was ultimately designed for American and European audiences and conceived within the context of American culture, the third act’s turn to the United States maintains a certain consistency. In Korot’s recollection, the piece seems to have stemmed from a need to examine how Americans understood and reacted to the Arab-Israeli conflict and how attitudes in the United States differed from perspectives in the Middle East. Although the reasons behind the gradual political evolution of the piece remain tantalizingly unknown, concerns over issues of Islamic—and perhaps even Jewish—reception likely played some role. On more than one occasion Reich noted his fear of suffering a fate similar to that of British author Salman Rushdie, whose 1988 novel The Satanic Verses prompted Muslim protests, death threats, and, for the writer, several years of hiding. When composing the opening music of The Cave in April 1989 and considering the implications that orchestration might have for characters, Reich admonished himself in his notes, “Remember

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Rushdie!”29 Intriguingly, Reich’s worry was a potentially negative reaction not to his musical portrayal of Abraham, Hagar, or Ishmael but to that of Sarah, whose advanced age and infertility he had considered illustrating via the use of a guiro. By 1990, Reich publicly disavowed any political motivation whatsoever, claiming, “We are not trying to make a political piece, we don’t want to make enemies like Salman Rushdie did, and political pieces get dated.”30 While Reich characterized the project’s politics—or purported lack thereof—with this oblique reference to Muslim fundamentalism, he and Korot also went to great lengths to ensure The Cave was sensitive to Islamic and Jewish perspectives, screening the work for Jewish and Muslim religious leaders and scholars in advance of the premiere.

“Reconciling the Family of Man”: The Cave as Arab-Israeli Conflict Resolution Despite Korot and Reich’s best efforts, politics remain an animating force in The Cave, occasionally visible beneath the documentary veil of objectivity they attempted to cast over the opera. The pair’s impetus to reconcile Abraham’s descendants can be detected in the music, the text, and—most immediately— the narrative structure of The Cave. Indeed, the competing narratives that drive the larger Jewish-Muslim conflict are reflected in the juxtaposition of audiovisual interview fragments. As Carey Perloff, director of the initial production of The Cave, reflected in 2013: [As a director] I am drawn to the collision of ideas and the ways in which live theater can foreground conflict—so The Cave, with its competing narratives about belief, about history, about ideas of morality and justice and religion—fit my thinking beautifully. . . . To me The Cave was about the slippery slope of narrative. About how the stories which a culture tells itself become handed down in sometimes dangerous and ossified ways. . . . Because the piece is built on contradictory narratives and a multiplicity of voices, it shows the myth of Babel in real time: the way that human beings are often divided by their language, and trapped in their own myopic narratives.31

On a structural level, the very act of setting competing narratives side by side can be, in itself, political, and the handling of narratives in The Cave mirrors two distinct approaches to resolving Israeli-Palestinian tensions. Negotiators involved in conflict resolution and reconciliation, particularly in the Middle East, prefer emphasizing coexisting narratives that are recognized and legitimized by both parties in a conflict.32 Insofar as it presents contemporary Israeli, Palestinian, and American narratives in turn, The Cave models this method. A second, longer-term approach to conflict resolution calls for the

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construction of a single, bridging narrative that encompasses both sides.33 By weaving long-established biblical and Koranic accounts of Abraham and his family—the central narrative of The Cave—through competing narratives of Israelis, Palestinians, and Americans, Reich and Korot highlight a fundamental, foundational myth that might serve as such a bridging narrative. In a 2013 interview, Korot implied that at the time of The Cave’s creation, she and Reich saw the common roots of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity as a potentially positive, unifying force. Pointing to the international community’s increased, often negative, awareness of Islam’s religious roots since the 1990s owing to the rise of radicalism, Korot noted, “We, slightly before that, saw a different message [about Islam] that later came to be more dominant.”34 Even Reich in a 1993 interview confessed that he saw a peaceful message in The Cave: “The traditional Jewish view is that Ishmael’s and Isaac’s presence at their father’s burial was a sign of their reconciliation. And if they could do it, perhaps it suggests Arabs and Israelis can, too.”35 Reich and Korot are careful in The Cave not to dictate how this peace might be achieved; for them, doing so would push the piece from the realm of art into the realm of propaganda. Nevertheless, the central idea of the work’s conclusion— in Korot’s words, “that the simple act of breaking bread with the Other is also the most difficult in so many ways”—is fundamentally about reconciliation.36 Similarly, for assistant director Nick Mangano (who would later direct Three Tales), one of the most powerful themes in The Cave was that “a common religion, a common faith, but then also for some just a common mythology, can actually bring us together rather than further divide us.”37 More specific traces of Korot and Reich’s underlying motivation still exist. In one of the last changes to act 1 before the work’s premiere, Reich amended the final line of the opera’s opening text from Genesis 16. Since composing the movement in 1989, Reich had foregrounded the familial conflict that lies at the heart of the work by ending the movement with only the first portion of verse 12: “And he [Ishmael] will be a man of the wild; his hand against all, and the hand of all against him.” In a late change, however, Reich included the final portion of that verse: “And in the presence of all his brothers shall he dwell.”38 This inclusion suggests a familial cohabitation, perhaps even a peaceful one, that answers in the affirmative the question that Reich initially asked: Can Jews and Muslims live together peacefully? Reich’s translation, likely his own, lends this interpretation even more significance. Whereas most biblical translations interpret the final line as a strife-laden coexistence—“he will live in hostility toward all his brothers” or “he shall dwell over against all his kinsmen”—Reich’s rendering, with its seeming emphasis on equality and brotherhood, downplays conflict. Reich’s harmonic structures in The Cave also point toward a conscious effort to reconcile the Jewish and Muslim sides of the Abrahamic family through an intriguing mixing of keys. Reich associated specific keys with each character,

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Example 4.1 Transcription of entry dated July 22, 1990, in Sketchbook [41] (Steve Reich Collection, PSS).

using harmonies derived from interviewee speech melodies as a basis for the narrative text sections. For example, in a sketchbook entry dated July 18, 1990, Reich wrote out each harmony from the act 1 movements he had constructed from interviewee responses to the questions “Who, for you, is Abraham?” and “Who, for you, is Sarah?” In an entry four days later (see Ex. 4.1), Reich then chose several of these chords to serve as the harmonic foundation for the “Birth of Isaac” text (Genesis 18:1–2, 9–14; 21:1–3). Along with these harmonies, Reich listed the primary keys for each family member (having already transcribed, harmonized, and ordered the speech samples for Abraham, Sarah, Hagar, and Ishmael). Abraham, as father of both Muslims and Jews, occupies two distinct key areas: F major and A minor. As if to emphasize the musical logic between Abraham and Isaac, Reich wrote out the harmonic connection:  “Isaac  =  D mi[nor] relative of F maj[or] Abraham.” Reich’s decision to create a musical connection between Abraham and Isaac, despite having not yet transcribed and harmonized the speech samples for the “Who is Isaac?” section, demonstrates his intention to emphasize the commonality of these characters, even when doing so challenged his commitment to the primacy of the documentary source material. It also highlights Reich’s unexpected mixing of familial keys. Given both Abraham’s and Sarah’s harmonic associations (F major/A minor and C major/A minor, respectively), the intuitive key choice for Isaac would be A  minor. However, rather than keeping Isaac within the white-key diatonic family and linking Hagar (F major) and Ishmael together in the “darker” flat-key space of F major/D minor, Reich assigns A minor to Ishmael and D minor to Isaac, thereby mixing the musical bloodlines and ensuring that the Ishmaelite family would not be read as darker or more negative.39 Act 3’s focus on the United States—a stand-in for the larger West—also can be interpreted politically. According to Korot and Reich, the “American” third act functions, in part, as a critique of Western ignorance of foundational

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cultural myths; avant-garde theater director Elizabeth LeCompte of the Wooster Group, in a humorous reply to the first of the five interview questions (“Who, for you, is Abraham?”), begins the act by asking, “Abraham Lincoln?”40 Yet the American perspective accrues significance beyond what Korot and Reich expressly intended, given that The Cave played solely to Western audiences and arguably helped raise the international profile of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. By dramatizing the gap between Middle East tensions and their interpretations in the United States, The Cave might be read as an exhortation to Americans to better understand their country’s increasing involvement in the Middle East.41 The act 3 responses have the added effect of explicitly inserting the United States into the narrative of a long-standing ideological conflict. The structural arrangement of The Cave—the Israeli perspective at the beginning, Palestinian in the middle, and American at the end—implicitly situates the United States as a sort of teleological endpoint to the conflict. This arrangement also mirrors the narrative progression of Different Trains. In that piece, the first two movements present disparate geographic settings (the United States and Europe) during similar times before the narrative returns to America in the third movement, which has the effect of reorienting the traumatic memories of Holocaust survivors as part of the United States’ collective past. This straightforward narrative logic— with the US as endpoint—suggests that the future of (and perhaps the solution to) the conflict in the Middle East might be a kind of Western, American pluralism that can accommodate multiple, contrasting narratives. Or, in another possible reading of the third act, the path toward Palestinian-Israeli reconciliation must inevitably lead through the United States. Like Reich’s purported musical objectivity in Different Trains, his and Korot’s apolitical claims about The Cave weaken when confronted with the documentary evidence of its development. Moreover, the very act of creating a work for the theater suggests some sort of political stance, insofar as theater functions, according to historian Baz Kershaw, as “a public arena for the collective exploration of ideological meaning,” in which “the spectator is engaged fundamentally in the active construction of meaning as a performance event proceeds.”42 Measuring the political or social impact of theater or music may prove difficult, but it does not necessarily follow that performance has no tangible effect whatsoever. Indeed, Reich’s association with the San Francisco Mime Troupe in the early 1960s gave him ample models for mixing theater and politics (as well as live music and film), and his and Korot’s formal conversations with audiences after performances of The Cave suggest a tacit acknowledgment on their part of theater’s potential efficacy.43 If The Cave helped to raise the profile of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it likely did so among the types of musicians, artists, and intellectuals who might engage with Israel-Palestine in the future as artistic creators or as scholar-critics. At the same time, The Cave offered a model for how artists might sidestep controversy while broaching politically sensitive subjects; the vitriolic reception of The Death of Klinghoffer, John

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Adams’s 1991 opera dealing with the Arab-Israeli conflict, provides a prime counterexample.44 Although the use of documentary material gives The Cave a patina of impartiality and objectivity, it also supports a political reading of the opera. Amy Lynn Wlodarski has argued convincingly that Reich’s seemingly unbiased use of documentary material in Different Trains acts as a form of “secondary witness,” in which Reich’s interpretations of Holocaust survivor testimonies are advanced without revealing his own subjective standpoint.45 Such subjectivities also underlie documentary theater, where works constructed by juxtaposing documents have a long history of being designed for expressly political purposes. Drama theorist Carol Martin writes in her expansive assessment of documentary theater in the late twentieth century that “as staged politics, specific instances of documentary theatre construct the past in service of a future the authors would like to create.”46 As staged politics, The Cave allowed Korot and Reich to construct both the past and the present in the service of an eventual reconciliation among all of Abraham’s descendants.

Notes 1. Reich and Korot 1994. 2. Documentary theater historian Derek Paget (2009, 235–36) notes that much late twentieth-century documentary theater is built on the belief that a “witness’s claim to authenticity can still warrant a credible perspective” in a mediatized, “postdocumentary” culture. 3. Gopinath 2005, 41. 4. L.  Austin 1969, 91. The article also included a response from Lukas Foss that prefigured Reich’s statement about Guernica. Gopinath has pointed out that the trope of Guernica and its inability to effect political change appeared first in Jean-Paul Sartre’s What Is Literature? (1949) and later in Theodor Adorno’s article “Commitment” (1965). 5. See, for example, “Jonathan Cott Interviews Beryl Korot and Steve Reich (1993),” in Reich 2002b, 72. Reich continued to espouse his “theory of political impotence” during the creation of The Cave (see Schwarz 1989). 6. Cowan n.d. 7. Letter to Betty Freeman from Steve Reich, August 14, 1980, Betty Freeman Papers, Special Collections and Archives, UC San Diego (used by permission). Freeman (1921–2009) was one of the most important American patrons of new music and the arts in the middle to late twentieth century. See J. Johnson 2014. 8. Reich’s interest in video extends back to 1975, the year after he met Korot. See “Videotape and a Composer (1975),” in Reich 2002b, 82–84. On Korot’s Dachau 1974, see Korot 1976, 76–77; Godfrey 2007, 140–67. 9. Steve Reich, phone interview with the author, July 25, 2016.

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10. This recollection from Sellars was made in a conversation with the author on March 30, 2013, in Princeton, New Jersey. Reich and Sellars remained in intermittent contact through most of 1987 regarding a potential theatrical collaboration. An early press description confirms that Reich was still thinking of using World War II as a subject: “His theatre piece will have its premiere at the Stuttgart Opera House in September 1991 and will bring video into play on a grand scale. . . . The subject matter is not yet decided, but it seems likely to be a collage of the type used in Different Trains, and it will follow Desert Music (a setting of poems by William Carlos Williams about the atom bomb) in dealing with the Second World War” (Bowen 1988). 11. When Kehr later took a position with the Wiener Festwochen, the commission followed. On the commissioning and producing of The Cave as an entrepreneurial enterprise, see Ebright 2017. 12. “Abraham & Nimrod,” computer document, Steve Reich Collection, Paul Sacher Stiftung (hereafter PSS). (All PSS sources appearing in this chapter are used by permission.) This particular document is illustrative of the difficulties posed by working with electronic archival documents. Some portions of this text file do not render properly on the computers at the Sacher Stiftung; they appear as an illegible jumble of numbers, letters, and punctuation symbols. Nevertheless, several portions of the text file are readable. In that sense, these documents are not unlike manuscript fragments in which only a small portion is legible. The dating of these electronic files is also fraught with difficulty. Although the Macintosh operating system lists the date of the file’s creation as October 2, 1986, one of the notes within the document is dated “9/24/86.” 13. Steve Reich Collection, PSS. 14. C. West 1994, 147–49; see also Carson 1994. 15. For a summary of the “Hymietown” incident, see Greenberg 2006, 243–44. 16. Novick 1999, 146–69. 17. Ibid., 155. Invoking the Holocaust became a central strategy in pursuit of this support. See also Finkelstein 2003, 31, 149. Within the context of the 1970s and atrocities committed and endured during the Vietnam War, the representation of the United States as the antithesis of Nazi Germany helped to reinforce perceptions of American goodness (see MacDonald 2008, 1106). 18. There are relatively few specifics about Reich’s trips to Israel. For a general account of these trips and their effect on Reich’s compositions, see “Hebrew Cantillation as an Influence on Composition (1982),” in Reich 2002b, 105–18; Puca 1997. In the 1980s, the Arab-Israeli conflict garnered increasing international attention owing to intermittent violence. Although there were no large-scale conflicts for several years after Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982, occasional Palestinian terrorist attacks and subsequent Israeli military retaliations—fueled in part by Israel’s policy of residency revocation and continued settlement growth in the West Bank and East Jerusalem—precluded serious efforts at peace. For a historical overview of the Arab-Israeli conflict from the late 1970s to the early 1990s, see C. D. Smith 2013, 346–437; Harms 2012, 117–67.

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19. Riskin, as well as other rabbis at Lincoln Square Synagogue, served as a Jewish adviser to Korot and Reich during The Cave’s development. Although Reich has never given a public indication of his relationship with Zionism or potential solutions to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Riskin, at least, has implied that the twostate solution is not a viable option (see Maltz 2014). It is worth pointing out, however, that Jewish attitudes in the early 1990s toward potential peace solutions may well have shifted due to the rise in Islamic extremism since that time. 20. Most scholars of the Arab-Israeli conflict reject the idea that the contemporary strife has any ancient, religious roots, arguing instead that it is a distinctly modern, politically born conflict (see, for instance, C.  D. Smith 2013, 1; Harms 2012, 1, 3). 21. Steve Reich, phone interview with the author, July 25, 2016. 22. Numerous computer documents at the Sacher Stiftung show Reich experimenting, in prose, with how to structure The Cave and answer its central questions. 23. “Cave,” computer document, Steve Reich Collection, PSS. The only portions of the text that were legible on the Sacher Stiftung computers were the headings for each section. 24. Hamm archives, Brooklyn Academy of Music. Based on similar drafts of the project descriptions at the Paul Sacher Stiftung, the description housed at the BAM archives likely dates from February or March 1989. 25. Ibid. 26. The idea for exploring dhimmi status is referenced in several computer files, including “Historical Outline Revised,” “Historical Outline Revised 2_19,” “Questions for Jewish Scholars_x,” and “The Cave-Outline 1_20_89” (Steve Reich Collection, PSS). 27. “The Cave-Book Description,” computer document, Steve Reich Collection, PSS. In this document from July 1990, Reich wrote, “We will interview primarily Americans (including Black, Asian and Hispanic interviewees) and also some Europeans, and will aim for a cross section of Western opinion primarily (but certainly not exclusively) reflecting what is presently viewed as a ‘sophisticated and enlightened’ outlook.” 28. Beryl Korot, phone interview with the author, August 19, 2013. 29. Steve Reich Collection, PSS. 30. Daly 1990. Reich also referred to Rushdie in Kidron 1989. 31. Carey Perloff, email correspondence with the author, July 16, 2013. 32. D. L. West 2003, 3. 33. Pappé 2006, 194–204. 34. Beryl Korot, phone interview with the author, August 19, 2013. 35. “Jonathan Cott Interviews Beryl Korot and Steve Reich on The Cave (1993),” in Reich 2002b, 177–78. 36. Beryl Korot, phone interview with the author, August 19, 2013. 37. Nick Mangano, phone interview with the author, September 23, 2013.

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38. The final entry in Reich’s 1992 agenda is from October 16 and contains the complete text of Genesis 16:12. 39. Reich had ample speech samples to draw from and was thus able to select those that conformed to his large-scale tonal planning. On Reich’s process of transcribing and arranging, see Ebright 2014, 117–25. 40. “Jonathan Cott Interviews Beryl Korot and Steve Reich on The Cave (1993),” in Reich 2002b, 175–77. 41. Overt American political involvement in the Middle East and, more specifically, Israel stretches back to the formation of Israel and the beginnings of the Cold War, when the United States sought to align the new, socialist-leaning Ben-Gurion state with Western interests. On the influence of the United States on Israeli culture and politics, see Segev 2002. 42. Kershaw 1992, 16–17. 43. On Reich’s work with the San Francisco Mime Troupe, see Cole 2012; Gopinath 2011. Indeed, the direct precedent in Reich’s work for mixing live musical performance with film is his music for Robert Nelson’s Oh Dem Watermelons. On the various forms that art’s political efficacy might take, see especially Rancière 2010, 134–40. 44. On Klinghoffer’s reception, see Fink 2005a; Longobardi 2009. 45. On Different Trains and the idea of “secondary witness,” see Wlodarski 2010. 46. Martin 2006, 10. On the intersections of The Cave and the documentary theater tradition, see Ebright 2014, 133–43. On the increasing reliance on oral history and the authority of the witness in documentary theater of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, see also Paget 2009, 235–36. On documentary theater, see also Bechtel 2007; Dawson 1999; Youker 2012.

PART II REPETITION, SPEECH, AND IDENTITY

5 Repetition, Speech, and Authority in Steve Reich’s “Jewish” Music Robert Fink BD: Will there ultimately be a town of Friendship? SR: I’m not a prophet; I’m only a poor composer. So I have no idea. BD: I hope you’re better than a poor composer! [Laughs] SR: Well, I mean, compared to a prophet.1

Exodus 4:9–10

Good New Ideas Usually Turn Out to Be Old What happened to Steve Reich? This was the question circulating at a recent scholarly conference on musical minimalism, during a searching session devoted to historical analysis of repetitive music and cultural politics.2 Surveying the long arc of Reich’s career, participants became aware of an uncomfortable truth:  that repetition in Reich’s music, though it may have started out as an avant-garde gesture accompanying conventionally liberal attitudes, had, over the years, increasingly been put in the service of traditionalist, conservative politics, and even, in the aftermath of the 9/11 terror attacks, something disturbingly close to xenophobia. Reich’s optimistic 1970 prediction, that “the pulse and the concept of clear tonal center” would be the future of new music, has come true, but, it seems, with politically complex results. Sometime around the millennium, minimalist repetition, once associated with antihegemonic thought

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and action, began to harmonize with geopolitical rhetorics of power, as both modernist and feminist critics have long warned us it could.3 How, then, might we trace a changing politics of repetition across Steve Reich’s musical career? First, we need a point of articulation, some pivot between the early, questioning Reich of the 1960s—by no means a hippie, but a restless prodigal son, at least, cum center-left secular Jewish intellectual—and the twenty-first-century musical patriarch who now appears to have found his answers, who increasingly sees even the disruptive innovations of his early career as a return to intellectual certainties from the past: In retrospect, I understand the process of gradually shifting phase relationships between two or more identical repeating patterns as an extension of the idea of infinite canon or round . . . that this new process bears a close family resemblance to the thirteenth century musical idea of round seems to give it some depth. Good new ideas generally turn out to be old.4

It’s Gonna Rain, the work Reich is discussing, was written in 1965, but his repositioning of its repetitive tape loops as an “infinite canon” comes from his collection of writings on music, first published in 1974; it is thus roughly contemporaneous with his return to Jewish orthodoxy, and his first encounters with Hebrew liturgical language and the rabbinical cantillation systems developed to render it audible.5 The first fruit of Reich’s subsequent study of accent markings (ta’amim) in Semitic cantillation was Tehillim (1981), also his first texted work since the speech-based tape works of 1965–67. Taking advantage of the fact that the Psalms have no canonical tradition of Ashkenazi liturgical performance, Reich composed what by his own account are musically “traditional” settings of the Hebrew text,6 highlighting his ability to construct patterns of changing meter that mirror precisely its spoken accent patterns when sung. Tehillim was a breakthrough piece for Reich, who had been enduring a fallow compositional period after producing his summary masterwork of patterned repetition, Music for 18 Musicians, in 1976.7 With its achievement, he effectively abandoned the complex of repetitive rhythmic processes—phase shifting, beat-class pattern filling, systematic augmentation and diminution—that had dominated his work, singly and in combination, since their genesis in his first experiments with taped speech loops in 1965.8 Reich’s desire to set a biblical text rendered those repetition techniques irrelevant, pushing him toward a direct re-engagement with the “musical” aspects of emotionally heightened speech explored by his early tape works. Tehillim is, in this view, a conscious rewriting of the speech-song of It’s Gonna Rain. But where the earlier work used an overload of looping and dubbing to fix the listener’s attention on the way “[black] Pentecostal preaching hovers between speaking and singing,”9 the new piece parcels out repeats according to the composer’s new view of his earlier speechbased work as essentially traditional and (in both senses of the word) canonic. Over a pulsating, nonmotivic accompaniment, each biblical verse is set as a

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single melodic phrase without internal repeats; repetitive textures occur only during literal four-part canons built up in the outer movements. Reich explained in an accompanying program note that he deliberately avoided his characteristic “repetition of short patterns” in order to be “as faithful to the Hebrew text as possible,” using music to make both accent pattern and meaning immediately comprehensible. In a strikingly awkward yet emphatic turn of phrase, itself repetitively stuttering and yet strangely passive, he described how the decision to abandon repetitive process was all but forced on him: “Returning then to the question about repetition as a musical technique, my reason for limiting it to repetition of complete verses of the Psalm text is basically that, based on my musical intuition, the text demanded this kind of setting.” Eight years later, as he began serious work on his “documentary opera,” The Cave (1993), submission to the (voice in the) text was again experienced as an ineluctable command: “What I found was that once I had chosen the text, the text then forced me to do things musically I would not otherwise have done. This I found to be extremely stimulating.”10

Argument: Speech, Music, and Repetition in The Cave I am going to make overt a hermeneutic strategy that the alert reader, primed by the epigraphs to this chapter, might already have registered with some surprise: bracketing Reich’s return to Jewish orthodoxy with a renewed attention to text setting and the abandonment of instrumental repetition, I  am casting the postminimalist composer in the role of musical prophet. Yielding, under duress, to an inner call to prophesy is, one might argue, the master trope for any self-identified Jewish creative artist; thus it’s not surprising to find that Reich’s original plan for what became Tehillim was to set an excerpt from the book of Jonah, the paradigmatic reluctant preacher of God’s word.11 In what follows, I  want to lay out terms upon which one might consider the relationship between repetition, speech, and prophetic authority in the music of Steve Reich, a complex and contradictory set of relations encapsulated in the biblical figure of Moses, the stuttering Prophet, who was both the vessel for divine truth and unable to master the rhythms of articulate speech. (He was, to quote a phrase that has been variously and ingeniously glossed for millennia, “slow of tongue.12”) The point here is not to become caught in the biblical content of Reich’s “Jewish” works, or to imply that Reich’s re-encounter with his own Judaism necessarily drove his worldly politics in a conservative direction. (It does appear that this happened, but making that case will not be my focus.) Rather, I want to consider the way the innate repetitiveness of musical discourse—a fundamental constituent of “the musical” foregrounded by minimalism—both fosters and undermines the power of the spoken texts that Reich increasingly placed at the center of his work during this pivotal period.13 In Reich’s own telling,

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composing Tehillim meant acceding to a voice in his head—he called it his musical intuition—that insisted he make his music speak the truth, by subjecting it to the musical demands of speech as truth. But what is that “truth”? In the shifting interactions between composed music and sampled speech over the course of The Cave, what the text(s) “demand” is never clear, and a delicately negotiated politics of speech and its repetition must be reconstructed, sometimes measure by measure. Almost a decade in conceptual development and production, The Cave will likely retain its position as the most ambitious single project in the linked careers of Reich and his longtime partner, video artist Beryl Korot. The work, whose eponymous subject, the Cave of the Patriarchs, is believed by both Jews and Muslims to be the burial place of Abraham, the first prophet of Yahweh, is strongly didactic on at least three levels. Juxtaposing texts from the Torah and Koran with contemporary interviews, The Cave’s libretto attempts to show that Axial Age historical and cultural roots underlie the current Arab-Israeli conflict; the staging of the opera deploys a wide range of language-bearing media—including videotaped speech and handwriting, live performance of sung text, and animated computer display of typed/printed texts—to both communicate its argument and privilege speech over writing in a characteristically Western way; and, as a musical composition, The Cave presents a catalog of techniques by which repetition, in particular canonic imitation, might mediate between the musical potential of spoken discourse and the discursive potential of musical sound. The current discussion will bracket off the political controversy attendant on the first aspect of The Cave to focus on its second aspect: the battle, carefully staged by Reich and Korot, between the epistemological claims of speech, song, and writing. It is designed as a theoretical prolegomenon to a larger criticalanalytical study of the third aspect, the evolving way in which The Cave’s musical repetitions interact with the melody and rhythm of the sampled speech on which the opera is built. To understand this last aspect, and thereby develop a reading of Reich’s language-based operatic politics, one must first interrogate his long-standing and oft-expressed belief that “natural” speech is an expressively “true” marker of identity in ways that other linguistic forms are not. Reich’s privileging of talking over writing and singing goes all the way back to apologias for his earliest tape works; it places the composer within a logocentric tradition that encompasses not only the European philosophers he studied in college but also the prophetic Hebrew writings with which he began to engage seriously only in his midthirties. Let me orient the reader of the present chapter with a synopsis of what detailed textual analysis might eventually tell us about the larger relationship between speech and repetition in Reich’s “Jewish” period. In general, pulsed repetition of speech fragments, in the early tape pieces a generator by itself, automatically, of the listener’s perception that sampled speech has melody and

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rhythm, is sidelined in works like The Cave by the composer’s own deliberate transcription of what he perceives to be its “true” musical content. Repetition, relieved of the responsibility to musicalize speech through gradual process, takes on new forms that have the composerly air of the past. (Good new ideas generally turn out to be old.) In the course of The Cave’s three acts, speech fragments from subject interviews are presented frankly, from the very beginning, as musical motives and are then made to repeat at irregular intervals through retriggering, accompanied and pervasively imitated by groups of string and wind instruments that also repeat canonically among themselves. In act 2, as Israeli voices give way to Palestinian, the episodes of musicalized speech begin to include live singers who, having functioned as a separate chorus cantillating episodes from Genesis, are now interwoven contrapuntally with the speakers. In act 3, devoted to American voices, the singers repeat the interviewees’ words, but vary their pitches and rhythms, creating a rich four-part counterpoint that, finally, merges back into the homophony of the opening as the opera returns to the biblical texts with which it began. This elaborately lapped repetition structure, in which words, phrases, melodies, rhythms, movements, and even acts seem obsessively to repeat each other, fairly cries out for interpretation as cultural practice. One might attempt to induce the power dynamics enacted in The Cave from close comparative reading of repetition structures across the opera’s three acts, paying attention to the political distribution of different compositional techniques. Whose utterances are repeated—and by whom? Who is allowed to speak at length, and who is constantly interrupted? Do Reich’s composed-out repetitions undermine the authority of his speakers? Or does musical repetition undermine his authority, signaling prophetic overload, an intermittent breakdown of signification in which, under the imperious demands of the text, Reich’s music itself begins to stutter? A full treatment of speech, authority, and repetition in Reich’s vocal music must eventually deal with all these questions, but in what follows I want to prepare the ground by posing a single, more general one: What does The Cave tell us (and show us) about the power of speech itself? What are the contours of the philosophical field on which its games of music, language, and repetition are played out?

In Plato’s Cave: Steve Reich’s Metaphysics of Presence It is fair to say that Steve Reich’s retrospective view of his own career puts his recognition of the musical possibilities of spoken language at the center.14 He has returned over and over to the notion of “speech melody,” a phrase by which, in the tradition of the Greco-German umbrella term melos, he refers to the linked constellations of pitch and rhythm that arise “naturally” from the distinctive

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way a given person talks. At the time of The Cave, Reich held and expressed expansive views on the epistemic power of musical speech:  “In our Western languages, speech melody hovers over all our conversations, giving them their fine emotional meaning. . . . We are, with speech melody, in an area of human behavior where music, meaning, and feeling are completely fused.”15 For Reich, the distinctive cadences of the human voice, if reproduced in a work of art transparently enough, can give the listener access to subjectivity and individuality directly, without any sense of mediation. The person speaking is just . . . there: Using the voice of individual speakers is not like setting a text—it’s setting a human being. A human being is personified by his or her voice. If you record me, my cadences, the way I speak are just as much me as any photograph of me. When other people listen to that they feel a persona present.16

Reich first made this claim of presence in regard to his tape works (the preceding passage is from a program note for It’s Gonna Rain, probably written a few years after the work’s 1965 premiere). At about the same time, he played theatrically on the relationship between recorded speech melody and physical presence in a “live” electronic work. My Name Is (1967) was a site-specific phasing piece employing multiple tape loops, realized in front of an audience on three lo-fidelity portable players. But rather than field recordings, the vocal raw material was sourced from audience members themselves, waylaid as they entered the concert, saying (they of course did not know why) “My name is—” followed by a first name. As Reich later noted, “hearing your name that way tends to get to people,” especially since, having no idea that their voice would be at the center of a musical composition, most people identified themselves “in an offhand way.” But the effect of My Name Is goes beyond this ironic shock of self-recognition. Theoretically, it is an almost perfect representation of what Jacques Derrida, writing in that same year, called out in his Of Grammatology as the underlying fiction of linguistics, that human thought is based on an original “self-present voice” that transmits “the most immediate, natural, and direct signification” of meaning from subject to subject.17 My Name Is confronted select members of its audience with the most direct possible artistic representation of Derrida’s “s’entendre parler” (hearing/ understanding-oneself-speak):  the amplified sound, repeated over and over, and then elaborated in three-part phased counterpoint, of their own recorded voices, captured announcing and then pronouncing their own first names, sound-images that pointed, precisely, to themselves, the people there, listening. (There is no record of how 1967 audiences physically reacted to the piece as self-presence; did they crane their heads, trying to match the exuberant call and response of recorded voices to the actual, silent bodies around them?)18 Reich’s tape loops, constructed in absentia while the concert’s first half was in progress, functioned during the performance according to Derrida’s logic of the trace, the mechanical recording of the past onto the present, the absence

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“behind the scenes” that enables and yet destabilizes our subjective feelings of immediacy and self-presence.19 Reich characterized My Name Is as a caricaturist’s game, “sort of like doing a sketch of people at the door.” The idea that one could capture a person’s essence in a fleeting vocal trace stayed with him, spurring the nascent documentary aesthetic that would culminate in works like Different Trains and The Cave. In September 1975, he contributed a short essay, “Videotape and a Composer,” to an anthology of writings on video art coedited by his new companion and future collaborator, Beryl Korot. He outlined two possible projects in which his signature phasing process could be applied to video: an update of My Name Is, and a new, related piece to be called, simply, Portraits: In this piece, three or more people are videotaped close up saying words or making sounds that give some direct intuitive insight into who they are. A casual remark accompanied by a typical gesture or a habitual speech melody might contain the brief (one to three seconds or so) sound and image necessary for the portrait. Each brief videotape is then duplicated as a loop, as mentioned above, and played on three or more decks and monitors, as described for My Name Is.20

Marcelle Pierson notes the “Rousseauian echo” of passages like these, the way they tap into a notion of natural language woven deep into the discourse of Western metaphysics.21 She also finds it significant that this rediscovery of voice and gesture happens for Reich in the context of renewed interest in Jewish liturgical music. The primal linkage explored in Portraits, between a “habitual speech melody” and a “typical gesture,” is reminiscent of the poetic story Abraham Idelsohn tells in his 1929 Jewish Music about the unbroken development of the ta’amim, the signs of biblical cantillation in the Hebrew world; in a sweeping passage that Reich reproduces in his own article on the subject, Idelsohn conjectures that when the cantor’s gestures in space were transcribed as marks on a page, the practice of cantillation gave birth to the technology of musical notation.22 For Pierson, this alternative, mythic tradition provides an alibi for a return to notated song: “Reich finds [in Idelsohn’s Jewish Music] an origin story to rival Rousseau’s. Cantillation moved from the voice to gesture and finally to the written page—a narrative of the advent of technē in the vocal act.”23 In this reading, song and (musical) writing are allies in a battle against the metaphysical truth claims of speech-as-presence. As Gary Tomlinson has argued, following the logic of Derrida’s supplement, “Singing and writing converge on speech from different sides. . . . By virtue of the characteristic surplusover-speech that each carries, they resist the preeminence of speech within the logocentric scheme.”24 Of course, Derrida’s insight is theoretically true of almost any musical composition by a Western author;25 why should we tarry to mark yet another musical struggle with logocentrism? As will become clear through the following analysis, I  find The Cave striking for Reich’s unusual,

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self-abnegating authorial position. Thanks in part to his idiosyncratic reading of Rousseau-through-Idelsohn, he is the rare composer of an opera who seems to take the side of logos, of spoken language as immediately present, against the dual supplementarity of both writing and song—a choice all the more striking for being overtly thematized in the mise en scène of the work’s complex, multilayered libretto. (Note that in making this claim I diverge, for my own purposes, from Pierson’s melos-centric reading of Reich’s work.) Reich and Korot jointly developed the book for The Cave, weaving its text together out of four distinct types of linguistic material: (1) five short framing questions in the form, “Who is, for you, Abraham (Sarah, Hagar, Ishmael, Isaac)?”; (2) sampled excerpts from the sampled answers to those questions, all in English, collected in West Jerusalem, Hebron, New  York City, and Austin, Texas, over the period 1989–91; (3)  Hebrew and Arabic liturgical chants, presented in the original language; and (4)  scriptural episodes from the book of Genesis involving the patriarch Abraham and his kin, presented in multiple European languages. Composer and video artist then quite literally “set” the four types of texts used in The Cave in front of their audience, using synchronized multichannel video on five screens both to present the written word in dynamic, visual forms and to demarcate a large multilevel stage set, upon which the musicians in the original production performed live (see Figure 5.1).26 Each of these modes of linguistic action—question, answer, liturgy, scripture—is structured by a different set of “primal” relations among the powers of speech, writing, and song. But in the theatrical space of The Cave, with its relentless doubling of seeing and hearing—“The idea,” reports Reich, “was that you would be able to see and hear people as they spoke on the videotape and simultaneously you would see and hear onstage musicians doubling them, actually playing their speech melodies as they spoke”27—everything, as it were, turns to speech. Writing is endowed with the immediacy and presence of logocentric fantasy, while singing, yoked firmly to the demands of its text, relinquishes (if the onstage mirroring is strict enough) its “residue” (Pierson) of nonlinguistic excess.

Language Layers 1 and 2: Questions and Answers The five framing questions are the deepest, oldest layer of The Cave. As in the original theatrical game of presence, Reich’s My Name Is (1967), the first move, the querying of identity that elicits the speech material from which the piece will be made, is not itself allowed to become part of that material. In a fascinating choice that reverberates through The Cave, the first question—Who is Abraham?—appears in writing. Is this an anti-logocentric gesture? Well, I didn’t use the gerundive casually: the words are not (already) written and then shown; rather, it is precisely the process of writing that appears, by hand, filmed in extreme

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Figure 5.1 Original stage set of The Cave (1993), showing the use of video screens during a “talking head” section.

close-up, so that the highly amplified sound of ballpoint pen on paper fills the ambient space of the theater. Platonism famously held that writing was more like painting than speech, for, as Socrates notes in the Phaedrus, “The creations of the painter have the attitude of life, and yet if you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence. It is the same with written words.”28 As Derrida notes in glossing this passage, for the Platonist, writing is worse than figurative art because “it inscribes in the space of silence and in the silence of space the living time of voice.”29 But not this writing—these words appear in real time on the screen; they make a sound: they speak. This brief moment of writing-as-sounding is not the first thing we hear in Reich and Korot’s documentary opera. There has already been a long scriptural prelude, about which more anon. Later, what Reich designates in his score as the “sound of scratchy pens writing” will fill an entire movement, “Video Handwriting,” accompanying the sight on three video screens of three hands moving across the page in three different European languages, writing out Genesis 16:2–4, in which Hagar conceives the firstborn son of Abraham. (Each hand writes at its own speed, and thus the three pens trace out an

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abrasive rhythmic canon, analogous to the three-part canonic processes in My Name Is.) But it is this initial flash of speech-writing, Who is Abraham?, that rings up the opera’s curtain, setting the action in motion and motivating a long entrance speech/aria. Dr. Ephraim Isaac, director of the Institute for Semitic Studies at Princeton, and a distinguished public intellectual of Ethiopian-Yemenite Jewish descent, answers the opening question about Abraham at length, telling how he learned from his father to recite the unbroken lineage, name by Hebrew name, from Adam, the first man, down to himself. In effect, he improvises an iterative, patrilineal expansion of My Name Is to encompass, from a Jewish perspective, all of human history: Who is Abraham? Abraham, for me, is my ancestor—my very own personal ancestor. I  was brought up to think like that, and I  still, I  guess, think like that. It stuck in my mind. My father, when I  was a young person, well, actually a child, used to count the names of our ancestors starting with Adam going all the way down to the Twelve Tribes. And I remember how we used to learn:  Adam, Seth, Enosh, Kainan, Mahalalel, Yered, Enoch, Metushelah, Lemech, Noach, and then we would go on down, Noach, Shem, Arpachshad, Shelah, Peleg, Reu, Serug, Nahor, Terah, Abraham, and then we used to say, Abraham, Yitzhak, Ya’acov, and then we used to say the Twelve Tribes, our ancestors’ names, just memorize all of them, Reuven, Shimon, Levi, Yehuda, Issachar, Zebulun, Dan, Naftali, Gad, Asher, Josef, Benyamin, and then go all the way down and come down to my great-great-great-grandfather whose name was Shimon, and then Shalom and then Shalam and Harun and Mesha, and Yitzhak and myself. So for me there is a chain of ancestral relationship to Abraham.

It is hard to imagine a more perfectly logocentric text. It not only is speech, it is about speech, used in precisely the way that privileges speech in Platonic metaphysics, as a method of face-to-face, mnemonic instruction, in which patriarchal truth, the “intelligent word,” is “graven in the soul of the learner.”30 As Derrida notes, “It is precisely logos that enables us to perceive and investigate something like paternity,”31 and, speaking directly to the camera, The Cave’s first interviewee, the only one allowed to go on uninterrupted at such length, testifies to the metaphysical effect of the (spoken) word of his father:  “I was brought up to think like that, and I still, I guess, think like that. It stuck in my mind.” Socrates himself could not have asked for more.32 Isaac’s speech is an extreme example of Reich and Korot’s general procedure in the second layer of the work, which preserves, like a fossil, Reich’s unrealized 1975 idea for Portraits. During these documentary sections, although the sound of speech is pervasively repeated and imitated in sound, the visual “repetition” of sound by the written word is conspicuously absent; captions, translations, or inscriptions do not clutter the multichannel mise en scène that Korot generates

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by freezing and enlarging small details from the short video clips that, together, made up what she called the “talking head channel” of the score.33 The visuals are subservient, helping sketch “a kind of musical portrait”34 of the Israeli, Arab, and American interviewees while they speak. As Reich had predicted in 1975, during these sections, “the [video] image is . . . simply the ‘sync image’ of the soundtrack,”35 and the effect is to highlight voice as presence, the simultaneous experience of speaking as both melody and body language.

Language Layers 3 and 4: Chant and Scripture It is worth noting at this point that The Cave presents Ephraim Isaac’s long exposition of his paternal ancestry without repetition of any kind. The speech itself is repetitious in the way that a mnemonic often is, with a loose refrain structure (“and then we used to say . . .”) that helps articulate the long sequence of memorized names. But Reich does not use the power of digital sampling to break it up and rearticulate it musically: he does not impose additional repetition.36 Nor does he accompany the speech with repetitive motives derived from its melodic contours. Both those techniques are central to The Cave, of course, and I will discuss their implications later. But let us remain with Dr. Isaac for a moment. During the remainder of act 1, his voice is sampled, transcribed into musical notation, and echoed by instruments, like all the other talking heads we simultaneously see and hear. But Reich gives him the last word, closing the act with his chanting of the Torah portion that tells of the death of Abraham and his burial in the Cave of Machpelah (Genesis 25:7–10). Isaac’s cantillation of this text follows the distinctive Yemenite tradition, perhaps the oldest still extant, old enough that it preserves ta’amim for the Psalms, the ones whose loss in the Ashkenazi tradition opened up a space for Reich to compose his own setting. In this third layer of The Cave, most directly related to his late 1970s study of Hebrew cantillation, Reich the composer steps aside in favor of Mizrahi (“Eastern,” that is, from the Near East, not Spanish or German) chant, an aboriginal practice shared by Jews and Arabs that, even more than the tropes he learned in New York, can be imagined to preserve the “primal, authentic speech-force of melody.”37 Reich clearly understood that, as a twentiethcentury American, he had no more authority to impersonate this lost unity than he did more recognizably non-Western musical traditions: “Just as I had found it inappropriate to imitate the sound of African or Balinese music, I found it similarly inappropriate to imitate the sound of Hebrew cantillation.”38 Thus, The Cave presents the liturgical song of the Other without editorial interference, as if it were ethnographic documentation of Rousseau’s “primitive” speech-melodies—but with a (dia)critical difference. Unlike the score’s actual speech fragments, transcribed into musical notation by the composer prior to the performance and read only by the live musicians doubling and imitating

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them, passages of liturgical chant from the Torah and Koran are not transcribed, but visually “doubled” for the audience by printing out the sacred texts, in real time, onstage. In what I would identify as the opera’s signature stage effect, neatly typeset and translated lines of scripture appear rhythmically, verse by verse, on multiple video screens next to the cantor’s image as he sings. The effect was hinted at during Isaac’s long patrilinear speech, but there it was only the proper names in his recitation that were flashed, in tempo, on the screen as he spoke them. Reich and Korot most consistently deploy this “simultaneous translation” effect for the topmost layer of the text, the scriptural episodes relating to Abraham, his wives, and their descendants, primal family scenes into which the written questions and the spoken commentaries burrow. Since Reich set these biblical texts (in English)39 for his ensemble, using the metrically responsive postminimal style developed for Tehillim, Korot devised an equally metrical technique for setting them out onstage, suturing precise bursts of computergenerated text to every irregular phrase and downbeat. Mise en scène and mise en musique are perfectly matched; as promised, everything we hear, we can instantaneously read as well. One hesitates to interpret this pas de deux of composer and videographer according to Derrida’s logic of the supplement, where each, by focusing so intensely on his or her métier, undermines rather than stabilizes their collective project.40 In fact, both Reich and Korot are intensely dedicated structuralists whose work jointly and equally resists Derrida’s critique of the sign, and it is Korot who takes control of the stage at the opera’s opening in breathtaking fashion, providing a theatrical primer on how to mobilize sound and writing in the service of compositional and textual logos.

Orthography, Rhythm, and the “Voice” in the Text (The Cave, Act 1, Scene 1, “Opening Typing Music”) Let us consider the first of these scriptural episodes in more detail. The Cave begins with an instrumental movement, in which the English text of Genesis 16:1–12 is “read,” not by vocalists, but by the percussionists of the Steve Reich Ensemble, who translate its irregular speech rhythms directly into sound (Ex. 5.1). A detailed look at the stage picture created in this opening scene (Figure 5.2, taken from a 2011 production in Strasbourg), shows how even simplified versions of the original staging preserve Korot’s design, which counterpoises to these rhythms the presence of writing itself as a “character,” playing its part in the dramatic argument as both opaque visual sign and carrier of logos. Since no one is actually speaking the parenthetical text in Reich’s score, there is no talking head channel; all five video screens, which form a rough threeover-two arch, are filled with writing. The two lower and outer screens present static, matching images of the Torah, so tightly cropped that the words bleed

Example 5.1 Reich, The Cave, act 1, scene 1, mm. 10–30.

Figure  5.2 Staging of a scriptural episode (Genesis 16:1–12) from The Cave, showing multiple traces and doublings of writing (Strasbourg, 2011).

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off their edges. For a typical audience, these texts, handwritten in special sacred calligraphy, will not be legible; even those fluent in modern Hebrew cannot “sight-read” them, since it has never been permitted to write the necessary diacritical marks for speech (vowels, punctuation, and cantillation signs) directly onto the scrolls. The relation (or, rather, nonrelation) between this unreadable, heavily cropped Masoretic inscription and the nonvocal “reading” of the speech rhythms arising from its simultaneous translation into (unheard) English is at the heart of my interpretation of the opera. This relation produces a short circuit of meaning that Derrida associates with the trace, the written mark in its subversive, “pictorial” aspect:  “all that gives rise to an inscription in general, whether it is literal or not and even if what it distributes in space is alien to the order of the voice.”41 Thus alienated, these traces of (hand)written Hebrew are very nearly reduced to silent, symmetrical pieces of set decoration. What saves them, paradoxically, is Korot’s careful attention to orthography, the distributive “art” of placing words on the page. Hebrew is read from right to left; but, if one looks closely, the initial indentation implies that each line of Genesis 16 begins on the left screen and continues, roughly, sometimes overlapping, onto the screen at right. The two incomprehensible pictures we see are, in fact, two cropped instances of a single text—but to put the pieces back together, one must go up (aliyah) and over, and this clockwise path runs right through a very different style of writing onstage.42 The upper three screens of the stage arch present modern translations of the biblical text in white serifed letters against a black background: English appears at the center, flanked by German and French. At one level, this polyglot display epitomizes what deconstruction finds to be the tautological nature of writing as pure repetition of itself. All the texts “say” the same thing, that is to say, they repeat each other’s signs, but, as when Hebrew script is presented without vowels or punctuation, we don’t hear the voice there. Or, rather, we do hear it, but, to coin a perceptual oxymoron, we hear primarily with the eye, and only indirectly with the ear. Reich’s printed score for The Cave (see Ex. 5.1) discloses that each word of the English text is pinned to a percussive accent within a grid of changing instrumental accent patterns that correspond to its spoken accentuation. Although the percussion group includes drums, clapping, and pieces of wood (a syllabus of Reich’s favorite instruments across the 1970s), it is built around the three lines of “Typing Music” that give the opening movement its name. One typist is designated for each modern language used onstage, and each executes paradiddles on an actual computer keyboard whose heavily amplified key clicks are mixed into the sound stage as part of the percussion battery. As the English-language text appears, word by word, on the top-center screen, in time with the key clicks of the first typist, we witness a disorienting remapping of the logos. The printed scripture (that is, a mechanically reproduced simulacrum of writing) is presented to us perceptually

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as if it were speech (an action that happens rhythmically in real time, that has a distinctive sound). But no audible voice activates this text; rather, it is the text itself that appears to speak, whose visual appearance is, itself, (a kind of) speaking. It is a slippery, simulated sort of speech. On the one hand, the assemblage on-screen of perfect typography in time to the rhythmic clicking of keys was ubiquitous enough an experience by 1993 to have been naturalized among The Cave’s computer-literate audiences as simply “the way thoughts appear to the mind,” just another way of s’entendre parler, with all the false immediacy and presence that phrase implies. As one might expect, this hearing/seeing-oneselftype depends on the same metaphysics of linguistic presence at the root of My Name Is, now updated from the era of the magnetic tape recorder to that of the silicon-based word processor. On the other hand, the connection here—so crucial to logocentrism— between what one hears and what one understands turns arbitrary and metonymic. The “live” typing is mere mime, designed to create the illusion that the words appearing on-screen are the result of some present human action, not just a mechanically unspooling trace left by Korot’s already enacted “action painting” with video scripture in the studio. (Like silent film accompanists or Foley artists, the typist-percussionists of The Cave use their musical skills to “mickey mouse” the phantom sounds of absent, prerecorded action.)43 The amplified key clicks do not in any sense transmit the meaning of the appearing words; sounds and images merely accompany each other with uncanny precision in time. Synchronicity is not signification, as becomes clear when texts begin to appear on the top-left and top-right video screens. Korot coordinates the French and German versions of the biblical text with quick interjections from Reich’s second and third computer typists. These texts, though of course they generate completely different rhythmic patterns when spoken, are both quickly “typed out” by identical canonic bursts of repeated eighth notes (see Ex. 5.1, mm. 13–14, 21–22, and 27–28). The musical gestures are so cursory that Korot has to cheat, making longer, nongrammatical chunks of the texts appear on each beat. One might assume that these not quite simultaneous translations of the Bible simply meant less to the collaborators.44 But though the link between audible sound and visible text frays at the top corners of the stage, it is not allowed to snap. Close listening to the 1993 studio recording reveals that Reich deployed his stereo illusion to shore up Korot’s illusion of writing-as-speech, panning the second and third typing parts hard right and left to match the spatial position of the German and French texts as they (would have) appeared.45 Even in the absence of staging, his flat little canons evoke the idea of speech rhythm without following it; if one knows the staging, the illusion of envoicing is sustained, just barely, by the overlay of aural onto visual space.

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Of Musical Grammatology (in the Age of Digital Repetition) It may seem perverse to approach Steve Reich’s attitude toward speech, music, and authority in opera by closely reading a passage in which no actual voices partake. But given the familiarity most listeners and critics have with Reich’s defense of speech melody from the excesses of operatic song—the way his documentary aesthetic disciplines all “inappropriate” musical responses to a politically charged situation by foregrounding the melodies and rhythms of recorded speech about it—what Tomlinson identifies as the other, equally important front of a three-way battle, the grammatological clash between speech and writing, deserves its full report as well. From this perspective, the striking vocal innovation of Reich’s Jewish period, the choice to write speech melodies directly into his scores, might seem to put the composer on the wrong side of the logos. But, as Tomlinson notes, the very music notation that Reich employed for the task “work[s] in intimate complicity with the logocentrism that has determined our orderings of speech, song, and writing.”46 Musical writing began as a way of doing for singing what the written word did for speech; that is, allow for the possibility of its accurate reproduction in the absence of the speaker/singer. Once the voices do come in, this primal “transitive” function of musical writing quite audibly drives compositional developments in The Cave. Consider Example 5.2, from act 1, scene 7, a characteristic passage in which Reich begins with direct instrumental doubling of a speaking voice, thus suturing his written trace to immanent sonic presence. The composer then does what any composer would “naturally” do: he harnesses the fungibility of musical notation, its adaptability to reproduction by any musical instrument, to transmit the speech’s musical essence to a waiting group of string players, who imitate and then canonically extend its characteristic rhythmic and melodic gestures. A clearer musical allegory for logocentrism can hardly be imagined; the instrumental ensemble internalizes and then reproduces the melos of a patriarch’s speech, participating in an orchestrated version of the mnemonic scene of instruction so privileged by Platonic thought.47 (The speaker here is biochemist and secular rabbi Yeshayahu Leibowitz, one of the most revered Israeli public intellectuals of the twentieth century.) But the entire thrust of Derrida’s grammatology is that subordinating any kind of writing to speech-as-truth in this way imposes an arbitrary limit on writing’s own power to engender the free play of signifiers. Notation, whether linguistic or musical, need not always be so  .  .  .  literal. (“Literally” is the adverb Reich uses to describe how musical instruments should imitate speech in The Cave.)48 Marks on a page— ancient inscriptions, let us say—laid down without vowels or punctuation, then photographed and projected on a screen, might point not to the original, metaphysical presence of chanted speech but to other texts, written in other

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Example 5.2 Reich, The Cave, act 1, scene 7, mm. 1–16.

languages, on other screens: texts that are not themselves spoken, but rhythmically drummed into existence. Any such grammatological reading of the opening scene of The Cave must contend not only with the relentless logocentrism of Reich’s compositional technique but with the writing-as-a-form-of-speech subtext of Reich and Korot’s mise en scène. As I’ve sketched out earlier, writing and typing hands periodically supplant the opera’s talking heads; as musical instruments imitate the

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voice, scratchy pens and clicking keyboards score their own manual ballet of alphabetic writing. (Derrida: “The history of writing is erected on the base of the history of the grammé as an adventure of relationships between the face and the hand.”)49 This focus on the look and sound of writing as real-time action turns it into a simulacrum of speech, a visual trace that strives for the illusion of aural presence. Everything, on stage and in the orchestra, is designed to bring us back to the primacy of the word—and let us acknowledge, now that we are almost at the end of this long theoretical journey—not just any old word, but the Word of the Almighty G*d himself. I reproduce in my text that distinctive orthographical stutter from orthodox Judaism not because I share its anxiety at taking the name of the ultimate patriarch in vain but to put the vocal logic of the supplement on display. The harder you try to stabilize this speechified writing, the more grammatology takes over. Yes, disembodied writing appears to “speak” itself, but it simultaneously displaces the very human presence that underpins metaphysical claims for speech. In the resulting absence, a Babel of polyglot languages crowds the operatic stage, reflecting not their collective identity as speech but their individual (and endless) semiotic difference (différance) from it. Even Reich’s own logocentric power as a composer, the ability to decipher with a musical ear the essence of the human as transmitted through the cadence of spoken language, cannot be relied upon. More than one recent critic has called Reich’s transcription skills into question; but even if we assume he usually “gets it right,” assume that musical caricatures (his term) of vocal utterance can capture something essential about the process of human thought, Reich manifestly cannot resist the temptation to add something (repetitive) to the word(s) as given to him.50 Viz. Professor Liebowitz—the speaker who replied to the question “Who is Sarah?” with the identifying description “Abraham’s first wife”—did not, we can assume, involuntarily repeat the last two words of that phrase when interviewed, highlighting a characteristic ascending major sixth in his speech for the composer and his orchestra to exploit. It was the composer who decided to repeat those words, a choice that created the echo, and thus the motive. I don’t mean to suggest that the rising sixth was not there, that Reich invented it; I do suggest that it is impossible to separate something “real” in the source material from the artifice of its compositional transcription and repetition. In order to capture the cadence of what is spoken to him, the musical prophet must fix it, and then repeat it. In that repetition, like Moses, he will be heard, by the unsympathetic, to stutter. Even sympathetic critics tend to find Reich’s score for The Cave disjointed. They sense his fundamental ambivalence about the respective powers of speech, writing, and song: Reich seems, on the one hand, to follow the speakers almost slavishly with his music; but, on the other, thanks to the montage of words and phrases, the

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speakers are forced to submit to his musical will. This is as it should be; that’s why he is the composer. But it seems that Reich does not actually want [to be] that, and the result is a sort of compromise, in which neither speaker nor composer fully come into their own.51

Reich’s music thus displays a kind of speech impediment, its conflicted desire to imitate the fluency of spoken language leading only to “stunted, repeatedly interrupted melodies”52 whose cumulative effect is “singularly inexpressive, cute (in a laborious way) rather than revealing.”53 More than one commentator diagnosed a consequent failure of the logocentric project, noting how the “artificiality” of Reich’s repetition technique “disconnects sound from meaning.”54 Somewhat ungratefully, given how carefully Reich subordinated himself to the demands of the logos, some of these same critics preferred The Cave’s Rousseauian moments of “primitive” liturgical music: In itself the music’s emotional coloring is limited . . . the feeling evaporates as soon as the spoken phrase translates into pure music. Here and there you are moved, but by a thought or a gesture or a facial expression. The most directly affecting music is a couple of minutes of recorded Muslim recitation.55

Such aboriginal Semitic song, argued one influential New  York critic who shared Reich’s strong connection to the Jewish faith, is what the composer should have been imitating: “The texts inspire a further longing, for a musical setting that suits their own character, one that is as mysterious, vital and resonant as the ancient tropes chanted by Mr. Isaac.”56 And with the reappearance of those “ancient tropes,” we have come full circle. Recall that Reich’s first setting of a Hebrew text was from the book of Psalms, which he chose precisely because there was no living tradition of sacred tropes “to either imitate or ignore.”57 Tehillim begins with the opening stanza of Psalm 19, which twists and turns in on itself in logocentric ecstasy: Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night revealeth knowledge; There is no speech, there are no words, neither is their voice heard. Their line is gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world. (19:2–4)

Reich later glossed this passage according to what Derrida would have identified as an “onto-theology” of the word,58 which makes Abraham the speaker, at the birth of monotheism:  “Abraham realizes he is the recipient of a wordless communication, he has an insight into things that is basically nonverbal, but which makes him aware that there is a divine intelligence behind all of nature.”59 Reich was a good student of the Torah, and would doubtless have known that the Hebrew noun used in Psalm 19 verse 4 to label this wordless communication, though it is often translated into English as “sound,” is actually

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from a root, qav, that can refer to a cord, a measuring line—or the string of a musical instrument.60 In works like The Cave, Reich re-enacts the prophetic transmission of pure thought: through his compositional craft, speech is transformed into wordless communication, which then goes out, over the strings of musical instruments, to the whole world. I can now return to my opening, somewhat offhand, question with a much deeper sense of what a satisfactory answer might entail. What happened to Steve Reich? Well, he became a prophet of the (musicalized) word: a composer devoted like no other before him to making composition a vehicle for logocentric theology. And yet, the logic of the supplement has undermined his authority: subordinating his music to the demands of logos, he only intensifies the desire of modern listeners for the mystery and vitality of unchained melos. In the beginning was the Word. But when a composer limits himself to taking dictation from it, one has to ask why, and to what end? In Reich’s case, the goal appears to be the remapping of musical creativity as a quasi-scriptural truth, a species of acoustic fundamentalism that Reich shares with some of the most influential minimalist composers of his generation.61 Acknowledging this uncomfortable fact is the first step on the road to a more balanced critical assessment of his unparalleled compositional achievements.

Notes 1. Steve Reich [SR] interview with radio host Bruce Duffie [BD], November 1995 (www.bruceduffie.com/reich.html). The “town of Friendship” is the West Bank city of Hebron, site of the Cave of the Patriarchs at the center of Reich’s 1993 opera, The Cave; Reich had previously noted that the Arabic name of the city, El Halil, refers to Abraham and means “the friend.” 2. This session, held at the Fourth International Conference on Music and Minimalism at Long Beach, CA, October 3–6, 2013, was titled “Politics and Memory,” and featured papers by John Pymm, Celia Casey, Ryan Hepburn, and Andrea Moore. This chapter owes its genesis in part to their insights, and to those of the conference participants, especially Ryan Ebright and Sasha Metcalf, for which I am grateful. Any flaws in argumentation or evidence are, of course, my own. 3. On minimalism’s “rhetoric of power,” see Chave 1990. The high-modernist rejection of minimalist repetition as akin to the structure of reactionary discourses like fascism and advertising is diagnosed in Fink 2005b, especially 62–67. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to give a full account of how antihegemonic Steve Reich’s early essays in repetitive music actually were; crucial recuperative work on voice, race, and politics has already appeared in Scherzinger 2005, Gopinath 2009 and 2011, and, most recently, in challenging counterpoint with whiteness studies and psychoanalytic theory (see Biareishyk 2012). At the 2013 session, Pymm

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discussed the political context of the early tape works, while Andrea Moore’s talk, “Memorial Minimalism: 9-11 and the Narration of Nation,” most directly addressed Reich’s post-9/11 politics, juxtaposing his WTC 9/11 (2011) with contemporaneous interviews that show the composer deeply engaged with the apocalyptic and partisan logic of “the global war on terror.” 4. Reich 2002b, 20. 5. The definitive collection of Steve Reich’s writings and sustained commentary on his own work can be found in Reich 2002b, edited and with an introduction by Paul Hillier. All quotes from Reich will be sourced there by page number, with editorial clarification as to the original dates of publication when necessary. A brief account of Reich’s return to the Jewish faith can be found here, in his 1982 article “Hebrew Cantillation as an Influence on Composition” (107). Although the present study is quite deeply concerned with the consequences of Reich’s encounter with the patriarchal and prophetic speech of the Hebrew Bible, only a short gloss on his own reconversion can be provided. The original Lincoln Square Synagogue, at Sixty-Ninth Street and Amsterdam, where Reich took adult education classes, was a pivotal site in the Orthodox religious revival of the 1970s under its charismatic rabbi, Dr. Schlomo Riskin. In 1963, the twenty-three-year old Riskin took over a failing conservative congregation and created, as one recent account puts it, “American Judaism’s model synagogue” (Landowne 2013), pioneering a modern form of Orthodox Judaism that combined strict religious observance and staunch support of Israel with political activism, social transformation, feminism, and outreach to assimilated secular Jews. Riskin emigrated to Israel in 1983 and took up the position of chief rabbi in the West Bank settlement of Ephrata, from whence he has built a major international reputation as a moderate nationalist religious leader and innovative pedagogue. Reich’s own religious practice is Orthodox, with some concessions to assimilated American taste: the baseball cap he invariably wears in public is appropriately casual, but a clear sign, for those who know, that he is observant enough always to cover his head in public. 6. Reich 2002b, 101. 7. Potter 2000, 246. 8. A contemporaneous, but still definitive overview of these developments can be found in Schwarz 1980–81; for more analytical detail on Reich’s techniques of beat-class patterning and augmentation/diminution, see Roeder 2003 and Atkinson 2011, respectively. 9. Reich 2002b, 21. 10. Reich 2002b, 104, 158 (emphases in original). 11. Ibid., 114. 12. The original Hebrew of Exodus 4:11, “k’bad-peh uk’bad lashon,” is most conservatively translated as “heavy of mouth and tongue.” There is little consensus among biblical scholars whether this phrase refers to a speech impediment, like a stutter; a physical deformity, like a cleft palate; or simply lack of native fluency in either Hebrew or Egyptian. Critical discussion of this passage in Graybill 2012, 16–22,

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lays out the textual evidence as an introduction to more general questions of Hebrew prophecy and the “travails” of the suffering male body. 13. The tense relationship between linguistic meaning and technologized repetition in the early tape works—does Reich’s setting intensify or destroy the individuality of the black men whose voices are used in It’s Gonna Rain and Come Out?—has been a key point of critical dispute. M.  Morris (2004), Scherzinger (2005), and Gopinath (2009) all begin from this point, as will I later in my argument. 14. Focusing on the pivotal nature of The Cave within Reich’s composerly evolution, and foregrounding its problematics of text setting and the human voice, I am entering a lively critical conversation already in progress. Ryan Ebright’s (2014) clarifying archival research into the genesis and evolution of the “Cave” project shows that Reich was considering a large-scale documentary music-theater work— one that would include images of the Holocaust as it re-engaged with human voices and “the kind of work I was doing with tape in the 1960s” (104)—as early as the spring of 1980, while he worked to satisfy the textual demands of Tehillim. There is also evidence that the documentary opera based on the modern implications of Abrahamic monotheism was taking shape at precisely the same time (1986–88) as Reich’s actual return to recorded speech in Different Trains. Ebright demonstrates how The Cave, as the nexus for a set of preoccupations with history, documentary witness, and the human voice, “is central to Reich’s compositions of the 1980s and 1990s”; some of the same ground is covered in Pymm 2013, with particular attention to sketch materials that show Reich the composer plotting “narrative trails” through assemblages of recorded speech. Pymm, Scherzinger (2005, 215–18), and Gopinath (2009, 130–34) have all analyzed in detail musical characteristics of the recorded voices in Reich’s early work, tracing the phenomenology of linguistic tonality and meter when subjected to repetitive process. Marcelle Pierson’s (2014, 2016) deconstruction of Steve Reich’s oft-quoted views on nature, authenticity, and the singing voice also covers similar ground. I will be glossing some of the same texts, and although Pierson considers The Cave only in passing, my account will, I trust, supplement her broader reading of the way vocal timbre and its “residues” of meaning and affect function in his work. 15. Reich 2002b, 181. 16. Ibid., 21. 17. Derrida 1997, 30. 18. This description and interpretation of My Name Is was gathered from the composer by editor Paul Hillier in 1999 (see Reich 2002b, 29–30). Gopinath (2009, 135) has noted in the context of 1966’s Come Out the simultaneous high sixties arising of process music and Derridean deconstruction. Reich had no contemporary knowledge of Derrida’s work, as far as we know. But it is interesting to note that as a philosophy student at Cornell in the 1950s, he would have shared seminar rooms with a promising graduate student named Keith Donnellan, who later became a major philosopher of language, and whose work, building on Bertrand Russell and J.  T. Austin, has focused on the linguistic pragmatics of identifying descriptions and selfreference; that is, of statements like, “My name is—X.” See Donellan 1970, 335–58.

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19. “Derrida’s [trace] is the mark of the absence of a presence, an always already absent present, of the lack at the origin that is the condition of thought and experience.” Spivak in Derrida 1997, xvii. 20. Reich 2002b, 84. 21. Pierson 2016, 33. 22. Reich 2002b, 108–9. Reich quotes Idelsohn (1929) 1992, 67–68. This “origin story,” as Pierson correctly labels it, is highly suspect as music history. Idelsohn’s argument is based largely on the correspondences between one early sixteenthcentury European source and his own twentieth-century transcriptions, and assumes, as does Reich himself, that the musical traditions of Middle Eastern Jewish communities remained unchanged for centuries while, for instance, the theory and structure of the Arab music around them shifted over the centuries. See Shiloah 1992, 103–9, where Idelsohn’s claims are respectfully but skeptically evaluated. 23. Pierson 2016, 39. 24. Tomlinson 1995, 348. 25. Tolbert 2002. 26. The following discussion is based on the published score of The Cave, available from Boosey & Hawkes; the 1993 Nonesuch recording by the Steve Reich Ensemble; performances at the Barbican in London during Phases:  The Music of Steve Reich, October 2006; and filmed excerpts from the recent performance at the Musica Festival, Strasbourg, 2011. In fact, none of these sources entirely agree: the studio recording leaves out many sections of the score, especially in places where the loss of the video channels would vitiate the effect; also, Reich and Korot have eliminated and then restored several numbers from the staged opera over the years, and replaced the original stage set with a less expensive version for subsequent revivals. A complete variorum is beyond the scope of this chapter, but where necessary, I will identify a specific source when making observations on the work. 27. Reich 2002b, 172. 28. Plato 1892, 275d. 29. Derrida 1981, 138. 30. Plato 1892, 276a. 31. Derrida 1981, 80. 32. Interview (1989) with Ephraim Isaac, The Cave, act 1, scene 1.  In Isaac, a pioneering intellectual and decorated peace activist who not only is director of the Institute of Semitic Studies at Princeton but also was the first professor of AfroAmerican Studies at Harvard, Reich has sought out not only a direct coeval (b. 1936)  but a diplomatic voice of unimpeachable political integrity; if one were to imagine a contemporary carrier of the Socratic logos, it might well be the widely celebrated coauthor (along with Harold Brackman, the director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center) of From Abraham to Obama: A History of Jews, Africans, and African Americans (2015). 33. Korot in Reich 2002b, 172. Video footage from the Strasbourg performance of The Cave does disclose French supertitles above the stage area during the talking head sections of the score. But the conventions of operatic supertitles allow us to

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bracket these words off as “outside of the performance,” at least provisionally. (The echo of Derrida’s hors-du-texte is deliberate, and signals the provisional nature of this interpretive move.) 34. Korot in Reich 2002b, 174. 35. Reich 2002b, 83. 36. In fact, he could not have fitted this long speech into the sampling keyboard he was using in the late 1980s; even at a sub-CD quality sample rate of 36 kHz, the Casio FZ-1 could hold only fifteen seconds of audio (see Ebright 2014, 110n18). 37. Tomlinson 1995, 350. 38. Reich 2002b, 114. The observation that “the word ‘inappropriate’ often signals [Reich’s] moral anxieties” comes from Sumanth Gopinath (personal communication with the author, 2015). 39. The English text does not correspond exactly to any widely circulated translation. It most closely follows a 1917 translation “from the Masoretic text” by the Jewish Publication Society (JPS Tanakh, 1917), with updated pronouns and some streamlined phrasing. This version is close in diction and cadence to the familiar King James Version. I  have not been able to identify the French and German translations used. 40. Reich and Korot have always maintained that their collaboration is equal. Korot took full responsibility for the video design of The Cave in interviews: “He gave me the audio for the talking-heads channel. It was up to me to provide the rest and make it work with the score” (in Reich 2002b, 172). As one might well anticipate, given the speech-song-writing tensions surveyed earlier, a consistent critical complaint about The Cave has been that, until its third act, where American vernacular speech rhythms come to the fore, Reich’s music is too austere and self-limiting, and is consequently overshadowed by Korot’s multiple video screens. 41. Derrida 1997, 9. 42. The Hebrew expression aliyah, “to go up,” refers both to ascending the pulpit as a reader of Torah and to returning to the Jewish homeland in Palestine. 43. “Writing would indeed be the signifier’s capacity to repeat itself by itself, mechanically, without a living soul to sustain or attend it in its repetition, that is to say, without truth’s presenting itself anywhere” (Derrida 1997, 111). 44. Reich’s linguistic nativism at the time of The Cave was unapologetic; he freely admitted that requiring all the interviewees to answer in English ironed out their distinctive speech rhythms in a way that could be imagined as utopian or imperialistic depending on your sympathies: “What I found was that in terms of the different speech-melodies of these groups of speakers, the English language proved to be the great equalizer. There was no characteristic Israeli or Palestinian speech-melody distinct from that of Americans. In general, it was speaking English that dominated the rhythm and cadence of the speakers. The syllables, with their rhythms and accents, dominated the speech melody of all the speakers” (Reich 2002b, 194). For Reich it was self-evident that if he, the composer, could not understand intuitively the relationship of sound-image and meaning in the spoken language with which he was working, there was no possibility that his musical transcriptions would work.

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45. The only live recording of The Cave available for study is a low-fidelity, singlecamera documentation of the majority of act 1 as it was performed in Strasbourg at the Musica Festival in 2011 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9MTxLCv_nw, accessed November 28, 2015). It isn’t possible from this video, whose audio track appears to be mixed in mono throughout, to determine whether the mix in the hall had the same stereophonic spatial dimensions as the 1993 studio recording. 46. Tomlinson 1995, 355. 47. It is worth noting that the actual string players in a performance of The Cave do not play along with the first appearance of a given speech sample; as the score notes, the instrumental doubling you hear there is also a sample, coordinated through MIDI, and thus under the direct control of the composer/conductor. Only after hearing (and thus, symbolically, being instructed by) the MIDI sampler do the live string players begin to play their parts. 48. “In order to combine the taped speech with the string instruments, I selected small speech samples that are more or less clearly pitched, then transcribed them as accurately as possible into musical notation. The strings then literally imitate that speech melody” (Reich 2002b, 152). 49. Derrida 1997, 84. 50. Reich’s vocal transcriptions have been ideologically controversial for some time now. Both Gopinath (2004) and Scherzinger (2005) express serious moral qualms about Reich’s attempts to capture the essence of African voices, either on tape or in drummed rhythms. Scherzinger (2005, n23), taking issue with the way Potter (2000) notates the vocal snippet at the heart of It’s Gonna Rain, implies, I think, that the composer himself misheard it—a claim that Gopinath (2004, 140–41) makes explicitly about the percussive vocables Reich imitated in Drumming. Both are concerned with Reich’s appropriative hearing of non-Western voices, but I suspect neither would be surprised at an argument, like the present one, that extends the logic of notation as “appropriation” to all spoken voices, European or otherwise, and then reverses it. Why should we believe that any writing could capture spoken presence without distortion? Is not appropriation-and-distortion inherent in the act of writing itself? Gopinath calls Reich’s transcription “an ethnographic fantasy of self-validation,” and it surely is. Reich would surely be insulted by the implication of ethnocentrism, but perhaps a degree of fantasy and self-mythologizing is inherent to all Western musical writing and, thus, not his unique moral failure: “At the moment of generating a musical notation—moments like those in the Middle Ages, of capital importance for European music history—alphabetic writing declares this absence. By this generation, it moves to capture in its own inscriptive terms an aspect of sung utterance that will always escape it” (Tomlinson 1995, 377). 51. Luttikhuis 1993. 52. Oestreich 1999. 53. Driver 1993. 54. Hall 2006. 55. Maycock 1993. 56. Rothstein 1993.

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57. 58. 59. 60. 61.

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Reich 2002b, 101. Derrida 1997, 71. Reich 2002b, 129. See Brown, Driver, and Briggs 1994, commentary on Strong’s H6957. See Fink 2011.

6 Steve Reich’s Dramatic Sound Collage for the Harlem Six Toward a Prehistory of Come Out John Pymm The story of the premiere of Steve Reich’s Come Out at a benefit event at Town Hall, New York, on Sunday, April 17, 1966, has been well rehearsed, not least by the composer himself.1 Played as the concluding item of the evening, the piece underscored a monetary collection to fund independent lawyers for the retrial of the Harlem Six, a group of six young African Americans who had been wrongly charged with murder.2 Lasting 13:36, Come Out would have seemed well-suited for this purpose, providing ample time for several collecting hats to be passed around the mainly occupied fifteen hundred seats of Town Hall. While attention was no doubt focused on passing the hat, members of the audience might have recognized in Come Out the voice of its protagonist, Daniel Hamm, from a sound collage they had heard earlier in the evening, created for the occasion by Reich as part of a dramatization of Truman Nelson’s book The Torture of Mothers. This context inevitably nuanced the audience’s experience of hearing Come Out, potentially imbuing the piece with layers of meaning that have subsequently proved difficult to excavate for those familiar with the work only as a freestanding tape piece. Now accessible in the collection of Reich’s archival materials in the Paul Sacher Stiftung, Basel, the sound collage received no further outings following its premiere, and the composer has made scant reference to it in the five decades since the benefit,3 and never by its original title of Harlem’s Six Condemned.4 The meager 327 words devoted to Come Out in Reich’s Writings on Music give no clue as to the existence of a sound collage. I  shall argue in this chapter, however, that a close reading of Harlem’s Six Condemned enables us to rethink and deepen our understanding of Come Out by tracing its prehistory and setting a broader context for appreciating both pieces. The rethinking of the significance of Come Out has been taking shape for well over a decade, suggesting diminishing levels of interest in its importance as a phase piece and a growing awareness of issues of racial identity in the work. Reich has spoken of his selection of speech material being based on the naturally-occurring melodic contours of Daniel Hamm’s words—“raw speech

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material that really had musical content.”5 The composer has also made some tantalizing acknowledgment of the importance of the identity of the person who spoke them, the context in which the words were spoken, and the implications of what was spoken,6 potentially giving a green light to seek layers of meaning embedded in Come Out. Keith Potter was among the first to identify the significance of both phonic and phonemic aspects in the piece, recognizing that Reich’s use of speech material in his tape music invites inquiry into their social and cultural contexts. In so doing, Potter laid the foundations for further scrutiny of narrative strands in the work.7 Mitchell Morris’s consideration of identity in the work explores Reich’s treatment of Hamm’s voice “in all its grainy individuality, with its accent and idiosyncrasies of pace and pronunciation intact . . . describing a specific assault not only on his bodily integrity but also and more importantly on his claims to dignity.” By the end of the piece, “we are hearing an audible representation of the bruise blood itself.”8 In contrast to Morris’s focus on Reich’s crushing of Hamm’s identity through his relentless method of phasing, Lloyd Whitesell draws attention to the imbalance between the composer’s authorial voice as a white narrator and the actual mouthpiece through whom the words are heard, a young black man. By the end of the piece, Whitesell argues, the narrative journey has taken us from “black voices [which] are melodious and expressive, occupying the position of dramatic subjects,” to a point where all distinctive character has been “drained from the voice objects” and Hamm’s voice has all but dissolved into “an aural condensation of whiteness” so that Reich’s voice speaks powerfully over— rather than through—Hamm’s words.9 In the context of what he describes as “the tendency within 1960s aesthetic utterances . . . to express and even simulate violence through texts and discourse,”10 Sumanth Gopinath offers a more extensive analysis of the political dimensions of Come Out, seeking to comb out a tangled mass of narrative strands, which he finds densely woven into the fabric of the piece: “encompassing leftist photodocumentary and Jewish identity, 60s-era artistic representations of violence, representations of black urban uprisings, sexualized and exoticized depictions of black otherness and appropriations of musical Africanisms, fantasies of black and white paranoia, and the racial economic politics of incarceration.”11 Faced with such knotty complexity, Gopinath establishes three hermeneutic stages for a discourse on the work: a primary focus on sonic particularities before moving to a consideration of aesthetic utterance; a consideration of the historical framework of the Harlem Six case as a means of interpreting the work; and finally an understanding of the piece as a political work of art on the basis that Reich himself has referred to it as such, while recognizing that the function of the piece is as significant as its content. To these may now be added two more: the context of the original benefit event, and a close reading of Reich’s sound collage that held pride of place on the program.

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At first sight, Harlem’s Six Condemned appears as something of a historical curiosity, a piece of verbatim theater with minimal musical content created for a sitespecific event, which Reich was initially disinclined to produce. After returning to New York in September 1965,12 Reich met filmmaker Truman Nelson (1911–87), a Marxist civil rights activist and writer remembered particularly for his biography of militant abolitionist John Brown (1800–59).13 Nelson set out to persuade Reich to edit an extensive collection of contemporaneous taped speech material for use in a planned benefit event for the retrial of the Harlem Six. In his December 1987 interview with Ev Grimes for the Oral History of American Music, Reich recalled his discussions with Nelson about creating music for the benefit event: It turned out [Nelson] had ten reels of reel to reel tape of interview with the police, mothers of six black kids, the six black kids, all of which concerned the murder of a white woman in I guess it was the Bronx in 1964, which murder happened, but for which six black kids were arrested . . . and so they wanted to do a benefit at Town Hall and as one of the little details on the program, they wanted me to edit these tapes down to some sort of little scenario that Truman Nelson gave me so that it could be used as a dramatic sound collage. I explained to him that this was not my stock in trade, but that I would do it on one condition, and the condition was that if I found something in all this mass of tape that I wanted to make a piece out of, he would let me do that. He said, “What do you mean, a piece?” I said, “Take a listen to this.” I played him It’s Gonna Rain and good civil rights activist that he was, he really liked it. I think he felt it had something to do with John Brown, but he didn’t know what. In any event, I  did the editing as requested and did find this one little phrase through all this mountain of material where Daniel Hamm, who was one of the kids who, it turns out, did not do it, said, “I had to like open a bruise up and let the blood come out to show them I was bleeding.”14

By this stage—albeit twenty-one years after the event—Reich’s memory had evidently become rather sketchy on several details:  he was unable to recall exactly when the murder took place; whether the location was Harlem or the Bronx; the name of the person who had been murdered; or the significance that Nelson clearly attached to his desired sound collage as the mainstay of the benefit, which was considerably greater than might be suggested from its description as “one of the little details on the program.” Reich’s lasting memory— and his dominant narrative—of composing Come Out was his abiding hope of finding a speech snippet with the same musical potential that Brother Walter’s voice had provided for It’s Gonna Rain, capable of functioning as the melodic basis for a phase piece. Despite the composer’s protestations to the contrary, Nelson’s commission was neither Reich’s first sound collage nor his first work for a benefit. His dismissal of sound collages as being not his “stock in trade” is therefore curious, since by 1965 he had created at least three recordings using the sound-collage

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technique:  The Plastic Haircut (1963), a collage of sounds taken from The Greatest Moments in Sport, a 1955 LP; Livelihood (1964), a collage of sounds assembled from recordings Reich made as a taxi driver in San Francisco; and a preparatory tape collage he made for It’s Gonna Rain (1965), also based on his own field recordings in Union Square, San Francisco, in June 1964.15 Reich’s lack of enthusiasm for what was set to become his fourth sound collage is conceivably explained by a preference for his newfound phasing technique rather than the editing of tapes, possibly intensified by a desire to leave behind a style he associated with his time in California. Additionally, Nelson’s commission offered a constrained structure involving existing spoken material that allowed Reich little of the narrative freedom he had enjoyed in previous sound collages. While in San Francisco, Reich had also gained some experience of producing work for a benefit concert with the stated aim of raising money for a political cause. The performance of his Event III in February 1964 was a benefit for “Civil Rights activists seeking to integrate the workforce of San Francisco’s SheratonPalace Hotel.”16 Given such a pedigree in activist art, it is curious that Reich should express such strong doubts as to the power of art generally—and music specifically—in effecting political transformation,17 as evidenced in a 1992 interview with K. Robert Schwarz: I can’t think of any major political changes in the world that were effected by a change in art. Picasso’s Guernica is an overwhelming masterpiece, but it still didn’t stop aerial bombing for two seconds! So I’d say, show me, where is the political art that has made the slightest difference? These are just private preoccupations of musicians. I don’t see that the political history of the world has been influenced by the arts of any given time. I think the opposite: that the arts reflect the political reality around them. They are the unconscious mirror of that.18

Nonetheless, Reich’s agreement to participate in the Town Hall benefit suggests— at least at that stage in his career—some measure of belief in the potential of the event, if not the music, to influence politically the situation of the Harlem Six; and with hindsight the composer has been lavish in his assessment of the benefit’s success in achieving social justice for the youths.19 The benefit itself was clearly a significant undertaking, as indicated by the size of venue hired for the evening. Financial backing was sought in advance of the occasion, which would become—together with the retiring collection and sponsorship from the Charter Group for a Pledge of Conscience—the principal means of covering costs, as well as raising money for the desired retrial of the Six.20 Nelson was evidently successful in garnering the support of several individuals who might have yielded such influence, including “attorney Howard N.  Meyer; authors Nat Hentoff and Maxwell Geismar; Professors Staughton Lynd, Dan Dodson, and Eleanor Leacock; playwright Howard da Silva; and a number of other academic and professional people.”21

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Pre-event publicity drew attention to the reputation of those scheduled to perform live onstage. Under the banner “New York Meetings Slated to Defend Harlem Victims,” The Militant, a Socialist newspaper, “published in the interests of working people,” attempted to attract interest on the basis of the involvement of well-known names associated with the civil rights struggle: NEW YORK—Dick Gregory, Ossie Davis, and William Stringfellow will appear at Town Hall Sunday, April 17, at a public meeting to protest the conviction of the so-called Harlem Six and to raise funds for their appeal. The program, to begin at 8  p.m., will include a dramatization of The Torture of Mothers by Truman Nelson, narrated by Davis with a cast of 50 and including tape recordings testifying to instances of police brutality occurring in Harlem in the Spring of 1964.22

While it would be tempting to portray the event as an entirely somber occasion, those taking a lead spanned a range of performance styles from political oratory to comedy. Ossie Davis (1917–2005) and Dick Gregory (1932–2017) had both developed reputations as social activists. Davis was an eminent actor, director, and playwright, and Gregory—who acted as MC for the evening and had also previously been an advocate for the San Francisco Mime Troupe’s A Minstrel Show—was a comedian. Although less prominent as a campaigner than the other two, William Stringfellow (1928–85) also spoke as a representative of the Charter Group, the main sponsors of the benefit. An attorney and author, Stringfellow was a Harvard Law School graduate and, subsequently, a radical theologian who had made his home in a slum tenement in Harlem. The dramatization of The Torture of Mothers took pride of place on both the program and the publicity material, while Come Out received no mention whatsoever, either here or in subsequent press reporting. On April 18, 1966, the New York Times carried a brief review of the events of the previous evening entitled “Benefit Aids Appeal of 6 Convicted of Harlem Killing.” The Militant carried a more extensive report by Herman Porter on Monday, April 25, 1966. Under the headline “Benefit in New  York Aids Legal Defense of Harlem 6,” Porter provides a more comprehensive account of the proceedings at Town Hall. During the dramatization of The Torture of Mothers, the mothers sat on the stage while the young men’s story was relayed through their own voices on tape; this was interspersed with Davis’s narration and would seem to be the point at which Reich’s sound collage was played, although neither it nor Come Out is specifically mentioned. Civil rights attorney Conrad Lynn spoke, explaining how he had become involved in the case and how the youths had been denied legal representation of their own choosing. Another speaker was Nathan Schwerner, a retired wig maker whose son, Michael, was one of three civil rights workers who had been murdered by members of the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi in 1964. Truman Nelson, who was apparently seated in the audience rather than onstage, was

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introduced and also said a few words; finally, in addition to functioning as MC, Dick Gregory rounded off the evening with a comedic performance, which must have immediately preceded the playing of Come Out.23 Come Out was not the only piece of music heard that evening, however, and Porter reports that the program contained a significant amount of vocal music. Civil rights activist, vocalist, and songwriter Abbey Lincoln (1930–2010) and her drummer husband, bebop pioneer Max Roach (1924–2007), performed a selection from “The Freedom Now Suite.” We Insist! Freedom Now was a jazz album recorded between August 31 and September 6, 1960 by Candid Records and contained tracks assembled ultimately for the 1963 centenary of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. The album is an avowedly political work comprising five songs: “Driva Man,” “Freedom Day,” “Triptych: Prayer/Protest/ Peace,” “All Africa,” and “Tears for Johannesburg,” each written by Max Roach with lyrics by Oscar Brown (1926–2005).24 Although the studio recordings on the LP employed a total of nine musicians, the unspecified selection chosen for the Town Hall benefit was performed by husband-and-wife duo Roach and Lincoln, appropriately, since they were the only artists to perform on all five of the recorded tracks on the LP. This music provided the audience with a relatively radical and new kind of “protest music,” reflecting contemporary tendencies in jazz, and had an immediacy by virtue of being performed live, which Come Out was powerless to match as a tape piece. Since hardly any of the audience members would have been familiar with Reich’s phasing process, the particular style of a phased piece alone would have been unlikely to engage its audience, let alone persuade them to give money for a political cause. To appreciate the nature and content of Reich’s sound collage, the events surrounding the Harlem Six case bear some brief retelling.25 On the afternoon of Friday April 17, 1964—two years to the day before the benefit concert— some seemingly minor events at a fruit stall in the street at 368 Lenox Avenue, New  York, quickly escalated into a riot. During the uproar, Frank Stafford, a thirty-one-year old African American hosiery salesman, intervened and was beaten violently by a police officer, which led to Stafford eventually losing an eye. Others were also caught up in the melee and arrested along with three teenage black boys, Wallace Baker (nineteen), Daniel Hamm (eighteen), and Frederick Frazier (sixteen). They were all taken to the Twenty-Eighth Precinct police station—a place known as the Meat Grinder—and beaten severely throughout the night.26 The following day, the teenagers were released and a public meeting was held at Friendship Baptist Community Center on Thirtieth Street, where Hamm and Baker had an opportunity to recount their experience of sustained police brutality. It was at this meeting that Nelson’s first set of recordings was made. Twelve days later, on Wednesday April 29, 1964, a more serious—but ostensibly unrelated—incident took place. Some youths entered a clothing store on 125th Street and Fifth Avenue looking for suits to wear for a Malcolm X rally,

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but having been told by the owners (a Jewish couple, Frank and Margit Sugar)27 that there was nothing in his size, one of the youths stabbed and killed Margit. Her husband was also attacked but recovered following emergency treatment. Hungry for an early arrest, police focused their attention on the rooftop tenements of Harlem where a pigeon club was run by a group of six African American youths. All six were taken forcibly into custody and beaten to extract confessions. Daniel Hamm and Robert Rice both signed admissions of guilt, and on September 8, 1965, all six teenagers—having received inadequate legal representation—were sentenced to life imprisonment, thus providing the impetus to raise money for a lawyer of their mothers’ choosing for a retrial, rather than the Legal Aid lawyer provided by the court. The case of the Harlem Six is remembered largely through Truman Nelson’s book The Torture of Mothers,28 which is based on transcriptions of speech recordings made on three separate occasions. The first set of tapes was recorded by a social worker, Willie Jones, for Harlem Youth Unlimited—a community self-help organization—at the Friendship Baptist Community Center in the immediate aftermath of the police beatings following the fruit stall riot. The other two tape sources consist of recordings of the mothers made subsequently, one by Nelson himself and a further set of recordings produced independently by Willie Jones. Collectively, these account for the ten reels of tape that were given to Reich, although it cannot be judged whether, or to what extent, Nelson had already edited the tapes before handing them over. Since the archival recording of Harlem’s Six Condemned lasts for only 26:46, it is likely that most of Nelson’s source tapes failed to find their way into Reich’s sound collage. The scenario that Reich was given remains unknown, but the layout of the collage closely follows that of Nelson’s book, suggesting that this was also the scenario he gave to Reich and accounts for why Reich selected almost identical source recordings to The Torture of Mothers despite having an apparently extensive collection of tape material from which to choose. The result is that all but three sections—1, 21, and 23 in Table 6.1—are also transcribed in The Torture of Mothers. The enduring appeal of The Torture of Mothers lies in Nelson’s ability to fashion a persuasive narrative through his selection, transcription, and presentation of audio sources, which are laid out on the printed page in the style of epic poetry, creating a heightened style of language that contains few features of black American speech.29 Reich approaches the spoken word with the same respect that Nelson demonstrates in his transcriptions, avoiding manipulation, repetition, or looping of the voices on the tapes. Reich embraces this role of quasi-auteur with enthusiasm, at times shaping and recasting Nelson’s original structure to create different emphases. The resulting Harlem’s Six Condemned consists of twenty-nine speech extracts, each containing a single voice, except for sections 15 and 28, each of which contains two voices. The sections are separated by fourteen gaps in total, enigmatically positioned and varying

13

12

11

10

9

8

7

4-second gap

Daniel Hamm

4-second gap

16-second gap

Daniel Hamm

16-second gap

3-second gap

Daniel Hamm

10-second gap

Wallace Baker

5

6

Daniel Hamm

4

Frank Stafford

Frank Stafford

Frank Stafford

Frank Stafford

Unidentified businessman

Fruit stall holder

Others

3

4-second gap

Harlem Six

Herbert Paine

Mrs Baker

Mothers

2

1

Section

Table 6.1 Arrangement of tape transcriptions in Steve Reich’s Harlem’s Six Condemned

Unidentified mother

21

Mrs Hamm Mrs Baker

27

28

29

Mrs Rice

26

Mrs Thomas

Mrs Hamm

25

Unidentified mother

23

Daniel Hamm

3-second pause

3-second pause

Mrs Hamm

22

8-second gap

11-second gap

Mrs Baker

20

3-second gap Mrs Thomas

Mrs Craig

Daniel Hamm 9-second gap

19

24

Daniel Hamm

7-second gap

Mary Hamm

Mrs Hamm

Mrs Baker

18

17

16

15 [duologue]

14

Frank Stafford

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in length between three seconds and sixteen seconds. The main exceptions are between sections 8 and 9 and sections 9 and 10, each of which is punctuated by a gap of sixteen seconds, a pattern repeated between sections 10 and 11 and sections 11 and 12, where there is a shorter but equally regular gap of four seconds each. The purpose of these gaps is unclear. They may have served a narrative function in allowing space for Dick Gregory to introduce the names of the speakers on the tape, although there is insufficient space for this to have been carried out consistently, but the tape could have been stopped and restarted in case more was said than the mere introduction of names. There is no record as to how identification of the voices was accomplished in the original performance and no suggestion that the audience was given a transcript of the tapes or a copy of Nelson’s book that had by this stage been published privately. The boys themselves were in prison and could not be present and, since the mothers sat for the performance of the tape collage, the linkage between the boys’ voices on the tape with their mothers on the stage would have been complicated. Harlem’s Six Condemned has three strands in Reich’s narrative, each of which contains a different group of voices. The first strand runs intermittently from section 1 to 17 and consists of the voices of those caught up in the riot. The second strand contains the voices of two members of the Harlem Six, and runs from section 4 to 16, with an additional contribution from Daniel Hamm in section 29. The third narrative strand comprises the voices of the mothers, and runs from section 12 to 28. The interweaving of these three strands produces an overall tripartite structure for the collage. From section 1 to 11, the voices of the Harlem Six and the other witnesses overlap; between sections 12 and 17, these are joined by the voices of the mothers, and then from section 18 to 29, the voices of the mothers are allowed to emerge on their own. Reich’s focus on male voices reflects his chosen title Harlem’s Six Condemned, contrasting with the female focus of Nelson’s title, The Torture of Mothers. The collage opens with the voice of Edward DeLuca, the proprietor of the fruit stall. As he speaks, the cash register rings in the background, locating him at the exact place where the fruit stand riot happened. DeLuca is the prime agent in the narrative, since had he not attracted police intervention the sequence of events would not have unfolded. He is unidentified and onedimensional in his single fifty-two-second appearance, although some details emerge through what he says.30 We learn that the fruit stall is on the street outside a larger fruit shop (DeLuca is therefore not an itinerant street seller) and that he was in the back of the shop when one of his employees alerted him to what was happening outside. The newspaper reports refer to the riot being started by the antics of children, while DeLuca’s account is gendered: they were “a mob of young fellows,” and it was “these boys” that DeLuca thought were not indigenous to Harlem. After a four-second gap, we hear the voice of Herbert Paine in section 2. He relates being caught up in the commotion, and he speaks animatedly of dodging the police, pinpointing the action as being on 129th

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Street. Paine recounts how the youths are hit around the face, with one of them fighting back against a police officer, resulting in two of the cops teaming up to beat that youth. Following a momentary blip in the tape, we hear in section 3 the voice of an unnamed businessman. Although he has witnessed these injustices, he affirms the right of the police to enforce the rule of law. Walking through a block in the area near the fruit stall, he sees the police attacking the youths and, fearful that it could have been him, accentuates the need for humor and sensitivity in patrolling the area. Like Herbert Paine before him, he refers to police brutality in beating the youths around the head and causing bloody injuries. Frank Stafford is central to Reich’s diegesis, providing a dominant and defining voice among the witnesses to injustice in Harlem’s Six Condemned. Stafford’s words are underscored by the sound of typewriters clangorously typing while he speaks, although these do not create as clear a sense of location as DeLuca’s cash register. Reich allocates him a comparable level of exposure to Daniel Hamm, and Stafford’s contributions alternate with Hamm’s between sections 6 and 11. Stafford’s words comprise five of the twenty-nine sections of the collage—6, 8, 10, 13, and 17—a far greater degree of prominence than he receives in The Torture of Mothers. Reich does not name Stafford, however, and we are dependent on Nelson’s description of him as “an American prototype, thirty-one years old, a family man with two kids and a non-working wife, plays a good game of basketball on Sunday; a salesman, hits the sidewalks of Harlem with a neat attache [sic] case and a peddlers [sic] license . . . anything to decently support his family . . . an American prototype, except that he’s black.”31 Stafford speaks of being attacked by three policemen and being hit in the eye. He is recognized by a passerby who urges him to cooperate with the police as his eye was clearly in need of emergency treatment. Instead of being taken to a hospital, Stafford is taken to the Twenty-Eighth Precinct police station and abused further, and he describes how the police continued beating him, smashing oranges in his already injured face. Labeled as a “cop fighter,” Stafford is further punched in the jaw and the chest before being taken to Harlem Hospital, where Wallace Baker would also be taken, and where Frank Sugar—the owner of the used clothing store—had a life-saving operation after being stabbed. For Stafford, it was to be a pointless journey, however, since specialist medical attention was not available there. Subsequently taken to Bellevue Hospital in Lower Manhattan, Stafford recalls a two-week period during which surgeons attempted to save his eye but to no avail, rendering necessary a second operation to remove it. He does not name specific police officers but speaks of an enduring suspicion of him as he now wears an eyepatch while working as a street seller. Given his extended period of hospitalization, the taped interview with Stafford must have been recorded some weeks after the fruit stall riot. Only two of the six imprisoned boys—Daniel Hamm and Wallace Baker— are given voice in Harlem’s Six Condemned. Whereas Wallace Baker is allotted

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only one section, Reich demonstrates a veritable fascination with Hamm’s voice, which is heard seven times, interspersed as a kind of intermittent vocal rondo between sections 4 and 29. As with Reich’s treatment of Frank Stafford, Hamm’s prominence here stands in contrast to Nelson’s book, paving the way for using his words as the basis for Come Out. In the source recordings, Hamm speaks with a quiet, measured, and somewhat melodic voice that stands out from the rest of the speakers on the sound collage. When combined with the story about the bruise blood, we gain at this point a sense of a fairly calm, rational individual, rather than that of an impassioned subject producing a “human outcry”32 that one might ostensibly hear as the piece develops and increases in intensity. Indeed, there is something lulling, even meditative, about Hamm’s restrained persona and its realization in his speech, which stands in great contrast, for example, to Brother Walter’s. Whether the result of the musicality of the young man’s voice or compassion for his plight in having to injure himself further in order to be allowed to go to the hospital, Reich gives heightened agency to Hamm, appointing him spokesman for the six youths in Harlem’s Six Condemned. We also learn a great deal about Hamm’s situation. He lives about a mile from the scene of the fruit stall riot—and describes himself as unemployed, but seeking employment with the assistance of a nearby adult education center. In a previous generation, Hamm might have been a candidate for employment with the Pullman Company, with its policy of employing African American men as porters, but Hamm is no latter-day Lawrence Davies.33 In section 4, Hamm describes hearing a police siren, seeing a police officer waving his billy club and brandishing a gun at some children, and becoming caught up himself in the events. The police tackle him, and he is taken handcuffed to the patrol car, with his friend Wallace Baker. Sections 7 and 9 progress the narrative and relate events at the Twenty-Eighth Precinct police station, where they are handcuffed and systematically beaten by gangs of up to twelve police officers. After some four hours of merciless beatings, Hamm recalls—in section 11—the police’s decision to take boys who were bleeding to the hospital. Since Hamm was not bleeding, he opened up a large bruise on his leg where he had been beaten. The phrase describing these actions—“I had to, like, open the bruise up and let some of the bruise blood come out to show them that I was bleeding”—receives central prominence and appears near the midpoint of the collage, between 12:26 and 12:31. This central positioning reinforces further the significance of Hamm’s voice in defining Reich’s relationship with the Harlem Six. This is followed in section 16 by an analepsis as Hamm returns to the description of events at the police station, recounting the police becoming weary with beating the boys, spitting at them, and even walking over them. Hamm’s words bring the collage to a conclusion in section 29. He claims that the police wish to rid the area of African American youths in the careful preparation of the city’s image for the New York World’s Fair, which opened on April 22, 1964, just five days after the fruit stall riot and a week before the murder of Mrs. Sugar. His

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words speak for all African Americans in Harlem: the fair’s success depends on black citizens undertaking menial, “penny-ante” jobs as a means of making their presence in the city more palatable. And his emphatic “and that’s it” brings the collage uncompromisingly to an end. Wallace Baker—the only other member of the Harlem Six to be given a voice—adds little to the narrative through his single contribution in section 5, although his vocal pitch is distinctly lower than Hamm’s and therefore provides some timbral contrast. The voices of all six mothers are heard in the collage. Despite Wallace Baker receiving scant exposure, his mother is the first to appear, her story beginning in section 12 with her being called to Harlem Hospital to sign a consent form for Wallace’s X-ray. She recalls Wallace’s neck being jolted to one side, his being unable to walk, and his wearing a patch over one eye, just as Frank Stafford needed to do after losing an eye. She describes the indignity of seeing her son, bloodstains on his trousers, crying as she enters, knowing that the police had extracted a confession from him for killing Mrs. Sugar. Mrs. Baker introduces Lieutenant Satriano in the narrative, whom she has read about in the newspaper because of a corruption case against him. Leading a horde of some thirty policemen, Satriano enters her house without a search warrant, apparently looking for a coat stolen from the Sugars’ clothing store. She describes in graphic, quasi-dramatic terms the invasive search by the detectives as they snatch the bedclothes, her young grandchildren thrown crudely on top of each other, and her own indignity as Satriano refuses to leave the room while she gets dressed to go to the precinct. She is seemingly in conversation with Daniel Hamm’s mother in section 15, although closer examination reveals the tapes to have been merely juxtaposed, with no actual exchange between them. Mary Hamm—mother of Danny (as she refers to him)—is a prominent voice in Nelson’s book but is overshadowed in Reich’s sound collage by her son’s contribution. Starting in section 15, she appears to be in conversation with Mrs. Baker, a genuine duologue rather than the splicing together of two voices to create a semblance of conversation. She speaks of her incredulity that a policeman could have beaten her son but stoically asserts that the law is always right and the African American is always in the wrong. Mrs. Hamm describes her experience of the police visiting her house and taking Danny for questioning as part of their rounding up of the boys after the clothing shop murder. In Reich’s hands, Mrs. Hamm’s story moves quickly to the police crowding on the roof to arrest the boys and take them to the precinct. In section 27, her final contribution to Reich’s narrative, she speaks of not wanting her son to be represented by a Legal Aid lawyer, having seen how unsatisfactorily this has worked out for the son of one of her friends. She speaks also of the lawyers’ attempts to confuse the boys to get them to confess to the murder, her reference to their fast talking presaging Reich’s subsequent treatment of Daniel’s voice in Come Out, where Hamm’s rational speech gives way to phased incomprehensibility.

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In section 19, Walter Thomas’s mother, Mildred, speaks of how the detectives raided her house, searching for the coat stolen from the clothing shop, grabbing Walter and trying to handcuff him. Initially assuming this to be the boisterous behavior of Walter’s friends, the realization of what is taking place only dawns on her when ten or eleven detectives try to arrest her son. Once again Lieutenant Satriano is at the center of the investigation, focusing on an old coat that Mrs. Thomas intended to throw out, which is assumed by the police to have been stolen from the used clothing store. On behalf of the mothers, Mrs. Thomas makes contact with Bill Epton, the African American head of the Harlem Defense Council. Epton was also a central figure in the Progressive Labor Party, based at 336 Lennox Avenue, New York, close to the events of the fruit stall riot. Nelson’s prose shows a particular sensitivity toward Mrs. Craig,34 but in Reich’s hands her voice is heard only near the end of the collage, where she describes visiting her son Willie and having to talk to him through a telephone link because he was being held in a cage. His only reported request to his mother is for her to get him a lawyer, a request that becomes the raison d’être for the benefit, and is therefore a significant way that the collage magnifies our understanding of Come Out. Mrs. Rice’s voice is also heard only once, where she takes up the theme of wanting an independent lawyer to represent her son. Nelson describes Mrs. Rice and her husband as being “a little more prosperous than the others,”35 but her husband’s encounter with Judge Calkins serves only to quash the family’s aspirations of independence as Calkins attempts to impose on them lawyers of the court’s choosing. Nelson’s commentary points to the additional difficulty that Rice had “implicated himself on the tape, saying openly that during the riot he had picked up a garbage can to defend himself.”36 There are several ways in which Harlem’s Six Condemned sheds new light on our understanding of Come Out. First, it confirms a shared political context and content for both pieces, and Reich’s political association through Nelson with those seeking to challenge injustice. Although contemporary accounts of the benefit make no mention of Reich’s contribution to the evening, it aligned his work with the aims and aspirations of a loosely associated group of people at the forefront of civil rights in New York, just as he had been previously associated with the San Francisco Mime Troupe. In both cases, however, Reich’s working style seems to have contained a strong element of independence, perhaps reflecting a mindset of producing music for, rather than creating performance with. Second, analysis of the sound collage creates a sonic context through the granularity of the individual voices, the distributed sense of placefulness it establishes, and the materiality of its sonic dimensions, which collectively allow the participants to exist as complex, rounded characters, capable of agency and intervention. Come Out then attempts to function as a microcosm by taking a single voice and loading it with meanings that cannot easily be fathomed outside of this context, so that we might develop an appreciation of who Daniel Hamm is, where he lives, his daytime occupation, and his relationships with his friends and with his mother (his father is not mentioned).

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While some of this could be garnered from reading The Torture of Mothers, the sound collage gives us a unique insight into Hamm’s emotional world, and of those around him, reflecting Reich’s view that “speech melodies are windows into people’s souls,”37 the conviction that there is an inseparable link between the music innate in a person’s speech and the personality of the speaker. Harlem’s Six Condemned presents a rich tapestry of speech melodies, providing context and depth to Hamm’s voice, which is then extracted to form in Come Out an extended musical portrait of his personal identity. The decision to focus the entire diegesis through a single character has resonance in Jewish narrative: just as through Abraham, the promise is given that all generations shall be blessed, Reich treats Hamm as a focal point for the suffering and injustice of African Americans. Third, the sound collage establishes Reich’s function as auteur-like, a role he had already developed in his three previous uses of sound-collage technique. In realizing the scenario given to him by Nelson,38 Reich shapes and refines material so that his own voice is heard through the voices of others. On one level this is also true of Reich’s approach in Come Out, as has been recognized by Siarhei Biareishyk: Whereas Hamm’s voice is directly audible in the utterance, the work also entails the latent voice of the composer—a voice embedded in the structure of the piece, inaudible but nonetheless present in the compositional choices of the author in manipulations of Hamm’s statement.39

In Harlem’s Six Condemned, Reich’s editing magnifies the racial distinction between himself and the voices he presents, emphasizing the function of “whiteness” as he arranges the voices of thirteen African Americans, and in so doing presents a patriarchal chronicle in which the three narrative strands move from older men, to the youths and to their mothers. The Torture of Mothers gives a voice to the women whose sons were suffering injustice. Reich’s storyline mediates the story through the voices of men as much as women, a narrative gap reflected in its title, which focuses on the fate of the Harlem Six “condemned” rather than the tortured anguish of their mothers. This notwithstanding, however, each of the mothers is given a voice by Reich,40 whereas the voices of Wallace Baker and (especially) Daniel Hamm are loaded with the responsibility for representing the plight of the entire Harlem Six. Fourth, the sound collage challenges Reich’s assessment of the success of the benefit—and by implication his music—was that it achieved its stated aim because in the fullness of time there was a retrial for the Harlem Six.41 While serving to add a quasi-fairy-tale ending to the case, this is something of an overestimation, not least because it ignores the extended period of time before the youths were released. It was not until 1967 that the appeal led by Conrad Lynn came to court, and while it was successful in achieving a retrial, the outcome was that two of the six were found guilty and immediately began lengthy custodial

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sentences, with the other four not being retried until 1971. It was not until the summer of 1974 that Daniel Hamm—Reich’s principal protagonist—was freed from prison. Reich’s retelling treats the benefit at Town Hall as an isolated event, but in August 1967 a much larger event was staged at the Village Theater in Lower Manhattan, which attracted an audience of two thousand people. On this occasion, Ossie Davis acted as MC with music provided by singer Richie Havens. James Baldwin delivered an impassioned speech demanding—in support of the Harlem Six—an economic boycott, focused on persuading African Americans not to buy cars from General Motors. The event had a broader scope in its civil rights aspirations than the Harlem Six, however, and in addition raised money for civil rights work in South Carolina. Reich has tended to underplay his personal commitment to the cause of the Harlem Six, which went far beyond the benefit. His lack of public comment has been interpreted as a lack of interest in the case, and the release of a commercial recording of Come Out might have suggested that Reich’s only interest was personal advancement.42 But the composer’s correspondence with Conrad Lynn during 1967 reveals the extent to which he went to ensure that Daniel Hamm received a fair payment from the royalties he received for his voice being used in the CBS recording, with Reich negotiating an additional one-off fee for Hamm as a “performer.” Hamm wrote to Reich in 1968 to express his gratitude to Reich for his actions.43 This close reading of the source materials calls for a rethinking of Come Out, which takes into account the threefold relationship between the benefit concert and its aims in achieving justice for the Harlem Six, the shaping of the narrative in The Torture of Mothers and Reich’s subsequent recasting of the story in his sound collage, and the layers of meaning that these create. The initial appeal of Come Out, the first of Reich’s pieces to be commercially recorded, was its introduction of phasing as an experimental technique. From the vantage point of the early twenty-first century, Reich’s use of phasing as a compositional method can now be understood as a relatively small component in the composer’s output, while his ongoing work with creating music from speech material, especially that of male African Americans, spans his entire oeuvre. The importance of Come Out thus lies in establishing a broader context in which to understand the emerging significance of Reich’s speech-based music.

Notes 1. Reich 2002b, 22. 2. Strickland 1993, 190. 3. Gopinath 2005, 200.

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4. The source recording for the work, archived at the Paul Sacher Stiftung, SSR [SR CD-3 Track 5], is entitled Harlem’s Six Condemned, and the title is used in that format throughout this chapter. The spine of the original tape box also carries this designation, although the front of the box has the format “Harlem’s Condemned 6.” Both inscriptions are in Reich’s handwriting. 5. Duckworth 1999, 297. 6. Zuckerman 2002. In conversation with Edward Strickland, Reich stated clearly that “Come Out is a civil rights piece.” Strickland 1993, 40. Reich’s conversations with Dean Suzuki, however, suggest that Reich believed any political content of the work to be secondary to the musical content. Suzuki 1991, 461. 7. Potter 2000, 177–79. 8. M. Morris 2004, 62–64. The phrase “bruise blood” has since been adopted by choreographer Shobana Jeyasingh as the title for her 2009 dance piece that uses Come Out as its soundtrack, and which conveys physically the emotion of the words through angular and anguished movement. See Mackrell 2009. 9. Whitesell 2001, 177. 10. Gopinath 2009, 135. 11. Gopinath 2005, 195. 12. This date is proposed by William Duckworth (1995, 299), although in an unpublished interview of July 18, 1994, with K.  Robert Schwarz, Reich puts the move a month later to October 1965. Irrespective of the exact date, Reich’s return to New York was approximately eighteen months after the events that had led to the imprisonment of the Harlem Six. 13. Extracts from Nelson’s The Old Man: John Brown at Harper’s Ferry (1973) and his other main writings are reproduced in Schafer 1989. 14. Grimes in Reich 1987a. 15. It is conceivable that Reich saw the role of tape editor as somehow dissimilar to his previous work in creating sound collages, although the only significant difference would seem to be that Nelson, rather than Reich, created the dramatic scenario. 16. Cole 2012, 324. 17. Gopinath (2005, 194–233) has explored in detail the possible relationships between the political and Come Out. 18. Schwarz 1992, 13. See also Ryan Ebright’s discussion of this issue in his chapter in this volume. 19. See also Strickland 1991, 40; Zuckerman 2002. 20. Nelson (1968, 88) indicates that various means of raising money (and awareness) were adopted, with the mothers themselves collecting on the streets of Harlem to pay for lawyers of their choosing. 21. See The Militant 1966, 4. The inside page of the program for the event also contained a statement from novelist, playwright, and social critic James Baldwin (1924–87). 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid.

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24. Scott Saul points to the syncretic African/African-diasporic music in We Insist! Freedom Now, which resonates with Reich’s quasi-African musical elements in Come Out. Saul 2009, 93–96. 25. This account is assembled from a range of sources. Gopinath (2005, 215–18) provides a fulsome account of the details of the case. While acknowledging the significance of Nelson’s The Torture of Mothers, Gopinath’s account also draws extensively on a variety of newspaper reports and four other main sources: Baldwin 1966; Kunstler 1994, 172–74; Lynn 1979, 3–33; and Rubinstein 1968, 21–25. Additional details have since been published in Boyd 2008, 87–101. 26. Nelson links this police station with jailhouse beatings of African Americans dating back to the 1930s. Nelson 1968, 18. 27. Gopinath emphasizes the racial tensions between Harlem’s established Jews and Italians, whom he describes as having “assumed the mantle of whiteness” (2005, 210), and the more recently arrived African American communities. He also makes reference to the surfacing of such tensions in the first trial as a result of the Jewish heritage of the judge, the victim, and five members of the jury. 28. References in this chapter are to the Beacon Press edition, published in 1968. The publisher’s note to this edition traces the book’s faltering steps to publication from its production in autumn 1964, some six months after the events that it narrates. Because of difficulties in finding a publisher, Nelson initially published The Torture of Mothers privately through his own Garrison Press. Following the benefit concert at Town Hall, selections of the book were published in the July 1966 issue of Ramparts magazine, coinciding with James Baldwin’s seminal article in the Nation (Baldwin 1966). An abridged version was also published in Schafer 1989, 230–38. 29. Gopinath 2005, 225–26. 30. With the exception of four lines in The Torture of Mothers, DeLuca’s voice is absent from Nelson’s original account, but without this reference, it would be impossible to identify him in Reich’s piece. 31. Nelson 1968, 4. 32. Potter 2000, 178. 33. Lawrence “Happy” Davies is the African American Pullman porter subsequently recorded by Reich in a 1986 interview for Different Trains. The Pullman Company had a policy of exclusively employing African American men. 34. Nelson 1968, 30. 35. Ibid., 85. 36. Ibid., 26. 37. Reich 2002b, 178. 38. See Grimes in Reich 1987a. 39. Biareishyk 2012, 75. 40. The difficulties in identifying two of the sections make it impossible to say with complete certainty whether Mrs. Chancy, Ronald Felder’s aunt, is actually presented. 41. Zuckerman 2002. Strickland (1993, 40) also notes Reich’s stated belief that Come Out was a political piece, and his satisfaction that the event led to the retrial of the Harlem Six.

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42. Gopinath 2005, 202. 43. It is unclear how this relates to concert performances, of which the piece received many. In the May 1966 Park Place Gallery concert program, Come Out to Show Them (4/66)—as it was still called—is described as being “composed as part of a dramatization of Truman Nelson’s book, The Torture of Mothers, which was presented at Town Hall in April of 1966 as a benefit for the retrial—with lawyers of their own choosing—of the six boys arrested for murder during the Harlem ‘Fruit Stand Riots’ of 1964. The voice is that of Daniel Hamm, 19, one of the six now serving a life sentence. He is describing a beating he took in the Harlem 28th precinct. The police were about to take the boys to Harlem Hospital to get them ‘cleaned up’ and were only taking those that were visibly bleeding. Since Hamm had no actual open bleeding he proceeded to squeeze open a bruise on his leg so that he would be taken to the hospital. ‘I had to like open the bruise up and let some of the bruise blood come out to show them.’ ” By the time of a performance at Fairleigh-Dickinson University in January 1967, the concert program contained a note on Come Out (4/ 66)—as it was known by then—whose precise description recurs in programs for several years: “Composed as part of a benefit, presented at Town Hall, for the retrial, with lawyers of their own choosing, of the six boys arrested for murder during the Harlem riots of 1964. The voice is that of Daniel Hamm, then 19, describing a beating he took in the Harlem 28th precinct. The police were about to take the boys out to be ‘cleaned up’ and were only taking those who were visibly bleeding. Since Hamm had no actual open bleeding he proceeded to squeeze open a bruise on his leg so that he would be taken to the hospital: ‘I had to like open the bruise up and let some of the bruise blood come out to show them.’ ” By this stage, all references to Truman Nelson and The Torture of Mothers had been removed.

7 From World War II to the “War on Terror” An Examination of Steve Reich’s “Docu-Music” Approach in WTC 9/11 Celia Casey The events of 9/111 were so devastating and traumatic that—over the years since then—various art forms have struggled to respond sensitively and appropriately to them.2 A  number of important composers became caught up in the politically sensitive aftermath because their views (and even musical styles) were considered contentious. Karlheinz Stockhausen found himself at the center of a firestorm of controversy when he labeled the attacks “the greatest artwork in the cosmos”;3 Pierre Boulez’s passport was seized during a dawn raid on his hotel room in Switzerland because of a comment he had made decades earlier about blowing up opera houses;4 and John Adams’s opera The Death of Klinghoffer was dragged into the limelight ten years after its premiere because of its perceived sympathy for PLO terrorists.5 In such a volatile situation, many composers approached the topic with caution. Adams, for example, was “sort of horrified by the idea because the wounds were very raw and people were at that point almost overdosed on [the] imagery,”6 while anxiety manifested itself in uncertainty for Michael Gordon (“by using this subject am I forcing the audience to be sympathetic to my work before even a note of music is played?”)7 and John Corigliano (“how could I instruct the audience to ignore their own memories?”).8 Even Steve Reich—a composer well credentialed in creating works about significant issues—delayed responding to 9/ 11 for nine years,9 this despite receiving high praise for his previous responses to traumatic issues. For example, according to Richard Taruskin, Reich’s Different Trains (1988) is “the only adequate musical response—one of the few adequate artistic responses in any medium—to the Holocaust.”10 In the wake of 9/11, artistic responses tended to avoid expressing overly personal perspectives,11 reflecting the view held by abstract painter and writer Laurie Fendrich, who asserted We need, I think, to achieve intellectual control of our feelings, and direct our actions according to what is right and just, instead of to what pleases us as “personal expression” or intrigues us as convoluted theory.12

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There was also a trend towards straightforward expression, for example in literature, whereby aesthetics were apparently subordinated to communicative function and “direct” expression. . . . Grief seemed to instill a desire to communicate “directly” and to disdain “artificial figures, elegant verse, complex explanations, and Latinate language.”13

Authenticity was another issue, as expressed by Marc Aronson, who perceived a desire for dealing with reality, describing “a sense that we need to reckon with the real, not the imaginary; the tragedy, not the fantasy.”14 Reich understood the desire for impersonality, directness, and authenticity post-9/11: The only way to deal with events like this, in my view . . . is to go to the documentary sources that participated in that event . . . and the tone of voice, the speech melody, contains within it the true intensity of the event, not a dramatization thereof, not a fantasy thereof, but a retelling of a witness.15

His response, WTC 9/11 (2010) is composed for string quartet and features prerecorded speech and sounds from or related to the attacks. The first movement, “9/11,” is based on public domain recordings from North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) and the New  York City Fire Department (FDNY) recorded on the day of the attacks.16 The second movement, “2010,” centers around excerpts from interviews Reich conducted with friends and former neighbors in Lower Manhattan, as well as an FDNY officer and three members of Hatzalah, a Jewish volunteer emergency medical service. The final movement, “WTC,” reflects on the aftermath of 9/11 and the lives lost, and includes excerpts from interviews Reich conducted with a rabbi, a Jewish cantor, and a woman who sat with the bodies (or parts of bodies) of victims, singing psalms until their burial. The melodies and rhythms of the recorded documentary material generate the musical material that is performed by the string quartets (one live string quartet plays against two prerecorded string quartets and prerecorded voices and sounds).17 The quartet provides an accompaniment to the recorded speech, framing it as music and enhancing the perception of the musical qualities in the spoken intonation. Reich popularized this documentary approach with his response to the Holocaust in the much earlier Different Trains, which Cathy Lane described as “docu-music”—a term that will be used throughout this chapter in reference to WTC 9/11.18 The docu-music approach for Different Trains is summarized by the composer in an early sketch dated December 18, 1987: “It is a must to choose the documentary materials first. Their pitches & rhythms will then determine the string music.”19 At the time of its release, Reich claimed that Different Trains “[began] a new way of composing” as a work that would “accurately reflect the

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whole situation” and which “[presented] both a documentary and a musical reality.”20 A little over a decade later, Reich elaborated on this documentary approach in an interview with Rebecca Kim: To consider using the Holocaust as subject material in any way, shape, or form is so inherently . . . not just difficult, but impossible. What makes this piece work is that it contains the voices of these people recounting what happened to them, and I am simply transcribing their speech melody and composing from that musical starting point. The documentary nature of the piece is essential to what it is.21

For Reich, the speech melody of individuals heard in Different Trains “is the unpremeditated organic expression of the events they lived through.”22 Such thinking led him to see docu-music as the most appropriate way to respond not only to the Holocaust and to 9/11, but to other sensitive topics like the Israel-Palestine conflict in The Cave (1993), the Hindenburg disaster in Three Tales (2002), and the 1993 World Trade Center bombing in City Life (1995). He describes the approach in terms of detachment: My way of dealing with these things is to stay as close as possible to the documentary reality. If Different Trains or The Cave or Three Tales or City Life have any validity, it’s because I’ve been able to stay with that reality without turning it into some sentimental, maudlin fantasy. That’s exactly what I'm trying to do with the voices of the NORAD traffic controllers, the New York City Fire Department and my friends and neighbors who went through this. By taking that matter-of-fact attitude, one actually preserves the emotion perhaps by understating it a bit.23

The emphasis on personal detachment in Reich’s docu-music works can be traced back to his early, process-based compositions. K.  Robert Schwarz relates his use of “objective” processes to an impersonal basis for composition, one that is “closely connected to the subjugation of [the composer’s] individual expression.”24 Commentary around WTC 9/11 has emphasized similar ideas by focusing on the objectivity of Reich’s docu-music approach, for example Jesse Gephart writes that “the piece has no slant, it has no bias, it does nothing but elicit from you an emotional response. It’s almost like you’re back there, on that day, reliving the ordeal all over again.”25 Despite the desire for objectivity and impersonality projected on composers responding to 9/11, Martin Scherzinger raises concerns about this ideal. Drawing on Freud, he states: The belief in direct speech, authentic expression, unfettered creativity, and so on, strikes us as naïve today . . . [the] internal process of selecting, organizing, and assigning value to artistic material constitutes a field of aesthetic and political judgments without which there can be no artwork.26

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This chapter will examine a selection of primary materials held at the Paul Sacher Stiftung (PSS), including recorded interviews, computer files, and handwritten sketches, in order to uncover aspects of the creative process for WTC 9/11. Three elements will receive particular focus: first, an imagistic approach to the “grain” of sound recordings; second, directorial shaping of the narrative; and finally, structural and referential elements. Sound recordings are used not only as musical material and fodder for Reich’s original techniques but also to evoke the experience of the event, in a way comparable to the iconic images of the burning towers. Reich’s role as director is investigated in his input during the interview process. His structural approach is examined as time-altering treatments of source material from J.S. Bach. An investigation of these traits not only contributes to our understanding of Reich’s docu-music approach but also provides important insights into the creative process of such a pivotal composer of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century.

The Grain of the Voice Aspects of the first movement of WTC 9/11 are foreshadowed in Reich’s early tape works. Mitchell Morris’s observations about Come Out (1966) as a response to violence are particularly relevant in several ways, such that one may see WTC 9/11 as a late fulfillment of compositional trajectories initiated some forty-four years earlier; first, in the embrace of specific details in the grain of the voice and recordings and, second, in the use of temporal distortion. “I’m not against grain and funk,” Reich once affirmed. “I’m an old 35-mm film buff!”27 The opening of WTC 9/11 launches directly into an assault of noisy, grainy recordings with a level of “dirt” unprecedented in Reich’s work. The strings’ insistent, anxious, pulsing rhythm is taken directly from a recording of a phone’s busy signal, evoking the composer’s experience of being in contact with his son, Ezra, who, along with his wife and daughter, was residing in Reich’s apartment on the morning of the attacks, four blocks from the World Trade Towers.28 As Reich was not in the city during the attacks he relied on the phone to ensure his family remained safe, and feared its disconnection—“It was a pretty wrenching experience . . . Basically I told him ‘don’t hang up.’ ”29 This intensified the phone sound’s meaning for him, and he experimented in the sketching stage with interview excerpts relating to phone calls. In the opening of the work, the phone’s sound quality becomes the focus, each repetition stripping back referential meaning to allow a more direct emotional experience. Speech recordings follow, with increasingly distorted timbres, their words often obscured. There is a focus on the actuality of the recordings, the authenticity of the artifacts. Juan Suárez writes about a similar dissolving in Come Out, of “sense into noise and the voice into sheer grain,” resonating with

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Roland Barthes’s well-known essay “The Grain of the Voice,” which appeared some years after Come Out.30 For Morris, “such specificity is also clearly necessary to the aesthetic or ethical trajectory of Come Out. It matters a lot that we are listening to Hamm’s voice in all its grainy individuality, with its accent and idiosyncrasies of pace and pronunciation intact.”31 The selection of grainy and harsh speech and sound samples for WTC 9/11 was also symbolic; for Reich, “they are very noisy recordings . . . and that noise is part of the texture of what’s going on. That noise and confusion is emblematic of the reality of 9/11, for the people who were in it.”32 Reich has also made a similar comment regarding the street sounds he recorded for City Life (1995): “You get passing noises and it all sounds dirty and cheap, but I like the grainy and gritty quality of the sounds. It’s exactly like New York.”33 Morris’s second observation concerning temporal distortion is significant for WTC 9/11, given that Reich first conceived the work as “a totally abstract, structural, musical idea.”34 As he recalls: I had no idea what the content of that piece would be. The only idea that I did have was a formal idea, and that was that whoever was talking, whatever they were talking about, their final syllable would be extended out via software as a held tone, which could then be doubled by viola, or violin, or the cello, or what have you. . . . So this idea existed quite independently of any content for quite some time, and I was really concerned, you know—what am I going to use for material?35

Reich used digital technology to elongate parts of speech excerpts, as he describes above, in a technique he terms “stop-action sound.” Reich articulated both techniques in letters to his patrons Betty Freeman and Judith Stark some thirty years earlier, in 1980 and 1981, before they were technologically possible for him.36 While stop-action sound made an appearance in the final movement of Three Tales, it was brief and, as Reich explains: “There is so much going on, you don’t really hear it clearly. In WTC 9/11 it’s front and center. It’s the texture, the connective tissue between one section and the next.”37 Retrospectively, Reich realized that stop-action sound not only provided structural cohesion but was also symbolically appropriate in the post-9/11 context: “You start building up these textures of what the memories—or the vapor trails, if you like—of what people had said,”38 and “you begin building up chords of meaning, if you like, and connecting one speaker to another harmonically.”39 Stop-action sound could also be seen as an appropriate signifier for the trauma surrounding 9/11.40 In his analysis of Come Out, Morris connects the temporal distortions of the piece with the temporal distortions experienced by those who are involved in traumatic situations, writing that “many people who have experienced serious violence . . . report significant temporal distortions. Time speeds up, slows down, or seems to recur.”41

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Using stop-action sound enabled Reich to exert aesthetic control over recorded speech and sounds through suspending tones at certain places of his choosing and extending these so that they form part of the continuing harmonic fabric. It also allowed for the disguise of graphic documentary material; for example, in the final recording that appears in the first movement, one recorded excerpt is extremely harrowing in its original form. It was made famous after being played to jurors in the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui in the United States Supreme Court on April 11, 2006.42 It captures Kevin Cosgrove’s last words, spoken on his mobile phone as the World Trade Center South Tower he is in begins to collapse at 9:58 am on September 11, 2001. His call to 911 from the 105th floor ends with the sound of the tower collapsing and his scream “Oh God! Ah!” Reich edits out “Oh God!” from this excerpt for the final work, though his sketches include the entire phrase.43 In the recording of WTC 9/11, this excerpt is not aurally distinct, having been transformed from a short, cut-off exclamation into a stretchedout long note through the use of stop-action sound. It is doubled by the cello of the first quartet, which further masks its identity and conceals its meaning. The excerpt appears as simply “Ah” on the instrumental score and is not mentioned in the program notes.

Reich as Director Several months after establishing the formal basis and technical elements of WTC 9/11, Reich realized the subject matter of the work:44 “The light bulb went on and I said, ‘Wait a minute! I have unfinished business’—I never dealt with 9/11, which was in my own backyard—literally—and concerned my own family.”45 Because Reich had lived in close proximity to the World Trade Center for twenty-five years, he had many friends and neighbors who were in New York at the time of the events and were directly involved, so he decided to interview a number of them, “to clarify what really happened,” as he wrote in an email to interviewees.46 Reich interviewed twenty individuals, and the voices of thirteen appear in the final work.47 The majority of interviewees were asked to recall and reflect on their experience of 9/11 in semi-structured interviews. This reflection was evoked by a list of questions that Reich asked,48 which appears in the PSS archive in the form of a computer file dated May 26, 2010,49 and is replicated in Table 7.1. The archival recordings reveal that Reich approached interviews with a number of precompositional aims related to content and style, which he achieved through directing.50 Reich frequently requests answers in complete sentences (since, as he mentions to interviewees, questions were not to be included in the work). He also often asks for answers to be repeated for clarity and

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Table 7.1 Steve Reich’s list of interview questions for WTC 9/11 (2010). Questions for 9/11 • • • • • • • • • •

Where were you the morning of September 11th, 2001? What was your reaction when you heard or saw the news? Were you or anyone you know personally involved? It’s more than eight years ago now. Do you still remember it? What is your feeling about it now? Do you think something like that could ever happen again? Is New York City still a target? Why? Why do people often fail to identify who attacked us? (Who attacked us? Can you name them?) About 3000 people died on 9/11. Do you have any religious tradition or personal thoughts about what happens to us after we die?

Example 7.1 Compositional sketch dated “7/28/10” (Steve Reich Collection, PSS).

ease of musical setting. As a result, the source material is extensive, allowing Reich to be selective, illustrated by a sketchbook annotation of two interviewees saying the same phrase (Ex. 7.1). Such priming of the source material also occurred in Different Trains, where Reich prompted responses to particular phrases and requested repetition to ensure clarity, as evidenced in the following exchange with his governess, Virginia Mitchell. Reich: I just want to get, like, when we’re talking about it, you mention, you know, 1939, 1940, so on so forth . . . what do you remember from, like, ’39? Mitchell: ’39 was when we went out to California . . . Reich: Yeah, can you actually say, “in 1939.”51 Preconceived formal ideas seem to have driven content. This is supported by a journal entry dated February 21, 1988 where Reich writes: “All of Virginia is sampled. All of Mr. Davis is sampled. If I am needed, I’ll be sampled to fill a particular need.” Indeed, Reich did record himself saying phrases that were similar to Mitchell’s speech samples used in the final version of the piece, although he abandoned the idea of using his voice in the composition soon after.52

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Reich’s directorial input is more explicit for WTC 9/11 in terms of content and style. For the creation of the third movement, Reich provided nine interviewees with prepared scriptural readings and psalms. This enabled him not only to dictate the work’s content but also to foster greater stylistic input through a directorial stance. Reich directed interviewees to recite scripts at least three times each, and provided guidelines and feedback in terms of pace, clarity, intonation, and pronunciation. The following is an abridged example of this direction: Interviewee A: When the body is placed in the earth, the soul is free to find its place. Reich: Read the “p” in “place” . . . Interviewee A: . . . “The Book of Remembrance reads itself for everyone’s hand has signed it.” Reich: One more time like that; without so much accent on every word.  . . .  Interviewee A: Uh . . . the Chofetz Chaim says: “What you have, you have for a while. What you give away you have forever.” Reich: Okay, not so dramatic . . . Interviewee A: Okay. Reich: More matter-of-fact . . . Reich even went so far as to ask interviewees to speak with a different accent to sound more “believable.” The following is another abridged excerpt of an interview with a different interviewee: Reich: A little bit more from Texas now. Interviewee B: [Louder and in a Texan accent]: No such thing as too late to change!! [laughs]. Reich: Try that again! Interviewee B: [In a Texan accent]: No such thing as too late to change. Reich: One more time, a little bit slower.  . . .  Interviewee B: [Reads more slowly]:  “The book of Remembrance reads itself for everyone’s hand has signed it.” Reich: A little bit more toward Texas and see what happens. Interviewee B: Okay. [In a Texan accent]:  “The book of Remembrance reads itself for everyone’s hand has signed it.” Reich: One more time like that. Interviewee B: Okay. [In a Texan accent]:  “The book of Remembrance reads itself for everyone’s hand has signed it.” Reich: . . . it becomes more believable [laughs]. Interviewee B: What? Reich: It becomes more believable . . . Interviewee B: Does it?!

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Reich: Yeah! Interviewee B: When you put the Texas on it?! [laughs]. Reich: Yeah!! [laughs]. Well, it does, because you heard things like that when you were a kid, so it taps into that. Reich directs another interviewee to recite a scripted line, what he describes as “a real Americanism” with a New York accent: Reich: How about “No such thing” goes a little bit  .  .  .  like, that’s a real Americanism. . . . In other words, that would go faster and then . . . you know [laughs]; slow down. Interviewee A: [In an “American” accent and said more enthusiastically]: “no such thing as too late to change!” Reich: [Laughs]. Okay, now bring it to New York City. [Both laugh] Interviewee A: [With a New York accent and in a more serious tone of voice]: “no such thing as too late to change.”53 This type of direction was also present when Reich was creating his earlier documusic work, City Life (1995). Primary source recordings for this composition reveal that Reich asked a street vendor if he was willing to be recorded saying the phrase “check it out”—“a really typically New York thing to say,” according to Reich.54 The vendor, who was already spruiking women’s and men’s clothing, then inserted the phrase insistently and repeatedly throughout his sales pitch, after receiving some direction from Reich to shorten the way he said it at first. Reich’s direction in WTC 9/11 also involved establishing and maintaining a consistent pitch framework for the sung sections that feature in the third movement of the work through the use of a tuner, remarking to one individual, for example, “This particular part’s gonna be in the key of C  .  .  .  in case you just start chanting . . . there’ll be this very quiet . . . [turns on tuner and starts humming].”55 The use of pitch and time shifting technology in WTC 9/11 also resulted in fewer tempo and key changes, overcoming a struggle he encountered when composing Different Trains.56

WTC, World to Come, The Well-Tempered Clavier While the first two movements of WTC 9/11 portray both the dramatic immediacy and the direct experiences of 9/11, the third movement adopts a more solemn and contemplative tone both musically and in subject matter, while also reflecting the composer’s devout Jewish faith. It is centered on the afterlife, with a focus on the Jewish tradition of Shmira. As Reich explains: After 9/11, the bodies and parts of bodies were taken to the medical examiner’s office on the east side of Manhattan. In Jewish tradition, there is an obligation to

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guard the body from the time of death until burial. The practice, called Shmira, consists of sitting near the body and reciting Psalms or Biblical passages.57

Reich’s friend and former neighbor, composer David Lang, featured in both the second and third movements, inspired a number of aspects of WTC 9/11. Lang composed his own response to 9/11, World to Come (2003), which features the voice and cello playing of Maya Beiser.58 Reich’s WTC 9/11 also features Beiser (a friend of both composers), who sings parts of Psalms and the Torah in the third movement. In his interview with Reich for WTC 9/11, Lang reveals that he noticed the coincidental initials of World Trade Center and “World to Come,” a common description in Judaism of the afterlife. Lang explains that his composition is an attempt to express through music what he knows about the afterlife, although he admits that his knowledge surrounding this topic is still developing—his statement “I don’t really know what that means” relates to this discussion and is featured as a speech excerpt in Reich’s composition. Lang’s discussion about the inspiration behind the title of his composition clearly influenced Reich, which Reich admitted to Beiser when he interviewed her for WTC 9/11 and acknowledged in the program notes for the work.59 There is also another meaning behind the initials “WTC”—Lang identifies J. S. Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier as having a role in his composition. In his interview with Reich, Lang praises Bach for making his religious beliefs fundamental to the creation of his music and emphasizes the importance of a similar project for himself.60 The Well-Tempered Clavier also inspired Reich’s WTC 9/11; however, its significance is only apparent in considering the musical structure of the third movement. Here, music takes greater precedence than in the previous two movements. The recorded speech excerpts are more embedded within the musical fabric; as Reich told Andrew Ford, the “voices are very mixed back behind the strings, so you have to kind of lean forward to hear what they’re singing, which is exactly what I wanted.”61 In a compositional sketch dated September 27, 2010 (almost five months after his interview with Lang), Reich wrote: Work out combined harmonies of JSB—WTC 1st Prelude with 2—or 3 chords stacked on each other as clusters—either just right hand or both. TRY + see if you can then follow that for all of 3rd movement. . . . Held tones in MAYA’s reciting of Psalms will be very good with JSB/WTC. Also Cantor Goffin’s62 chanting Exodus 23:20 in C Major. Held tones here very helpful. . . . Speech samples need to be either: A) By themselves to begin movement B) Follow the start of just Maya’s reading—3) Be worked into MAYA/GOFFIN/JSB.63

A prior structural decision had been sketched on August 18, 2010: Find S-L-O-W PULSE could be every bar or slower64

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Example 7.2 J. S. Bach, Prelude No. 1 from The Well-Tempered Clavier, mm. 1–5.

Example 7.3 J. S. Bach, Prelude No. 1, The Well-Tempered Clavier, first five chords.

The harmonic design of WTC 9/11 may bear traces of Reich’s initial thought of combining chords from Bach’s Prelude No.  1 from The Well-Tempered Clavier (see Ex. 7.2) and slowing them down. The first five chords in the Bach Prelude, heard before any chromatic notes are introduced, could perhaps have been the source of Reich’s sonorities. The five chords are shown in Example 7.3 (chords 1 and 4 are identical). The boundaries of each successive sonority in WTC 9/11 appear to be marked by a change in rhythmic density, departing from the prevailing texture of sustained notes in the strings. An ascending figure that opens the third movement of WTC 9/11 (m. 657; see Ex. 7.4) resembles the ascending arpeggiation heard in every bar of Bach’s Prelude, while also being drawn from the speech melody excerpt “the bodies.” The arpeggiation figure acts as a signal to the beginning of a section, and with it a new chord. Basing a section on a single chord is a long-standing practice in Reich’s music, notably in Music for 18 Musicians (1976), where sections are introduced by rhythmic changes in the vibraphone part. Each new section in the third movement of WTC 9/11, based on a new chord, similarly commences with a rhythmic interjection, which can be seen to suggest a progression on to the next chord in the manner of Bach’s prelude, but in a stretched-out manner.

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Example 7.4 Opening of WTC 9/11 (string reduction).

This stretching-out procedure is familiar in Reich’s style, as seen most clearly in Four Organs (1970) and clearly articulated in Slow Motion Sound (1967) and in his stop-action sound technique discussed earlier. The sonorities demarcated by rhythmic activity (and marked by a rehearsal number) begin at measures 657, 685, 728, 810, 833, 867, and 902. Sonorities are built up slowly, one pitch at a time, reminiscent of the gradual note-to-note shifts between long-sustained chords in Reich’s Variations for Winds, Strings and Keyboards (1979). Bearing in mind Reich’s stated intention to build chords with combinations of harmonies from Bach’s prelude, the first sonority can be interpreted as combining Bach’s second and third chords (revoiced) (see Ex. 7.5). Similar constructions are found in the sonorities of measures 810–32, 833– 66, and 867–901, which use the first three chords of Bach’s prelude. Such an interpretation cannot be conclusive, since all seven diatonic pitch classes are present, making many different interpretations possible; however, the sonorities are grouped in sequence, suggesting that Reich’s sketch plan of creating clusters from combinations of two or three of Bach’s chord has been incorporated, though in a somewhat veiled manner (see Ex. 7.6, 7.7, and 7.8). The other sonorities use “stacked fifths,” a stylistic feature of many of Reich’s works since Eight Lines (1979), particularly prominent in Tehillim (1981), which

Example 7.5 Harmonic reduction of mm. 657–84.

Example 7.6 Harmonic reduction of mm. 810–32.

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Example 7.7 Harmonic reduction of mm. 833–66.

Example 7.8 Harmonic reduction of mm. 867–901.

Example 7.9 Harmonic reduction of mm. 685–727.

Example 7.10 Harmonic reduction of measures 728–809.

can be traced back to a song Reich wrote in 1957, citing the influence of Béla Bartók in the opening of the second movement of his Second Piano Concerto (1931)65 (see Ex. 7.9 and 7.10). This ambiguous merging of several triads has the result of suspending time, converting sequential sonorities into a static, frozen “now” that (as with the slow-motion and stop-action sound techniques) is extended, suggesting the timelessness of the afterlife, and thereby reflecting structurally the “World to Come” in a way that recalls Lang’s comments, in addition to being a fitting depiction of the time distortions involved in traumatic experiences.66 Reich’s homage to Bach is not only one of personal adulation (in Reich’s view Bach is “the greatest composer who ever lived in the West”),67 but could be seen as something transcendent, similar to how works by “past masters” such as Beethoven, Brahms, and Mahler are used at times of crisis and upheaval, as discussed by Adams.68

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Conclusion The perception of Reich’s docu-music as detached and objective—and thereby eminently suitable in responding to trauma—is challenged by closer examination of his creative processes, which resonates with leading documentary filmmaker John Grierson’s description of the medium as “the creative treatment of actuality”69 or Richard MacCann’s description as “something more special than straight reporting, something unique and rather wonderful—factual, yet artistically arranged.”70 Scrutiny of sketch materials indicates that WTC 9/11 is a far more personal and constructed response than its docu-music approach may lead us to believe, with several preconceived ideas at play in its creative evolution. The high level of authorial influence (or even “intervention”) reveals an artist at work, searching for an authentic, personal response to trauma, and utilizing musical techniques inherent to his style. Autobiographical elements emerge in Reich’s speech-based works throughout his career. The dark mood of It’s Gonna Rain (1965) reflected his pessimism following a difficult divorce and during a time of nuclear threat, soon after the Cuban Missile Crisis.71 Different Trains (1988) is based in Reich’s childhood experience of traveling on trains between New York and Los Angeles to be with one or the other of his divorced parents, at a time when other Jewish children, in Europe, were on trains to Nazi camps. City Life (1995) is the composer’s farewell memento to New York City and a way for him to recollect the sounds he had heard daily while living there for thirty years. His move to Vermont was prompted by frustration with increasing noise and pollution, reflected in the third movement’s title “It Has been a Honeymoon—Can’t Take No Mo’,” and the work evokes the sense of impending danger that Reich experienced following the first major terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in 1993. WTC 9/11 keeps with this tendency by exploring aspects inherently personal to the composer. It is not surprising to find a composer personally involved in his subject, especially one so close to home. Reich comments:  “Certainly I  wouldn’t have written WTC 9/11 if I  hadn’t been involved in it personally.  .  .  . [It] was a very powerful experience, not just something I  watched on television but something that intruded right into my personal family life.”72 Reich’s autobiographical approach to the creative process reflects his experience: “This was not some media event for me . . . it was a terrifying personal experience that I will never forget. . . . [It] impacted me directly. You’re being tapped on the shoulder and told, ‘Hey man, this is yours. This is your part of the story.’ ”73 During interviews he conducted for the work, the composer sometimes interjected with personal reflections on his experiences of 9/11, as in the following:

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I lived during the war—I saw these photos, you know; Cologne, Dresden; and Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and then I went down there to see it . . . and I actually saw it. . . . I just, I broke down, because it all . . . I mean, now it’s in my backyard and I didn’t want to go back down there again.74

Reich’s approach to WTC 9/11 has resulted in a work that has the potential to evoke strong emotions for listeners, especially for someone who experienced the events such as Rob Haskins, who said, “Never in my wildest imagination could I envision a piece of music that had the capability to resurrect the sense of fear, dread, and hopelessness that I felt that day. Reich’s new work does that.”75 WTC 9/11 also promotes a reflection of life beyond 9/11, fulfilling an important challenge articulated by Peter Tregear, who writes: When using art commemoratively the challenge of both artists and critics alike should be not simply to help us remember epochal events and their impact upon us, but also to enable the much more difficult task of reflecting critically both on that past and ourselves.76

It also encouraged Reich to reflect on his own life and beyond. When discussing the inclusion of part of the Wayfarer’s prayer chanted by the cantor in the third movement, he has commented: “It’s actually from Exodus. . . . [It] means: ‘Behold, I send an angel before you, to keep you, on the way, and to bring you, to the place that I have prepared’ and I hope somebody says that when I’m in that position.”77 Reich’s outlook is optimistic: “I believe there is a World to Come and I have no more idea about it than David Lang does but I hope I get there.”78

Notes 1. 9/11 refers to the four coordinated terrorist attacks by al-Qaeda in the United States of America on September 11, 2001. 2. For example, British composer Tansy Davies said of her opera Between Worlds (2015), “I don’t think it could have been done earlier.” Quoted in Maddocks 2015. 3. This comment resulted in the cancellation of scheduled performances of Stockhausen’s works, including a performance of Stimmung by Ossia, a music group run by students at the Eastman School of Music. Scherzinger 2007, 96. 4. Wroe 2008. 5. Palestinian Liberation Organization terrorists hijacked the cruise ship Achille Lauro and killed Jewish passenger Leon Klinghoffer in 1985. See Bohn 2004. 6. DePont 2011. 7. Gordon 2007. 8. Corigliano 2010.

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9. Reich did, however, mention a “work in progress” as early as 2002 (Midgette 2002). 10. Taruskin 2008. 11. Fisher and Flota 2011, 4. 12. Fendrich, quoted in Fujimura 2001, 72. 13. Alkalay-Gut 2005, 257–58. 14. Aronson 2003, 28. 15. Petridis 2011, 10:53–11:55. 16. The public domain recordings obtained from NORAD reveal the drama that unfolded when it was realized that American Airlines Flight 11 (the first plane to crash into the World Trade Center) was not on course. These recordings are available online: https://archive.org/details/NORADU SN O RT HC OM _ 0 9 _ 1 1 _ 0 1 _ Tap e s _ g ov e r n m e nt at t i c . or g _ R e l e a s e d _ Apr_9_2008/NORAD-USNORTHCOM_09_11_01_Tapes_governmentattic. org_Released_Apr_9_2008/DRM1_DAT2_Channel_2_MCC_Op.mp3. 17. Both Different Trains and WTC 9/11 were composed for the Kronos Quartet. 18. Lane 2006, 9. 19. Reich n.d.b. The music for Different Trains is based on excerpts of the recorded testimony of five individuals, including Holocaust survivors and figures relevant to Reich’s personal experience. Reich 1989. 20. Steve Reich, “Different Trains,” liner notes for Different Trains/Electric Counterpoint compact disc (Nonesuch 79176-2, 1989). 21. Kim 2000. 22. Quoted in Reich 2002b, 198–99. 23. Currin 2011. 24. Schwarz 1980–81, 379. 25. Gephart 2011. 26. Scherzinger 2007, 93. 27. Davidson 1999. 28. Moehlis 2012. 29. Day 2011. 30. For a discussion of the connection see Suárez 2008, 82. 31. M. Morris 2004, 61–62. 32. Moehlis 2012. 33. Tingen 1995, 12. 34. Tsioulcas 2011. 35. Reich 2010. 36. Reich n.d.a. 37. Moehlis 2012. 38. Tsioulcas 2011. 39. Reich 2013b. 40. Adams also included temporal distortions in his response to 9/11, On the Transmigration of Souls (2001), describing “a kind of density of texture that I wanted to capture in the music, but in an almost freeze-frame slow motion.” Adams 2002.

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41. M. Morris 2004, 63. 42. See Stout and Lewis 2006. 43. The original speech excerpt was saved with the title “My G-d Ahhh.” Reich n.d.b. 44. Reich 2013b. 45. Reich 2011b, 0:41–0:53. 46. Reich n.d.b. 47. Interviews were conducted from January 18 to October 6, 2010. Reich n.d.b. 48. Reich mostly adhered to this list of questions, although he sometimes deviated to related questions, for example: “Did you know anybody who was in the Trade Center?” He also prepared additional lists of questions for specific individuals. Reich n.d.b. 49. Reich n.d.b. 50. Brown and Dillon 2012. 51. Reich n.d.b. 52. Reich n.d.b. 53. No excerpts were used from this interview excerpt, they are included here to illustrate Reich’s interview process. Reich n.d.b. 54. Reich n.d.b. 55. Reich n.d.b. Reich’s choice of C major for the third movement is explained in the following section of this chapter. 56. In a journal for Different Trains, Reich wrote: “The REAL PROBLEM is putting together more than one speech sample and getting it into notation!!!” (February 2, 1988. Reich n.d.b.). He also remarked in an interview that “People don’t speak in a fixed tempo or key . . . so every section of Different Trains is in a different key or a different tempo.” Riefe 2013. 57. Reich 2013b. 58. Reich also composed Cello Counterpoint (2003) for Beiser. 59. Reich n.d.b.; Reich 2011b. 60. Reich n.d.b. 61. A. Ford 2012, 8:33–8:48. 62. Reich recorded a cantor from the Lincoln Square Synagogue, Sherwood Goffin, who chanted part of the Wayfarer’s prayer from Exodus. Reich 2013b. 63. Reich n.d.b. 64. Ibid. 65. Potter 2000, 156. 66. M. Morris 2004, 63. 67. Strickland 1991, 36. 68. Adams 2009, 262. 69. Grierson 1966, 13. 70. MacCann 1973, 11. 71. Strickland 1991, 190. 72. Day 2011. 73. Berger 2011; Currin 2011.

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Reich n.d.b. Haskins 2011, 155. Tregear 2007, 168. A. Ford 2012, 8:08–8:32. Ibid., 10:29–10:36.

PART III REICH REVISITED Sketch Studies

8 “Save as . . . »” Hybrid Resources in the Steve Reich Collection Matthias Kassel Ever since the Paul Sacher Stiftung (PSS) acquired the Steve Reich Collection in 2008, it has numbered among the foundation’s most frequently consulted holdings.* The main reason for this is, of course, the fame of Reich himself, whose works have been performed successfully the world over for some five decades and are widely available on sound recordings. Compared with the widespread popularity of Reich’s music, however, musicologists have tended to stand aloof from it, owing first of all to an academic mentality focused mainly on historical progress, but also on the subject itself and the state of the sources. True, studies of Reich’s music already began to appear early in his career, but seldom were the authors able to penetrate deeply into the substance of his pieces, for Reich generally avoided detailed explanations not specifically related to performances or central compositional ideas. At times his published statements, being rarely subject to verification against the sources, were elevated to the level of axioms with a tendency toward mythification, thereby doing a disservice both to scholars and to the subject itself. Some of the chapters in this volume reveal just how far and across such wide areas the level of research has risen since the PSS opened its Steve Reich Collection. Several of the authors pursued their studies on the basis of original sources preserved in the Sacher archive, and in every case it transpires that the structural, harmonic, and thematic intricacies underlying Reich’s artistic ideas are far more complex than his purportedly “minimalistic” music would seem to imply. In this chapter, I begin with some thoughts on the PSS’s general collection policies and proceed to a brief discussion of the structure of the Steve Reich Collection, thereby providing a context for the source studies in this volume and information for future research projects. Beginning with the manuscript holdings, I will discuss two historical layers of material under the catchwords “hybrid-analog” and “hybrid-digital.” These two generic crossovers lend the

* This chapter was originally written in German and was translated to English by J. Bradford Robinson. 179

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collection its specific character, in terms of archival practice and media analysis, and place special demands both on the archive itself and on scholars studying the sources.

Paper Archive and Context In its basic philosophy, the PSS was designed to be an archive for the preservation and study of musical manuscripts related to composed music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and it was as such that it opened in 1986. Its workplaces and shelf space were therefore aligned on the conservation and examination of paper sources, inter alia with air-conditioned storage, an ongoing strategy of photographic reproduction, passive and proactive custodial measures such as acid-free wrappers, and, in some cases, restorative stabilization. As a result, studies tended to focus on manuscript and sketch analysis, as is reflected in many of the articles published in the PSS’s annual bulletin.1 Yet the PSS’s holdings are not limited to handwritten working papers. In order to study synchronic and diachronic contexts and lines of evolution, not only in the music itself but also in the individual’s ties to institutions and other people, it is essential to have appropriate contextual documents as well. Often ties of this sort can only be inferred from correspondence, program leaflets, photographs, or other supporting material. For this reason, the PSS incorporates all musically relevant contexts in its collections wherever possible. Moreover, the act of musical creation has harbored a general tendency toward multimedia expansion. This tendency, no longer restricted to experimental working methods, has been reinforced by the widespread distribution and accessibility of technical means for recording and processing music in the twentieth century. Given the structurally multimedial nature inherent by definition in our modes of composition, performance, and perception,2 even creative musicians with a staunchly traditional modus operandi will at some point accumulate workshop and performance materials outside the medium of writing—that is, physical objects that augment the paper source material. In the case of electronic music, live electronics, or works created entirely on tape (we need only think of Reich’s It’s Gonna Rain and Come Out), such media may even stand in lieu of paper sources. However, when manuscript holdings are expanded with an eye to extratextual and receptionaesthetic contexts, this adds a completely new dimension—a layer of nonwritten materials directly related to the genesis and substance of the work in question. Rather than positing an extrinsic relation between written text and supporting material, here we must assume that they have equivalent status in an intermedial context.3 In the following, I will discuss examples of this from the Steve Reich Collection.

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The Steve Reich Papers In its basic substance, the Steve Reich Collection consists first and foremost of written material. The very first consignment from the composer, a large body of materials delivered in 2008, contained handwritten sources for all of his works completed to date, from Music for Two or More Pianos or Piano and Tape (1964) to what was then his most recent creation, Double Sextet (2006–7).4 Reich augmented these holdings in two subsequent consignments of 2010 and 2013, extending the material available for study to the string quartet WTC 9/11, completed in 2011. The manuscript section of the collection made it possible to carry out textual investigations of Reich’s music in the same way as with every other collection in the archive.5 As a rule, this material is classified by work in dossiers combining sketches, drafts, fair copies, annotated copies, and printed scores for every piece concerned. One peculiarity of the Steve Reich Collection is the large number of sketchbooks that he compiled continuously from the 1960s. Their significance for the genesis of his works and their underlying ideas, and thus for analytical research, cannot be overstated. There are now fifty such sketchbooks in the archive (Reich himself calls them “note books”) containing notes, sketches, and drafts for the pieces he was currently working on, as well as discarded material and rough ideas, transcriptions and pattern studies, verbal notes, and much else besides. Despite his turn toward computer-aided working methods, Reich still sets down many of his important ideas in writing, so that his sketchbooks also contain basic information on his most recent pieces. It is here that any study of his music must begin.

Hybrid-Analog: Paper Plus Tape Ever since the tape pieces It’s Gonna Rain (1965) and Come Out (1966), Reich’s oeuvre has contained compositions for, or with, magnetic tape. As a result, his collection also includes nonwritten archival documents that provide information on the elaboration of these media layers. Here, I am not referring primarily to the audio material that accompanies compositions in the ancillary form of live recordings of rehearsals or performances. His collection does contain documents of this sort, which may indeed shed valuable light on a work’s history. One especially interesting example is the many tapes for his “work in progress” Music for 18 Musicians (1976), which bear witness to its lengthy gestation with the participating performers.6 The collection also has many live recordings of performances made since the 1960s, some of which bring to life key markers in the work’s reception history. However, the magnetic tapes for his tape compositions, as well as the performance tapes for such pieces as the Counterpoint series,7 or Different Trains (1988), are far more important. Rather

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than being secondary to the particular work, they constitute an intrinsic component, whether as an integral part or as an intermedial addition. In these cases, analytic studies that ignore cross-media components can only illustrate partial aspects of the work in question. Of the several hundred units in the tape archive of the Steve Reich Collection, special mention should be made of audio materials from the early stages of his compositions. Examples include several “sketch tapes” that functioned as storage tools in Reich’s studio. We also find source recordings, sometimes quite extensive, that gave rise to the material for the documentary layer of Different Trains, as well as various “work tapes” for The Cave (1993) and several other pieces. Such aural “snapshots” allow us to retrace the acoustical control points that Reich inserted during the act of composition and to examine them as preliminary stages en route to the work’s final form. The parallels to working with handwritten sketches and drafts are obvious and stand out sharply in Reich’s working methods, allowing us to speak of interlinked source materials with a “hybrid-analog” media approach. Here “hybrid” refers to the fact that the media components always relate to the written sources. The sound documents preceding the compositional process and the control recordings accompanying the act of creation are all manifest in the written material, for example, in the form of transcriptions or later revisions of the musical text. The term “analog” refers here to the fact that the material is rooted in the outdated area of analog media and must consequently be stored and assessed with their particular technical requirements in mind. This applies to audio material dating well into the 1990s, before digital technology finally spread through all media.8

Hybrid-Digital: Paper, Data, and Back Again By the mid-1980s, the computer had found its way into Steve Reich’s studio. His goal, as is well known, was not computer music per se, with its programmed experiments in synthesizing sounds and scores; rather, from the very outset he used the computer as a technological aid both in creating scores and parts and in arranging and assembling audio sources and performance tapes. As far as archiving and source analysis are concerned, this means that his formerly analog-written working materials and media expansions increasingly came to contain digital variants. But it does not mean that pure computer-aided media analysis is now necessary to make the relevant sources accessible. As with the hybrid-analog parts of the collection, the switch to computer files did not entail a complete realignment of his working methods. Instead, again we find media crossovers, so that for the time being I refer to these sources as “hybrid-digital.” As musical notation was also digitized, this now affected not only the audio material but also the elaboration of Reich’s scores, a task previously done entirely by hand. Not only that, it need hardly be emphasized that computerization also

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affected the contextual areas of the collection—photographs, program leaflets, working correspondence, and much else besides. Many things now arose in a digital format from the very beginning (i.e., they were “born digital”) and reached the archive in this form. Nevertheless, completely paperless composing remains a great rarity. As a rule, and as is the case with Reich, hybrid working methods apply to texts: paper documents such as sketches, working diagrams, overviews, verbal notes, and draft scores continue to be produced, whether by hand, as a computer printout, or as a combination of printout and handwritten annotations. Thus, a good many of the sketches for Different Trains were written down as usual in sketchbooks, but we also find various computer printouts with handwritten alterations. In addition, there are various analog-to-digital conversions in the audio expansions of Different Trains: 1. The original audio material, consisting of interviews and train noises, was recorded on analog magnetic tape. Snippets of this were digitized and processed for the composition and the prerecorded tape using a sampling keyboard and an Apple-Macintosh computer with sequencer software. 2. Analog rewrites of sections from the piece exist on so-called work tapes from various phases of the computer processing. In other words, Reich overwrote several control recordings from the sampler setup on his tape recorder in order to listen to them later. 3. The recording originally intended for performance purposes is in fact a prerecorded tape, that is, the version composed on the computer was transferred to analog magnetic tape. Four-track and stereo versions of such performance tapes are preserved in the collection. Today the publisher provides a CD recording digitized from these tapes.9 Despite these transitional areas between handwritten music and auxiliary analog or digital medium, conventional analytic studies of Different Trains are still appropriate. The sketchbooks and the partly annotated computer printouts have much to say about the work’s gestation, and a comparison with the surviving tape recordings conveys a vivid picture of the overall conception.10 For a complete study, however, it is essential to consult the computer data, which involves entering uncharted archival and analytic territory. A brief description of the state of the sources from the archive’s standpoint will serve to illustrate this point. Besides handwritten documents, the first consignment of Reich’s papers also contained several hundred data storage devices (DD and HD diskettes, 44 MB cartridges, ZIP cartridges, etc.). The initial inspection at the archive revealed many different ways in which the digital data had rapidly deteriorated: 1. A large number of the diskettes, now fifteen to twenty years old, were already unreadable and had to be set aside for future technically demanding and costly salvaging operations.

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2. Most of the diskettes were formatted and written in obsolete operating systems, such as Mac OS 6 and OS 7 in the case of Different Trains, necessitating the use of a historic computer. 3. Similarly, the versions of the software programs employed are only partly operable and are further restricted by active copy protection features to prevent their reinstallation. Transferring such obsolete files into current computer systems often requires the use of several intermediate versions, not all of which are currently available. 4. Should the transferal be successful, the stored file information (dates of creation and modification, software and hardware versions, etc.) is automatically altered by the new system, making it difficult to localize such data in the creative process. 5. Furthermore, the sampler Reich used to write some of the HD diskettes (manufactured by Casio) made use of a proprietary format and lacks reliable functionality today, even when given large amounts of time. As a result, these diskettes, too, cannot be studied without difficulties. This is only a small sample of the problems still to be solved before the data material can be completely accessed. In an ideal world, the process should end with every file completely broken down in a searchable database and with the metadata captured with maximum accuracy.11 The technical complications I have just outlined reveal that we still have a long way to go before we reach this end. To keep interested scholars from waiting unnecessarily, the digital section of the Steve Reich Collection was given a purely pragmatic temporary system. Though sometimes clumsy in its handling of older data, it provides enough information to answer most of the questions asked. A  technologically up-todate workstation is available to study the sequencer and music notation files. For older works, such as Different Trains, we also employ earlier Mac models with the OS 9 operating system and operable versions of the software programs that Reich himself used at the time, thereby making it possible to read many of the files and to display the original folder hierarchy created from the diskette images (see Fig. 8.1).12 This historical system, which closely resembles the original version’s environment, allows us to open and examine many of the music and text files for Different Trains and some of Reich’s later compositions. Not only that, the accessible file information proves to be fairly stable and can be used in addition to Reich’s own storage system and naming habits to explore the chronology of his creative work. At the same time, several wholly novel problems crop up. The first is purely quantitative: though it is reasonable to expect two or three draft scores or several performance tape versions to exist for a particular work, the processing of a large number of file versions quickly turns into a mare’s nest. This is already apparent in the still relatively manageable body of data for Different Trains. In the screen

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Figure 8.1 Steve Reich, Different Trains (1988), screenshot of the folder structure in list form (Steve Reich Collection, PSS).

shot in Figure 8.1, only two of a total of thirteen main folders were expanded. When the other folders are opened (Fig. 8.2), we are suddenly confronted with a list of more than 470 objects, bursting the limits of the screen. These objects must first be classified by format and temporal location before their files can be examined. In this case, some of them can presumably be compared with existing paper sources and assigned a place in the work’s genesis. But it is plain to see that the road to the text-critical verification of these assignments is narrow and thorny. Moreover, media classifications of this sort involve a few unusual sources of errors: 1. It is only at a lower folder level that the dates displayed in columns two and three refer to Reich’s original dates (1988), whereas the dates of the main folders refer to the date of the copy operation at the Archive (2012–13).13 Further, it must be assumed that the sequence of times of day is at best relative: whether they relate to the local time zone in Reich’s original system (EST) or to that of the system employed at the archive (MEZ) can only be determined definitively via the resource code of the individual files. 2. Similarly, the program assignments in column five are reliable only with reservations, as they are dependent on the program versions installed in the archive’s system. The identification of the Professional Composer documents is probably correct, as this software program was so specific and short-lived that misinterpretations of this format are highly unlikely. In contrast, the assignment of “Different Trains Sequence 1st” in folder 5 (Fig. 8.1, line 8) to Performer 6.02 reveals just such a shift, as version

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Figure 8.2 Steve Reich, Different Trains (1988), screenshot of the folder structure in expanded list form (Steve Reich Collection, PSS).

6.02 (1998) was installed in the archive, whereas Reich had presumably switched to Digital Performer (available from 1990) long before Performer 6.02 was released. True, the version installed in the archive easily reads the older files, since this software program remained backward-compatible for an extraordinarily long period of time. But there are bound to be slight discrepancies in function and display. 3. A  related source of error lurks in the system-dependent assignment of file formats to standard programs.14 Difficulties result above all in older Mac data, for in its earlier versions this environment, unlike DOS and Windows systems, made do without such filename extensions. Instead, the connection to the software program was written directly into the files’ code. As the program assignment is invariably defined and modifiable within the system concerned, files may at times be accessed by the wrong program or by a different version, as illustrated by the preceding example of Performer files. In many cases this may not pose any problems; after all, the substance of the file becomes recognizable. But for exact text-critical

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access it is important to reconstruct the original environment, though this is often impossible in practice (we need only think of the time lapse or the use of little-known special programs). Further, the use of established exchange formats, such as MIDI control data (.mid) in music notation and sequencing programs, or digital audio data (.wav, .mp3, etc.), is not invariably helpful, for the contexts of the original operating system are not transmitted, severely limiting the text-critical analysis.15

Work in Progress In many respects, all further processing of the Steve Reich Collection must be considered a work in progress. First of all, this applies in a biographical sense, for we have the good fortune to be dealing with documentation compiled during the composer’s lifetime and can hope to expect many more works from him. But the material already available in the archive is still being documented, as is the case with other collections at the PSS. In particular, the manuscripts must still be completely cataloged for long-term preservation on microfilm. This custodial desideratum, too, is no longer performed with analog technology but by using a digital scanning process followed by a printout of the backup films to produce a complete set of picture files for all the manuscript pages. This will resolve the previous dilemma, namely, that access to the originals must be limited for custodial reasons and can be ensured only with the aid of sometimes unsatisfactory archival reproductions. In future, filmed documents from PSS collections will be accessible on the computer screen, in color and with all the scaling and contrast options made possible by digital image display. Hybriddigital holdings, such as Steve Reich’s work dossiers since Different Trains, will benefit from this, for research work can then take place to a large extent on the screen, so that the digitized manuscripts and their “born digital” counterparts can be examined in parallel.16 There is no question that the “digital revolution” will continue to spread in the creation of music.17 An archive traditionally devoted to manuscripts, as is the PSS, will also have to face this problem if it wants to continue offering adequate research opportunities in the future. Though relatively small sets of digital holdings had already entered the PSS in several of its collections, the acquisition of the Steve Reich Collection finally made it imperative to develop a long-term strategy for archiving digital and hybrid-digital documents. Despite the short life spans of digital formats, this orientation must be envisioned over a period of decades, making it essential to evaluate and test the approach with great care. The archival progress may at times seem sluggish when viewed from the outside, but the fault lies solely with the care that must be taken and our obligation toward future generations. The Steve Reich Collection is a casebook example of the development and testing of a stable long-term methodology.

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Presumably manuscripts and other paper documents will become rarer in the future. This is already immediately evident in the work of Reich, who, after twenty years’ experience with computerized notation and audio editing, now works much less by hand than ever before, as can be seen in the gradual increase of digital working documents from his media expansions of The Cave (1993), Three Tales (2002), and most recently WTC 9/11 (2010). But, as long as there are compositions for—and performances with—musicians and sheet music (and I wager that this will continue for some time to come), this area of musical culture will persist in the hybrid-digital mode. Text criticism in music will follow suit; indeed, it already does.18 The rest is still up in the air.

Notes 1. The research papers from the Mitteilungen der Paul Sacher Stiftung can be found on the PSS’s website: www.paul-sacher-stiftung.ch/en/research-publications/ publications/official-bulletin.html. 2. See, for example, Cook 1998. 3. The various modes of the concept of context are discussed in Danuser 2010, reprinted in Hinrichsen, Schaper, and Spaltenstein 2014, 104–23. 4. See the announcement of the new Steve Reich Collection in Sacher 2009, 6–8. 5. Hall and Sallis shed light on methods of sketch and manuscript analysis using examples from various archives. The PSS is discussed there by Mosch with examples from the Luciano Berio Collection (Mosch 2004, 17–31). See also Sallis 2015. 6. See, for example, Keith Potter’s chapter in this volume. 7. Vermont Counterpoint (1982), New  York Counterpoint (1985), Electric Counterpoint (1987), and Cello Counterpoint (2003). 8. At present, I use the terms “hybrid-analog” and “hybrid-digital” mediality or media features on a provisional basis for archiving purposes in order to make a rough classification of these two major evolutionary stages in musical working methods. Thus “medium” always refers to the name given to documentary units in archival practice, i.e., basically to a container or repository of contents to be described separately. The complete description of an archival medium, whether digital or analog, falls into several sections and classifies inter alia technical metadata (type, format, size of repository, etc.), content metadata (authors, title, size, etc.), and the actual contents as parts of a unit. 9. Published editions of Different Trains for String Quartet and Pre-recorded Performance Tape: set of parts for Quartet 1 with CD of audio tape (New York: Hendon Music / Boosey & Hawkes, 1998)  [HL48001582]. Study score with written-out Quartets 1–4 (New York: Hendon Music / Boosey & Hawkes, 1998) [Hawkes pocket scores, 1168; HL48002256]. 10. See, for example, Zimmermann 2011.

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11. The metadata include the type and name of the data medium, the folder path, the name of the file (i.e., its assignment to a work), the file type, the dates of creation and modification, and so forth. 12. At present it is still fairly easy to find operable computers from generations dating back to the 1980s or 1990s, whether from responsible curators who forgot to dispose of their old equipment, or from international secondhand equipment dealers on the Internet. Historical software packages with viable versions of music software, with its often ingenious copy protection mechanisms, are much harder to come by. What this situation will look like in twenty to thirty years’ time is anybody’s guess. 13. Fortunately, the original dates in the old system environment were not modified when the data were mirrored. Extreme caution is called for in more recent systems, for beginning with System 10 (aka Mac OS X), the consistency of the dates is no longer ensured even within the Mac’s own data mirroring facility. 14. All computer users know this from their own experience. Files indexed with “.doc” and “.docx” are opened by the word (or, more accurately, text) processor, “.jpg” or “.tif ” by the picture editor, and so forth. 15. The world still awaits an established standard format for music notation or sequencing data that will enable files to be exchanged between the various programs. Promising attempts such as MusicXML are still at the development stage, and it is questionable whether commercial software providers will take a liking to such open formats at all. 16. The same distinction applies to documents subsequently digitized in the archive, whether these be audio, video, or image documents. The decisive factor in text-critical source evaluation is always the original form of appearance. 17. See Lehmann 2012; Borio 2015. 18. See Feller 2004, 176–88, as well as the chapters by Twila Bakker, Celia Casey, and John Pymm in this volume.

9 Sketching a New Tonality A Preliminary Assessment of Steve Reich’s Sketches for Music for 18 Musicians in Telling the Story of This Work’s Approach to Tonality Keith Potter Introduction In 2000, I wrote that, from Piano Phase (1967) onward, the considerable majority of Reich’s compositions would begin with the establishment of a musical idea with a modal pitch profile. The implications of this then determine both the structure and the expressive qualities of the subsequent work. With the background and beliefs already described, the character of Reich’s new modality comes as no surprise. There was at this time, indeed, he says, “an assumption that was pretty much the case with all of us” that diatonicism of some kind would form the basis for such music.1

But what exactly was that “diatonicism of some kind?”2 How did Reich himself conceive it, and how has he then developed his concept and practice of it during the half-century in which he has since been composing? And what, for the music analyst, are the most appropriate ways to conceptualize that evolving approach to harmony, and to use these to find and then deploy analytical methodologies that will cast new light on how these compositions may best be understood— and listened to? It should be added at this point that no comprehensive theory of Reichian tonal practice could avoid addressing further questions as well. How does the composer’s harmonic language interact with the rhythmic repetition on which his approach to minimalism was founded? Does the balance between the importance of rhythm and the importance of pitch as compositional determinants shift as Reich’s output develops; and, if so, in what kinds of ways and with what outcomes? No theory of harmony, arguably, can work in a vacuum, especially one seeking to understand music that, however far it subsequently moved from its origins, began with an approach that took not pitch structure but rhythmic repetition as its “sine qua non.” These are just a few of the many questions that must be answered if a comprehensive theory of Reich’s tonal practice is to be achieved. The present chapter

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does not aspire to such heights but offers merely some glimpses of the sort of answers to a few of those questions that can be opened up by study of the composer’s sketch materials for Music for 18 Musicians of 1974–76. Regarded— from the time of its first performances and, especially, its initial recording (issued in 1978)3 right up to the present—as Reich’s magnum opus, 18 Musicians seems the natural work with which to commence a fresh investigation into this composer’s harmonic language now made possible by access to his extensive sketches.4

Modality and Tonality, Modes and Chords Twenty years ago, Jonathan W. Bernard implicated the idiosyncratic nature and extent of repetition to be found in minimalist music when he warned that the so-called “return to harmony” or even “return to tonality,” much remarked upon by critics, is (at least in the case of Reich and Adams) really an appropriation of harmony for purposes that are essentially new and not yet at all well understood. To assume that composers, by retrieving such superficially familiar sonorities as triads and major-minor seventh chords, have also taken on, whether intending to or not, the hierarchical nature of common-practice tonality (if not its specific structures) may be assuming far too much.5

Eight years after issuing this admonition, Bernard identified “four basic stages”6 to “tell the story of what happened after [the] initial establishment of minimalism” in the 1960s. First, (1) Pieces became more complicated, which soon provoked (2) A greater concern with sonority in itself;

As a result of this, Bernard writes, the third and fourth “stages” of minimalist development ensued; and it is these that now clarify his original caution concerning “the return of tonality”: (3) pieces began sounding more explicitly “harmonic,” that is, chordally oriented, though not, at this point, necessarily tonal in any sense. Eventually, however, (4)  harmony of an ever more tonal (or neotonal, or quasi-tonal) aspect assumed primary control.  .  .  . [T]he hallmark devices of minimalism  .  .  .  were pushed into the background, where they became stylistic objects.7

So it is clear, on the one hand, that the approach to pitch organization to be found in works such as Piano Phase—while lending itself to description as modulating through a sequence emphasizing different pitch centers in turn—is probably best summed up as “modal,” not “tonal.” This work’s manifest avoidance

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of chordal structures for its harmonic basis, as well as its espousal of melodic material readily capable of being described in terms of a scale, or “mode,” make such a conclusion uncontroversial. On the other hand, it is far less clear that the approach to pitch organization to be found in, say, Music for 18 Musicians is best summed up as “tonal.” All published accounts of this work’s pitch structure develop an argument for its basis in a sequence of chords (taking off from the composer’s own description in the program notes for its first performances and, in particular, his liner notes to the work’s first recording).8 Yet in 18 Musicians—and possibly also with Reich’s later music, for all some works’ stated conceptual basis in chordal structures of various kinds—I would question whether the apparent umbilical cord between “tonal” and “chordal” is always meaningful either for the analyst of such music or for its listeners. Even if Piano Phase and 18 Musicians are to be regarded as examples of two quite different stages in Reich’s compositional development, as they commonly are, both these stages in his output share another fundamental principle behind his harmonic practice:  that of significant harmonic and tonal ambiguity. The outcomes of Piano Phase’s straightforwardly mode-derived approach, on the one hand, and those of 18 Musicians’ more complex integration of modal and chordal concerns, on the other, may actually be argued as being strikingly different in certain respects, not least in the potential that the latter work’s more subtle methodology has for building large-scale structures that are varied and satisfying. However, one thing that both works have in common is an equivocality concerning harmonies built from the bass upward. Piano Phase sidesteps such constructions completely by the drastically simple method—common to every minimalist piece that Reich wrote before Four Organs of 1970—of entirely avoiding all notes in the bass staff. No other mature work by Reich before Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices, and Organ of 1973 makes any use of the lower bass staff at all; in several of his notated, mature compositions written in the five years or so prior to Four Organs, Reich had used no note lower than middle C.  The reason lay in his antipathy to the functionality, which Reich thought inevitable, of the bass in determining and spelling out a tonal center and the relationships developed around this. In Four Organs, the composer considered that he had finally found a solution to the problem of handling the lower register in terms that had, for him, an acceptable level of ambiguity concerning what it said about the tonality of his music. Essentially, this conclusion revolves around the decision to treat the bass as the dominant, not the tonic, of his chordal vocabulary, and of the tonal grammar that he then proceeded to erect upon it. At its most radically reductive, Reich’s music can indeed be argued to question the theoretical frameworks previously devised for the kind of pitch vocabulary that he uses; and, similarly, to offer a range of what, in music-semiotic terms, might be referred to as “aesthesic” interpretations of the deployment of that pitch vocabulary in surprising contexts. Four Organs demonstrates that a

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triad-based chord in root position—here, in the form of what its composer calls a “single (dominant 11th) chord”9—can be used, as Ronald Woodley puts it, “to explore the inherent vertical (and implicitly, in real time, horizontal) tensions between the ‘tonic-ness’ and ‘dominant-ness’ of its harmonic components.”10 This work’s subjection of such harmonic material to extended repetition for around fifteen minutes, with all changes effected only very gradually, begins the process of what Woodley has elsewhere called Reich’s “interrogation of the Western classical tradition.”11 Such a chordal approach deploying what appears to be a kind of functional harmony is then taken up again in the pairs of oscillating chords that underpin Mallet, completed three years after Four Organs. This is the first of Reich’s mature compositions to engage, in a more obvious manner, with the notion of chordal progression itself, going beyond both the single basic modality behind each section of Piano Phase and the slowly changing versions of a single chord that articulate the unfolding of Four Organs. What Woodley calls the “quasiaugmentational expansion” of the latter composition is, in Mallet, put to work in a context more responsive to previous conventions of Western classical tonality. Here, the procedure takes its starting point from simple oscillations between pairs of chords able to function as repeating cadential figures, and even able to demonstrate a degree of functionality via their bass notes; not all the chordal vocabulary used, though, can always be easily described in the conventional terms of sevenths, ninths, and so on. The “putative tonal motion”12 thus generated is then also enhanced by an approach to tonal modulation between the four sections of Mallet, thus rendering the work as a whole as quite significant in Reich’s ongoing reconsideration of “diatonicism of some kind.” Unsurprisingly, this then becomes one of the models for 18 Musicians, on which work commenced around one year after the premiere performance of Mallet in May 1973.13 However, on April 8, 1974, early on in his sketches for 18 Musicians, Reich diagnosed that his “problem is to avoid re-writing Music for Mallet Inst. V & O again.”14 Clearly intending that his ambitious new conception, then scarcely begun, must break new ground, he writes that the “Solution” to this problem “is to concentrate now on new aspects of [the] piece.” These he identifies as particularly the ones exploring layered textures to produce a “double layer of augmentation.”

Music for 18 Musicians: New Light on the Nature of Its Tonality and the Role of the “Cycle of 11 Chords” How, then, might the groundwork now start to be laid to describe a Reichian theory of harmony? In 1978, while experimenting with the (then just-released) LP of Music for 18 Musicians in order “to figure out how the piece worked harmonically,”15 and to do this entirely from listening,16 the American composer

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and critic Tom Johnson decided that the work “is in a special kind of D major.” Suggesting that such music, and much else that he here labels the “new tonality,” “doesn’t have much to do with chord progressions”—though he later clarifies that he is fully aware of 18 Musicians’ chordal basis, as described in Reich’s program notes—Johnson goes on: Instead, you hear, basically, a scale, and the chords and melodies that arise may be any combination of notes from this scale. As there is no concern for the chord progressions that propelled traditional European music and that continue to propel most pop and folk music as well, there is no need for a strong bass line to carry the progressions. There is often, if not always, a tonal center, but this is usually just the note that comes up most often and at the most important points. It does not have much sense of finality. And when this tonal center changes or modulates, it is usually just a question of shifting the emphasis from one note to another, rather than bringing in a whole new set of chord progressions, as Beethoven would have done.

Johnson’s thoughtful account of the “new tonality” that he finds in 18 Musicians—which includes a perceptive interpretation of how “Reich shifts the tonal center frequently and quite craftily” in this work that casts interesting light on how chordal/scalic, or modal/tonal, distinctions might be said to operate here—is particularly notable for the way in which it draws attention to the ambiguity central to this and all of Reich’s other compositions. Such a reaction can now be used as a springboard to attempt a fuller account of the nature and function of harmony, and of the nature and role of tonal processes embodied by that harmony, in 18 Musicians, including as represented by the composer’s sketchbooks. Others besides Johnson have previously questioned the nature of 18 Musicians’ tonal grammar, and specifically the degree to which what Bernard called a “chordally oriented” approach is responsible for how this music unfolds for its listeners. Yet the “cycle of 11 chords played at the very beginning of the piece and repeated at the end,”17 using only a key signature of three sharps, on which Reich stated that the whole work was based, has long passed into the common currency of the discourse around what has become, for many, the key composition in Reich’s output. After all, 18 Musicians opens, and closes, with a statement of the complete sequence of eleven chords, which Reich labels “Pulse” in the final score, articulated as pulsing chords using both treble and bass notes, and with the entries of the instruments staggered, each rising to and falling away from forte in a dynamic arch: what the composer called “the rhythm of the human breath in the voices and wind instruments . . . gradually washing up like waves against the constant rhythm of the pianos and mallet instruments”; the resulting crescendi and diminuendi are one of the work’s most characteristic sounds. In between these “bookending” statements, sections based on each chord in turn are unfolded. As the composer puts it, describing the first stage of the main

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portion of the work, “While this pulsing chord is held for about five minutes a small piece is constructed on it.” This procedure then continues for all eleven chords, “[stretching] out . . . the basic pulsing harmony” of each one in a manner that Reich compares to the deployment of a cantus firmus in twelfth-century organum. The chord cycle is given, in the form familiar from its publication in several secondary sources, as Example 9.1. One significant element should be noted at once about this sketch:  its date. This is the only instance so far found, in the entire collection of the composer’s sketchbooks, of the basic chord cycle for 18 Musicians written out in exactly the form in which it has been familiar from other published sources since 1982.18 Yet Example 9.1 was copied out on February 1, 1989, around thirteen years after the work on which it is based was completed and premiered.

Example  9.1 February 1, 1989: untitled sketch for Music for 18 Musicians, recopying of “cycle of 11 chords,” dated “2/1/89,” Sketchbook  [39], whole page (Steve Reich Collection, PSS).

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There are, in fact, a few differences between Example 9.1 and the versions of the cycle of eleven chords already familiar from secondary sources. Besides occasional variations regarding the details of how these chords are notated— including their labeling (many published versions use Roman numerals), the basic note value used, and “stacking” arrangement and beaming—these differences are confined to changes to their voicing; in no case is there any difference in the actual pitch classes themselves.19 Why should Reich have returned to this chord sequence following completion of Different Trains (1988) and just as he was beginning to sketch ideas for The Cave (1993)? The answer seems to lie in the words on the previous page of this sketchbook. Trying out some simple melodic and harmonic material (the chord with notes in the bass staff moving in parallel fifths at the top of Example 9.1, prior to the statement of the 18 Musicians cycle of eleven chords, is another instance of this), he decides that what he presently needs for his new composition are “Equanimious [sic] Harmonies that move.”20 In apparent search of these, he decides to “Look at Music for 18—again.” As already noted, the composer’s original program and liner notes of 1976–78 underline the significance of thinking in chords, and of harmonic directionality. We must, though, be careful to note that Reich’s crucial statement here refers only to the work’s opening “Pulse,” and not to 18 Musicians as a whole: “There is more harmonic movement in the first five minutes of Music for 18 Musicians than in any other complete work of mine to this date.”21 We should, in beginning any attempt to interrogate the role of the cycle of eleven chords in the complete composition, additionally note the following further quotation from the same source: Although the movement from chord to chord is often just a revoicing, inversion, or relative minor or major of a previous chord, usually staying within the key signature of three sharps at all times, nevertheless, within these limits, harmonic movement plays a more important role here than in any of my earlier pieces.

The relatively modest scope of the variety of chord types involved evidently places self-imposed limitations not only on the chordal vocabulary itself but also on the extent to which it can generate harmonic motion. Treating the combination of treble and bass as a single entity, it is nevertheless possible to attempt a brief description at this point of the nature of those chord types and to demonstrate a degree of tonal progression behind this sequence of chords as a whole. I have elsewhere described the cycle of eleven chords of 18 Musicians as being constructed on the principle of “stacked” fourths and fifths already familiar from Reich’s earlier music and derived, in part, from his enthusiasm for jazz. The three pitch classes of chord 1’s treble part, for example, are most readily labeled as D9, piling the notes D, A, and E into a “short stack” of perfect fifths. The two additional bass pitches, though, seem to ask the question as to whether chord

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1 as a whole is not, in fact, more meaningfully to be regarded as based on B. Its pitches can be conceptually regarded as continuing the “stacking” of the treble pitches, extending the sequence of perfect fifths above E with B and F♯. However, the emphasis on the tonic and dominant of B that the new total of five pitches also suggests (even though any chord on B would be a second inversion, since F♯ is the lowest note) allows this aggregate to be arranged in thirds, to give the label B minor11 (B, D, F♯, A, and E as the highest pitch in this conceptualization, which lacks the ninth that C♯ would have provided). Second-inversion chords of various kinds are characteristic (five chords in the cycle of eleven chords can be so construed). Such tonal evasiveness, measured by conventional kinds of music theory as derived from Western classical music, is typical of Reich’s approach, which probably draws its principles, ultimately, more from those to be found in various areas of jazz. The composer’s frequent recourse to labeling his harmonic materials modally—Dorian, Phrygian, and so on—doubtless derives, in significant part, from this source. Though I have not sought to use such labels as a resource here, this is a subject that would benefit from more research in the future.22 Thus, even a chord containing only five pitch classes can convey a considerable degree of ambiguity, even about its individual identity, never mind its function in any sequence of chords. All eleven chords in the cycle have only four, five, or six different pitch classes. Even those with four can yield ambiguities: the treble pitches of chord 3, for example, the first of these, strongly suggest an Abased tonality, but the addition of C♯ and F♯ in the bass makes the total aggregate an F♯ minor7 chord. The chords with six pitch classes (chords 5, 6, and 9) are capable both of greater ambiguity taken separately and of functioning in quite subtle and complex ways to help create any tonal context. “Local” revoicings and inversions—for instance, the way in which the E appearing only in the upper octave of chord 1’s treble part is then added to the lower octave of chord 2 as well, both aggregates arguably being eleventh chords on B (with chord 1 a second inversion and chord 2 a root position)—make clear how subtle the “motion” from one chord to another can be. If, however, we regard chords 1 and 2 as offering different voicings of a IV chord in F♯ minor, then we can begin to make sense of the cycle of eleven chords as a whole in terms of harmonic movement. The B minor of chords 1 and 2 thus leads to the F♯ minor of chords 3 and 4. Up to this point, the number of pitch classes in each chord has been either four (chord 3) or five (chords 1, 2, and 4). Chords 5 and 6 increase the number of pitch classes to six, beginning the ambiguous harmonic movement in the direction of A major (or even the D major heard by Johnson) that will characterize the remainder of the sequence. F♯ minor is seemingly regained in chords 7 and 8 (four and five pitch classes, respectively), but another expansion to six pitch classes in chord 9 is the start of a final three-chord tendency to A major (or, again, even to D major). Since there are no accidentals in any of these chords (though pitches contradicting the key signature of three sharps

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are occasionally introduced into some sections of 18 Musicians itself, as immediately occurs with the G naturals in the oscillating chords of the middle part of section I), all eleven chords taken together could be interpreted as being in F♯ minor. Yet, as we have seen, the potential for a functionality that moves from F♯ minor (chords 1–4) to A major or D major (chords 5–11) is at least latent in this sequence.23 When Reich suggested, as quoted previously, that “harmonic movement plays a more important role here than in any of my earlier pieces,” did he, then, refer exclusively to the statements of the “Pulse” that frame the main body of the work? Or did he intend at least to infer that the whole composition was involved? On the one hand, the use of the word “here,” and the context of this passage in a paragraph beginning with a reference to “the first five minutes” of 18 Musicians, suggest the former. On the other, Reich’s reference, later in this program note, to the “opening 11-chord cycle” as “a kind of pulsing cantus for the entire piece”24 at least raises the issue of how far the “harmonic movement” of the “Pulse” may be inferred, and even perhaps aurally detected, in the composition as a whole. Meanwhile, the mention, toward the end of this note, of the “play of changing harmonic rhythm against constant melodic pattern” as “one of the basic techniques of this piece” clarifies the importance, for the composer himself, of a sense of harmony shifting in interesting new ways, even if this passage is clearly a description of the outcome of placing the kind of oscillating chords already mentioned, originally devised for Mallet, into fresh contexts with an effect that is evidently intended to be different from that found in the earlier work. * * * Before we can proceed any further with an argument about the nature of harmony and tonality in 18 Musicians, we must address the obvious objection to the kind of harmonic analysis of Example 9.1 indulged in earlier. The pitches in the treble staff and those in the bass were in fact conceived somewhat separately, and with a significant degree of independence. This has been known since some of the earliest commentaries on 18 Musicians: K. Robert Schwarz, for example, stated in 1982 that the bass line—that is, the sequence of the lowest notes of each chord, strung together in apparent imitation of the more familiar harmonic conventions of Western classical music—is in reality “no more than decorative.”25 Nearly twenty years later, the present author—basing my comments on, among other sources, personal interviews with the composer—suggested that “the independence of treble and bass, and the greater importance of the former over the latter, is maintained throughout [the work].”26 It appears, also, that what began as a “treble-dominated” approach typical of Reich’s earlier manner was modified only at a subsequent stage of 18 Musicians’ evolution by the suggestion, made by one of the players during initial rehearsals, to add a bass clarinet to the work’s still-undecided instrumentation, thus causing lower pitches to be added to the opening “Pulse.”

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Some Further Evidence from Reich’s Sketchbooks concerning the Evolution of the Cycle of Eleven Chords The sketchbooks, not available for inspection at the time that either Schwarz or I was writing, tell this story in much greater detail. These now provide evidence for some of what could only previously be gleaned from the composer directly and from perusal of what versions of the score were available at the time.27 They also now permit a much more nuanced interpretation of the nature and significance of Reich’s evolving harmonic language for Music for 18 Musicians, giving us much more information to be able to assess more rigorously the nature and significance in this story of the separation of treble and bass pitches to which reference was made earlier in the chapter. In addition, these sketches may make it possible to establish the position occupied by oscillating chords derived from the example of Mallet in an account of the evolution of the cycle of eleven chords in the later work. If harmonic motion were indeed to take a significant step forward in Reich’s practice via the struggle to achieve a new kind of tonal thinking, then the chords of Example 9.1 might be expected to play the originally determining and overall controlling role in the evolution of the compositional process as represented by Reich’s extensive sketches for this work. Extrapolating from this hypothesis, the first problem that the composer would have to solve might logically be expected to be the establishment of the details of the harmonic vocabulary appropriate to the demands of such a new grammar of goal-directed harmonic motion. His second problem would logically then be to compose out the details of how the grammar of such a harmonic motion unfold via a chord-by-chord application of this sequence itself. However, the early pages of sketches for 18 Musicians provide clear evidence that the starting points for the work were neither specifically chordal nor more than tangentially about pitch in any way, but predominantly textural and timbral, and then to some degree rhythmic/metric. No pitch material of any kind, chordal or melodic, occurs in the initial draft of ideas for the work.28 When, then, does the cycle of eleven chords of Example 9.1 make its first appearance in Reich’s sketches for 18 Musicians, and what role does it play in the work’s germination as evidenced by this crucial source? A  reasonable answer to the first question would read: not until December 15, 1974, when what has already been described here as the treble pulsing of the final eleven-chord cycle begins to show itself, in part, via short sequences marked “Piano Pulse” that will eventually yield the complete sequence. This is, already, around one year after the very first ideas that might be regarded as contributing to the evolution of 18 Musicians were jotted down. Any answer to the second question, concerning the role of the cycle of eleven chords in the evolution of the whole work, can usefully be prefaced by some further explanation. Sketchbook evidence of the evolution of harmonic ideas, and

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the extent of any kind of coherent harmonic plan, reveals that two main kinds of material may be identified characterizing the earlier stages of work in this area. The first of these consists of pulsing chords or, sometimes, simply pulsing notes, usually high in the treble staff. The second consists of oscillating chords (establishing themselves in due course in pairs) that, from the outset, seem conceived to underpin the pulsing chords, or notes. These oscillating chords will immediately be familiar, to those who know Reich’s music well, as deriving from the chordal oscillations in the already mentioned Mallet. Though two more secondary types of material—what one might best call interlocking patterns and more clearly melodic material—also feature in the sketches working up the early ideas for 18 Musicians, pulsing chords and oscillating chords are the most important generators of harmonic ideas and, eventually, of tonal planning in the work. The evolving relationship between them becomes a vital aspect of the story behind the tonal evolution of 18 Musicians. But the question as to whether the dual harmonic “drivers” of pulsing chords and oscillating chords can be directly mapped onto the sequence of treble and bass pitches outlined earlier has yet to be answered. In the sketchbooks, the story behind 18 Musicians’ tonal evolution is a long one, taking its time, as already suggested, both to clarify the basic constituents of what only after considerable experimentation cohered as the cycle of eleven chords and to identify the complete sequence as the work’s main underpinning structure. In these early sketches, such chordal materials are notable both for the extent to which they are conceived separately from the cycle of eleven chords itself and for the extent to which they are identified rhythmically and texturally as well as in terms of pitch. Example 9.2 shows Reich on February 20, 1975, working on pulsing chords for the treble pulsings of the 18 Musicians cycle. The significance of this moment in the work’s evolution is pointed up by the heading: it is here, after more than nine months spent on composing 18 Musicians, that Reich makes a decisive attempt toward its eventual title (even the quickly rejected “A New Orchestra” is quite telling). Example  9.2 February 20, 1975: “Work in Progress for . . . 18 Musicians,” ten pulsing chords, treble only, dated “2/20/75,” Sketchbook [15], first two staves only (Steve Reich Collection, PSS).

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A few examples of comparison between this and the treble line of the cycle of eleven chords of Example 9.1 show how the cycle itself and the composition as a whole might have developed from the version of February 20. (Note that, rhythmically, this sketch has in fact already established the continuous eighth-note pulsing of the final score; Reich makes this clear in his bracketed annotation.) In chord 3, while moving the lowest treble note from D to E, Example 9.1 reduces the total number of pitch classes from the opening three (D, E, A) in chords 1 and 2 to just two (E, A): reflected in both section IIIA and IIIB of the final score, the only instance in which two “small piece[s],”29 as Reich would have called them, are composed upon the same chord. The 1975 sketch makes the same move to low E but retains D an octave higher in the “Piano Pulse,” a solution not followed in the work’s final version. As the chord sequence unfolds, the main differences between Example 9.1 and Example 9.2 continue to lie in the greater dissonance of the 1975 sketch, compared with the one of 1989. It will additionally be noted that Example 9.2 has only ten chords, not eleven. What is missing from the 1975 sketch is not the final chord of the sequence (E, F♯, A—identical in both versions) but one of the chords with E as the lowest treble note. While the 1989 sketch, accurately reflecting the final score, offers four increasingly dissonant chords based on low E, the 1975 sketch has only three. This suggests that the process of increasing dissonance toward the center of the chord sequence—and thus toward the center of the whole composition as well—was eventually deemed by Reich to require more space to expand than his 1975 attempt allows: an observation strengthened by noting his eventual decision to write two “pieces” built on chord 3, as already seen. Clearly, over the period of some two years during which 18 Musicians was composed, many different versions of these pulsing chords were tried out, and some earlier, as well as later, attempts survived into the final score. Just one further example of these many versions can be illustrated here. With the partial performances of 18 Musicians in May 1975 looming,30 the only further sketch to feature a fuller version of the treble strand of the cycle of eleven chords is the one dated March 14, 1975, reproduced here as Example 9.3. This fills out a much fuller texture than did Example 9.2—adding female voices, violin, cello, and possibly bass clarinet—and, for the first time, supplying notes in the bass staff to accommodate the additional performers. The basic structure of the treble pulsing chords continues to be maintained by the two piano parts; marimbas, voices, and violin articulate other, mostly very closely related, voicings around this central layer. This, then, seems a significant moment when decisions about instrumentation, and about how the “Opening Pulse” itself will be articulated, are being made, necessitating the addition of notes in the bass staff to the (by now) already quite well-established pulsing chords in the treble. A chord sequence with bass notes as well as treble ones is the natural, indeed inevitable, outcome of such decisions. Yet that chord sequence—now, with the full eleven chords, very close to the solution of the score’s complete cycle—is,

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Example 9.3 March 14, 1975: “Opening Pulse—revision & expansion,” dated “March 14,” Sketchbook [15], (Steve Reich Collection, PSS).

in itself, a consequence of textural expansion using a cello and a bass clarinet, rather than one brought about specifically by prioritizing, during the compositional process, the creation of a complete cycle of eleven chords with bass as well as treble pitches, on which the whole composition will be built. In turning the ten-chord sequence of February 20 more closely into the eleven-chord sequence with which all listeners to 18 Musicians are familiar, we may note that the sketch of March 14 demonstrates interesting changes of detail. Example 9.3, for instance, drops pitch class A from the treble staves of chords 5 and 6. In Example 9.2, chord 6 had marked the move of the lowest note of the treble strand from E to F♯, giving just three treble chords with their lowest note as E (chords 3–5), rather than the four of the eventual solutions of Examples 9.1 and 9.3. Starting in each case from chord 5, the consecutive dissonances built up from these lowest notes are thus handled somewhat differently, as Reich shifts his harmonic thinking here. Example 9.2 moves from a cluster including all the pitches of the three-sharp key signature between E and B, to a F♯–C♯ cluster in chords 6 and 7. Then, with the move to low C♯ in chord 8, the cluster is gradually thinned back down to F♯–B; to F♯–A in chord 9 (where the lowest note is F♯ itself); and, finally, with chord 10’s further shift of lowest note back to E, dismantled altogether to give E, F♯, and A. It should also be said that, in adding

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an extra chord to Example  9.2, Examples 9.1 and 9.3 only offer a completely “filled-in” five-pitch cluster at chord 8 (F♯–C♯). Let us now turn to look briefly at the new bass pitches. The bass notes of Example 9.3 supply the solutions that Reich will now retain right through the remaining year and more before the complete premiere of 18 Musicians (note that on March 14 he is already considering placing the dyad of the opening chord an octave lower). Interpretations of some of the possible kinds of harmonic movement discernible in the combination of treble and bass notes that go to make up the final cycle of eleven chords have already been offered earlier in this chapter. The pitches in the bass are, of course, crucial to any such interpretations. Bass notes are also clearly of special significance both for the harmonic construction of the “wavelike” length-of-a-breath pulsings and for the other ways in which Reich also articulates harmonies in individual sections of 18 Musicians. In the opening and concluding “Pulse,” the chords of this cycle feature in exactly the form given in Examples 9.1 and 9.3. Length-of-a-breath pulsing chords in each individual section of the final score—occurring in every section (including both sections IIIA and IIIB)—may be divided into two categories in terms of their deployment of the treble and bass pitches of the eleven-chord cycle. Six sections (sections I, IIIA, IIIB, VI, VII, and VIII) use only treble pitches in pulsing chords lasting a fairly short time (two or at most three pages, as measured out in the final score; the way in which this material is notated makes giving measure numbers unhelpful). The other six sections (II, IV, V, IX, X, and XI) use pitches from both the treble and bass staffs (at nine or ten pages in the final score, most of these are longer than those in the first category; though in section V the pulsings run for only six pages, and in section X for only three—but since the pulsings of this penultimate section run straight on from those of section IX, this length is, musically speaking, not especially relevant). In all these cases, the individual chords in the cycle of eleven chords act as a kind of departure point for similar types of harmony, but with different voicings. In the main body of the work, the harmonies for these pulsings, and indeed the other chordally based textures involved, do not always deploy all the pitches of the chord in question; neither are they always derived from the expected “correct” chord. To give examples of the deployment of the cycle of eleven chords in length-of-a-breath pulsing chords from just the first two sections of 18 Musicians: the pulsing chords of section I themselves, played by two clarinets, merely alternate D–A and A–D dyads extracted from the treble pitches of chord 1, ignoring not only the F♯–B dyad in the bass staff but also the E in the treble. Meanwhile, the chordal underpinning that supplies the bass pitches—in the part of the texture performed by voice 3 and the two strings—has by this point in the section modified the initial F♯–B dyad of chord 1 so far that it can now alternate chords with G natural and A in the bass. In the longer exploration of pulsing chords to be found in section II—beginning on a pair of bass clarinets plus violin and cello—the initial bass dyad

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of F♯–B and treble dyad of D–A can be ascribed to chord 2.  But the next aggregate—a bass dyad of C♯–F♯ and a treble dyad of E–A—may be presumed to derive from chord 3, not chord 2; though the treble pitches E and A  also occur in both chords 1 and 2, it is only in chord 3 that the E–A dyad stands alone in the treble staff. These two initial pairs of dyads then proceed to operate as merely the first two in a long sequence of such dyads in section II:  some of them traceable to, for instance, the bass dyads of chords 2, 4, and 5; others apparently entirely unrelated directly to the cycle of eleven chords. This sequence eventually settles on a lengthy oscillation between bass dyads with the pitches E–B and F♯–D (again, not clearly related to the cycle at all). Throughout the whole sequence, the dyads in the treble—D–A and E–A (interpretable as extracted from some combination of the cycle’s chords 1, 2, and 3)—have been alternating unchanged. In the final work as a whole, indeed—and now broadening the topic to take in all the ways in which harmonies are articulated in individual sections of 18 Musicians—Reich takes the harmonies of some sections so far from those suggested by the chord sequence that an attempt to argue for a tonal scheme such as the one proposed in my earlier discussion of Example  9.1 might be argued as making no reasonable sense. To give a single instance of the problems involved:  I have already suggested that chords 5 and 6 of the final cycle of eleven chords increase pitch density, and tension, as part of a move away from F♯ minor, with both the bass line (D to A) and the bass-staff dyads (D–A succeeded by A–E) of this pair of chords implying that A  major is now the key involved. In Example 9.3, chords 5 and 6 are exactly the same as those of Example 9.1, now laid out for Reich’s new ensemble. But in the score itself, we find more chromatic ideas overlaid around these two chords, even though the general tendency toward A major is still to some degree retained in the texture as well. In section V itself, there is a change of key signature to four sharps and a fairly strong suggestion of C♯ minor as the tonal center, reinforced by the initial length-of-a-breath pulsings. This is followed, in the scherzo-like and also to some extent recapitulatory section VI, by a return to a three-sharp key signature that “revisit[s] the root-position, F-sharp minor certainties”31 of section IIIA. The bass dyad, A–E, of chord 6 is present in the relentless alternations of the lower piano parts here, but only as the third and seventh of an F♯ minor7 chord; and the cello’s oscillating dyads are grounded on D, as the submediant of F♯, and remain squarely within three-sharp territory.32

Oscillating Chords This now leaves us with the other main sides of the tonal story to tell: that of what I have chosen to call the oscillating chords derived from Music for Mallet

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Instruments, Voices, and Organ; and of what the relationship of these is, if any, to the cycle of eleven chords, perhaps particularly to the sequence of dyads in the bass staff that underpins the treble pulsing chords of Examples 9.1 and 9.3. In Mallet, what Reich calls the “process of augmenting or lengthening the repeating chord cadences in the women’s voices and organ”33 is already at least putatively “directional,” to the extent that these chords help to determine the music’s overall tonal motion, positing an integration of such specifically “harmonic” thinking into textures that continue to develop around, and are of course also driven by, a pulse. As Reich puts it, “The first process of rhythmic construction in the marimbas and glockenspiels has the effect of creating more fast-moving activity, which then triggers the voices and organ into doubling, quadrupling, and further elongating the duration of the notes they sing and play.” As in Music for 18 Musicians, these processes involved in Mallet interact upon one another; thus harmonic motion is closely related to the presence of pulse, and to the articulation and unfolding of a quite strict rhythmic process familiar from the composer’s more obviously “process-driven” works such as Drumming (1970–71). Indeed, we have earlier noted that Reich was worried that 18 Musicians would merely “re-write [Mallet].” Oscillating chords for 18 Musicians arrive even earlier in the sketchbooks than pulsing chords, with several sequences of them starting on April 14, 1974. As in the final score, and unlike in Mallet, these can sometimes occur in sequences of more than two chords, though the majority are chordal pairs. The first to be “composed out” in a manner resembling the way in which oscillating chords are treated in the final score was sketched on April 28, with further elaboration on subsequent dates. This sketch, involving a complete texture of pulse, oscillating chords, and other material, is given here as Example 9.4. Despite its notation in four flats—it takes Reich a surprisingly long while firmly and finally to establish the key signature of three sharps as his overall tonality—the significance of this B♭ minor7/F minor9 pair of chords for the development of 18 Musicians will already be clear from its kinship to the oscillating chords of this work’s final score. As with several of the latter—including those articulated by the “paradiddling” of two pianos (the fast alternation of each pianist’s hands that mimics the rhythmic style of the treble pulsing chords and is first featured in Reich’s output in Phase Patterns for four electric organs of 1970), as well as the sustained textures of female voices, violin, and cello, and (just once each) pairs of clarinets and bass clarinets—the chords in the sketch of April 28 articulate a tonic-dominant relationship using root position harmonies: an approach quite different from that of the cycle of eleven chords. The importance of the material first sketched on this occasion is potentially enhanced by the fact that it is recopied several times in the ensuing months. These include a sketch of May 2, 1974: seemingly part of the new plan, mentioned earlier, to use pulsing chords to effect harmonic changes. It is around this point in the sketches that the first hints are given of how Reich sees the possible link

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Example 9.4 April 28, 1974: untitled sketch for pulse and oscillating chords, dated “4/28,” Sketchbook [13], whole page (Steve Reich Collection, PSS).

between the treble pulsing chords and any more purely sustained harmony involving bass as well as treble. On May 5—only one day after having written out quite explicitly, for only the third time, a texture including both treble pulsing chords and treble-and-bass oscillating chords (plus a melodic figure)—he writes “pulse + long tones,” simply as confirmation of this idea (without any musical notation to illustrate it).

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The final score itself encompasses a wide range of approaches to the oscillating chords in every individual section of the work. These are presented most often in the form of simple chordal pairs as illustrated in Example 9.4, but they can, as stated earlier, also be articulated as paradiddling in two of the parts for piano; sometimes both these types occur in the same section. Length-of-abreath pulsings also participate in presenting sequences of chords within individual sections, and these tend to be longer than the simple chordal pairs found elsewhere; sections II, V, IX, and X involve only length-of-a-breath oscillating chordal material. Voicing and the actual pitch content of these oscillating chords, too, are more varied and more complex than in Example 9.4, with several instances of first- and second-inversion chords and, as we have already seen, pitches outside the key signature of three sharps. The first oscillating chords in the sketchbooks to be notated in 18 Musicians’ eventual key signature of three sharps—D (sharp7)/F♯11—occur on May 8, 1974. Again, these and subsequent examples are used to underpin experiments with elaborating fuller textures. On December 4, 1974, Reich notates Example 9.5, a full texture of pulsing chords (a cluster of all five pitch classes from D to A that does not feature in any other examples illustrated here) and other melodic and also more purely rhythmic patterns, including a quite elaborate extrapolation of a sequence of harmonic rhythms for these chords. This sketch is underpinned by a sequence of seven chords that takes off from the already much-used B minor7 and F♯ minor9 harmonies and offers various alternatives to how this sequence will end, including two different options for concluding on E11. Such a sequence is evidently designed for oscillating use within a single section; though no part of it appears, at least without significant alteration, in the final score, several passages could be argued to draw on some part of this sequence for their underpinning chords. Section IV, for example, includes length-of-a-breath pulsings in the bass clarinets to provide a crucial part of the F♯ minor9 harmony of the second chord at the bottom of Example 9.5; while three female voices, violin, and cello offer a more skeletal suggestion both of this chord and what is really B minor9 (held C♯s are a feature here). Such connections are, though, dangerously tenuous and suggest that a harmonic outline such as that provided by the chords in this sketch perhaps has only a tangential relationship to the final score itself. Yet the basic oscillation of B minor and F♯ minor, in particular—in a variety of chord positions and harmonic densities—remains a frequent occurrence in 18 Musicians: right away, in section I, the work’s first oscillating chords outline B minor in a second inversion and F♯ minor7 in root position. It can also be said that the general approach to the vocabulary behind the chord building of Example 9.5—seventh, ninth, and eleventh chords, an emphasis on parallel fifths in the bass staff—will be familiar to anyone who has looked at the final score. Curiously—and perhaps merely by accident, since these chords are fairly clearly designed for oscillating use on a local level—the progression that they

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Example 9.5 December 4, 1974: untitled sketch for a sequence of four-part chords, on page dated both “12/2” and “12/4,” Sketchbook [14], whole page (Steve Reich Collection, PSS).

outline, in the bass part in particular, bears some resemblance to the overall tonal shape behind the cycle of eleven chords when their pitches in the bass staff are supplied, as in Examples 9.1 and 9.3: a broad trajectory from B minor to F♯ (minor) to D major; then, more speculatively, a return to F♯ minor. However, it seems unlikely that Reich would have consciously sought out and developed

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such a relationship between two such, on the face of it, quite different layers of his harmonic material in progress; and, of course, such basic tonal “moves,” involving a plethora of tonic and dominant chords of various kinds, will be part and parcel of any diatonicism that engages at all with chordal functionality.

Conclusion So, what have we learned from this brief examination of the composer’s sketch materials for Music for 18 Musicians about how Steve Reich conceived the “diatonicism of some kind” to which he evidently remained as committed in the mid-1970s as he had been in the late 1960s? Clearly, he wished to extend this diatonicism into fresh territory, at least fresh territory for him: not least in the quest to find new ways in which to construct a large-scale musical structure built less overtly than Drumming had been on rhythmic ideas. What do the composer’s sketchbooks say about the manner in which this diatonicism evolved to fit, and indeed to shape, the new conditions of 18 Musicians itself? And how might we move forward, as analysts or listeners, to take account of this new information? It is possible, I think, to say five things at this stage of research. First, much, if not all, of the pitch material of 18 Musicians arises out of compositional concerns that are still based on pulse and rhythmic patterns, on melodic patterns, on polyphonic layering and unfolding of contrasting types of material, and on working out how all these might be articulated by a new and, for Reich, larger-scale ensemble that, for the first time for him, included instruments of the Western orchestra. At no stage in the sketchbooks covering the years 1973 to 1976 does the cycle of eleven chords, with bass as well as treble pitches, occur, with the explicit focus of clarifying a harmonic scheme for the whole composition. Several attempts can be found in these sketches to determine the best sequence of pitches in the treble staff for what were, from the outset, seen as the pulsing chords that would run right through the work. It is a long time, however, before these treble pulsing chords accumulate sufficiently even to begin to articulate any large-scale plan. In addition, the eventual sketch attempts that also include pitches in the bass staff appear to function not as sketches for determining the chord sequence itself in a finished state but as versions of the well-known complete sequence explicitly “composed out” for use in the form in which it is heard in the work’s opening and closing stages. Tonal and harmonic concerns thus did not, as might be inferred from previous commentary on the work—including the composer’s own—drive the compositional conception from the outset, giving such matters a pride of place in Reich’s methodology that they had never possessed before. Rather, they arose as a consequence of his efforts to devise musical materials for a work

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predicated, above all, on the integration of types of timbrally and texturally contrasting layers of musical materials that were new to the composer’s output at this time. Second, how much does the tonality of 18 Musicians depend on chordal structures for its conception—and also for its perception, for its listeners? Not as much as has been generally thought in the past, I would suggest. Oscillating chords, sometimes of a relatively conventional kind, lie behind individual sections of the work, and these have an element of functionality to them that derives in significant part from Reich’s willingness to accept root positions as well as his often preferred more altered versions of chords, in the sense both of inversions and of deploying his favored ninth, eleventh, and even thirteenth chords, as well as sevenths; consecutive parallel voicing, especially with fifths in the bass, is another departure from “standard practice.” The individual chords of the cycle of eleven chords, on the other hand, have rather different roles to play. Thus, my third point is that—as a consequence of the emphasis, during the compositional process itself as revealed by the composer’s sketchbooks, on other concerns, discussed earlier—the construction of this chord sequence was conceived by Reich much more via its treble notes than its bass ones. Bass notes were added only later; and compositionally, the treble pulsing chords seem to continue to have been regarded by Reich with a considerable degree of independence from the bass. This is the composer’s attempt to engage in new ways with a significant degree of ambiguity about what his harmonic materials “spell out,” a characteristic of all his early minimalist scores, as we have seen. Though, as quoted earlier, each of these eleven chords is indeed taken as the basis for “a small piece” (in the case of chord 3, two “small pieces”), Reich is quite free with the way he handles each chord. A variety of treatments is allowed them; sometimes, especially with the anyway independently generated oscillating chords, he is quite cavalier about changing notes, including, as we have already observed, the introduction of pitches foreign to the prevailing key(s) suggested by the key signature of three sharps; he even, for one section, changes the key signature of three sharps itself. And always, of course, he preserves a crucial ambiguity about what key the music is in, especially with regard to the relative major or minor of his key signature. The contrast between Reich’s approach in 18 Musicians and that of Philip Glass in his exactly contemporaneous Einstein on the Beach (1974–75; premiered, as was 18 Musicians, in 1976)  is telling. While Glass’s large-scale music-theater work builds its harmonic foundations on chord progressions underpinned by functionally moving bass lines, for all the harmonic and other innovations that Glass’s work employs, Reich’s large-scale “Music For A New Orchestra” (as it was initially called in Example 9.2) is constructed around a more evasive approach to its chordal materials. In this approach, bass lines, and indeed all notes in the bass staff, are treated rather differently, in a manner arguably closer to that

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found in the jazz compositions or improvisations so beloved by the composer in his younger days, especially when the modal instincts and practices frequently found in many forms of jazz are involved. It can also now be noted that, to judge by his sketches for 18 Musicians, Reich continued to be wary of the bass staff well into the 1970s: page after page of these sketches work with the treble staff alone. Even when some kind of functionality can be argued for the effects created by the cycle of eleven chords, the bass pitches of this sequence are, as it were, insinuated into the harmonic mechanisms that drive the work: sometimes achieving something beyond K. Robert Schwarz’s already quoted characterization of “no more than decorative,” but operating more by stealth than by more overt kinds of functionality. As a consequence, listening to 18 Musicians can provoke a wide range of perceptions about the nature of its tonality. Tom Johnson was surely not very wide of the mark to suggest, from his listening experience quoted earlier, that the work “doesn’t have much to do with chord progressions”; nor even— though the only departure in key signature that the final score makes from three sharps is to four sharps, not two—to say that it “is in a special kind of D major.” Fourth, it would, of course, be wrong to ignore altogether the significance of the cycle of eleven chords, whether musicologically, analytically, or as a factor in how we experience the work as listeners. This applies not only in the opening and closing expositions of the cycle itself in the form that Reich labels “Pulse,” but also in the way in which we might understand, examine, and enjoy the gradual unfolding of the fifty or so minutes of music between these two bookending statements. The treble pulsing chords themselves help to hold 18 Musicians together, and their impact can also be discerned, in particular, in the length-of-a-breath pulsing chords that permeate this music, as well as via the melodic and rhythmic materials assembled around the harmonic aggregate of each of the work’s individual sections. Meanwhile, the oscillating chords anchor the chordal dimension of 18 Musicians even more firmly—if more locally, in the sections in which they occur—as an important factor in the work’s appreciation at all levels. Fifth, and lastly, Reich’s sketches for 18 Musicians should allow a great many details about how the work was composed—quite painstakingly over a long period of time, as is often the case with him—to inform, and indeed help to shape, as may be desired, whatever analytical strategy is deemed appropriate for future work. Here, again, the positive aspects of ambiguity as a tonal and harmonic stance can be taken on board by the analyst, who is now faced with the complex and detailed working out of music far from “minimalist,” at least by any limited, or pejorative, definition of the term. Any analyst must also confront decisions about whether—and, if so, how—the interface between poietic and aesthesic “information” will connect to, and affect the outcome of, further musical analysis of this magnum opus of American minimalism.

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Notes 1. Potter 2000, 188. 2. This description derives directly from interviews with the composer, conducted by the present author in 1986. As referenced in the main text, it is referred to in Potter 2000, 188; the quotation at the end of the following paragraph comes from the same interview source. 3. Steve Reich, Music For 18 Musicians (ECM 1129, 2301 129). 4. Steve Reich’s archival materials, significant in particular for the collection of sketchbooks they include, were acquired by the Paul Sacher Stiftung, Basel, in 2008. 5. Bernard 1995, 284. 6. Bernard 2003, 114. 7. Ibid. 8. Reich 2002b, 50. All other quotations from the composer that are reprinted in this volume which come from his own program or liner notes written at the time of the premiere performance or recording of individual works are simply referenced to this source. 9. Ibid., 9. 10. This and the quotation in the following paragraph are taken from Woodley 2007, 462. 11. Woodley 1992, 768. 12. Potter 2000, 230. 13. Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices, and Organ was completed in May 1973 and first performed on May 16 that year by Steve Reich and Musicians at the John Weber Gallery, New York City. 14. This and the other quotations in this paragraph are taken from a note dated “April 8” [1974] in Sketchbook [13] (PSS, Basel). All other quotations from the composer’s sketchbooks will simply be dated—and, where appropriate, located in greater detail—in this chapter’s main text. 15. All the quotations in this and the following paragraph are taken from Tom Johnson 1978, also in Tom Johnson 1989, 345–48. 16. Johnson could, at best, have had only a score of sections I–VII of this work to hand and may not have seen any score at all. Reich began to write out a full score of 18 Musicians during its composition but completed this only as far as section VII; this pencil manuscript is now in Basel. For rehearsal and performance purposes, only instrumental and vocal parts proved necessary. Sections of this incomplete score did pass into other hands during the early years of the work’s public exposure. But it was not until 1997 that a full score of 18 Musicians—based on the 1978 ECM recording as transcribed by Marc Mellits, under the composer’s supervision— was initially completed; a version of this was finally published by Boosey & Hawkes in 2000. 17. All the quotations in this and the following paragraph are taken from Reich 2002b, 87 and 89. 18. The cycle of eleven chords seems to have received its first publication in a secondary source in Schwarz 1981–82, 247. This notates each chord as an eighth

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note. Later instances include Potter 2000, 234, and Reich 2002b, 89; both these use whole notes. 19. In Example  9.1, chord 7 lacks the high C♯ to be found in the published versions; chord 9 lacks high G♯, B, and E; and chord 10 lacks high E. With a single exception (the G♯ of chord 9, played by the violin and sung, optionally, by voice 1), these “missing” notes are supplied exclusively by the two marimba parts of the score itself, as eventually published in 2000. 20. Reich, sketch dated “1/31/89,” Sketchbook [39] (the same source as for Ex. 9.1). 21. This and the following quotation are taken from Reich 2002b, 87. 22. In addition to the inevitable influence of John Coltrane, and probably Miles Davis, we might note that the drummer Kenny Clarke has frequently been named by Reich as an important influence, including specifically in 18 Musicians; while the impact of a drummer can scarcely be said to be a harmonic one, Clarke worked with Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, and many others who could in some way be behind the composer’s approach to harmony. Paul Hillier quotes Reich as saying that “Kenny Clarke produced a buoyant, floating sense of time which I think you can hear me trying to imitate in the ’70s pieces like Drumming and Music for 18 Musicians” (see his introduction to Reich 2002b, 7). For a further discussion of the influence of jazz on Reich, see Potter 2000, 158–60. For a further discussion of Reich’s use of “stacked fifths” in the cycle of eleven chords in 18 Musicians, see Potter 2000, 233–36, and elsewhere in the latter volume for broader commentary on this harmonic principle. The modal jazz of John Coltrane was probably the most significant jazz influence here. For examples of the application of modal terminology to the analysis of Reich’s music, see Bennett 1993; Garton 2004. An “altered-dominant” chordal vocabulary derived in important part from his study of jazz also plays a prominent role in some of Reich’s later compositions, in particular, as his sketchbooks help to testify. I have recently explored such chordal vocabulary, with particular reference to Reich’s Triple Quartet (1999), in Potter 2017, 189–207. 23. For the present author’s fuller discussion of tonality and harmony in 18 Musicians, see Potter 2000, 233–45. 24. These and the following quotations in this paragraph are taken from Reich 2002b, 89, 90. 25. Schwarz 1981–82, 249. 26. Potter 2000, 234; the anecdote about the significance of the bass clarinet in devising notes in the bass staff for the cycle of eleven chords may also be found on this page. 27. K. Robert Schwarz probably had a copy of the full score of sections I–VII, as mentioned earlier. Marc Mellits’s transcription of the complete score (see note 16)  was still in progress while I  was writing most of chapter  3 of Four Musical Minimalists, and I had access to a prepublished version of this as well. 28. Though the composer writes in his program note for the work that “The first sketches were made for it in May 1974” (Reich 2002b, 87), the initial reference to the

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work actually occurs in Sketchbook [13] (“November 26, 1973–October 10, 1974”), dated “12/6,” which indicates December 6, 1973. With the exception of material that appears to relate to his second period of study of Balinese gamelan music in Seattle in the summer of 1974, much, if not everything, in the sketchbooks from December 1973 to March 1976 almost certainly involves ideas connected to 18 Musicians. In addition to the remainder of Sketchbook [13], this covers the whole of Sketchbook [14] (“October 11, 1974–Feb. 19, 1975”) and Sketchbook [15] (“February 20, 1975– March 20, 1978”) as far as, probably, March 1976 (the last dated sketch is January 6, 1976, but sketches follow on the three pages after this, and Reich gives “3/76” on the front of the sketchbook for the completion of material for 18 Musicians). 29. Reich 2002b, 89. 30. The partial premiere of 18 Musicians, performances of sections I–IV, took place on Tuesday May 20, Wednesday May 21, Friday May 23, and Saturday May 24, at The Kitchen, New York City. See the entries “Concert – Work in Progress Kitchen” on these dates in the composer’s “Weekly-Minder” diary for 1975. The world premiere of the complete work took place on Saturday April 24, 1976; the composer’s 1976 diary entry reads “Music for 18 Musicians world premiere—Town Hall.” (These diaries are also now in Basel.) 31. Potter 2000, 242. 32. For another tonal interpretation of sections V and VI, see Fink 2005b, 52–55. 33. This and the following quotation are taken from Reich 2002b, 76.

10 Improvisation, Two Variations on a Watermelon, and a New Timeline for Piano Phase David Chapman In his 1974 Writings about Music, Steve Reich dedicated four long paragraphs and most of two printed pages to the origins of his keyboard duet, Piano Phase. The first two of these paragraphs suggest a rough timeline for the piece’s creation that begins “shortly after Melodica” in late May 1966 and ends “early in 1967” with its premiere.1 A summary of the composer’s timeline is provided in Table 10.1. The latter two paragraphs offer a few brief performance notes and include an incipit from a handwritten manuscript of the work. Throughout this passage the composer threaded several claims about what he understood to be the work’s significance within his creative output. With Piano Phase, Reich felt that he had successfully achieved his transition from tape composition, in which he had discovered his signature phase-shifting process, to instrumental music performed by human beings “without mechanical aid of any kind.” Most important to the composer—judging from the frequency and emphasis with which he made the point—Piano Phase was completely worked out ahead of time and required no score. Reich and Arthur Murphy, one of his closest musical collaborators at the time, “were not improvising [emphasis in the original]” at its premiere. Reich thus looked back from the publication of Writings about Music in the mid-1970s and framed the creation of Piano Phase in two ways. First, it initiated a career-defining series of live-performed works that would soon culminate in the early drafts and performances of Music for 18 Musicians (1976). Second, it provided him with an early platform for a thorough repudiation of improvisation, which had become one of the major themes throughout the Writings about Music. The Piano Phase origin story survived with no alteration or expansion in the composer’s reprinted and slightly retitled Writings on Music (2002), and principal elements of the story could still be observed as recently as 2011, when Reich recorded a two-minute version for a documentary film about his career.2 His 1974 autobiographical account, moreover, has served as the basis for nearly all scholarly treatments of the work’s history since the 1970s.3

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Table 10.1 Reich’s 1974 timeline for Piano Phase Date

Event

May 22, 1966 “Shortly after Melodica” “late in 1966” “In the next few months” “Early in 1967” “later”

Reich composes Melodica Reich considers composing live music Reich’s first live-plus-tape experiments for Piano Phase Reich’s collaborations with Murphy on Piano Phase The premiere performance of Piano Phase Piano Phase fully notated

Source: Reich 1974, 51–52.

Reich has never hidden the fact that improvisation had played a very prominent role in his musical career, especially during his San Francisco period in the early 1960s. He has described the tensions he felt between his strict serialist training at Mills College and the creative freedom of the nearby Jazz Workshop as “almost a moral dilemma,” finding the work of musicians such as John Coltrane, Stan Getz, and Bill Evans more fulfilling than that of Schoenberg and his creative descendants.4 A number of Reich’s pieces from that West Coast period reflect a desire to find an expressive voice within a jazz-inflected style, including: Four Pieces (1963), his Mills College thesis composition; Pitch Charts (1964), written during his first postgraduation year; and Music for Two or More Pianos or Piano and Tape (hereafter, simply Music for Two or More Pianos) from 1964, which will figure prominently in this chapter. Yet in the early 1970s, Reich withdrew all his jazz-inspired works from the previous decade and foreclosed any role for improvisation in the body of work that survived. It was during this period of self-reassessment that the composer’s origin story for Piano Phase began to take shape. During these same years, the relationship between improvisation and the postwar musical avant-garde seemed especially fraught, often appearing to represent separate and even competing streams: on one side, John Cage and the so-called New York School, with their emphasis on compositional openness and indeterminacy; on the other side, a diverse group of late- or post-jazz experimentalist improvisers, including performance groups such as Musica Elettronica Viva and the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, among many others.5 This perceived lack of overlap between musical communities meant that the terms “indeterminacy” and “improvisation” were often treated— especially among the avant-garde—as mutually exclusive, referring to distinct and separate practices. Such was the state of scholarly discourse on the subject in the mid-1990s when George Lewis identified John Cage’s distaste for jazz as the source of his own outspoken repudiation of improvisation and his refusal to admit African

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American experimental music as a legitimate part of the postwar musical avant-garde.6 In Lewis’s view, not only should the work of black musicians have a place within a broader and more inclusive history of experimentalism, but indeterminacy itself ought to be treated as a form of improvisation. Indeed, as Benjamin Piekut and others have noted in more recent studies of experimental music from the 1960s and 1970s, improvisation and indeterminacy often coexisted rather peacefully, if not enthusiastically, within postwar experimentalism.7 This newly mingled and complex history has meant a loosening of these terminological distinctions, so that features that might once have been called indeterminate are now treated as improvisational, and vice versa. However, as Lewis also made clear, despite this terminological slippage, the decision to call a practice either indeterminate or improvisational can be socially and politically meaningful, with profound implications regarding the relationships between composers and performers. In the discourse of indeterminacy, composers retain their authorial dominion over the many iterations of their project; in improvisation, composers cede some control to performers.8 As we will soon see, these become central concerns within Reich’s creative philosophy in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Reich’s well-known stylistic and conceptual turn in Piano Phase was at least in part a return to practices from earlier that decade when indeterminacy and improvisation characterized his approach to performance. Documents among the Steve Reich Collection at the Paul Sacher Stiftung (PSS), Basel, complicate the composer’s autobiographical account and challenge several of its key assertions. These documents—which range from manuscripts and correspondence to archival audio recordings—suggest that neither Reich’s antipathy toward improvisation nor his keyboard duet Piano Phase appeared fully formed at its premiere in January 1967. That performance did not feature the familiar B minor–inflected motive shown in Example  10.1a, which has served as the basis for a number of analyses over the years, but instead featured the harmonically ambiguous motive shown in Example  10.1b.9 This motive originally appeared in a manuscript dated December 1966 and was preserved as the lower piano part in measures 17 through 26 of the final score, eventually published by Universal Edition in 1980.10 Before settling into the final version in late 1967 to early 1968, Reich, Murphy, and others performed Piano Phase in no fewer than three preliminary forms, and it appeared on paper in at least four different configurations, as shown in Table 10.2. Keith Potter has previously written that “Piano Phase apparently went through several versions,” and Dean Suzuki reprinted two of these preliminary manuscripts in his 1991 dissertation, along with the composer’s note that they “are not to be performed.”11 Reich’s multiple versions of Piano Phase were eventually consolidated into the published version known today. (See Table 10.2 for a current list of the known preliminary versions of Piano Phase, up to and including its first performance in its final form.)

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Table  10.2 Preliminary versions of  Piano Phase, up  to its first performance in its final form Date

Type

Notes

Nine modules based on motive in Example 10.1b December 1966 Ink manuscript Archived in PSS, Basel Publication Anti-Illusion catalog (1969), p. 29 January 1967a

Ink manuscript

January 5, 1967

Performance

(measures beamed internally) Archived in PSS, Basel Fairleigh-Dickinson University Recording archived in PSS, Basel

Twelve modules based on motive in Example 10.1a January 1967b Ink manuscript Archived in PSS, Basel Publication Notations anthology (1969), p. [179] Corresponding to mm. 1–21 of published version, plus five measures based on Example 10.1b January 31, 1967 Performance New York University (“Angry Arts”) March 17–19, 1967 Performance as “Four Pianos” at Park Place Gallery Ink manuscript Archived in David Tudor Papers, Getty Museum, Los Angeles Corresponding to the version published by Universal Edition in 1980 1967 Ink manuscript Archived in PSS, Basel January 14, 1968 Performance Phillips Exeter Academy, Exeter, NH Recording archived in PSS, Basel

These many early iterations of Piano Phase testify to an extensive work-inprogress period and reinforce the composer’s early view of the-work-itself as something that was independent from any single manuscript or authoritative recording.12 Until January 1968, when Reich and Murphy first performed the final and most familiar version at Philips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, Piano Phase had existed as multiple expressions of a single set of animating ideas. These included, most especially, Reich’s signature phase-shifting process, wherein two musicians begin to perform a motive in synchrony, then one speeds up or slows down and moves out of phase with the other until their downbeats are displaced by precisely one pulse. The process continues as the phasing part cycles through all possible metric combinations, until the two parts synchronize their downbeats once again at the end of the process. The paired notion that “the process is the concept” and “the concept is the work” links Piano Phase and its composer to the conceptualist and process art movements of the late 1960s, as has been noted elsewhere.13

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The Piano Phase motive achieves its characteristic melody as an emergent property of two distinct patterns played separately by the two hands.14 In the familiar B minor version in Example  10.1a, one hand begins by oscillating between F♯4 and C♯5, while the other hand repeats the ascending three-note chord, E4–B4–D5. At its premiere Piano Phase featured the brighter, tonally ambiguous motive of Example 10.1b, an example of what Potter has called the “stacked-fourth” harmonic idiom that characterized Reich’s music during these years: E5–B4 in one hand and E4–A4–D5 in the other.15 Indeed, the more familiar B minor motive stands out as an exception to the composer’s broader “stacked-fourth” style. Despite the aural differences between the two motives in Example 10.1, both require the performer to place one hand directly above the other, typically with the palm of the right hand nearly resting on the knuckles of the left, fingers overlapping. To the “stacked fourths” of Reich’s harmonic idiom one might therefore add the “stacked hands” of his keyboard performance practice. In the 2011 film documentary Phase to Face, Reich demonstrated this disposition of the pianist’s hands as he relayed his Piano Phase timeline. An artist’s rendering of this disposition of the hands appears in Figure 10.1. Other compositions by Reich from the mid-1960s reveal these concepts beginning to form. One such comparison is already commonplace: Reich’s Reed Phase dates from the same month as the earliest manuscript for Piano Phase

Example  10.1 Two motives for Piano Phase:  (a) the B minor motive as it appears in mm. 1–2 of Reich 1980c; (b) the “stacked-fourth” motive as it appears in mm. 1–2 of MS December 1966 (Reich 1969c). (a)

(b)

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Figure  10.1 Reich demonstrating the “stacked-hand” disposition in Piano Phase Source: Steve Reich: Phase to Face, dir. Éric Darmon and Frank Mallet, 17:30.

(December 1966), and scholars often refer to these two as a closely related pair.16 This similarity being well established, then, the present chapter adds to this stylistic grouping two keyboard ensemble pieces from the mid-1960s that also suggest significant parallels to—and set important precedents for—Piano Phase, namely, the aforementioned Music for Two or More Pianos and a largely extemporaneous and ephemeral piece most often referred to as Improvisations on a Watermelon. On January 5, 1967, an audience in the Fairleigh-Dickinson University art gallery in Madison, New Jersey, heard Reich and Murphy perform not one but three piano duets, plus three tape works and Jon Gibson’s performance of Reed Phase, then called Saxophone Phase. The program for that event appears in Table 10.3. The order of the presentation that evening, which paired a piano duet with a tape work in each of its three periods—that is, before, between, and after two intermissions—implies an even distribution of similar works and invites comparison between the three groupings. Both Piano Phase and Two Variations on a Watermelon (as it was listed in the program) received their first performance that evening; it was, by contrast, the last known performance of Music for Two or More Pianos. Of the three, only Piano Phase remained on the composer’s works list after the early 1970s.

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Table 10.3 Fairleigh-Dickinson University Program, January 5, 1967 An Evening of Music by Steve Reich Music for Two Pianos and Tape (2/64) Art Murphy and Steve Reich, Pianos It’s Gonna Rain – or meet Brother Walter in Union Square after listening to Terry Riley (1/65) intermission Saxophone Phase (12/66) Jon Gibson, Soprano Saxophone Piano Phase (12/66) Steve Reich and Art Murphy, Pianos Come Out (4/66) Composed as part of a benefit held at Town Hall in April of 1966 for the re-trial with lawyers of their own choosing- of the six boys arrested for murder during the Harlem ‘Fruit Stand Riots’ of 1964. The voice is that of Daniel Hamm, 19, one of the six now serving a life sentence. He is describing a beating he took in the Harlem 28th precinct. The police were about to take the boys to Harlem Hospital to get them cleaned up and were only taking those that were visably [sic] bleeding. Since Hamm had no actual open bleeding he proceeded to squeeze open a bruise on his leg so that he would be taken to the hospital. - “I had to like open the bruise up and let some of the bruise blood come out to show them.” intermission Two Variations on a Watermelon (5 & 11/66) Art Murphy and Steve Reich, Pianos Melodica (5/66) Source: Archived program, folder “Programme Jan 1967,” Steve Reich Collection, PSS, Basel.

Music for Two or More Pianos or Piano and Tape (1964) In the fall of 1965, around the same time that Reich moved back to New York City from San Francisco, John Cage began assembling an archive of manuscripts from as many composers as he could convince to participate.17 He had two goals for his collection. First, his aesthetic objective was to reflect the widest possible range of notational practices in use at the time. He intended to display the collection in art galleries and museums not only as aural documents but also as visual objects. Cage had hoped to use these exhibits to accomplish his second goal, which was to raise funds for his nonprofit organization, the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts.18 The archive eventually

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held contributions from Karlheinz Stockhausen, Henry Cowell, and Leonard Bernstein, among many others, with a particular emphasis on graphical notation, textual scores, and other avant-garde manuscript practices.19 Cage published 260 of these scores in an anthology entitled Notations in 1969.20 Piano Phase MS January 1967b appears on page  179 of that (unpaginated) anthology, featuring twelve modules that phase the more familiar B minor motive against itself. Archived correspondence indicates that Piano Phase was not Reich’s original contribution to Cage’s collection. In a letter to Cage dated January 13, 1967 (now archived in Basel), Reich referred to a recent conversation between the two men at a concert in Central Park and described having sent Cage a “multiple piano piece from 1964” some months prior—somewhere in the middle of his Piano Phase timeline—but was now enclosing another new work to replace the earlier one: “something just completed—at least in its initial stage.”21 Though Reich does not name either score, it is reasonably clear from his description that he originally sent Music for Two or More Pianos and replaced it with Piano Phase, having premiered it at Fairleigh-Dickinson University only eight days earlier. Music for Two or More Pianos is in part an indeterminate work, with nine harmonic modules that strictly limit what notes the pianists play but do not dictate precisely how to do so or how many times they should play through the score. Reich has described its open form and specific instrumentation as having been influenced by Stockhausen’s Refrain from 1959 and Feldman’s Piece for Four Pianos from 1962 (though Potter asserts he could not have known the Feldman piece in 1964);22 he also emphasizes that its overall harmonic palette had been “particularly influenced by the sound of Bill Evans,” the noted jazz pianist.23 In a letter to Suzuki, Reich described seeing this as “much influenced by jazz structure (a sequence of chords which form a cycle which can be repeated for as many ‘choruses’ as you like).”24 By invoking “choruses,” even highlighting the term with quotation marks, Reich connected the avant-garde indeterminacy of the composition’s form to the scaffolding jazz musicians traditionally use to structure their improvisation. Reich seems to have revived this Evans-inspired work at some point in 1966, perhaps around the same time that he reconnected with his former Juilliard classmate Arthur Murphy, after which the two began rehearsing and experimenting musically together. Murphy, also a composer, graduated with a master of science degree from Juilliard in spring 1966 and was at that time particularly consumed with Bill Evans and his style. Murphy had become a close confidant of Evans and was working closely with the pianist on several transcriptions of his improvisations for eventual publication.25 The creative interaction that blossomed between Reich and Murphy in 1966 eventually became a key component in the Piano Phase timeline: Reich’s program notes

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after 1970 frequently describe “a period of several months [after Melodica in which] Art Murphy and I, first [started] working at home playing against tape loops of ourselves, and later on two pianos.”26 Most of this statement survives even in the autobiographical Writings mentioned earlier; once again, these comments could just as easily describe rehearsals for Music for Two or More Pianos. The 1966 revival of this “multiple piano piece from 1964” testifies to a rich network of creative exchange involving Reich, Murphy, and Evans in 1966. In his notes for Piano Phase, Reich asserted that his first efforts to forge a new path toward live performance involved prerecording a pattern on the piano “and then tr[ying] to play against the loop.”27 Such description bears a striking resemblance to the performing instructions for Music for Two or More Pianos in its piano and tape configuration, wherein one of the pianos may be replaced by “recordings of the chord series [which] must be made prior to performance by the performer(s) involved.”28 Still other similarities can be identified between the two works, from the performers’ freedom to pace their own progression through the piece and to perform the work as many times as they like, to the fact that melodies and other objects of musical interest emerge from unplanned collisions of minimally planned elements: “resulting possibilities of repetition [and] imitation of single notes, intervals, chords, [and] melodic fragments,” as the notes to Music for Two or More Pianos explain.29 Several writers have observed that Music for Two or More Pianos prefigures the composer’s later and more familiar works from his phase-shifting period, both in its measure-length modularity and in its use of modal harmonies.30 Reich himself has even suggested that Music for Two or More Pianos may have predated Terry Riley’s In C, long considered the seminal work of modularrepetitive minimalism, by a few days.31 This older keyboard duet was Reich’s last work to require live performance before he began to focus, rather unusually, on spoken-word tape pieces.32 It was a thread that he abandoned in 1964 and picked up again in 1966. Music for Two or More Pianos thus bookended that period of tape composition that resulted in It’s Gonna Rain (1965) and Come Out (1966), marking both its beginning and end.33 The more strictly controlled processes of Piano Phase replaced the indeterminate/improvisational Music for Two or More Pianos as Reich’s representative work in Cage’s Notations anthology. The evidence from archival correspondence and manuscripts, the timing of Reich’s early collaborations with Murphy, and the knowledge that Music for Two or More Pianos featured prominently—and for the last time—at the FairleighDickinson concert strongly suggest that Reich first satisfied his desire to abandon tape for instrumental music by reviving his last live-performed composition, Music for Two or More Pianos, until Piano Phase superseded it and rendered it obsolete.

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Variations/Improvisations on a Watermelon (1966) and the Piano Phase Improvisation A newly composed piano duet also appeared in the midst of Reich’s 1966 Piano Phase timeline, best known today as Improvisations on a Watermelon. The title makes even more explicit the composer’s claim to openness and spontaneity than did the earlier Music for Two or More Pianos. As shown in the program in Table 10.3, the Improvisations were originally titled Two Variations, and its two parts date from May and November 1966. As an unscored and eventually withdrawn work, Improvisations on a Watermelon has tantalized and eluded analysts and historians. Most of what has been known about the composition came from Reich’s cursory writings on the subject. The notes attached to the program at Fairleigh-Dickinson, for example, refer to “a simple shift of accent in a repeated figure, and a gradual expansion of a two note figure into a five note one.”34 Jon Gibson has also offered some brief testimony, having been the only other musician known to have performed it besides Reich and Murphy.35 Although no recording of the Fairleigh-Dickinson premiere is known to exist, Reich’s archives now contain two recordings of the work from a few months later.36 They offer the best entrée and illuminate many elements that were uncertain or unknown about this ephemeral work. The harmony featured in the accompaniment throughout the Improvisations, shown in the keyboard 2 part in Example 10.2, links the work to Reich’s music soundtrack for the controversial experimental film Oh Dem Watermelons (1965). For that soundtrack, which was originally intended to be performed live during the film’s screening, Reich had arranged the minstrel songs “Massa’s in de Cold Ground” by Stephen Foster and “Oh! Dat Watermelon” by Luke Schoolcraft. As Sumanth Gopinath explains in his description and analysis of the soundtrack, Reich had interpreted Schoolcraft’s song as a jaunty gospel- or rag-like two-step dance, with a highly rhythmic accompaniment characterized by “boom-chick” or “oom-pah” patterns over a do-sol bass. At the appearance of an especially pungent cluster chord, A3–C♯4–D4–G4—variously described Example 10.2 Transcribed selection from Reich’s first Variation on a Watermelon Source: Digitized archival recording of March 19, 1967, performance at Park Place Gallery, CD 1, Track 2 (Steve Reich Collection, PSS, Basel), 0:54–1:19.

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as a “dirty dominant” in D major, a “suspended dominant,” and a “synthesis of tonic and dominant”—Reich’s arrangement veers off into an extended repetitive canon on the word “watermelon.”37 In Gopinath’s reading, this musical passage and its analogy to “a record stuck in a groove” forms a musical moment in which the forward progress of time has been suspended. Eventually, this temporally frozen “dirty dominant” finds resolution on a D major tonic, as the canon ends and the film soundtrack continues with the return of the minstrel song. According to Gopinath, Reich effectively bracketed and contained the canon’s mesmerizing and chaotic complexity within the overall song, granting it space while at the same time controlling it.38 By contrast, resolution never comes in the piano variations. The record (as it were) remains permanently stuck in its groove, stripping the “dirty dominant” of its progressive function and turning it into something like a quartal (or “stacked-fourth”) cluster chord in A Mixolydian. Within that tense stasis, improvisational spontaneity replaces the canon’s chaos. Yet it is the rhythmic elements of this accompaniment and their relationship to the melodic solo part that are most relevant to the present study. Similar to the Schoolcraft song setting, both piano variations involve a repeated “oom-pah” accompaniment part in one keyboard, as seen in Example 10.2. Each four-beat measure contains three “oom-pah” patterns, followed by two eighth notes that propel the pattern back into itself. The melodic solo part features a new rag-like or Latin tune, not heard in the original film soundtrack, whose syncopations play off against the steady metrical foundation of the accompaniment (see the keyboard 1 part in Ex. 10.2). Reich’s “shift of accent in a repeated figure” occurs in the middle measure of Example 10.2, when the upbeat eighth notes in the second keyboard expand to add a third, immediately displacing the downbeats of the two patterns in the following measure by an eighth. The process repeats, and the downbeats are displaced by two eighths, then three, and so on. The two parts return to synchrony at the end of the variation. It is thus not the conspicuous melodic part that changes to produce the shift, but the apparently subordinate accompanying part. Not merely suggestive of the gradual and continuous phase-shifting process as Reich would codify in Piano Phase later that year, this process resembles even more the nongradual, discrete phase-shifting process of Clapping Music (1972), which most have considered to be a later development.39 Reich’s later take on the live-performed phase-shifting technique in fact appears to have been one of his first. Note, once again, that this first variation appeared in May 1966, in the earliest days of Reich’s search for a way to apply phase shifting to live performance. The efforts that ultimately resulted in Piano Phase most immediately produced the first Variation on a Watermelon. The second variation, transcribed in full in Appendix 1 to this chapter, is more open-ended than the first, wherein all the note-to-note details are rather more strictly controlled. Between the two variations, the accompanying part drops its

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upbeat eighths and alters the basic elements of its regular pattern: adding and then dropping again the upper sol to its do-sol bass (at time marking 2:51 and 4:55); eliminating beats to produce meters with a duple and triple pulse (3:56, 5:00, etc.); and slightly shifting the harmonic cluster within the Mixolydian collection (4:26, 4:55, 5:34, etc.). In this variation, the more prominent solo part presents Reich’s “gradual expansion of a two note figure into a five note one,” from the F♯5–E5 dyad at 3:17 to the five-pitch collection at 4:24 (F♯5, E5, D5, C♯5, B4)—and back a few minutes later (6:22–7:11), though he never refers to the pattern’s contraction. Complex patterns emerge between this expansion and contraction: the slight hesitations and subtle rhythmic adjustments in the recording suggest that these melodic figures were being created spontaneously in performance. The transcription notates what was an undifferentiated stream of pitches in the audio with stems and beams moving in alternating directions, a choice that highlights the steady oscillating dyad F♯5–D5 and isolates it to the pianist’s right hand. The results plausibly resemble the composer’s “stacked-hand” disposition of Piano Phase shown in Figure 10.1. This, and not some Scarlattian arm-crossing technique, is likely what Reich meant when he described these improvisations as “hand-over-hand variations.”40 Many of the common features previously identified in Music for Two or More Pianos and Piano Phase may also be seen in these Variations, from their modular repetitions and modal harmonies to their instrumentation and performance practice. Though the program notes do not mention it, they could just as easily be performed in a piano-plus-tape configuration as they could live, and indeed likely were rehearsed in this live-electronic configuration, since Reich and Murphy did not have access to a pair of pianos until very close to the premiere.41 Of further note is the hint of “gradual process” in both of these variations, namely, their “shifts of accent” and “expansion[s]” of a small figure against a steadily pulsed accompaniment. The unplanned collisions of minimally preplanned musical figures form further conceptual links to Music for Two or More Pianos and reveal a richly interconnected network of musical relationships among these keyboard compositions. These playful and spontaneous interactions between the two hands thus appear to have been the reason for Reich’s changing the work’s title from Variations in January 1967 to Improvisations before March 1967.42 The second variation/improvisation dates from November 1966, just days before the earliest manuscripts for Piano Phase and its sibling work Reed Phase. Not only does their history overlap with the timeline for Piano Phase, but they also represent early expressions of ideas now firmly associated with that and other later works. Though Improvisations on a Watermelon appeared as a separate composition with its own premiere at Fairleigh-Dickinson University in January 1967, it was, in effect, a first draft for Piano Phase. There is even more reason to wonder at Reich’s insistent foreclosure of any role that improvisation played at the premiere of Piano Phase. Unlike the piano duets already described, a recording of the Fairleigh-Dickinson performance of

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Piano Phase does exist among Reich’s archives in Basel. According to this audio document, Reich and Murphy performed through the MS December 1966 twice. We might represent the overall form of these two presentations of the Piano Phase process as A–A. Between these two A sections at the premiere—bracketed and contained by them, perhaps, in a manner similar to the chaos of the canon in the Oh Dem Watermelons soundtrack—Reich and Murphy performed a twominute improvisational riff on the Piano Phase figure as a contrasting B section, which resembles the second Variation on a Watermelon. A transcription of this improvisation from the 1967 Piano Phase performance appears in Appendix 2 to this chapter. In this previously unknown passage, as in the Variations, the improvising performer plays with the order and lengths of the figures in each hand, resulting once again in minimally planned, in-the-moment patterns and figurations in the spontaneous collisions of the two parts.

Conclusion Returning now to Reich’s most emphatic claims about Piano Phase—namely, that he and Murphy “were not improvising” at its premiere—the composer was less likely denying the existence of the improvisational passage transcribed in Appendix 2 than insisting that the phase-shifting process itself was not improvisational. It is this process that survived the period of development and revision that followed the premiere and came to dominate Reich’s compositional strategies through the mid-1970s. In an early version of “Music as a Gradual Process,” published in the same Anti-Illusion catalog as the December 1966 Piano Phase manuscript, Reich declared that such processes offered him greater control over every aspect of the work and its performance: Musical processes can give one a direct contact with the impersonal and also a kind of complete control. [. . .] By “a kind” of complete control I mean that by running this material through this process I completely control all that results, but also that I accept all that results without changes.43

Among the “bi-products [sic] of the intended process” that Reich described as part of this new emphasis on the impersonal, he included “sub-melodies heard within repeated melodic patterns” and “slight irregularities in performance”—those spontaneous and emergent effects that resemble the “resulting possibilities” described in the notes to Music for Two or More Pianos, and thus which describe well his approach to improvisation in early 1967.44 He now accepted “all that results,” perhaps, but neither as indeterminacy nor as improvisation: these results, soon to be called “resulting patterns” in Violin Phase (1967), were now bracketed and contained—in a word, controlled—and the composer’s ownership over them retained. By the end of the decade, these features were no longer “improvisational” but had become aspects of the “impersonal.” In his

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1974 Writings about Music, “Music as a Gradual Process” appeared with a new penultimate paragraph. Process was in and improvisation was out: “The distinctive thing about musical processes is that they determine all the note-to-note details and the over all [sic] form simultaneously. One can’t improvise in a musical process—the concepts are mutually exclusive.”45 The social and political implications of this new attitude toward improvisation extend beyond the more abstract power dynamics between composer and performer. By 1974, when Writings about Music first appeared in print, Reich and Philip Glass had parted ways with some still-cryptic acrimony, and the musicians who had once performed for both were forced to choose between them. Jon Gibson, to whom Reich had dedicated Reed Phase, chose Glass. Arthur Murphy, the consummate improviser and Reich’s close collaborator since the mid-1960s, chose to stay with Reich but had left Steve Reich and Musicians by July 1972.46 Reed Phase went the way of the keyboard duets and was also soon withdrawn. Additionally, as Reich’s interest in Indonesian and Ghanaian music grew toward the end of the 1960s, along with an increased anxiety about the cultural appropriation of non-Western practices, so too did his rejection of improvisation: “I am not interested in improvisation,” he declared in the May 1969 concert program, “or in sounding exotic.”47 Yet, unlike Cage’s dismissal of jazz and improvisation—and therefore African American experimentalism—Reich’s critique seemed most pointed at the ostensibly white avant-garde itself. In his 1973 “Notes on the Ensemble,” he took special aim at “a certain idea that’s been in the air, particularly since the 1960s, and it’s been used by choreographers as well as composers and I think it is an extremely misleading idea,” namely, “that the only pleasure a performer (be it musician or dancer) could get was to improvise, or in some way be free to express his or her momentary state of mind.”48 Instead, he argued, musicians find joy in performing the music they love, and “whether that music is improvised or completely worked out is really not the main issue. The main issue is what’s happening musically; is this beautiful, is this sending chills up and down my spine, or isn’t it?”49 Reich no longer accepted improvisation as a fulfilling pursuit in his own work and rejected the argument that improvisation alone could offer performers a legitimate or fulfilling experience. There are good reasons to treat Reich’s account of the origins of Piano Phase as abridged and simplified, no more detailed than it needed to be for his own purposes. The composer’s views of his own life and works surely are not subject to the same pressures and expectations as those motivating music scholars. The revised chronology traced in this chapter nevertheless forces us to crucially re-evaluate our understanding of Reich’s compositional development while offering new aural delights and further opportunities for examining sound and meaning in the composer’s music. Evidence from his archives at PSS now offers us a new timeline for the origins of Piano

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Table 10.4 A new timeline for Piano Phase, from its precedents to its premiere Date

Event

May 22, 1966 May 1966 Early to mid-1966? Mid- to late 1966? November 1966 December 1966

Reich composes Melodica and turns to live performance Reich creates the first Variation on a Watermelon Reich begins collaborating privately with Arthur Murphy Reich sends MS Music for Two or More Pianos to Cage Reich creates the second Variation on a Watermelon Reich composes the first versions of Piano Phase and Reed Phase Reich and Murphy finally rehearse on two pianos Reich and Murphy perform three piano duets at Fairleigh-Dickinson University

Early January 1967 January 5, 1967

Phase, slightly different and more detailed than his own story (summarized in Table 10.4), to wit: around the time that Reich completed Melodica and began turning his thoughts toward live performance, he revived his improvisational Music for Two or More Pianos or Piano and Tape, sending it to Cage as his representative contribution to the Notations collection, and commenced private collaborations with Arthur Murphy, each man working in his studio with piano and tape. The creative interaction between Murphy and Reich resulted most immediately in two improvisational keyboard variations based on Reich’s Oh Dem Watermelons score, which appeared in May and November, followed by the earliest manuscripts for Piano Phase and Reed Phase in December. Piano Phase premiered in January 1967 with a short improvisational passage, thereafter excised and never again acknowledged. The two musicians presented several versions of Piano Phase throughout 1967 and then performed it in its final and most familiar form in January 1968. Only then was it complete, having taken the form known to listeners and performers today, without a trace of the improvisations that had characterized its compositional process.

Notes 1. Reich 1974, 51–52. 2. Reich 2002b, 34–36; Steve Reich: Phase to Face 2011c, 16:47–18:19. 3. See, for example, Mertens 1983, 49–50; Suzuki 1991, 461–67; Schwarz 1996, 64–66; Potter 2000, 181–88; Ross 2007, 501; Taruskin 2009, 373–74. 4. Reich 1993, 38. 5. See Piekut 2014. 6. Lewis 1996; see also Kostelanetz 1970, 161–63.

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7. See Belgrad 1998; Cox 2002; Lewis 2004; Kim 2008, 2012; Feisst 2009; Gendron 2010; Piekut 2011, 2013, 2014. 8. “A much more widespread view that has evolved in the Eurological music circles with regard to improvisation is the notion that, to be musically coherent, improvisation cannot be left as ‘free,’ but must instead be ‘controlled’ or ‘structured’ in some way” (Lewis 1996, 115). 9. See especially Dennis 1974; R. D. Morris 1988; Fink 1999; Horlacher 2000/ 2001; Christensen 2004; Botha 2010. 10. Reich 1969c, 29; 1980c. 11. Potter 2000, 182; Suzuki 1991, 462. 12. Note, for example, that in both MS December 1966 and MS January 1967 the performance note ends with the statement: “This is a work in progress.” See Reich 1969b, 1969c. 13. This was strongly suggested in March 1967, as Klaas van der Linden first noted, when Reich hung two early manuscripts for Piano Phase on the exhibit wall at Park Place Gallery in Manhattan, noting on a nearby placard:  “the two scores of Piano Phase represent two versions of the same musical process” (Van der Linden 2010, 4). The connections between Reich and the concept and process art movements were most recently asserted by Ross Cole (2014). This topic is one of the oldest within the intellectual discourse on minimalism generally, and Reich specifically; see, for example, Bernard 1993; Hitchcock 1996. 14. This emergent melody, which one can hear even when only one pianist plays the opening Piano Phase motive, is different from those “resulting patterns” described in Epstein 1986, which are the result of the melody being phase-shifted against itself. 15. Potter 2000, 187, 191, 234, 241. 16. See, for example, Potter 2000, 181; Strickland 1993, 197; Suzuki 1991, 456. 17. Silverman 2012, 220–25. 18. See the preface to Cage 1969. 19. See the appendix entitled “Works in the Archive,” in Cage 1969, [251–70]. 20. Cage 1969. 21. Reich, New York City, to John Cage, Stony Point, New York, January 13, 1967 (Steve Reich Collection, PSS, Basel). The concert to which Reich refers was likely the New Year’s Eve Central Park performance in Clark 1967. 22. Potter 2000, 162. 23. Suzuki 1991, 438. 24. Ibid. 25. See B. Evans 1969, 1984; Pettinger 1998, 197. 26. Archived program from Berkeley University Art Museum dated November 7, 1970, folder “Programme 1970 Nov.” (Steve Reich Collection, PSS, Basel). 27. Reich 1974, 51. 28. Reich 2002b, 12–13. 29. See the performance instructions as published in Reich 2002b, 12. 30. Potter 2000, 162; Reich 2001, 11.

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31. Suzuki 1991, 435; Carl 2009, 37. 32. Potter 2000, 162. 33. Gopinath (2005) has noted the exceptionalism of this period of tape composition from 1965 to 1966, describing it as “a rupture in the history of Reich’s music and American experimental composition” (4), not only in its embrace of tape and technology as compositional media, but most especially in its radical political commitments. 34. Archived program from Fairleigh-Dickinson University dated January 5, 1967, folder “Programme Jan 1967” (Steve Reich Collection, PSS, Basel). 35. Suzuki 1991, 439–40; Potter 2000, 170; Gopinath 2011, 164. 36. Digitized archival recording of March 19, 1967, performance at Park Place Gallery, CD 1, Track 2 (Steve Reich Collection, PSS, Basel). 37. Gopinath 2011, 157, 160; Potter 2000, 170. 38. Gopinath 2011, 160–61. 39. See Potter 2000, 225; Reich 2002b, 68; Hartenberger 2013, 371–72. 40. Potter 2000, 170; Gopinath 2011, 164. 41. Reich 1993, 40. 42. See the archived program from Park Place Gallery, March 17–19, 1967, folder “Programme Mai 1969” (Steve Reich Collection, PSS, Basel). 43. Reich 1969a, 56. 44. Ibid., 57. 45. Reich 1974, 11. 46. Murphy’s last appearance as a named member of the Steve Reich and Musicians ensemble was on an archived program dated July 13, 1972, for a performance of Drumming at the “Spiel, Klang, Elektronik, Licht” festival in West Berlin. See archived program dated July 13, 1972, folder “Programme Jul 1972” (Steve Reich Collection, PSS, Basel). 47. Archived program from Whitney Museum dated May 27, 1969, folder “Programme Mai 1969” (Steve Reich Collection, PSS, Basel). 48. Reich 1974, 46–47. 49. Ibid.

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Appendix 1 Transcription of the March 1967 Performance of the second Variation on a Watermelon. Source: Digitized archival recording of March 19, 1967, performance at Park Place Gallery, CD 1, Track 2 (Steve Reich Collection, PSS, Basel). Note that the archival recording continues with a second performance of the Second Variation.

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Appendix 1 Continued

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Appendix 2 The Piano Phase improvisation, January 1967.

Source:  Digitized archival recording of January 5, 1967, performance at FairleighDickinson University Art Gallery, CD 25, Track 5 (Steve Reich Collection, PSS, Basel).

11 Steve Reich’s Counterpoints and Computers Rethinking the 1980s Twila Bakker This chapter aims to re-evaluate the role of Steve Reich’s 1980s Counterpoint series in the context of his reinvention as a venerated member of New York’s new music establishment. A consideration of these works’ prominence in the performed repertoire and their critical reception demonstrates how Reich reengaged with past compositional interests now couched in more conventional terminology, facilitating his gradual transformation from outsider to insider. Concurrently with this transition to tradition came a personal change with Reich’s first use of the computer as a compositional tool. An exploration of this development offers insights into how he has since then pragmatically incorporated digital compositional habits alongside previous analog ones, all while maintaining his recently secured foothold in the Western classical canon. The Counterpoints’ aesthetic compactness, their continuities with the composer’s earlier works, and their popularity among performers make them an ideal case study for observing these shifts in Reich’s compositional output.

The Counterpoints: The Stuff of History Following on from the popularity of his Music for 18 Musicians (1976) and its commercial release on ECM records in 1978, Reich’s music thrived and his reputation increased during the 1980s, appealing to, and connecting with, a much wider audience than had previously been the case. He became the archetypal artist who—while managing to remain true to his aesthetic convictions— nevertheless transmuted those ideas into an art form that was direct, accessible, and increasingly popular among performers and musicians outside of Reich’s own ensemble. In the 1980s, Reich began working exclusively with Nonesuch Records, whose director, Robert Hurwitz, Reich had known from his days at ECM, following the director when he made the transition to the new label.1 During this time, Reich’s commissions accumulated with a steady consistency (see Table 11.1) and with them associations with several prestigious musicians and performing ensembles, an external indicator of commercial success. By this time, 239

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Table 11.1 Steve Reich’s 1980s compositions with commissioners listed Year

Work

Commissioned by

1981

Tehillim

1982 1983 1984

Vermont Counterpoint Eight Lines/Octet (1979) The Desert Music

1985

Sextet

1985

New York Counterpoint

1986 1986 1987

Three Movements Six Marimbas/Six Pianos (1973) The Four Sections

West German Radio, Cologne; South German Radio, Stuttgart; and Rothko Chapel, Houston Ransom Wilson 1979: Hessischer Rundfunk West German Radio, Cologne, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music Laura Dean Dancers and Musicians and the French government for Nexus Fromm Music Foundation for Richard Stoltzman St. Louis Symphony Orchestra —

1987

Electric Counterpoint

1988

Different Trains

Mrs. Ralph I. Dorfman for the San Francisco Symphony in honor of its seventy-fifth anniversary Brooklyn Academy of Music and the Brooklyn Philharmonic for Pat Metheny Betty Freeman for the Kronos Quartet

Sourced from Hoek 2002, 32–37.

one can safely proclaim that Reich had “made it” as a composer, yet critics— then and since—have often decried Reich’s music from this period as coming up short, despite the fact that the decade started with the very original-sounding Tehillim (1981) for voices and ensemble, and culminated with the powerful Different Trains (1988) for string quartet and tape. In comparison with these two landmark compositions, the Counterpoints and other works from the 1980s have generally been underrepresented in scholarship. Some critics have characterized this period as Reich’s less than successful orchestral decade—which is intriguing, since Reich himself rather controversially predicted an end to the orchestra during the early 1970s.2 Rather than engaging with the 1980s as Reich’s “period of reinvention,” scholars have focused instead on the pantheon of watershed works from the 1960 through 1970s— the early tape pieces, the phase pieces, Drumming (1970–71), and Music for 18 Musicians—before leaping forward to Different Trains and then on to some of Reich’s more recent works.3 This omission is surprising, since (and in contrast with other compositions from Reich’s oeuvre) performances of the Counterpoints

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have been widespread. For example, between 2001 and 2013, the three counterpoint pieces composed during the 1980s accounted for an average of 14 percent of the performances advertised on Reich’s personal website, whereas the much more frequently discussed “Phase” pieces amounted to only 8 percent. A survey of the same body of performances found that concerts including a Reich composition from the 1980s amounted to just over 27 percent. From this, it can be stated with some certainty that the compositions from the 1980s—including the Counterpoints—have become part of standard contemporary repertoire, even though they have not afforded an equitable amount of research. How did this group of compositions first emerge? In the early 1980s, Reich received a telephone call from American flute virtuoso Ransom Wilson. During the call, Wilson petitioned the composer to write a flute concerto for him. Reich’s response to the request was an emphatic and swift refusal; he would not—could not—write a concerto. Yet doubts must have lingered because, as Reich later recounted, he realized that turning away a musician of Wilson’s caliber seemed a foolish thing to do.4 Re-evaluating the situation, Reich returned Wilson’s phone call proposing a solution that he felt would work for both composer and commissioner: not a concerto but an updated version of Violin Phase (1967),5 with Wilson prerecording multiple lines of music to play against in live performance. This collaborative effort with Wilson was to become the first of Reich’s Counterpoint series:  Vermont Counterpoint (1982), followed by New  York Counterpoint (1985) and Electric Counterpoint (1987), and after a long hiatus Cello Counterpoint (2003).6 Interspersed between some of Reich’s larger ensemble works, the 1980s Counterpoints can be understood in part as microcosms of Reich’s adjustments to the ethos of the time—while still maintaining the aesthetic ideals found in his early works. With Ronald Reagan’s two-term presidency reflecting a shift to the right in US politics of the time,7 Reich likewise became firmly entrenched in what has been touted as the new phase of his compositional style—one that rendered “the bare-bones variety of minimalism . . . the stuff of history.”8 On the surface, the story of Reich rejecting a concerto commission fits into the late 1960s and early 1970s image of the composer, perpetuated through the recounting of stories such as his Mills College encounter with composer Luciano Berio, which often finds Reich donning a heavy Italian accent while repeating a variation of “If you want to write tonal music, then why don’t you write tonal music.”9 As such the rejection of the concerto commission meshes with the idea of Reich as the rebellious yet talented composer steeped in America’s West Coast counterculture before finding his way home to the galleries and lofts of downtown New York City. With Vermont Counterpoint “updating” Violin Phase, Reich returned to and reclaimed a part of his own compositional technique left dormant during the 1970s: a tape accompanist. However, unlike Violin Phase’s tape, which required a mere three additional lines creating a quasi-quartet with the live line,

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Vermont’s tape called for ten recorded flute lines fashioning a “concerto for one,” and therefore allowing Reich to respond, in his own way, to Wilson’s request. Although it is sometimes performed by ensembles, the combination of tape and live remains Reich’s preferred instrumentation format for the Counterpoints— where the ultimate effect is to train the audience’s attention on the soloist with an extremely focused sound. Tape accompaniment can achieve this because, as Reich has stated, “if the live player plays the piece correctly then the ensemble will be spot on.”10 Critic Gregory Sandow was not overly enthusiastic about Vermont Counterpoint’s engagement with an invisible accompanist, finding that the tape part acted subversively, making it impossible for the audience to understand the performance without the aid of the program note.11 Four years later, New York Counterpoint hardly fared better in Sandow’s eyes (or ears), as he still took issue with Reich’s use of multitrack technology: Part of the musical point of the piece, though, is that the 11 parts should speak with the same voice, and so to anyone sensitive to the inevitable theatrical component of any musical performance, “New York Counterpoint” contains a builtin contradiction. All 11 parts must be played by the same clarinetist; the piece can look convincing or sound the way Mr. Reich wants it to, but not both.12

By the time Electric Counterpoint entered the repertoire, other critics were also beginning to react to the concept less favorably. Kyle Gann, then writing in the Village Voice, felt that the Counterpoints seemed “disposable and infinitely extendable. (New  York Counterpoint, Vermont Counterpoint:  can Lunch Counterpoint be far behind?).” For Gann, Pat Metheny (for whom Electric was written; see Table 11.1) was forced into the predictable short repeated motives of the Counterpoints, and no consideration was paid to his unique performative abilities.13 Although one can readily hear Reich’s creative imprint in the Counterpoints, there are nevertheless distinctive qualities that belong to the new style of the 1980s. K.  Robert Schwarz has maintained that Reich’s music was still characterized by an inherent tension between “intuition” and “process” while simultaneously preserving the integrity of the underlying musical process.14 Rather than adhering to the ideology of impersonality codified in his oft-quoted essay “Music as a Gradual Process” (1968), in Schwarz’s and others’ assessment, Reich could be seen to be moving toward more intuitive forms of composition well before the 1980s. After completing Drumming in 1971, the composer relinquished his fixation on phase shifting and embraced new techniques such as combining rhythmic construction and multiple canons. Reflecting on the change in his aesthetic approach in an interview with composer and critic Michael Nyman in 1976, Reich commented: The early pieces are very forceful examples of a strict working out of certain new ideas even though they had certain relationships to canonic structure

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and augmentation. But once you’ve done that what do you do? Just sit there cranking out one perfect phase piece after another? Personally, as a human being, I  feel the need to move on, not to sell out or cop out, but just to move on.15

Not looking so much to compromise but rather to grow, Reich took the techniques he had developed in his pre-1968 compositions and applied them in increasing and varied ways. Even prior to Music for 18 Musicians, Reich was gradually starting to edge toward the insider status he achieved over the course of the 1980s, noting that in all his music there was an underlying structure but warning that the structure was not “merely systematic” as that would become uninteresting.16 On the other hand, notwithstanding Reich’s claims that he wasn’t about to sit and churn out more “perfect” phase pieces, Vermont Counterpoint was advertised from its outset as an updated Violin Phase, with the composer stating that “the techniques used [in Vermont] include several that I discovered as early as 1967.”17 Like Violin Phase, Vermont consists of several concise linear, melodic ideas. Throughout the course of the composition typically three patterns or at most (very briefly) five melodic patterns are heard simultaneously (although there are in fact a total of seventeen musical patterns in Vermont). The busiest moments in Vermont occur during the transition from section III to IV (rehearsal numbers 69 and 70); and although five melodic patterns are present, only three rhythmic patterns occur (with two other patterns augmenting into chordal figurations). While some of these techniques are somewhat consistent with earlier works, one can identify a shift in approach. Rather than adhering to what Catherine Cameron has noted as a persistent theme in American composers’ selfcommentaries, namely, “the goal of creating a musical [tradition] based more closely on American [musical] culture and history rather than simply borrowing from European . . . resources,” Reich reverts to employing conventional language to describe his music.18 One factor that did change between Violin Phase and Vermont was Reich’s admission of the function of “canon” in his music. In the program note to Violin Phase, Reich’s vocabulary is replete with references to “psycho-acoustic byproducts” and “phase-shifting” but includes no mention of canon, although by 1974—in the “Notes on Compositions 1965–1973” section of his Writings about Music—Reich remarks that in retrospect he understood “gradually shifting phase relations . . . as an extension of the idea of infinite canon or round.”19 In his note to Vermont, Reich describes its two-part compositional system in more traditional language, avoiding terms or phrases developed in earlier writings such as “shifting phase relations”: Primarily building up canons between short repeating melodic patterns by substituting notes for rests and then playing melodies that result from their

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combination. These resulting melodies or melodic patterns then become the basis for the following section as the other surrounding parts in the contrapuntal web fade out.20

New York Counterpoint’s program note also evinces a dichotomy between old and new Reich. The use of interlocking repeated patterns on multiples of the same instrument draws on the earlier Phase works, but the rate of change in the patterns themselves reflects more recent works such as Sextet (1985). The use of more standard music terminology indicates Reich’s willingness to bring the public’s perception of him in line with the notions of “middle-class favorites”21 in musical reception and understanding. The utilization of such conventional terms would not be out of place in describing the music of Bach or Beethoven, for example. In his note on New York Counterpoint, Reich also writes about exploiting the ambiguity of dividing 12 into a meter: 3/2 = 6/4 ultimately becomes a large 12/8, where eighth notes can be grouped in threes (four groups in total) or fours (three groups in total)—a concept that preoccupied Reich throughout the early 1970s in works such as Drumming and Music for Pieces of Wood (1973).22 The metrical opacity afforded by the division of 12 enabled Reich to create the perception of newness. For example, in discussing New York Counterpoint, he writes: In the last movement of New  York Counterpoint the bass clarinets function to accent first one and then the other of these possibilities while the upper clarinets essentially do not change. The effect, by change of accent, is to vary the perception of that which in fact is not changing.23

The aural similarities of these pattern-based compositions sometimes cause confusion, but while patterns still lie at the heart of a composition—repeated as they are throughout a movement—musical interest is not derived from the earlier process of a variable distance canon but rather through the shifting of perceived groupings, revealing a continuity with his 12-division-based works from the 1970s after Drumming. But perhaps the difference is one of degree rather than kind. As he notes with respect to Vermont Counterpoint: [In contrast to my works from 1967], the relatively fast rate of change (there are rarely more than three repeats of any bar), metric modulation into and out of a slower tempo, and relatively rapid changes of key may well create a more concentrated and concise impression.24

Thus, in discussions of the Counterpoints, Reich utilizes traditional vocabulary to describe these compositions rather than developing a new lexicon, as he had done with previous techniques and compositions. The term “rhythmic construction,” although used in relation with the Counterpoints, was in fact coined and used by the critic and musicologist K. Robert Schwarz25—unlike “phasing,”

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a term that Reich de-emphasized in the years following his application of it to describe the variable distance canons of his 1960s works. The importance of tradition and convention to Reich in relation to his work can be found in a 2010 interview when the composer is discussing Piano Phase: It is a weird technique. If you go to a conventional music school anywhere in the Western world . . . they will not teach you how to phase . . . but there are other ways of getting what is called . . . a canon or a round. That’s what’s going on here [referring to a performance of Piano Phase], that’s what’s going on in It’s Gonna Rain, it’s one sound against itself. That’s a canon; it can be from the 13th century, it can be Johann Sebastian Bach, it can be Béla Bartók, it can be Steve Reich.26

Phasing is repackaged here, focusing on the elements within it that are orthodox versus heterodox rather than by simply invoking “a technocrat word” he admits to being “guilty of coining.”27 With this rather blunt self-assessment, Reich immediately places himself in a historical line that would have been familiar to him from at least his Cornell University years, when he attended classes with musicologist William Austin.28 The undergraduate music history sequence devised by Austin began with Gregorian chant and went up to the death of J. S. Bach in 1750, at which point chronology would be replaced by what Austin referred to as serendipitous and parallel musical pathways:  jumping from Bach and the first half of the eighteenth century to Claude Debussy at the turn of the twentieth. Austin’s take on music history clearly had an impact on Reich’s fledgling thoughts about the subject, and the composer can be seen to rehearse his teacher’s view on several occasions, such as the quip that “If all the music from Haydn to Wagner were to disappear, I’d miss a few pieces, but most of it—I wouldn’t even know it was gone. Whereas, to lose Bach, or Stravinsky or Bartók—the world would be very slim [pickings].”29 Contemporary composition could—and did, in both Austin’s and Reich’s worlds—fit into music history by claiming the Baroque tradition as its standard-bearer. Even the term “counterpoint” recalls the compositional significance of perennial favorite of classical music lovers, J. S. Bach. This link is made explicit in the sketches for New York Counterpoint where, after noting future designs for the development of melodic patterns into harmonic ones, Reich signs off with “QED/J.S.B.”30—an abbreviation of the Latin quod erat demonstrandum Johann Sebastian Bach—serving as explicit acknowledgment of the composer’s inspiration for this work. Whether conscious or not, Reich’s invocation of the father of Baroque music has possible echoes in the Reagan era’s conservative climate:  a case of the “wacko [minimalist] composers going legit,” to paraphrase Gann.31 This return to traditional terminology and references to the Baroque coincides with Reich’s welcome return to the respected concert halls of

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New York, an impressive reversal of public opinion that laid the ghosts of the 1973 Carnegie Hall performance of Reich’s Four Organs to rest.32 By the 1980s, Reich’s works were being premiered on New  York’s stages facilitated by the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) and across the country with other venerable backing institutions (see the commissioners listed in Table 11.1). All the 1980s Counterpoints were premiered at a BAM-sanctioned event; furthermore, both Vermont Counterpoint and Electric Counterpoint appeared as part of The Next Wave series.33 This was a quite remarkable turn of events for the composer, as highlighted by critic Tim Page in contrasting the world premiere of Music for 18 Musicians, which had been “heralded by stark white posters, decorated with a few measures of music, plastered on the grimy walls of SoHo,” and the performance of the same a decade or so later as part of the New York Philharmonic Horizons Festival.34 Some critics, such as New  York Times’ Bernard Holland, found awkward resonances in Reich’s relationship with the past. In a 1987 review of Electric Counterpoint’s premiere, Holland laments “[to] a truly avant-garde composer  .  .  .  how debilitating are such reconciliations with the past? I  do not presume to answer, or tell Mr. Reich which bridges he should burn; but if he wants, I’ll gladly send him the matches.”35 Writing around the same time, Gann found the composer embroiled in something of a midlife compositional crisis, resulting in “European monuments built of African folk-rhythmic units [which] were marred by a structural incongruity of ends and means, like cathedrals made from straw.”36 Holland and Gann both share concerns about Reich’s shift from a composer whose reputation was first established through musical experimentation and innovation to easy accessibility and commercial success. Holland sees Reich’s return to traditional models as undermining his status as a groundbreaking composer, while Gann suggests that Reich’s compositions from the 1980s lack structural integrity. A narrative begins to emerge from these reviews of a composer passionate for change and reform betraying his younger self. This is also evident in commentators such as Page and Barbara Jepson, who refer to Reich in the mid-1980s as a former Young Turk.37 With the Counterpoints, Reich can be seen to standardize the terminology employed in discussions of his work, linking himself publicly and privately with composers considered part of the Western classical canon. As Reich was paid up front to compose and garnered positive attention from important cultural institutions, a change in his circumstances was gradual but continuous. Commissions accumulated, and with them came increased media attention that eventually placed Reich at the center of the classical music world’s stage. This media attention is echoed in Reich’s own use of conventional terminology, reflecting on his need to strike a balance between innovation and tradition.

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Computers: The Mad Scientist’s Invisible Assistant? As already discussed, with Vermont Counterpoint Steve Reich began again to use multitrack tape as a “perfect accompanist” after a hiatus from the medium in the 1970s. The break (signaled most adamantly in Reich’s essay “An End to Electronics”)38 was partly precipitated by events (both personal and compositional) during 1966 that had caused the composer to feel “like a mad scientist trapped in a lab.”39 Turning in the 1980s toward a different technology in the form of the personal computer, Reich began to explore the capabilities of digital technology as a tool for score preparation: a kind of invisible assistant. Although Reich started working with the computers, he still maintained his newly established relationship with tradition. Fittingly, Electric Counterpoint was one of Reich’s first works to incorporate music notation software (MNS) as a compositional tool, specifically the software program Professional Composer. During the years between Vermont Counterpoint and Electric Counterpoint, he actively explored possibilities for printing music from a mechanized source. As was the case for many professional composers, music copying was both time-consuming and expensive for Reich. For The Desert Music (1983), according to a story related to Peter Catapano, Reich had received a commission of $15,000 for the work, but the copyist’s fees totaled $17,000.40 It was three years before Reich took the next logical step in his digital development—the acquisition of an Apple IIC for his son in 1986. This personal purchase led Reich to consider the possibilities of MNS. By 1987, he had purchased a Macintosh Plus and was using it in conjunction with Mark of the Unicorn’s (MOTU) notation software Professional Composer and MOTU’s related software sequencer, Performer.41 Ten years after adopting the computer as a compositional tool, Reich recalled that he “found both programs to be a tremendous practical help, especially in preparing parts,” noting that they were “extracted automatically from the score.”42 The impact of MNS on the working methods of composers during the last two decades of the twentieth century has only started to be explored. In addressing the ways in which such software transforms the work environment of a composer, Chris Watson has asked what comprises contemporary compositional tools, positing the argument that the physicality of MNS, housed as they are inside the computer, lies in opposition to the cultivated Romantic ideal of the composer: The historically acculturated romance and simplicity of the chair and desk, the quill, ink well and manuscript is gone, replaced by the plastic of the CPU, screen, keyboard and mouse. The enduring nature of the Romantic ideal renders such notions as the members of the First Viennese School ordering Sibelius software upgrades via e-mail, or meeting at drinking houses to discuss

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RAM requirements for the rendering of WAV files as absurd. Musicology offers no depictions of Bach chatting with his patrons via Skype, Brahms hunting for a wireless router at his local Dick Smith or Webern hiking in the alps with his iPod.43

In the 1980s, many of the circumstances described by Watson were still situations that belonged to the future. Composers were not yet communicating with their sponsors through online real-time video programs. However, they were beginning to grasp the capabilities of computers, hardware, and software. MNS was new and innovative; Reich was testing it out and even by 1996 (several years after acquiring it) was still enamored with the concept, commenting that he “would be quite surprised if, in less than five years, most young composers were not generating their scores via computer.”44 Professional Composer provided Reich with several compositional benefits, in addition to the possibility of reducing copying fees. The software was advertised to musicians, composers, and arrangers as “an end to messy scores, illegible sketches, and time-consuming copying,” encouraging them to “imagine an efficient musical assistant who not only copies beautifully, but also performs lengthy tasks like transposition, part extraction, and a multitude of score formatting and printing jobs—a smart assistant who knows all instrument ranges and checks for errors in your score.”45 Such lengthy tasks that could be taken over by the composer’s invisible software assistant can be found in the “Variations” menu of Professional Composer, which, for example, provides six interesting possibilities for transpositions and rhythms: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Transpose Parts Transpose Key . . . Transpose Interval . . . Rebar Change Rhythm . . . Merge Staves (command-M)

A selection of these six transformational tools appear to have been utilized in Reich’s e-sketches for Electric Counterpoint, demonstrating his exploration of the software’s capabilities although not necessarily an expansion of them. Reich still holds on to the traditional notion that the musical idea should precede the use of technology, be it on a computer or via a specialized tape recorder.46 Ostensibly, according to the Professional Composer user manual the transposition tools were easy and convenient to apply and reverse.47 However, in a contemporary review of the software, Elaine Cousins notes that early versions were not without flaws. She comments that the “Transpose Interval” command could “only carry out exact intervallic transposition,” meaning that if the

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user wanted, for example, to retain the original key signature of the fragment undergoing transposition, she or he “would have to make that adjustment on a note-by-note basis after the transposition was completed.”48 Cousins’s commentary on Professional Composer confirms Alan Belkin’s understanding of the difficult nature of MNS development, drawn from the fact that “music notation is only partly rule-based; it has a visual, aesthetic aspect that is often difficult to reduce to simple algorithmic form.”49 As MNS is predicated on the software designers’ ability to convert the visual element of a score into the command lines of a programming language, the success of such a translation requires reducing the “psychic friction” between what the user intends and what is actually realized.50 What becomes apparent in Cousins’s review is that by the mid-1980s Professional Composer had a higher level of psychic friction than was desirable, a situation that continued to plague software designers. This concern is evident in Belkin’s reviews of a range of similar MNS packages from ten years later, where he expounds on the difficulties early programmers continued to experience in balancing flexibility versus functionality.51 For example, the “Merge Staves” feature in Professional Composer software was not only located in the “Variations” menu but was additionally possible for a composer to achieve through the keyboard shortcut command-M. The “Merge Staves” tool, like the very methods of applying it, again offered a time-efficient option for a previously labor-intensive task, namely, combining “two or more single staves together.”52 Reich’s use of the features located in the “Variations” menu is found in two of the remaining loose pages of sketch material, somewhat surprisingly in hard copy rather than in a digital format. The pair of documents, “First Resulting Patterns,” from July 12, 1987, and “Resulting Patterns,” dated July 18, 1987, illustrate Reich’s “auditioning” of resulting patterns for the first movement of Electric Counterpoint.53 Both pages consist of sixteen staves, the top ten of which are computer-generated, presumably from Professional Composer files.54 Lines 9 and 10 (the bottom two computer-generated staves) on both documents comprise a composite of lines 1 through 4, and lines 5 through 8, respectively. Lines 9 and 10 are most likely the result of Reich taking advantage of the “Merge Staves” option. Visually, the composite staff appears cluttered and messy, with all four printed lines appearing one on top of the other. Further confusing the lines are rests that overlap with notated pitches. According to the Professional Composer manual, for the rests not to appear in the merged staff—overly complicating the score—they “would need to be invisified in order to obtain the desired result.”55 This additional step appears not to have been undertaken, and the visual confusion that accompanies these documents is therefore most likely a by-product of using the software as a sketching tool rather than for typesetting a score. The adoption of compositional tools made possible by MNS to increase the software’s

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efficacy does not suggest that technological determinism held sway at this point in Reich’s compositional practice.56 Indeed, a similar approach may be found in earlier Reich sketches. For example, from very early on in Vermont Counterpoint (an entirely paper-based composition), Reich compresses multiple flute lines into a single staff in order to form the resulting live flute line.57 More recently, Reich has described his workspace as a blend of the analog and digital notation styles: “I still use my music notebooks to work out the basic harmonies . . . [the notebooks are] sitting right on top of my electric keyboard by my computer, so I’m back and forth with all of that.”58 The first instance of such “back and forth” procedures found in the extant sketch materials for Electric Counterpoint are the half-computer, halfhandwritten documents described earlier in this chapter. In both documents, lines 1 through 4 and 9 are the same, the differences in the pages stem from variations that occur in lines 5 through 8 and the corresponding resulting line 10. It is in the later section where Reich experimented with other software-aided tools, such as the three forms of transposition outline offered in the “Variations” menu. This idea of experimentation aligns with the fact that lines 5 and 6 were scribbled out on the earlier document “First Resulting Patterns.” Possible remnants of the other options available in the “Variations” menu can be found in the early electronic MNS documents for Electric Counterpoint. Between e-documents titled “African horn polyphonie” and “horn polyphonie” (see Table 11.2 for dates of creation and modification), the option of “Change Rhythm . . .” may have been applied, while between “horn polyphonie” and “short horn polyphonie” the “Transpose Key . . .” option in Professional Composer was likely utilized. As with the “Merge Staves” feature, these automations within the software didn’t create a new style of music: rather, they increased Reich’s efficiency for composing in an already established aesthetic. Table 11.2 Comparison of select early Electric Counterpoint computer files File

Created Date

Modified Time

Date

Time

Metrical Length Key Division (Bars) Signature

African May 10 14:17:24 May 14 19:33:31 Sixteenth 8 horn notes polyphonie

C major

horn May 14 20:30:20 May 15 02:09:08 Quarter polyphonie notes

16

C major

short horn June 30 14:06:41 June 30 14:25:58 Quarter polyphonie notes

16

G major

Derived from Electric Counterpoint computer files (Steve Reich Collection, PSS).

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Another feature of Professional Composer was its ability to provide playback of the inputted notation. While composing Electric Counterpoint, Reich could utilize the MNS of Professional Composer in conjunction with the sequencer software of Performer, enabling him to listen back to melodic ideas almost instantaneously. In his e-journals—a digital diary of text files that accompany the MNS e-sketches—Reich not only jotted down ideas and tracked his progress through the composition but also referred to other digital sketches, both Professional Composer and Performer documents. This is evident midway through the composition of Electric Counterpoint when Reich made notes to himself, such as on August 25, “Just to remember-paste in sequence P-Live+7etc (40-73) to sequence. Then go back to Print score and enter it in and print.”59 By utilizing this feature of Professional Composer, Reich was effectively recreating a digital equivalent of his earlier working methods, when he would engage performers in his ensemble to create rough recordings of sketch material for him.60 This practice has continued to the present day, where computer or tape demos are presented to performers in advance in order to maximize rehearsal time.61 In the 1980s, Reich was not creating his own computer-triggered musical instruments or programming his own software:  he was simply utilizing the products available on the market to his own ends.62 His compositional quandary (expensive copyist’s fees) was old enough, but his solution—a personal computer along with accompanying software packages—was creative yet relatively uncontroversial. Perceptions of the composer’s technological conservatism would change only beginning with his use of sampling keyboards in Different Trains (1988) and beyond, whereby he was said to both come “full circle [by returning to] the use of taped speech” and yet “[offering] something completely new and unique.”63

Conclusion: Reich’s New Beginning In the 1980s, Steve Reich bid farewell to his early period of hardcore minimalism and reinvented himself in the image of the composers he had first encountered in William Austin’s music history class. To this end, he adapted traditional terminology to fit his stylistic predilections rather than inventing new jargon. This shift also coincided with Reich’s gradual acceptance into the canon of Western art music. In the early 1990s, when his position in that canon was fairly secure, Reich admitted that in the late 1970s he had already realized the need to return to more conventional ensembles.64 Traveling with large numbers of musicians was not always a financially viable—let alone sustainable— enterprise, and surely this was increasingly the case over the course of the inflationary 1970s and recessionary 1980s.65 Pragmatically, Reich needed to

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adapt to the orthodoxy of the orchestra, augmenting his compositional output when opportunities presented themselves with multitracked string quartets and solo virtuosi.66 In the 1980s, Reich shied away from the image of a composer keen to promote his “outsider” status. Like his adaptation of traditional terminology to describe his music post–Music for 18 Musicians, Reich used what was available to him rather than seeking to create something new. His reversion to the status quo—reflected in critics’ responses and the composer’s own use of more conventional language to describe his music—mirrors the rather conventional use of computer technology with MNS. Electric Counterpoint’s e-sketches suggest that Reich “had an idea and used . . . technology to realize that idea.”67 But do Reich’s traditionalist musical rhetoric and use of notation software in the 1980s relate to one another in a more thoroughgoing way, beyond their temporal confluence and mutual conventionality? I would argue that there are three possible ways to understand this, all of which are bound up with economic problems emerging from the period in US history and the composer’s life. First, as suggested earlier, MNS permitted a new efficiency in his creative practice, which may have enabled greater productivity when he was faced with the need to manage large commissions and, perhaps, new expenses encumbered in part by the birth of his son Ezra in 1978.68 Second, on a purely practical level MNS helped Reich and his virtuoso soloists create prerecorded tape-loop ensembles for performers of the Counterpoints, and thereby helped to manage the squeeze on expenses generated by larger performing ensembles, which Reich could not afford to maintain during the 1980s unless working with established commissioning ensembles.69 Third, and more speculatively, as an early adopter of MNS, Reich may have unwittingly contributed to the downsizing of the music publishing industry, which increasingly required composers to use such software applications to reduce editing, copying, and printing costs. In all cases, what becomes “conservative” about the 1980s for Reich are the contradictory economic circumstances that he experienced—increased personal economic stability placed against the need for new logistical considerations in relation to independently organized projects. As can be seen from this chapter’s review of the Counterpoint pieces during the 1980s, an examination of these works shows them to be more than frivolous concert pieces. Their significance lies in their facilitation of a shift in the composer’s self-portrayal, creating a new beginning from old ideas, and perhaps their indexing of wider socioeconomic shifts in the period of their composition.70 The 1980s saw Reich standardize aspects of his compositional career which, when combined with his musical efforts, projected the concept of a conventional composer—one who celebrated the traditional historical antecedents of the Counterpoints—and the exploration of the capacities of the personal computer.

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Notes 1. For a brief description of Nonesuch’s recording practices, see Shorto 2004. 2. Reich 2002b, 51–52 [“Some Optimistic Predictions (1970) about the Future of Music”]. 3. Keith Potter does not cover the 1980s in his work, and Schwarz skips over the Counterpoints in any meaningful way (see Schwarz 1996; Potter 2000). 4. Reich, quoted in Steve Reich: A New Musical Language (1987b; directed by Margaret Williams). 5. Reich 1988, 273. 6. Cello Counterpoint is not considered in this chapter, which focuses on the works from the 1980s. 7. Freeman 2012, 373, 375, 377–78. 8. Schwarz 1996, 82. 9. A version of this story appears in Reich 2002b, 203. 10. Reich, quoted in Raines 2015, 21. 11. Sandow 1982. 12. Sandow 1986. 13. Gann 1987. 14. Schwarz 1990, 246. 15. Reich, quoted in Nyman 1977, 19. 16. Reich 1974, vii. 17. Reich 2002b, 119. 18. Cameron 1985, 435. 19. Reich 1974, 50. 20. Reich 1982. 21. Reich, quoted in Strickland 1991, 35. 22. Reich 2011a, 1980b. 23. Reich 1985. 24. Reich 2002b, 119. 25. The term “rhythmic construction,” which is used here, is equivalent to Warburton’s “block additive process”; however, the idea of “construction” derives from Reich’s own terminology and is used by Schwarz. As early as Drumming (1971), Reich was already referring to the substitution of notes for rests as a form of construction, and the opposite (rests being substituted for notes) as reduction. See Schwarz 1990, 251; Warburton 1988, 148; Reich 2002b, 64–65 [“Drumming (1971)”]. 26. Reich, quoted in Warren 2010. 27. Cited in Strickland 1991, 36. 28. Gagne and Caras 1982, 313–16; Strickland 1991, 35–36. In interviews conducted during the 1980s and 1990s, Reich often referred to his studies with Austin. The section on Reich’s experience with Austin at Cornell is edited out of the Fanfare version of this interview that was published in the same year the interview took place (1987); see Strickland 1987; Duckworth 1999, 310.

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29. J. Schneider 1991, 5–6. 30. Sketchbook [24] (Steve Reich Collection, PSS). 31. Potter, Gann, and ap Siôn 2013, 2. 32. Walsh 1982, 60; K. Smith, 2012. One might charitably describe the Carnegie Hall performance, which took place on January 18, 1973, as a concert that elicited a widely varied reception. For more on this concert, see Sumanth Gopinath’s chapter in this volume. 33. The series was launched in 1981 by the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Harvey Lichtenstein; see “BAM | Next Wave Festival.” 34. Page 1986. 35. Holland 1987. 36. Gann 1987. 37. Page 1986; Jepson 1988. 38. Reich 2002b, 38–51 [“The Phase Shifting Pulse Gate – Four Organs – Phase Patterns – An End to Electronics (1968–70)”]. 39. Reich, quoted in Nyman 1971, 230. 40. Catapano 2007. 41. Reich 1996, 19. The dating of Reich’s use of MOTU’s Professional Composer and Performer is confirmed in the extant sketch materials for the composition of Electric Counterpoint (1987), housed as part of the Steve Reich Collection at the PSS. 42. Reich 1996, 19. 43. Watson 2006, 111. 44. Reich 1996, 19. 45. MOTU n.d. 46. Raines 2015, 23. 47. MOTU 1985, 137–38. 48. Cousins 1985, 11. 49. Belkin 1994, 53. 50. Crawford 2009, 61. 51. Belkin 1994, 68. A more generic discussion of the peculiarities of the effects Human Computer Interaction (HCI) might have on compositional approach and practice can be found in Nash and Blackwell 2014. 52. MOTU 1985, 138. 53. Electric Counterpoint Folders, Steve Reich Collection, PSS. 54. Unfortunately, the exact configurations found in these printouts are not present in any of the accessible existing Electric Counterpoint Professional Composer digital files at the PSS. 55. MOTU 1985, 85. 56. Technological determinism as defined by Williams 1990, 12–14. 57. Sketchbooks [24], 60 and 87 (Steve Reich Collection, PSS). Note that the first sketch identified as relating to Vermont Counterpoint begins on page  51 of Sketchbook 24. 58. Raines 2015, 24. 59. “Note Book –Elect. Cntrpnt.txt,” Electric Counterpoint computer files (Steve Reich Collection, PSS).

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60. This can be seen in comments about recording and listening found, for example, at the bottom of Sketchbook 25, page  3; at the top of Sketchbook 25, page 14; on the right side of Sketchbook 25, page 30. Sketchbook [25] (Steve Reich Collection, PSS). 61. Raines 2015, 24. 62. In this way, Reich’s practice reflects realities in the shift from analog to digital technologies, which “differ greatly in the scope they allow for consumer appropriation” (Perlman 2003, 352), the latter being much less easy to modify without advanced technical knowledge. One might think of musicians’ reliance on preset sounds (rather than user-programmed ones) during the contemporaneous era of early digital synthesizer keyboards. As Paul Théberge notes, “As instrument technology became increasingly complex during the early 1980s (Yamaha’s popular DX7 is often cited as a case in point) and programming more difficult, the suspicion that most users simply did not program became even stronger. By the end of the decade, marketing departments were estimating that as few as 10  percent of users programmed their own sounds” (1997, 75). For his part, Reich likens MNS to a “word processing program” (2002b, 201). 63. Paul Hillier, in Reich 2002b, 6. 64. J. Schneider 1991, 5. 65. Another factor was surely the physical wear and tear of touring on the aging composer. In an interview from 1983, he implied this in the following comments: “Look, if you write music, as opposed to simply playing it, then you’re aligning yourself with a certain western tradition of notation, and music which will hopefully survive in its notated form. As I got past 40, and up next to 50, the idea of travelling around the world with my ensemble got less and less interesting to them as well as me. I’ve travelled with 2000 pounds of equipment and up to 24 musicians, and now my wanderlust is down to sub-zero. I just have to travel to make a living. So sending my music out in other ways is a relief ” (Morgan 1983, 6). 66. Retrospectively, Reich has noted in an interview that the nature of working with orchestras was somewhat depressing: “I am spending a year on this piece and the musicians are looking at their watches—they want to get home to Brooklyn . . . it’s their obligation to the living art of our time or some other boring phrase—and you feel that. . . . Also I am devoted to the microphone. . . . And the orchestras are still treating it like, ‘Oh my god, he’s using a microphone! It’s the end of the world!’ ” (see A. Ford 1993, 65). 67. Raines 2015, 23. 68. For example, one could argue that the labor of producing a canon become partly automated via Reich’s embracing of notation and playback software, thereby replacing the kind of precompositional thinking and requirements involved in canon composition in favor of a brute-force “guess-and-check” method. It is clear, however, that Reich’s method was to move back and forth between paper and computer—to use the latter to verify the results of the former (and, perhaps, vice versa). One might even productively draw an analogy here between Reich’s approach and the use of counterpoint in the music of the Second Viennese School, especially Schoenberg. Discussing Schoenberg’s atonal canons and other contrapuntal techniques, Richard

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Taruskin has argued, “But how elaborately ‘worked out’ is a canon or a fugue that is written in a style that recognises no distinction between consonance and dissonance, so that harmonically speaking, literally anything goes? The essence of counterpoint has always been its ‘dissonance treatment.’ That, and that alone, is where skill is required and displayed. What makes Bach’s Musical offering or Art of fugue such astonishing tours de force is not just the complexity of the texture, but the fact that that complexity is achieved within such exacting harmonic constraints. Take away the constraints and you have rendered the tour de force entirely pointless” (2004, 27). Whether one could apply the same argument in relation to Reich’s pandiatonicism is debatable, but there surely lies some truth in the notion that the musical material became, in a sense, preordained and fetishized by using computer technology. Whether this trend continued with more elaborate later works such as Different Trains and The Cave (1993), which were also composed with early versions of MNS, might prove a fruitful area for future research. Certainly, Reich’s engagement with technology demonstrates a decisive change from the man who had previously developed, created, and eventually rejected the Phase Shifting Pulse Gate. For more on the latter, see Kerry O’Brien’s chapter in this volume. 69. When discussing the constraints affecting the composition of his Sextet (1984), Reich noted, “I felt—it’s the 80s, there are a lot of economic considerations going on. People want us to play but they are not going to hire 18 people. I need a new piece for a small part of my ensemble.” In Reich 1987a, 106. The tapes also offered new revenue opportunities for Reich’s publisher, Boosey & Hawkes (which he joined in 1983 after publishing several early scores with Universal Edition in 1980; see Potter 2000, 353–54nn54, 55), and perhaps for the composer himself. 70. A study of Philip Glass’s reinvention of himself in the middle to late 1980s provides an interesting parallel for a greater understanding of the cultural climate in which these composers found themselves (see Grimshaw 2002).

PART IV BEYOND THE WEST Africa and Asia

12 Afro-Electric Counterpoint Martin Scherzinger Introduction: Occidental Africa As it is with most schools of artistic and musical thought, “minimalism” has become a trope in the collective awareness of the West, which transcends the actual works that—in their incoherent variety—it claims to represent.* More a conceptual condition than an empirical reality, the idea of minimalism tends to contain the logical and conceptual grasp of historical accounts of its various representatives. It is a tribute to a composer such as Steve Reich, albeit of a somewhat backhanded sort, that he should be eclipsed by the discourse surrounding his creations. This is especially paradoxical in the context of music that aspires to a condition of autogenerative immediacy, shorn of extramusical structure, content, and narrative; a music, in the words of Reich in 1968, where “compositional process and sounding music are one and the same thing.”1 Statements such as these became ubiquitous in a host of then-contemporary concert programs, commentaries, programmatic statements, manifesto-like slogans, and both critical and promotional reviews. Through a kind of mimetic cultural information transfer, a scholarly literature on minimalism that was primarily guided by a series of stylistic traits of this sort then emerged. In the decades that followed, these solidified into commonplace ideas—a tradition. Authorial noninterference, nonrepresentation, anti-illusion, flat surface, all-over pattern, repetitive structure, prevalent modularity, reduction of means, depersonalized processes: these were all informal but permanent hallmarks of an aesthetic style, an artistic movement, and a historical moment. The myth of minimalism prospered in a particular cultural and technological environment, primarily on the basis of a tacit set of contracts between visual artists, critics, historians, and musicians about how a new form of cultural production in the 1960s might be represented. The social, aesthetic, and institutional imbrication of a musical practice in the creative production of various artists (such as Sol LeWitt, Frank Stella, Michael Snow, and Richard Serra), as * This chapter has benefited enormously from conversations with Kofi Agawu, Rick Cohn, Evelyne Diendorf, Akin Euba, Sumanth Gopinath, Sabine Hänggi-Stampfli, Russell Hartenberger, Matthias Kassel, David Locke, Justin London, Robert Morris, Ulrich Mosch, John Roeder, Heidy Zimmermann, and many others. 259

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well as the writings of contemporary critics (such as Barbara Rose, Michael Fried, Richard Wollheim, Susan Sontag, Tom Johnson, and Michael Nyman), produced a public discourse on musical minimalism derived primarily from features associated with minimalism in the visual arts of the 1950s and 1960s. What this critical literature shields from view is the constitutive role played by audible cultures of the non-West in shaping the distinctive sound of minimalism. Reich’s connection to African music, in particular, is extensive. Arguably, the composer’s entire oeuvre stems from an interpretation of the complex counterpoint and pulse-dominated percussion of West African drumming ensembles. According to the official story—articulated by primary texts on the subject as well as the composer himself—in the early 1960s Reich studied African music by way of an encounter with Arthur M. Jones’s seminal book, Studies in African Music, which contains extensive transcriptions of West African drumming styles. During this time, the composer corresponded with Jones and took lessons in New York with the master drummer Alfred Ladzekpo. Then, in the summer of 1970, Reich spent five weeks in Accra, Ghana, on a study grant from the Institute of International Education. He took lessons with Gideon Alorworye at the Institute of African Studies (University of Ghana) and recorded, extensively transcribed, and analyzed his lessons. In the context of his own music, Reich attempted to go beyond an “exotic” invocation of African sound and instead to engage its formal structures.2 Drumming (1971) was one result of this attempt. Other examples of music from this period include Clapping Music (1972), Music for Pieces of Wood (1973), and Music for 18 Musicians (1976), all of which deploy undisguised appropriations of rhythmic patterns of West African drum ensembles. Less officially, however, Reich’s involvement with African music extends well beyond this often-repeated story, which marks only one African region, and also routinely underplays the scope and type of influence, construed as mostly “confirmation and encouragement” for an already formed style.3 In 1988, Reich stated that the influence of . . . Africa on my composition was more in the nature of encouragement than change of direction. Since I  had composed the formative works in my style (It’s Gonna Rain, Come Out, Piano Phase, Violin Phase, etc.) in the 1960s prior to going to Ghana in 1970, my trip there basically confirmed the direction I was already going in.4

Against this oft-repeated idea, this chapter will show that Reich’s compositional endeavor reflects less the “confirmation” or “encouragement” of an existing idea than a thoroughgoing debt to African musical thought. In other words, far from coinciding with some previous experimental proclivity (“in [Reich’s] style . . . Piano Phase, Violin Phase, etc.”) that happened to share characteristics with African music, as maintained by the composer, the music is in

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fact directly indebted—at its core and in its origins—to African musical principles, concepts, and techniques. The principles, concepts, and techniques at stake here are too numerous to be outlined comprehensively in this chapter. Instead, to turn the analytic tables, I will outline only a few of the foundational principles of Reich’s work and demonstrate their source in African musical practice and thought. These include the “phasing process” that grounds perhaps the most fundamental operation of Reich’s compositional modus operandi no less than the concept of “inherent rhythm,” perhaps the most noteworthy sonic-aesthetic feature (and central compositional preoccupation) of Reich’s entire musical oeuvre. Both of these principles were amply elaborated in the then-contemporary writings on African music with which Reich was well acquainted before embarking on his first signature minimalist work. For example, Reich derived the “phasing process” with reference to music of the Bemba and the Lala people of Zambia—a then-colonial territory known as Northern Rhodesia—about which he read in various anthropological accounts. In a letter to A. M. Jones in 1967 (currently archived at the Paul Sacher Stiftung [PSS] in Basel, Switzerland), Reich states that he had encountered Jones’s book Studies in African Music already in 1962. Close reading of Reich’s writings actually reveals his acknowledgment of the origin of the phasing idea in his studies of African music. With a hint of understatement, he writes, for example, that “seeing the book of African transcriptions by A. M. Jones undoubtedly helped prepare me to take a strong interest in the phasing process.”5 Reich states that Jones’s analyses of the phasing process in African music offered a “radically different way of making music,” which furthermore “suggested the multiple simultaneous tape loops [he] was beginning to experiment with at the time.”6 In fact, even the earliest tape pieces were initially crafted to reflect an African phasing process, in the manner laid out by Jones. In other words, far from discovering and then crafting a gradual process produced by subtle mechanical inaccuracies, Jones’s transcriptions of phased rhythmic relationships in the second volume of Studies in African Music laid the groundwork for the canon formations in the tape pieces. The fact that the tape loops gradually went further out of phase was a secondary (albeit temporarily productive) techno-mechanical glitch. I demonstrate this prior connection with African musical practice in an article on the production of Reich’s It’s Gonna Rain: [Nearly] all commentators on Reich’s early tape pieces do not notice the fact that Reich specifically aimed to set up the tape loops in It’s Gonna Rain in a particular Africanized phase relationship. Following Jones’s account of drumming from West and Central Africa, Reich writes, “My first thought was to play one loop against itself in some particular relationship, since some of my previous pieces had dealt with two or more identical instruments playing the same notes against each other”. Reich clarifies what he means later in the same

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essay, “I had intended to make a specific relationship: ‘It’s gonna’ on one loop against ‘rain’ on the other. Instead, the two machines happened to be lined up in unison and one of them gradually started to get ahead of the other”. After 1971 Reich would return to this more precisely African compositional practice, employing notched, instead of sliding, phase relationships in the context of quoted fragments of African music in Clapping Music (1972), Music for Pieces of Wood (1973), and Six Pianos (1972).7

Further evidence for Reich’s use of African musical models for his early tape pieces emerges in sometimes unexpected places—and sometimes even where the explicit focus is not primarily on African influence. For example, Reich is emphatic about his early acquaintance with African music when the question arises as to who of the early minimalists—Reich, Philip Glass, Terry Riley, and so on—first invented phasing. In the context of an antagonism between Reich and Riley, Reich demonstrates that he had independently arrived at the idea in the following terms: I ordered [Studies in African Music] from Oxford University Press, which was a big commitment in those days. Basically, what I saw was repeating patterns in 12/8 or subdivisions of 12/8 superimposed so that their downbeats do not coincide. This was before I  met Terry. I  had the ingredients:  African music, Coltrane, tape loops, and Jr. Walker.8

In keeping with his recollection elsewhere that he obtained Jones’s book in 1962, Reich here uses his encounter with disaligned downbeats in African music as evidence that he did not derive the phasing idea from Riley at the San Francisco Tape Center. Although it is beyond the scope of this chapter to describe the full extent of Reich’s involvement with the African phasing idea, I will return repeatedly, and not insignificantly, to some of the precise loci of his derivations of the idea in specific African musical contexts. Here, I wish only to draw attention to the overwhelming presence—already in his earliest works—of the phasing idea in general. As mentioned earlier, additional examples of borrowed African principles, concepts, and techniques abound, but, in the interests of brevity, I will focus here only on the second fundamental musical idea characterizing Reich’s musical oeuvre—the concept of “inherent rhythm.” The origin of this idea is perhaps less obviously associated with African music, especially if measured by its wholesale absence from the literature addressing cross-cultural referents in the works of Reich. I will therefore discuss this concept in a little more detail than the phasing process and will describe its adoption by Reich in various contexts. It would not be an exaggeration to say that not only did Reich’s work become a capacious conduit for inherent rhythm formations, but these formations practically define the central phenomenology of his basic aesthetics. Although he claims to have discovered the phenomenon himself in 1967 (dubbed a “resultant pattern” in the composer’s lexicon), the concept is an explicitly African musical one. Reich in

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fact closely studied the phenomenon of inherent rhythms in ethnographic texts and transcriptions of African music. There are various references to this kind of concept in writings he encountered in the 1960s. In Jones’s The Icila Dance: Old Style (published in 1952), the ethnographer’s informant L.  Kombe describes the counting process between handclapping parts and the Icibitiku drum of the Icila dance as a “resultant rhythm.”9 Alternatively, in Studies in African Music (published in 1959), we find a reference to the “typological features” of African music, such as short rhythmic patterns, that are “inherent in the very music itself.”10 These references in Jones’s published work notwithstanding, Reich also encountered the inherent rhythm idea through a different ethnographic source—the early English-language writings of the Viennese ethnomusicologist Gerhard Kubik. Kubik coined the technical term “inherent rhythm” to capture a prominent feature of south, east, and central African instrumental music, particularly likembe, zither, harp, lyre, and xylophone music.11 In 1962, the ethnomusicologist described these gestalt-like phenomena as “inherent or subjective rhythms,” but—given their prominent additional melodic component—he later changed the term to “inherent pattern.”12 The concept refers to the audible appearance of melodic-rhythmic lines that are not under the direct supervision of the motor actions of performers that produce them. In some cases, these seemingly phantom patterns are given a name, and even emphasized (via doubling) by specialist performers. In the stylistics of Kigandan Amadinda music, for example, two parts (known as Okunaga and Okwawula) are set forth by two or more performers known as Omunazi and Omwawuzi, who stand opposite one another and beat out interlocking phrases of different lengths reaching between two hundred and six hundred pulses per minute. The weaving of Okunaga and Okwawula creates a new basic structure that is engaged by a third performer (known as the Omukonezi) to draw out an inherent line embedded in the low register of the polyphonic texture. Kubik has argued that the crucial ingredients for the successful emergence of inherent melodic-rhythmic patterns derive from the basic structure of the musical module—it should exhibit largely spaced intervals with considerable overlap between parts, for example. When these modules are played at high speed with a smooth (unaccented) approach to the key strikes, the performers bring the array of notes into proximity without soliciting default metric entrainments. The mostly asymmetric inherent line that emerges in the bass notes is then doubled at the octave by the Omukonezi, who is seated on the verso end of the xylophone. The doubled inherent pattern is designated in Lugandan as Okukonera. Kubik’s early ethnographic engagement with Lugandan music offers detailed descriptions of this gestalt-like psychological phenomenon. The ethnographer recalls this discovery in 1959 in connection with the compositions of Evaristo Muyinda: when combining individual tone-rows of an Amadinda composition in interlocking style, “there would emerge a puzzle of melodic-rhythmic lines, crisscrossing one another, which we had not played.”13 Kubik credits the African

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musicologist Joseph Kyagambiddwa with an early description of the hallucinatory appearance of okukonera as a “voice” that “mysteriously looms up” in his book African Music from the Source of the Nile in 1959. The ethnographer then elaborates the idea, by describing them as indirect polyphonic lines, like thrown voices—“as if the spirit were talking.”14 An engagement with east, central, and southern African music has not yet registered in writings on Reich’s music, and yet this component of his engagement with Africa is perhaps the foundational feature of his basic compositional endeavor. Kubik’s English-language publications of the 1950s and 1960s in African Music:  Journal of the African Music Society were available to Reich at most institutionalized American libraries, including the Cornell University library, where he studied with William Austin in the 1950s, and with whom he remained in contact in the 1960s. Furthermore, the sketches, letters, and notes, held at PSS, amply reveal Reich’s considerable interest in these musical regions and an almost fanatical interest in the xylophone music of southern Africa long before his trip to Ghana. For example, in a letter written by Reich to A. M. Jones on June 5, 1967, Reich gratefully acknowledges the contribution of Jones’s African music studies to his own musical education and then requests both recordings of the music notated in volume 2 of Studies in African Music and tapes of African music of a similar timbre, notably unaccompanied African xylophone music. In Jones’s reply to Reich, dated June 16, 1967, the anthropologist instantly detects the link between Reich’s Piano Phase (a tape of which he had included in his correspondence with Jones) and Gerhard Kubik’s transcriptions of Ugandan xylophone music, as discussed earlier in the chapter. Interestingly, Jones suggests in his letter to Reich that, instead of using African source material, Reich should consider using conventional classical music, such as Mendelssohn or Mozart, to write music with staggered bar lines. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to describe either the precise details of the PSS archive—the various references to “African xylophones” in Reich’s compositional sketches in the 1960s, and so forth—or to give a comprehensive account of the ways these African stylistics and sounds take up considerable residency in Reich’s general compositional practice.15 For the purposes of this argument, it is crucial to note only that Reich applied the “inherent pattern” idea, and other African conceptualizations of time, already in his earliest works, at least five years before his short trip to Ghana in 1970.16 The relevance of the African inherent pattern idea to Reich’s compositional aesthetics, amply described in his writings, cannot be overstated. He credits the production of “resultant patterns” in his music, for example, as the primary source of the perceptual “mysteries” for the listener; these are the “impersonal, unintended, psychoacoustic by-products of the intended process.”17 The “mysteries” that emerged as “unintended psychoacoustic by-products” of Reich’s “resultant patterns” of 1968 are precisely modeled on the “puzzle of melodic-rhythmic lines, crisscrossing one another, which [were] not played,”

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of the Kigandan “inherent patterns” discovered by Kubik in 1959. As with the phasing idea, this African principle is explicitly explored in It’s Gonna Rain (1965), Come Out (1966), Piano Phase (1967), and Violin Phase (1967). In Violin Phase, which deploys a module derived from Ghanaian (instead of Ugandan) music, Reich actually adds another violin part to double an inherent pattern produced by multiple patterns in a phasing process, thereby imitating more precisely than in the three previous works the African performance practice of the Omukonezi. This is the inherent melodic line known in the Lugandan language as Okukonera. As it is for the Amadinda, the phantom-like appearance of inherent patterns is a crucial experiential property of Reich’s music. In the context of Violin Phase, Reich writes: “When I say there is more in my music than what I  put there, I  primarily mean these resulting patterns.”18 Not only does inherent pattern formation play a prominent role in every Reich composition to follow these early works, but the playing technique associated with inherent rhythms also influenced additional matters of performance. Sketches housed at the PSS, for example, reveal that even the positioning of marimba players on opposite sides of the same instrument in Drumming draws its inspiration from the Amadinda performance tradition. For the purposes of this argument, however, I wish only to draw attention to the fact that Reich’s deployment and self-proclaimed invention of the illusionist phenomenon of “resultant patterns” owes its origins directly to sonic communicative conventions in Africa, with strong associations to rituals of spirit possession practiced in Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Uganda. African sounds of biomedical communication are thereby transplanted, translated, and repurposed in the context of a particular brand of Western musical practice. To be sure, Reich’s music is often described as a conduit for a great variety of influences, including African music, but ranging extensively across both geography and history—from Balinese gamelan music to medieval organum and beyond. This chapter will show, however, that of these many potential sources of inspiration, the African source is irreducible—foundational of both the content of the musical modules and the compositional processes to which they are subject. The other apparent influences capture neither the scope nor the authority of African music on Reich’s distinctive style. Paradoxically, some of these nonAfrican influences even take their cue from Reich’s reading of African music. Take, for example, the argument about the apparent influence of organum— harmonic parallelism in the manner of Pérotin and Léonin—on Reich’s sense of harmony. The evidence indicates that this interest in medieval music actually derives from Reich’s reading of Jones’s various references to medieval organum in his explanations of African harmony. In fact, Jones’s Studies in African Music frequently references organum as a useful analogy for explaining the workings of African harmonic language. Likewise, his shorter texts repeatedly describe African harmonies in terms of medieval organum. For example, Jones and Kombe argue that the harmonies of the song accompanying the Icila dance mentioned

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previously are in “parallel 4ths, and is undiluted Organum.”19 The writers even spend time describing the way Africans deal with the potential musica ficta–like elements particular to this harmonic practice.20 Likewise, in his book on African music of the colony of Northern Rhodesia, Jones refers to the African use of “organum”—“that sort of harmony our forefathers delighted in around the years 900–1050 A.D.”—as an approach to harmony.21 Jones notes that this development of African harmony occurred “quite apart from European influence.”22 I cannot take up the full impact of African harmonic practice on Reich’s output here, except to note that even some of the references to apparently Western musical influences are likely sourced from his readings of African music. In sum, despite the fact that Reich’s compositional output is mostly interpreted within a Euro-American cultural framework, non-Western, and particularly African, music served as an important resource for Reich’s musical development and occupied a capacious place in his entire output. From the earliest works, such as the aforementioned tape compositions and phase pieces, to music written well after his trip to Ghana—including Music for 18 Musicians, Tehillim (1981), Different Trains (1988), Nagoya Marimbas (1994), Cello Counterpoint (2003), Mallet Quartet (2009), and so on—Reich’s works are plausibly portrayed as creative paraphrases of music from various parts of Africa. Instead of attempting a comprehensive historical overview of the works, this chapter will engage close analysis, and simultaneously trace the references, citations, styles, and techniques pertaining to specific source materials in Africa, in the context of a single work, namely, Electric Counterpoint (1987). It will then briefly describe the original function and context of the music in local communities in Africa, even if these are not demonstrably known by the composer who appropriated them. Along the way, the examination will suggest an assessment of the aesthetic-ideological dimensions implicit in the way the African materials are put to use in a non-African art music context. Historical musicologists have seldom advanced more than a cursory recognition of the role of non-Western culture in their assessment of the vocabularies seminal to the development of contemporary Western artistic and musical thought. This chapter sets an agenda for the study of twentiethcentury music that not only recognizes the diversity of the subject but also sees this global complexity as fundamental to the definition of twentieth-century music. This necessarily involves the incongruous juxtaposition of different conventions, worldviews, and values, as well as the incorporation of traditionally marginalized areas of musical activity within the interpretative matrix of dominant interpretations. Reflecting the multifaceted nature of its topic, this research offers a series of successive passes into the musical makeup of Electric Counterpoint in the hope of illuminating moments and passages of sound from a variety of complementary perspectives. While the focus is resolutely on musical production, the project draws on fieldwork-derived ethnographic data, archival documents (in Africa, Europe, and America), analyses of institutional histories,

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and aspects of political geography, technology studies, and media theory. My aim is to track the way music and sound circulates within different regimes of meaning and value, with a particular interest in retrieving the often tributary and ephemeral phenomena found in geographically remote cultures that, for complex reasons, are systematically written out of world history. The historical account I  am proposing announces neither the diminished value of Western music nor its retrospective demise, but aims instead to responsibly enlarge and supplement existing histories of Western music, and thereby genuinely globalize our understanding of cultural production.

Biography of a Sound: Ndereje Balendoro Steve Reich’s Electric Counterpoint begins with the unusual sound of massed guitars, spelling out chords that exceed the customary sonic reach of the guitar. Giant modal pitch blocks shift elusively against the steady state of pulsation. This is a giant hyper-guitar curiously articulated with a delicate touch. When the music scales down to the dimensions of the solo instrument, it does so by gradually opening a translucent soundscape inhabited by identical figures that leap and turn and dip to their own beat. Initially consisting of barely four notes, these emergent figures spin out an interesting internal temporality. Ostensibly, the figures are set in four measures of mere common time, but in fact exchange between binary and ternary patterning with a two-pulse anacrusis. The result is a pattern that agilely leaps, turns, and then falls in the context of a two-pulsed grouping and then dips twice in a three-pulsed one—a back and forth that is repeated with a very small shift. Example 12.1 displays the grouping structure marked by numbers and square brackets beneath the staff. What are these elusive figures? What is their distinctive mode of polyphonic play? Immediately following the arrival of the figure, fragments of a second figure played by the live guitarist in exactly the same pitch range as the first dart and dive in and out of spaces left by the first figure. Out of these transitory appearances, which become increasingly ornate, a fully formed figure gradually materializes, one that anticipates the first figure by two beats. The resulting two-voice canon at the unison yields a new set of contrapuntal strands: the first an approximate palindrome formed by broken repetitions on D occasionally tilting to E; the second an almost uninterrupted oscillation between A and B

Example 12.1 Rhythmic grouping of the module in Electric Counterpoint.

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Example 12.2 Overall resultant pattern at rehearsal 13.

(see Ex. 12.2). Minimal use of pitch materials (coupled with minimal shifts in articulation) that circle in an abbreviated registral span has the effect of drawing attention to the details of this contrapuntal/rhythmic fallout. The logic of the canonic strands alone suggests, with equal validity, a downbeat either on the first beat of the first and third measures or on the third beat of the second and fourth measures. This mode of metric entrainment is determined by the staggered phase relation between the two modules alone. On the other hand, the logic of the overall resultant pattern as analyzed by Fred Lerdahl and Ray Jackendoff ’s metrical preference rules (MPRs), might understand rhythm and meter in this context as MPR 5a, namely, “a metrical structure in which onsets of relatively long events are aligned with strong beats,”23 suggesting as downbeat either the third beat of the first and third measures or the first beat of the second and fourth measures. At this point in Electric Counterpoint, however, the first four pulses of the first and third measures are identical to the second four pulses of the second and fourth measures, thereby confounding Lerdahl and Jackendoff ’s “parallel musical segments” rule (MPR 1). Any claim to the downbeat by the first beat of measures 1 and 3 is unsettled by the corresponding claim to the downbeat by the second beat of measures 2 and 4. In fact, using the “event onset” rule (MPR 3) provides one of the strongest claims to placing the metric downbeat on beat 2 of measures 1 and 3 and beat 4 of measures 2 and 4. One example of the many alternate metric groupings is marked by the square brackets below the staff (Ex. 12.2). The subtle ambiguity about the precise place of the downbeat, as the two figures twist and turn, is matched by the subtle ambiguity regarding the pitch space in which the music dwells. While seemingly encased in a kind of D dyad (with genuflections toward upper neighbors), the resultant canon figure does not open into a recognizable modal collection at this point. With the addition of just one note (either G or F♯), the possibility opens up of a pentatonic subset derived from the harmonic blocks of the music’s introductory pulsing. At rehearsal 15 a second recorded guitar takes up the second figure; the live player fades out, haltingly initiating another run of fragmentary figures, this time with descending leaping gestures leading away from the lowest note A  of the resultant canon. Little by little, these motifs fashion a figure identical to the initial figure a perfect fifth below it, as if to offer a nod toward the idea of a traditional tonal answer to the theme. At the same time, the resulting pitch collection, with the inclusion of G, completes one of the two possible pentatonic sets. As it was

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Example 12.3 Overall resultant pattern at rehearsal 21.

before, this new figure is established and taken over by the recorded music, before yet another canonic figure (also a fifth below and out of phase by two beats) is introduced, step by step, by the live guitar. The overall resultant pattern emphasizes the metric ambiguity of the pattern, sounding the (evenly spread) minor seventh chord (built on E) on every aforementioned potential downbeat, with chords built upon variously stacked constellations of fourths and fifths on the intervening pulses (see Ex. 12.3). In the next staggered entry, the live guitar tries out yet another scale degree, this time a figure separated by the interval of a second from guitar 3. This new constellation recalls, in abbreviated form, the harmonic color of the opening pulsations—a sound of variously stacked seconds in the context of ninth and eleventh chords. At the same time, with the inclusion of F♯, this entry completes the second possible pentatonic subset implied by the opening figure (i.e., A— B—D—E—F♯). As if to reinforce this possibility, and also to restrict to each canonic entry the introduction of at most one new pitch class, Reich avoids a literal canonic entry at this point by substituting E for C (yielding the tetrachord D—E—F♯—G). Once it fades into the taped guitar 5 (at rehearsal 24), the new canonic figure becomes coloristic, smudging the pitch content of guitar 3 to produce a floating rhythmic contour. While never quite predictable, the remaining entries gradually spread these figures through the octave span below: thus, guitar 6 doubles guitar 2 an octave below; guitar 7 doubles guitar 1 an octave below; and guitar 8, which is introduced directly as prerecorded music (perhaps to hasten and offset the patent gradual process), doubles guitar 3 an octave below.24 At rehearsal 32, the live guitar then breaks out of the logic of canonic imitation and plays a more continuous line, one borne out of the inherent pattern produced by the highest notes in the musical texture. Against this, the remaining instruments (guitars 9, 10, and 11) issue forth the opening pulsations once more. These pulsations move through approximately the same chord progressions (and sudden modulation) as the opening pulsations, only now they sustain the polyrhythmic texture of the staggered figures and finally fade away into the next movement (see Ex. 12.4). As it is with most of Reich’s music, Electric Counterpoint is intensely selfreferential:  fragments of sound congeal into distinct figures in an audible process, which forms patterns of intricacy and variety that exceed its formal logic. The music is profoundly intratextual, alert to what Reich would call the “minute sound details”:  permutations and mutations produced by gradually

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Example 12.4 Harmonic scheme for the introduction to Electric Counterpoint.

expanding and ever-rotating canonic relationships.25 Yet, like all music, Electric Counterpoint is in fact also irreducibly intertextual, referencing a distinctive type of non-Western polyphonic interplay. Where exactly does the interlacing mobile of musical figures, which forms the expressive center of this movement from Electric Counterpoint, originate? This is music of the Banda Linda, a people numbering around thirty thousand who live in a wooded savanna region of central Africa. The theme is taken from music conceived for a giant horn orchestra comprising between ten and eighteen antelope horns (of various species) and wooden horns (ango), made from the calabash tree (opo), as well as pellet bells (engbi). The horns are tuned to the anhemitonic pentatonic scale (a scale devoid of half tones), which is probably derived from the Banda Linda xylophone scale (although this point has been contested). In performance, the horns, arranged in a curved row from high to low pitched, generally enter in consecutively descending order. Among the Banda Linda this purely instrumental genre is associated with rites of passage for adolescent youths, who learn to play the instrument during their initiatory retreat. The music, derived from various traditional sung genres, is played for pleasure to conclude the initiation rites.26 Reich, who briefly met the French-Israeli ethnomusicologist Simha Arom in Paris in 1976, discovered this music in Arom’s book Polyphonies et Polyrhythmies Instrumentales d’Afrique Centrale, published in 1985.27 Arom was initially sent by the Israeli government to establish European-style brass music in the Central African Republic in the 1960s. The ethnomusicologist became disenchanted with his official task, however, and quickly turned his attentions to local horn music practices. Having recognized the subtle artistry and complexity of it, Arom dedicated decades of his life to studying, recording, and transcribing music of the central African region.28 Arom deployed a novel technique for recording the heterogeneous ensemble (which he dubbed “tutti recording”), whereby individual members of the ensemble are recorded as soloists

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by deploying an internal playback of a recording of the entire ensemble.29 In a series of articles, as well as the book Polyphonies et Polyrhythmies, Arom systematically analyzes the music of various central African ensembles in terms of a semiotic method developed by Jean-Jacques Nattiez, Jean Molino, and others.30 In particular, Arom aimed to uncover the simplified “structural entity” or “model” that underlies the intricately patterned polyrhythmic strands of the music.31 To this end, Polyphonies et Polyrhythmies provides extensive transcriptions of large multipart ensembles, which are rendered in various tabular arrangements. The music of the first movement of Reich’s Electric Counterpoint is taken from Arom’s transcriptions of an Ippy horn orchestra’s performance of ndereje balendoro, an eighteen-part piece.32 Apart from the note arrangements themselves, the very idea of a performance consisting of soloist and prerecorded tape containing music of the full ensemble owes an allegiance to the “tutti” playback technique introduced by Arom in the context of ethnographic recording in the 1970s. In these large ensembles, each horn generally produces a single pitch. Horns with the same pitch class are assigned names. In Arom’s words:  “The instruments playing G are called tete; the ones playing E, ta; the ones playing D, ha; the ones playing C, tutule; and the ones playing A, bongo.”33 The six upper horns can produce an additional upper embellishing tone, by way of a small hole drilled at the top of the horn known as ogoro ango (hole in the horn).34 The horns are also assigned a “family” name according to each group of horns adding up to a pentatonic collection within a registral span; the highest family is called tuwule or tutuwule; the second, ngbanja; the third, aga; and the fourth, yaviri.35 According to Arom: Tuwule is an onomatopoeitic term for the embroidered figures played by the antelope horn instruments using their embellishing note.  .  .  . Ngbanja designates a kind of file or rasp, for as the Linda people say, “The rasp makes a loud noise.” When someone speaks in a loud voice, they say, “He has a voice like a ngbanja.” The register is the easiest to play in. Aga designates a kind of fish. The master of the horns says no one remembers any longer why this register is so called (“All the elders who once knew are now dead”). Finally, yaviri is the word for “heavy rain, storm, thunder.”36

Except for the first horn player, each successive horn player commences his part in relation to the preceding part one pentatonic step above it. These parts consist of short repeating figures, which are combined with one another in a way that emphasizes the principle of interlocking. Although the basic cell (which Arom calls a “model”) for each part remains intact throughout the performance, performers vary their patterns through subtle rhythmic manipulations, adding or subtracting notes and extending or splitting note values. After an introductory gambit involving a kind of “call and response” between the first horn, which rhythmically intones a fragment of repeated notes, and a tutti response, which issues a raucous held cluster chord, the individual horns enter in descending

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Example 12.5 Arom’s model for ndereje balendoro. Arom (1991) 2004, 371.

order with their characteristic hocketing rhythmic figures. Once the musicians have all entered, we reach the crux of the performance. Arom explains: The musicians with the antelope-horn instruments perform embroideries, embellishing notes, and trills, while held notes predominate in the lowest register. The musicians with the oblique instruments turn from side to side to start up musical dialogues with their closest neighbors, as they break in on, reply to, and pretend to parody one another. This part will last as long as the ende [“master of the horns”] likes.37

Although the intricate variations are seemingly infinite in number, Arom considers them to consist of the “uninterrupted repetition of diverse realizations of the rhythmic figures assigned to each instrument. . . . [All] these variations derive from a single simplified motif which provides each musician with the ultimate reference, or model [elsewhere called ‘paradigmatic theme’], for his part.”38 The model is presented in Example 12.5. Arom identifies various features regarding the formula: (1) the formula is based on a cycle of four pulsations; the durations of the sounds in this cycle include no more than a crotchet, twelve quavers, and two semiquavers; (2) no degree on the pentatonic scale has a total duration exceeding the value of a dotted crotchet; (3) there are only two sorts of “con-sonance” (i.e. simultaneity), both fifths (C–G and A–E, the latter being used twice).39

Contesting African Analytics Before describing the precise musical relationship between Reich’s Electric Counterpoint and ndereje balendoro, it is relevant to point out certain key features of these patterned horn figures not examined by Arom. I posit a slightly different basic theme (or resulting “model”) derived less from an analysis of primary musical elements and more from actually performed patterns that, statistically speaking, predominate in the notated performance. Instead of casting a music-analytic optic, these figures are therefore idealized average realizations of each respective part. I have notated this basic theme in Example 12.6. Some characteristics become immediately apparent. First, it seems that the first horn is generally permitted to articulate the first four pulses (of the first beat) in the

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Example 12.6 A different model for ndereje balendoro.

structure. While the actual variations often sound out on all four pulses (sometimes adorned with an upper neighbor, sometimes not), variations employing fewer than four pulses generally articulate at least the very first beat in the structure. Also, when more than one pulse is sounded, these are generally immediately adjacent to one another (yielding sixteenth-note values in Arom’s rendition). Second, it seems that the first horn is generally never permitted to articulate any of the four pulses of the second beat of the structure. In the variations, the first horn invariably leaves these pulses silent. In sum, the first half of the structure thus elaborates a kind of “binary”-type timing pattern, oscillating between four sounding pulses and four silent ones. In the second half of the structure, it seems that horn 1 is obliged to briefly articulate the ninth and twelfth pulses and to remain silent during all intervening pulses. This patterning is remarkably consistent across the equivalent instruments of the ensemble (in this case the tuwule) throughout the duration of the performance. In sum, the second half of the structure gently suggests a kind of ternary type of timing in the context of a two-beat time span. Taken as a whole, horn 1 oscillates between, on the one hand, a “binary” temporality rich in variation and, on the other, a “ternary” temporality practically devoid of variation. These qualities are indicated by square brackets below each staff line (see Ex. 12.7). Horn 2, it seems, is preoccupied with the spaces left silent by horn 1. More exactly, horn 2 is permitted to articulate the first two pulses of the second beat (namely, pulses 5 and 6). In performance practice, this horn part generally intones

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Example 12.7 A different analysis of the five horn parts.

only pulse 5, immediately after the first horn’s figure falls into silence. The combined structure therefore reinforces the “binary” temporality of the first half of the structure implied by horn 1. The same principle seems to apply in the second half of the structure, where horn 2 briefly intones the pulses directly following those given in horn 1 (namely, pulses 10 and 13). Once again, this reinforces the “ternary” aspect of the temporal patterning of horn 1. Considering horn 1 and horn 2 together illustrates an interesting case of cooperative contrast. While these parts are completely in between each other (with horn 2 performing only in the gaps left by horn 1), the manner of their interlocking is coordinated around a common oscillating temporality. In other words, the quality of the hocketing shifts to mutually reinforce a temporal back and forth. Horn 3 tends to fall into the spaces left silent by both horns 2 and 1. The variations for this part generally emphasize the upbeat of the second and fourth beats (namely pulses 7, 8, 15, and 16), sometimes with one note, sometimes with two. Variations on horn 3 frequently also articulate pulses 3 and 4, which coincides with the music of horn 1. On the one hand, this suggests the Linda may regard this sonority as a viable harmonic simultaneity; on the other hand, the logic of hocketing still appears primarily to apply. Of the four pulses articulated on the first beat by horn 1, pulses 3 and 4 are sounded out least in performance (hence the parentheses in Ex. 12.7). Arguably, then, these coincisions

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arise from the embellishment of a fundamentally interlocking situation. Taken as a whole, the pattern produced by the third horn issues a “binary”-type temporality throughout the structure. Its consistent up-beating pattern is therefore regularly contra-metric. Interestingly, however, where the upper horns congeal into a “ternary”-type temporal grouping (between pulses 9 and 14), horn 3 mostly leaves the pulses unsounded, effectively leaving open space in the texture for the implied ternary patterning of horns 1 and 2. Interesting, too, is the relationship of horns 1 and 3 vis-à-vis horn 2. Both have no points of coincidence with horn 2. But the respective patterns of these strictly hocketing relationships are differently woven into the spaces of the second horn’s part. As a result, horns 1 and 3 are also by and large in a hocketing relationship with one another. Horn 4 contrasts with the “binary”-to-“ternary”-type temporal grouping that is implied by the first three horns. Here the pattern begins with “ternary”-type grouping and gradually shifts toward “binary”-type grouping (which sounds out the first of beats 3 and 4, namely, pulses 9 and 13). Occasionally, the “ternary” pattern is mutated into a three-against-two figure that cuts across the pulse-level in the lower horns of this horn class (tutule). As a whole, horn 4 is therefore a kind of inside-out version of horn 1, a perfect fifth above it. Where the latter moves from a “binary”- to a “ternary”-type grouping, the former shifts from a “ternary” to a “binary” type, as if to infuse the qualities of one with those of the other. As a result of their concurrent presentation of inversely patterned temporalities, these two horn parts coincide on pulses 1, 2, 4, and 9, thereby issuing the C–G simultaneity noted by Arom. As it is with horn 2, horn 5 leaves silent the first four pulses of the structure and articulates pulse 10 to reinforce the ternary-type patterning (at play in the first three horns). Thereafter, horn 5 for the most part doubles the rhythmic up-beating of horn 3 a perfect fourth below horn 3. The rhythmic unison issues a simultaneity (D–A), obviously accepted by the Banda Linda, but this time not noted by Arom. Taken as a whole, the Banda Linda horn ensemble produces patterns of subtlety and fluctuation that exceed the sum of its various parts. Sometimes these patterns are responsive to the principle of interlocking, other times to that of rhythmic unison; sometimes they are responsive to the principle of oscillating temporalities, other times to that of interpenetrating temporalities (or polyrhythms). Despite this multicapillaried jostling and cajoling, no adjacent performers coincide at any points in the pattern: barring the fleeting coincision on pulse 4 of horns 3 and 4; that is, adjacent horns are strictly interwoven vis-à-vis one another. Perhaps this rhythmic principle is also a harmonic principle. That is to say, parts may only coincide between nonadjacent performers in the semicircle, thereby avoiding harmonic constellations involving steps in the pentatonic scale, and opening harmonic constellations composed of various fourths and fifths and one third. Against Arom, I would argue that G–C and D–A are therefore the two primary “con-sonances” in ndereje balendoro.40 Finally, despite the

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complex texture emerging from the interaction of multiple strands in the horn orchestra, not every pulse is given a sound: pulses 11 and 14, for example, are generally silent pulses, while pulse 6 is barely sounded. Arguably, these punctures in the latticed texture are an imprint of the song’s fundamental formal identity. I take this analytic excursion to examine closely the manner in which Reich uses this signature model in Electric Counterpoint. To what extent, “structurally” speaking (to invoke the composer’s terms), does the quotation behave like the traditional central African orchestra? Does the new music retain any of the values of the original when the music is translated from blown horns to electric guitars? How, in turn, does this translation comment on the character of the original? Reich’s interlacing use of the horn figure in Electric Counterpoint turns out to be both more and less exacting than the interlacing logic of the original. An immediate point of similarity, for example, is the tempo indication—the metronome markings of both Arom’s and Reich’s score indicate ♩ = 192. In other words, there appears to be an ideal tempo for the proper polyphonic functioning of the module. An immediate difference, on the other hand, is the fact that a single instrumental line in Electric Counterpoint performs the entire pattern, which in its original form is crafted by three distinct hocketing horns. Reich derives the theme by approximately combining parts for horns 1 to 3, depicted in Example 12.8, and extending the pattern with a slight variation of itself to a four-measure unit in the score. Interestingly, Reich’s variation—achieved by simply omitting the third E in the pattern—is a typical African modus operandi in the context of circling musical modules. In Example 12.9, for instance, horn 9 varies its basic pattern by omission of tones in realizations 11, 12, and 13. Paradoxically, however, the third E in ndereje balendoro is always present Example 12.8 Arom’s transcriptions of the first five Banda Linda horns. Arom (1991) 2004, 351–54.

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Example 12.9 Variation by omission in Banda Linda horn music. Arom (1991) 2004, 358. See variations 11, 12, and 13.

(perhaps vividly to preserve the nod to “ternary” timing at this point in the pattern). At any rate, the pattern in Electric Counterpoint is produced by a single instrumental line instead of a host of distinct horns sounding forth on single pitch classes. Perhaps Reich conjures the spirit of the original when the new entries articulate short, seemingly unpredictable fragments against the initial figure. These rhythmic fragments approximate the condition of the punctured solo entries of the original, but they do not observe the underlying model in the same way. Instead of introducing patterns of silence and sound that gradually clarify the interlocking whole, as in the African music, these entries appear in a more casual additive process. Until they congeal into the basic cell that forms the canonic figure, Reich’s motive-like fragments are essentially patterned in a freely irregular way. Despite this difference, Reich seems to have been responsive to aspects of the horn music’s structural behavior as well. First, while the original music does not unfold in staggered canons, Reich’s canonic mechanism resonates— both expressively and structurally—with the African original. Expressively speaking, the staggered imitations in Electric Counterpoint approximate the elusively interpenetrating quality of the original music. Structurally speaking, such staggered canons—the basis of Reich’s hallmark phasing technique—are found in various African traditions (including, as mentioned earlier, those transcribed and recorded by A. M. Jones, Hugh Tracey, and Gerhard Kubik in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, with which Reich was well acquainted). As stated at the outset, I  cannot develop the full extent of Reich’s indebtedness to this aspect of African musical practice in this chapter, but it is important to deepen the history of its precise ethnographic circulation at this juncture. Already as far back as the 1940s, Jones had distilled the phasing technique as a central component of African rhythmic practice. He continued to develop this line of thinking throughout his writings. A good example includes

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Jones’s representation of phased ternary patterns in his comparison between drumming techniques of the Lala people of Zambia and the Ewe people of Ghana in his Studies in African Music.41 His description of the phasing process is illustrative: When [the drummer] introduces his variant . . . he slips one quaver, thereby making a permanent cross-rhythm with Gankogui. Not only is this typical of Ewe practice [the contrast case] but the cross-rhythm he sets up is the exact counterpart of that made by the Ewe small drum Kagan. There are two ways of crossing two similar triple times: you can slip one quaver or you can slip two.42

Jones presents a diagram of the staggered canonic relationship between three parts to illustrate the nature of African phasing technique. Although written nearly a decade before Reich’s first phasing compositions, it practically reads like a guide to the composer’s compositional process. Again, even in his tape pieces It’s Gonna Rain and Come Out, Reich aimed to set up African-type phase relations. The tape pieces emerged less out of two tape loops gradually falling out of phase with one another than they did by gradually falling into phase with one another after having been set up, in Reich’s words, “180 degrees out of phase” with one another.43 In Reich’s less circumspect words, “[Jones’s transcriptions were] a very potent piece of information, especially for someone fooling around with tape loops, which I began to view as little mechanized Africans.”44 Jones had devised these principles from an earlier study of a drumming and dance style from Zambia known as Icila. In his description of the relationship between drums, no less than in his transcription of the full ensemble, Jones indicates the staggered relationship between parts.45 For example, the Akache and Ikulu drumming patterns, identical in rhythm but variable in sticking and stress, are separated by four pulses in the transcription of the full score.46 Other sources of information regarding African phasing techniques abound in the then-contemporary literature. For example, Kubik’s representations of “aural images” in Ennanga music from Uganda similarly reflects staggered relations between inherent patterns.47 Likewise, the music of the Mbira dza Vadzimu and Matepe of Zimbabwe (then Southern Rhodesia)—variously annotated in the 1950s and 1960s by Hugh Tracey and Andrew Tracey in the journal African Music (to which, as noted, Reich had access at the Cornell University library during his studies there)—provided the composer with a template for music fundamentally grounded in staggered phase relationships between parts. Thus, Reich could use an African compositional technique from one part of Africa on quoted material from another part of Africa, which does not in fact use that technique, paradoxically to conjure the time-transcending, almost hallucinatory, expressive character of the original African music. Furthermore, Reich overlaps the two patterns in an optimally Africanized sense. Let me explain. First, given the inherent oscillation of “binary” and “ternary” time in the original pattern, Reich overlaps them in a way that equally infuses properties of one

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with those of the other. Second, by beginning the canonic entry (“comes”) on the fourth beat of the original figure (“dux”), Reich avoids all coincidence between the two parts. In other words, this is the only possible pulse position that yields an entirely nonoverlapping resultant pattern (see Ex. 12.10). While this result is produced on the terrain of canonic imitation, such noncoincidence conjures the spirit of the original noncoinciding horn parts, which demonstrably operate on the terrain of interlocking. Again, Reich employs a particular African principle in the context of different African material to generate a characteristic of the latter African figure in the unique musical soundworld of Electric Counterpoint. As it is with the original music, Reich extends the music downward in a manner that resembles the horn “families,” which extend into the depths, and the lattice of the musical construction becomes analogously more complex as a result. Still more astute is the way Reich introduces these new figures. Recall that he uses a figure composed of only the first three horns, thus producing only the three tones (G, E, D) as well as an embellishing tone A. In the original music, the horns sound out the full pentatonic collection. To complete the collection without adding a new pattern (a compositional restriction produced by the phasing technique derived from various different African traditions), Reich introduces the same “three-horn” guitar figure a fifth below the original. This effectively serves to introduce the final tone one third below the lowest note of the abbreviated pattern. The new pattern also serves to introduce the final pitch of the original pattern a second below that. Given the striking resemblance between the horn patterns 1 and 4 at the beginning of beats 1 and 3 (outlined in my earlier analysis), the resulting music sounds remarkably as if it logically embeds the original African pattern. The African module is harmonically and contrapuntally richer than Reich’s (both engaging a wider array of intervals—fifths, fourths, thirds, and unisons—and subtly infusing metric diversity into the pattern; for example, ternary time into the alto voice in the first half of the module), but the resemblance, depicted in Example 12.11, is striking. It is as if the canonic entries a fifth below Reich’s original figure bring to completion, via the hypothetical additions of horns 4 and 5 of the original, the full African figure. Remarkably, Reich is able to conjure the complete African figure not by imitation as much as by the unique logic of an Africanized downward extension of a pitch-class “family” in the context of canonic phasing. In other words, the partial quotation is cast into an African process that “runs by itself ” (as Reich might say), which then produces the fully formed original as a resultant Example 12.10 Nonoverlapping figures in Electric Counterpoint.

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Example 12.11 Comparison of original horn pattern with Reich’s Africanized extension; in (a) original pattern (transposed up a fifth); (b) Reich’s extended pitch-class “family.” (a)

(b)

pattern.48 If his audiences were versed in the original, this would count as a curiously recursive and referential musical passage. As it is in some works by Brahms and Mahler, for example, it is as if Reich’s skillful deployment of an African musical procedure of itself produces the complete quotation of the original.49 From an African point of view, this would resemble the kind of listening scenario we find in the uncanny invocation of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” in the first movement of Brahms’s first symphony, for example. While the aesthetic world is quite different, this passage likewise suggests the paradoxical temporality of producing a referential allusion to the past through the future-oriented logic of developing variation. In other words, the allusion to the “Beethoven” apotheosis (in a major key) seems to emerge from the short opening theme of the symphony (in a minor key), as if to have emerged from its own developmental unfolding. Reich’s invocation-through-phasing of a quoted African fragment at this moment in Electric Counterpoint is of a similar expressive sort. Far from a study in gradual processes alone, this music conjures historical reference and resonance. The full range and subtlety of Reich’s intertextual resonance can only be perceived if its African components are reconstituted as one of its fundamental referents.

Phenomenology of an Algorithm (of Makwa and Gankogui) Reflecting his concern for a structural engagement with it, Steve Reich’s use of African music ranges from direct quotation to abstract invocation. The second and third movements of Electric Counterpoint deploy many of the techniques found in the first movement, yet the African components are somewhat less overt. In particular, Reich juxtaposes sections that elaborate canonic phasing of distinct musical modules with those composed of shifting modal pitch blocks. The second movement is in two parts. The music begins with a distinct canonic module, which gradually unfolds hocket-rich phasing interactions in pairs in the alto, soprano, and tenor registers (for the first fifty-one measures). The music then opens into the reminiscent sound of amassed chords in the bass, which simultaneously pulse with the circling phase patterns, before briefly ushering

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in the third movement via diminuendo (for exactly another fifty-one measures). The module itself can be heard as either three distinct phrases in 3/4, 5/8, and 4/4, respectively, or (more plausibly) as two asymmetrically grouped phrases articulating an ornamented descent from B above the treble clef to the oscillating root notes C♯ and D♯, respectively. As is common in African melodizing, these musical lines never ascend but only descend in cascading cyclic fashion. African melodic lines, notably those encountered by Reich in ethnographic work of the 1960s (ranging from melodies produced by Jege A. Tapera on the mbira to those of Mwenda Jean Bosco on the guitar) are generally directed downward. The technical reason for this downward impulse concerns the particularity of African modes of harmonic patterning and tuning practices, an aspect of African practice toward which Reich shows little, if any, interest. Here it suffices to point out the general African character of the melodies in the second movement of Electric Counterpoint. More precisely, the character of these descending lines, from a fixed high point to a noncadential oscillation between two root notes, is a common technique for generating cycles in sub-Saharan African music. This kind of compositional maneuvering is described by numerous writers in the 1960s across the terrain of southern African musical genres, ranging from the music of the Nsenga Kalimba, Shona Mbira dza Vadzimu, Xhosa Umrhube mouthbow, Xizambi friction bow, Katanga guitar, and even that of Zulu praise poetry.50 The canonic module that grounds the phase relations of the second movement of Electric Counterpoint is a root-progression melody of this sort. The first phrase (mm. 1–2) descends through the hexachord by way of a downward leap and then steps to D♯, followed by a sixteenth-note embellishment that recoups the missing pitch G♯ of the opening leap, to the root note C♯. In this way, the line completes the stepwise descent (from B to C♯) through the full hexachord by way of the paradoxical sound of two leaping fourths at the close. The second phrase (m. 3), a parallelism of the first (at first), is a more efficient descent, albeit equally adorned by a brief belated leap up to G♯, this time down to the root note D♯. The second phrase thus both functions as a pun on the phasing technique to come and also establishes the oscillating “root progression” cycle of the entire module. It should be noted that the pitch collection deployed for each respective descent is a subset of the hexachord that grounds the canonic phase-shifting section (C♯–D♯–E–F♯–G♯–B), which is itself a subset of the larger diatonic set that grounds the movement as a whole. In particular, Reich’s descending lines thereby elaborate the signature sound of a melody composed of intervals of seconds, thirds, and fourths. This approach is consistent with the analyses and transcriptions found in the contemporaneous literature on African music. By the mid-1960s, Reich encountered the writings of Kwabena Nketia, then professor of music at the University of Legon (Ghana), as well as that of the South African ethnomusicologist and archivist Hugh Tracey (with whom Reich had been in communication

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a year before contacting A. M. Jones), David Rycroft, John Blacking, and others. Reich had contacted Hugh Tracey in the summer of 1966 requesting recordings of African music, as well as explanations about how it works. In response, Tracey shared with Reich details about how to secure recordings of music from central and southern Africa from Tracey’s curated “Sound of Africa” series, and furthermore connected Reich to Nketia for musical resources pertaining to the regions north of the Congo. Nketia describes the characteristic compositional procedure in his book The Music of Africa in the following terms: “The structure of melodies built out of . . . scales is based on the controlled use of selected interval sequences.”51 Nketia demonstrates the various ways tetrachords and pentachords embedded within scale systems serve as the basis for conjunct sequences of downwardly directed melody formation, which can thereby emphasize certain signature intervals within a given melody, limited to “the frequent use of small intervals—seconds, thirds, and fourths.”52 As can be seen, the descending lines of the module in Electric Counterpoint deploy both the principles (and, in this case, the intervals) described by Nketia in his chapter on the melodic techniques of African music. Reich expands the harmonic reach of the canonic cycles, first, by gradually introducing three new lines that double the first three guitars a fourth above the original (guitars 4, 5, and 6 from rehearsals 48 to 53), and then by gradually doubling the same a fifth below (guitars 7, 8, and 9 from rehearsals 54 to 60). Once the expanded harmonic range is established, the live guitar introduces a kind of okukonera-type pattern produced by selected aspects of the sum of its nine parts. This more continuous pattern introduces inherently produced dyads at the third, an interval that is paradoxically (largely) absent from the sound of the pattern’s linear projection. In this way, the inherent pattern is particularly sensitive to the unguessed-at material latent to the contrapuntal situation.53 It is noteworthy that Reich, once again, omits one pitch class in the harmonic expansion produced by melodic parallelism in guitars 4 to 9. We noted a similar deviation in the first movement, effectively breaking with a melodic pattern to accommodate a harmonic idea. Instead of opting for note A on the third note of the transposed module (cf. rehearsal 48ff.), a pitch class that falls within the overall diatonic set, Reich alters the contour of the line by substituting the note D♯.54 This has the effect, first, of echoing the starting note of the initial melody and, second, of expanding the pitch field without expanding the pitch-class field; or, otherwise put, the Africanized “effect of shifting tonality, although there is no modulation.” Ethnomusicologists of African music in the 1960s, including both Jones and Nketia, richly describe the use of both harmonic parallelism and the avoidance of exact linear imitation in precisely such terms. Drawing on songs of the Gogo of central Tanzania, the Pangwa and Nyakusa of southern Tanzania, and the Wala and Adangme of Ghana, Nketia demonstrates that harmonization by way of “parallelism in fourths or fifths” is a defining characteristic of African music.55 He further notes that occasional thirds result “depending on

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the note of the scale against which a parallel melody is being sung.”56 In other words, African musicians alter the melodic parallelism of tones harmonized at the fourth or fifth to accommodate the integrity of a pitch-class subset (pentatonic, hexatonic, heptatonic, etc.). This basic approach is duplicated in the upper and lower phasing patterns (guitars 4–9) of the second movement of Electric Counterpoint. The module in the third movement reflects a somewhat different construction to that of the second movement, but it is also African-derived. Although it can be cast as two interlocking descending lines (D–B–A–F♯ and G–F♯–E, respectively), the module reflects less Nketia’s analytics and more those of Kubik. Reich applies Kubik’s principles for inherent-pattern formation found in Ugandan xylophone music, but the composer casts these principles in the pattern of a makwa handclapping rhythm, associated with the Zimbabwean mbira. Recall that Kubik’s conditions for the emergence of inherent patterns include largeness of intervals (to facilitate the audible delinking of individual tones from their module and permit gestalt formation with different modules), a high-speed and unaccented approach to performance (to avoid the constraints of a singular metric entrainment), and the registral overlap between parts (to facilitate the fusion of individual tones to produce additive lines).57 The module in the third movement of Electric Counterpoint observes these criteria precisely. In other words, every interval in the module is a leap (instead of a step), the module (no more than one measure in length) spans more than an octave, the tempo is fast (double that of the contrasting second movement), dynamic markings indicate an unchanging mf—barring the soloist, the chords in guitars 5, 6, and 7, and the basses—all of which are not associated with inherent pattern formation) and the four phasing guitars patently occupy identical registers. In other words, this is a well-structured pitch module for the formation of embedded okukonera lines. Reich pays particular compositional attention to the character of the inherent rhythms (“resultant patterns”) in Electric Counterpoint. The discrepancy between Reich’s handwritten musical sketches and his computer-generated ones exhibits this difference. That is, the sketches for Electric Counterpoint (housed at PSS) indicate that Reich rendered the basic interlocking lines with a music software program. Against this, he wrote out various potential inherent patterns by hand in red ink on printed copies of these computer-generated lines.58 As in the second movement, the live guitar doubles an inherent pattern, this time by emphasizing the four consecutive leaping fifths of the respective canonic entries at rehearsal 74.

Ambiguities of Handclapping The rhythmic unit underlying the inherent patterns recalls the module used by Reich in Clapping Music (1972). In fact, the final sketch associated with

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the bundle of notes and sketches for Electric Counterpoint (housed at PSS) is a rough handwritten rendition of the first six phase relations of Clapping Music. Example 12.12 is a transcription of Reich’s handwritten final sketch for Electric Counterpoint. It is likely that the sketch thereby served as an assistive reference point for detecting characteristics of the different phase relations between the module and its phased clones. This pattern was notated by A. M. Jones in various places in his studies of African music.59 For example, in The Icila Dance: Old Style, he notates a pattern associated with the Akache Example  12.12 Transcription of Reich’s final sketch for Electric Counterpoint (Steve Reich Collection, PSS).

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drum part that is a rotation by ten time-points of the Clapping Music pattern.60 Jones describes the use of nonsense syllables as a mnemonic device for this pattern in the context of its performance: “Mba-la Mba-la pa-ku pa-ku.”61 In the same book, Jones later notates a variation of the Ikulu drum part of this dance—a part that is frequently in a shifted phase relation to the Akache part that it complements—which is a non-rotated version of the same pattern we find in Clapping Music. This pattern, which Jones notates as “Variation 7,” is considered “the main variation” of Ikulu’s standard rhythm and is memorized with the following phrase:  “(Tu-) Mbu-lu- mbu lu- mbu ntu-wa.”62 In addition to providing a direct quote for Reich’s Clapping Music, Jones’s discussion of this pattern in relation to the phasing process is relevant here. He shows how, instead of entering at the beginning of the cycle, the coordination of various patterns involves a phase shift: “Variation 7 [the pattern used in Clapping Music] consistently enters on the 10th beat . . . instead of on beat 1”; it seems to comes in “3 beats too early.”63 For Jones, this unique phase position for variation 7 is noteworthy given the fact that “the entry of variation 7 could occur anywhere . . . because it consists of 12 quavers.”64 In his performance, Kombe places this pattern on time-point ten of the original pattern, but Jones’s analysis explicitly recognizes the functional efficiency of its phase rotation on any of the twelve time-points in the cycle. This is exactly what Reich would do in Clapping Music, where he systematically rotates variation 7 of Ikulu in all twelve of its possible phase positions. As mentioned earlier, however, the pattern itself is also one of a host of African handclapping patterns associated with the music of the Mbira dza Vadzimu, known as makwa. These patterns, which have been variously transcribed by ethnomusicologists such as Andrew Tracey and Paul Berliner, range from simple patterns, such as regular ternary patterns that coincide with the hosho (rattle) part, to complex asymmetric ones that resemble virtuosic solo drumming. In his iconic study Soul of Mbira, Berliner notates four makwa patterns, all of which coincide with the main beat of the hosho (rattle) pattern. These have been transcribed in Example 12.13. The fourth handclapping pattern in the transcriptions (marked as D in the example) is the same as the handclapping pattern used in Clapping Music and again in the third movement of Electric Counterpoint. Berliner describes this pattern as one “characterized by complex off-beat phrasing.”65 Berliner notes that the handclapping patterns performed in a mbira ensemble tend to “combine in many ways and usually participants perform at least two contrasting patterns simultaneously.”66 His description of the interacting process resembles a description of Electric Counterpoint itself: “As these patterns interlock they create a number of resultant phrases with different rhythmic relationships to the mbira piece.”67 Likewise, in their investigation of the Icila dance of Zambia (known as Northern Rhodesia at the time of writing in 1952), Jones and Kombe demonstrate the importance of handclapping in just these terms:

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Example 12.13 Paul Berliner’s transcription of four makwa handclapping patterns. Berliner 1981, 115.

(a)

(b)

(c)

(d)

Very likely [the performers] will divide into two sets of clappers each with its own rhythm. The combined clapping of these two parties may be a simple “three-against-two” but it may be much more subtle. . . . [Clapping] is the link between the drums and the song, for the clapping is the backbone of the song.68

Given the centrality of overlapping distinct handclapping patterns in the ensemble of both the Icila dance of Zambia and the Bira ceremony of Zimbabwe, it is conceivable that the African handclapping pattern deployed in the third movement of Electric Counterpoint is in fact derived from just such an interaction of two different clapping patterns. For example, the combination of a simple ternary handclapping pattern (such as that notated by Berliner in Example 12.13) and a complex handclapping pattern (such as that notated by Tracey in the 1960s) results in the makwa pattern notated by Berliner in Example 12.13 (see Ex. 12.14a).69 Another possible combination of a simple ternary handclapping pattern and a somewhat more complex one is depicted in Example 12.14b. In his theoretical reflections on rhythm formation, Arom depicts a resultant pattern similarly constructed from the combination of a simple ternary pattern and a signature asymmetric five-note pattern, which could be understood as the complement to the standard pattern.70

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Example  12.14 Two derivations ((a) and (b)) of a resultant handclapping pattern produced by combining two simpler makwa handclapping patterns. (a)

(b)

Most African music scholars will recognize the makwa pattern (marked by xs in Ex. 12.14a) as a rotation of the gankogui bell pattern found in West African drum ensembles (such as the Sogba or Sogo dances of Ghana), which proved to be a rich source of information for Reich as well. In fact, the seven-note gankogui pattern appears as the primary module in many of Reich’s works leading up to Electric Counterpoint. Reich spent considerable time in the 1970s sketching and transcribing a host of African drumming ensembles, many of which contain this particular bell pattern—Reich calls it the “Gong-Gong” pattern in his sketches, while Jones calls it the “standard pattern” in his writings. I cannot elaborate the full extent of Reich’s engagement with West African drumming ensembles in this chapter. Here it suffices to say that the particular variation of this standard pattern first deployed by Reich in Clapping Music is found as a handclapping pattern in Zimbabwe. One interesting difference between Reich’s understanding of these pattern types and their articulation in an African context concerns the fact that the Western composer tends to cast the rhythm into a binary metric scheme, while the African counterparts, both in Ghana and Zimbabwe, tend to cast (or even derive) the rhythm in ternary time. Reich betrays this non-African way of hearing in his notation of both the sketches for—and the score of—Electric Counterpoint. First, the detached stems of the final two eighth notes of the original pattern in Reich’s sketch of the six rotations of Clapping Music suggest a duple construction of time (Ex. 12.12), instead of a ternary one, as indicated by the African examples (Ex. 12.13 and 12.14). Second, Reich notates the third movement of Electric Counterpoint as 3/2 rather than 12/8, thereby subdividing the basic beat into four-pulse units. Arguably one may speak here of the transformation of ternary sonic qualities into binary ones—or even the Occidentalizing of an African temporality—and yet, on the other hand, the diverse attribution of time signatures itself attests to the capacity for multiple modes of metric entrainment inherent to this kind of rhythmic patterning. This formal point needs to be emphasized. The striking point about asymmetric African patterns of this sort (also known as “timelines” in some of the scholarly literature) concerns what music theorists

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call “grouping dissonance,” or what should more accurately be called “metric ambiguity.” Of the three possible ternary groupings associated with the formation of “compound” time in a 12-pulse sequence, the gankogui/makwa pattern has the formal capacity to entrain each with almost equal validity. Likewise, of the two (or four) possible binary groupings associated with the formation of “simple” time in a twelve-pulse sequence, the pattern can do likewise. In other words, the seven-note timeline successfully embeds every possible time signature, whether composed of two-, three-, or four-beat units; or whether beginning on time-point 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, or 12, with near-equivalent plausibility. Example 12.15 outlines the five fundamental ways meter can be construed across the terrain of the twelve pulses of the gankogui/makwa pattern. The quadrilateral layout of numbers (from 0 to 11) in Example 12.15 indicates the relationship between rhythmic and metric time-points (noncoincidences are marked in plain text; coincidences are marked in bold) in the context of differently projected metric schemes. Ternary (or compound) groupings are demonstrated horizontally, while binary (or simple) ones are demonstrated vertically. As can be seen, in the context of gankogui/makwa, all possible time signatures equally vie for syntax formation. What is striking about this timeline is the way it nests ternary and binary components across the entirety of a single pattern. In other words, to produce a pattern that can plausibly entrain both simple and compound meters (beginning on any time-point) is not simply to symmetrically distribute binary and ternary elements to halves of that pattern, respectively. The pattern in Example 12.16, for example, distributes a binary grouping across the first Example 12.15 Metric ambiguity in the gankogui/makwa pattern.

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Example 12.16 A less ambiguous metric alternative (nesting binary with ternary).

six time-points and a ternary grouping across the second six. Both metric temporalities should equally lay claim to such a pattern, and yet it actually depicts a less ambiguous alternative. This is because—while various distinct meters are clearly plausibly entrained in this scenario—the third of the ternary meters (beginning on time-point 2 in Ex. 12.16) as well as the second of the binary times (beginning on time-point 1) are distinctly less plausibly entrained by the pattern than are the others. Despite the fact that the pattern is infused with both ternary and binary values, these are divided symmetrically across the pattern, thereby undermining the plausible entrainment of either temporality across the entire pattern. In gankogui/makwa, in contrast, the pattern is subdivided asymmetrically, yielding a segmentation of , a property Arom calls “rhythmic oddity.” Arom describes this particular form of asymmetry thus: “These figures are always constructed by the irregular juxtaposition of binary and ternary qualities. The resulting rhythmic combinations are remarkable for both their complexity and their subtlety. They follow a rule which may be expressed as ‘half-1/half+1.’ ”71 In the gankogui/makwa pattern, the property of rhythmic oddity helps explain the uniquely nested and differential distribution of binary and ternary qualities, and hence its maximal metric ambiguity. In the context of music deploying phasing techniques, such as the Icila dance music, Mbira dza Vadzimu music—or, of course, Reich’s minimalism—this kind of pattern becomes a particularly rich resource for the kaleidoscopic distribution of rhythmic variation. Example 12.17 outlines the twelve phasing positions

Example 12.17 Asynchronous modalities of phase positions.

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of the pattern (right-facing square bracket on the left-hand side of the boxes) and a clone (left-facing square bracket on the right-hand side of the boxes). Silent beats are marked with a dash in the box. Note that each phasing position proffers a unique pattern, thereby saturating the unfolding musical field with variety. In other words, the first pattern has seven sounded time-points and five silent ones; the second has twelve sounded and no silent ones; the third has nine sounded and three silent ones; and so on. The variety is represented below the box by tracking the “filled beats” across all twelve phase relations. Interestingly, the unfolding of this variety itself tracks a kind of immanent developmental logic from seven to twelve sounded time-points (or “filled beats”) at phase position 6. In other words, the unfolding of music through phase positions 1 to 6 tracks the gradual becoming sound of silences. However, this quasi-telos is not a simple additive process—systematically replacing notes for rests (first 7, then 8, 9, 10, 11, and 12)—but rather one inflected with a degree of diversity and malleability (substituting 12 for 8 in phase position 1; and 8 for 12 in phase position 6, for example). This subtle distortion of the systematic process effectively juxtaposes sudden contrasts between phase positions with gradual unfoldings between them. The distortion also effectively postpones the arrival of full beat saturation by deploying more phase positions than if their unfolding had occurred strictly systematically.72 One may speak here of the asystematic aesthetics of a systematic process; or better, an asystematic systematics. In phase position 7, the quasi-telos is reversed in a kind of dislocated palindrome. In other words, phase position 7 recapitulates the structure at phase position 5, as does phase position 8 that of phase position 4, and so on. But there is an important difference. The recouped rhythmic pattern (the audible resultant pattern) in each case has itself phase-shifted in a manner that does not reflect the same phase-shifted relation between the two rhythms (the embodied motor patterns) that produce the resultant patterns. This is a kind of additional layer of phasing involving the pattern of resultant patterns. In other words, various resultant patterns—identical to already heard patterns—emerge in the second half of the phasing process in a way that is gradually set adrift from their initial metric coordinates. The striking point about this phenomenon is that two phasing processes—on the one hand, the motor patterns, and, on the other, the audible resultant patterns—are thereby going out of phase with one another. This kind of double phasing is striking not only because a shift in the relationship held by two embodied patterns produces a transformation of the heard pattern but because the shift in the relationship produces a repetition of the resultant, but systematically set adrift from its initial appearance. Uncannily, the repetition of the resultant is set adrift by a different time span than the shift in the time span between the phase relations of the motor patterns that produce the resultant. Let me illustrate the point with an example. In phase position 5, the resultant is produced when the original motor pattern is combined with a clone at

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time-point 5. The identical resultant in phase position 7, in contrast, is produced when the original pattern is combined with a clone at time-point 7. A time span of two time-points (between clones) separates the construction of these respective configurations. The audible resultant pattern of each respective phase relation, in contrast, is an identical rhythm—identity here is understood as including both the actual pattern of long and short tones and the pattern of coincidence between parts—shifted by a time span of seven time-points. In other words, a shift in phase relations by two time-points in the production of the structure is registered as a shift by seven time-points in the perception of the structure (see Ex. 12.18). Understood in the context of the whole process, we find that phase positions 6 and 0 function as a kind of pivot for a phase-shifted palindrome. What is fascinating about this phasing process is not only the strange algorithmic artistry of the cumulative process of pattern production but also, and especially, the uncanny algorithmic artistry of the palindrome structure of the whole. An algorithmic logic is perceptually experienced at one remove; we hear sonic ghosts of a formal process; we listen by way of musical ventriloquism. The dissemblance and then displaced resemblance between processes of production and their uncanny perception is a subtle, but central, feature of African music aesthetics. It is not the place of this chapter to elaborate the important role of ventriloquism in African spiritual practices, except to note that several African musical practices elaborate phenomenological scenes grounded in various levels of perceptual mismatch between motor pattern and heard pattern, between eye and ear, between embodiment and form.73 The relationship between embodied codes is paradoxically scrambled into a higher-order coherence, producing resultant figures of errant identity. The phenomenology of an algorithm, one might say, produces asynchronous sound that uncannily recapitulates its forms as a thrown voice. This symptomatic artistic fallout reflects strongly on the nature of the pattern itself. Although it is unlikely that Reich recognized the extent of its mathematical Example 12.18 Double phasing relation at phase positions 5 and 7.

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capacities, his music demonstrates a strong sense of the pattern’s formal value. In the third movement of Electric Counterpoint, for example, Reich sets up some phase-shifting relations between guitars that reflect the ventriloquist property outlined here. For example, the resultant rhythms produced by the phase relation between guitars 2 and 3, on the one hand, and guitars 1 and 4, on the other, are identical (again, including both the pattern of long and short tones and their coincidence between parts). As it is with the quality of perceptual mismatch described earlier, however, these resultants are rotated by a different time span to the time span shift that generated their respective phase relations. To be precise, the phase relations between patterns have shifted by a time span of 2 while the respective resultant patterns have shifted by a time span of 5. In his iconic essay “Music as a Gradual Process” (1968), Reich argues against “hidden structural devices” in music and for music as a perceptible gradual process. In an oft-quoted statement, the composer claims: “I want to be able to hear the process happening throughout the sounding music.”74 However, focusing more closely on a particular African instance of it in Electric Counterpoint, this idea needs to be adjusted. In other words, the uncanny recapitulation of errant identity in musical structures such as this adjusts the idea that music understood as a gradual phasing process is one in which “a compositional process and a sounding music are one and the same thing.”75 Two points mediate this terse idea. First, the perceptual mismatch between embodied forms and heard forms in this example occasions a powerful dissimilitude between sounding music and compositional process. Second, and less immediately apparent, the uncanny recouping of similitude under such conditions of transformation occasions a sounding music engendered as if by a different process. In other words, close listening to the sounding music of a gradual phasing process of this sort provokes the phantom sense of a distinctly dissimilar compositional process at work. Not only is the “sounding music” different from its “compositional process,” but to the extent that the sounding music becomes “the same thing” as the compositional process, it is by way of a phantom perception of the process. Returning to the appearance of the makwa/gankogui pattern in Electric Counterpoint, it should be noted that the pitch arrangements do not properly reinforce the uncanny logic of these phase relations. Neither does the third movement isolate the possible two-guitar combinations for attention to their perception. The former point deserves emphasis. Although his mentor A.  M. Jones repeatedly insisted that African “drumming is not merely rhythmic, it is melodic,” Reich’s understanding of African musical phenomena is largely scripted in purely rhythmic terms. His partial indifference to African harmonic practice, for example, has been briefly noted earlier in this chapter. Furthermore, a sketch of Ageshi drumming (dated June 26, 1972, housed at the PSS) features a vivid transcription of the gankogui pattern. On the relations of musical lines produced by phasing, Reich notes on the sketch:  “These relations have to do entirely with rhythms—not with pitches.” In the third movement of Electric

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Counterpoint this rhythm-centric conception is articulated compositionally—in other words, the logic guiding rhythmic processes tends to be divorced from that of pitch processes. This division of parameters obscures some of the uncanny phase relations the music nonetheless sets up. Perhaps one may speak here of a subtle and latent “invention” of African rhythmic complexity at the expense of pitch complexity.76 The failure to recognize the intimate conjunction of pitch and rhythm in African aesthetics—and the concomitant overvaluation of rhythmic processes of African music—was a commonplace of twentiethcentury receptions of African music. On the other hand, it should be pointed out that the layout of the four guitar rotations of the gankogui/makwa pattern in Electric Counterpoint reflects an application of the African principle of rhythmic oddity to the phasing process itself. Guitar 1 is separated by two pulses from guitar 2, guitar 4 is separated by three pulses from guitar 2, and guitar 3 is separated by four pulses from guitar 4 (and thereby, within modulo 12, by another three pulses from guitar 1). The total arrangement of instrumental parts thereby reflects the structure , or , a subdivision that reflects the characteristically African logic of n-1/n+1 temporal subdivision.

“Too African?” (Or Not African Enough?) In his many writings and interviews, Reich frequently draws special attention to the unique properties of the musical modules he deploys in various phasing relations. In a 2000 interview with Rebecca Y. Kim, for example, Reich astutely states: “All those little modules, they have to be gold or else you’re dead.”77 This statement is consistent with A. M. Jones’s analysis of African music, notably the “prime rhythmic ‘motifs’ ” that form a constituent element of African music, particularly of the way they are “built up with mathematical precision.”78 Reich is keenly attuned to the formal capacity of the gankogui/makwa pattern in particular. For example, in the Ageshi drumming sketch featuring the gankogui pattern from the 1972 sketchbook housed at PSS, Reich speaks to the compositional importance of setting up a “tremendously rich original ‘module’ ” for a successful phasing process. In other sketches from the same sketchbook, he examines various patterns and their combinations, frequently concluding that they are lacking in some way or another.79 In fact, the 1972 sketchbook for Clapping Music and Music for Pieces of Wood reflects an almost agonizing attempt on the part of the composer to break free from the African patterns he had used in his compositions up to this point, without forfeiting their delicate analytic characteristics. But this effort was met with little success. The sketchbook dated May–October 1972 is replete with variously grouped rhythmic patterns. Toward the end of this period, for example, we still find diverse incarnations of a suitable pattern for the compositions to come: on September 18, 1972, Reich notates a two-bar, ten-beat pattern; on September 30, he notates

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a one-bar, sixteen-beat pattern; on October 13, he notates a fourteen-beat pattern subdivided as ; on October 14, he notates a pithy eight-beat pattern; and on October 16, he expands this eight-beat pattern to an asymmetrically divided sixteen-beat pattern. Reich’s various attempts to strike “gold” in these sketched modules are revealing, for they reflect an antagonistic concern, on the one hand, for striking the appropriate mathematical characteristics required for rich phasing relations, and on the other for their potential signification as non-Western music—“just so much ‘ethnic’ sound,” in the words Reich jots on a sketch dated August 17, 1972. In his sketch from October 16, for example, Reich is anxious that the asymmetric patterns he crafted for Clapping Music and Music for Pieces of Wood sound, in the composer’s handwritten words, “a bit too ‘Latin.’ ” In the ensuing entry on October 22, in response to his remark about Latin-sounding characteristics, Reich notes:  “So maybe basic pattern progression is  .  .  .” followed by a sketch of three consecutive patterns in 12/8, 8/8, and 6/8, respectively. Of the three modules, the first, in 12/8, is the gankogui/makwa pattern discussed earlier in the chapter. By shifting time signatures, then, it appears that Reich hopes to resist the “ethnic,” Latin-inflected sound of his previously crafted modules, without excluding the African one. Interestingly, by October 29, Reich abandons the plan to shift meters and isolates the 12/8 gankogui/makwa pattern as the only module to be used in both Clapping Music and Music for Pieces of Wood. Even so, in a sketch of the module and its permutations on November 25 (see Figure 12.1), Reich is concerned that he “change [the] basic pattern in [first section] to more neutral [sic],” presumably because he construes the chosen gankogui/makwa pattern as signifying non-Western music. More precisely, in words written on the same sketch, Reich is concerned that the gankogui/makwa pattern might sound “Too African?” The concern about sounding too African does not fade throughout Reich’s career. Paradoxically, even in his descriptions in 1988 of the Banda Linda quotation in the first movement of Electric Counterpoint (nearly two decades after composing Clapping Music), for instance, Reich likewise points out that the African theme “if anything . . . seems a bit ‘un-African’ ” (in this case because of its time signature).80 It is as if the African citation itself here accomplishes the paradoxical objectives of a well-formed non-African pattern.81 Despite the evident reservation of sounding too African, Reich nonetheless settled on the gankogui/makwa pattern for Clapping Music (in 1972) and Music for Pieces of Wood (in 1973). Indeed, the composer deployed this basic module for years to come, including in works ranging from Music for 18 Musicians (1976) and Sextet (1984–86), to Nagoya Marimbas (1994), You Are (Variations) (2004); and, as examined here, Electric Counterpoint. This is hardly surprising given Reich’s abundant references to and transcriptions of this, and other African patterns in his sketches dating from 1969 to the end of the century. In a much later sketch for Tehillim (dated January 15, 1981), for example, Reich asks himself how to

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Figure 12.1 Reich’s sketch for Clapping Music and Music for Pieces of Wood (Steve Reich Collection, PSS).

change tempos in the piece. Reich’s solution:  “Metric modulations modeled on African examples (analyse recordings made in Ghana for this).” Again, it is beyond the scope of this chapter to outline the full extent of this engagement with African music in Reich’s considerable transcriptions of African music in his sketchbooks (which have not been discussed at all in this chapter). For

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the purposes of this argument, Reich’s consistent attachment to a particular rhythmic configuration seems to indicate a deep understanding and appreciation of its intricate permutational logic, even if its actual elaboration in specific compositions at times obscures some of that logic, and even if its elaboration in specific compositions is only one part of a broader patchwork of African modes of operation in these compositions. In conclusion, I would like to suggest that, far from sounding too African, Electric Counterpoint is not in fact heard as African enough in the context of its general (popular, legal, and academic) reception. In such a view, the music refers less to the thematic recall of African textures and tunes themselves than to the formal assemblage and rearrangement of their abstract elements. Of course, Jones repeatedly refers to African music as crafted with a high degree of “mathematical precision,” and this precision clearly resonated with the permutational logic of Reich’s aesthetic aspirations.82 Wholly shorn of its African meanings— notwithstanding the fact that traditional African music is itself a site of complex formal mathematics—the standard historical tale emphasizes the music’s generative procedures as abstract-sounding forms, filtered here through latent “minimalist” axioms:  reduction of means, depersonalized processes, anti-illusion, and so on. The task of this chapter has not simply been to account for historical facts more accurately and exhaustively than before. Nor is its aim simply a comparative study, descriptively collating and differentiating the aesthetic dimensions of the “same” music in America and Africa, respectively, accounting for the variable social effects of its repurposing in a global frame, and so on. In fact, the stakes of this kind of revision are higher than those thematically investigated in this chapter. For example, in the context of a global biography of musical sounds that today circulate in a hybrid of both exchange economies and gift-like ones, it is imperative to locate points of origin and appropriation with some historical responsibility, no less than sensitivity toward their socioeconomic place in our contemporary moment.83 To be sure, both concepts and samples of Clapping Music, for example, have reappeared in a variety of musical contexts since its “composition” in 1972. In The Sound of Two Hands (1992), for example, the Princeton-based composer Paul Lansky deploys variously tuned samples of clapping hands to render what he tentatively calls “a high-tech version of Steve Reich’s Clapping Music.”84 The samples do not appear to be taken from a performance of Clapping Music itself, but the composition features a prominent presentation of the African gankogui pattern. Likewise, in the realm of popular music, David Bowie’s song “Love Is Lost” from his album The Next Day (2013) is anchored in samples from Clapping Music. The video of the song begins with the sound of applause accompanying footage of Bowie washing his hands before metamorphosing into a section of Clapping Music, performed by James Murphy and other musicians, accompanied by clapping hands of an eerie, fictional audience. Murphy’s “Hello Steve Reich

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Mix for the DFA” was released as a bonus track on the album. The song is demonstrably rich in historical association, including a wooden puppet of The Thin White Duke and a sample from Bowie’s song “Ashes to Ashes” from Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) (1980). Not surprisingly, Reich is credited on both the album and the single. Similarly, Electric Counterpoint has enjoyed a social life beyond the limits of its own commodity form. In addition to its various releases—ranging from Pat Metheny’s well-known Nonesuch recording of 1987 to Dan Lippel’s re-Africanized version on New Focus Records in 2016, by way of Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood’s performance and recording on Radio Rewrite in 2012—Electric Counterpoint has been used in various other songs and musical works, no less than other media.85 One instance involves the ambient house band The Orb, which sampled the ndereje balendro section of the first movement of Metheny’s recording on its song “Little Fluffy Clouds,” which peaked at number 10 on the 1993 UK charts; another involves the artist Ramble John Krohn (RJD2), who sampled the work for his song “The Proxy” in 2004. Additionally, Electric Counterpoint has been featured in an anthology of music as an object of academic study, it has been arranged and performed for drum and bugle corps, and it supplies audio for a well-known video game.86 In short, the music enjoys considerable global circulation and play in the afterlife of its initial recorded production. Quite apart from the cultural repurposing for European and American music audiences of sonic, spiritual, biomedical, and musical practices found in Africa, the analytics of this chapter throw the question concerning property—its constituent licensing and copyright agreements—no less than its relation to political economy on a global scale into sharp relief. A summary account of Electric Counterpoint would include a host of African music strata, ranging from literal quotations and paraphrases to the application of techniques and principles. To name only the most obvious, citations include the Ippy horn music of the Banda Linda people in the Central African Republic and the makwa handclapping patterns of the Zezuru people in Zimbabwe, while African techniques include the phasing processes derived from the Icila dance of the Lala people in Zambia as well as the Ngwayi drumming of the Bemba people in Zambia, and the techniques for inherent rhythmic-melodic pattern formation of the Amadinda xylophone of the Luganda people in Uganda and the Matepe music of the Korekore people in Zimbabwe. These African invocations are clearly determined by various layers of media and mediation (including typologies of transcription, interfaces for recording technologies, tape, paper, vinyl, and so on). However, Reich’s actual compositional deployment of these African compositional strata ranges from modes that are deeply consistent with African practice to modes that are wildly inconsistent with it. In short, the music of Electric Counterpoint is most accurately historicized not as a minimalist work of art alone but as a creative paraphrase of African music. The seemingly autogenerative

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emergence of unguessed-at inherent musical patterns, for instance, reflects less the “impersonal, unintended, psychoacoustic by-products” of a neutral music construed as “gradual process” than it does a mathematically-grounded local biospiritual practice in the context of a particular African musical cosmology.87 It is in this context that the music’s inherent values (aesthetic, historic, geographic, economic) should be assessed. The question is: What are the ideological stakes of obstructing a classical compositionem africanum from sounding “too African”?

Notes 1. Reich 2002b, 35. 2. In the context of the analytic remarks (on a work written in 1988) to follow, Reich writes, “I didn’t want to sound Balinese or African, I wanted to think Balinese or African.” See Reich 2002b, 148. 3. Hoek 2002, 9. 4. Reich 2002b, 149 (emphasis in original). 5. Ibid. See also note 66. 6. Ibid., 148 (emphasis added). 7. Scherzinger 2005, 33. 8. Quoted in Alburger 2004, 3. 9. Jones and Kombe 1952, 9. 10. Jones 1959, 210. 11. Kubik 1962. 12. Kubik 1969. 13. Kubik 2010. 14. Ibid., 108. 15. For an overview of Reich’s materials held at the Paul Sacher Stiftung, see Matthias Kassel’s chapter in this volume. 16. For a discussion of the constitutive role of African music in the early tape piece It’s Gonna Rain, see Scherzinger 2005. 17. Reich 2002b, 35. 18. Ibid., 26. 19. Jones and Kombe 1952, 14. 20. Ibid., 15. 21. Jones 1949, 12. 22. Ibid. 23. This reference and the ones that follow are taken from Temperley 2000, 67. 24. In fact, only guitar 4 is not doubled an octave below. 25. Reich 2002b, 36. 26. See Arom 1985, 173; (1991) 2004, 308–9, 313. 27. See Reich 2002b, 149. 28. Personal communication with the author. 29. Arom (1991) 2004, 108.

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30. See, for example, Nattiez 1990; Molino 1982. 31. Arom (1991) 2004, 313. 32. Ibid., 173. The spelling of words in the Linda language in this chapter is an approximation due to the limitations of the Western keyboard. 33. Ibid., 311. 34. Ibid., 309. 35. Ibid., 311. 36. Ibid. Arom mentions only the (highest) horns, the antelope horns, in naming the first pitch-class family, a point that stands to reason in light of the claim that only the highest six horns can produce a second tone (1984, 193; (1991) 2004, 309). But it disconcerts the notion of pitch-class equivalence (implied by the “family” label) because the corresponding lower horns in the ensemble (horns 11 and 16 in Arom’s text) are unable to produce the embroidered figures ostensibly characterizing this family. 37. Arom (1991) 2004, 310. 38. Ibid., 313; Arom 1984, 186. 39. Arom (1991) 2004 371–72. 40. It is noteworthy that the module chosen by Reich is more reflective of the model of rhythmic activity associated with actually performed patterns in ndereje balendoro (as depicted in Ex. 12.6) than it is with Arom’s analytic model (as depicted in Ex. 12.5)—a realization nowhere in fact found in the many transcriptions of the horn variations. 41. Jones 1959, 194–202. 42. Ibid., 199. 43. Reich, quoted in Potter 2000, 169. 44. Quoted in Alburger 2004, 3 (emphasis added). 45. Jones 1952, 25–35. 46. Ibid., 38–39. 47. Kubik 1966, 23. 48. Reich 2002b, 34. 49. See, for example, Scherzinger 1995, 69–88, which explores the paradoxical appearance of Wagner’s introductory Meistersinger theme out of the logics of variation in a symphony by Mahler. 50. For example, in their 1961 analyses of kalimba music and the guitar music of Mwenda Jean Bosco, respectively, John Blacking and David Rycroft describe the process of melodic oscillation between two tonal centers, separated by a tone, as a “root-progression.” This affords what Rycroft calls “tonality contrast,” or what John Blacking describes as the “effect of shifting tonality, although there is no modulation.” See Rycroft 1961, 85; Blacking 1961, 30. 51. Nketia 1974, 147. 52. Ibid., 152. 53. The second inherent pattern, introduced at rehearsal 63, is composed of a more systematic pass through largely one-beat entities found in guitars 4, 5, and 6, respectively, thereby drawing attention to the phase relations of the upper voices. The three consecutive sixteenth-note riffs are particularly relevant to the task of making

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this process audible. At rehearsal 66 the third inherent pattern is introduced—a calmer variation of the pattern beginning at rehearsal 63 that nonetheless retains the signature sound of consecutive sixteenth-note riffs. This pattern draws attention to the phase relations of the lower voices. 54. Where Reich does finally introduce the pitch class A  (one measure after rehearsal 62 in the bass), he omits from the chord pulsations the pitch class D♯, perhaps to conjure the color of A major in this section. (Throughout the second half of the movement, the chord blocks consistently omit one pitch class from the full diatonic set, thereby creating coloristic modulation effects within a basic pitch set.) 55. Nketia 1974, 163–64. 56. Ibid., 164. 57. Kubik 1962. 58. For more on Reich’s use of computer software, see Matthias Kassel’s and Twila Bakker’s chapters in this volume. 59. Percussionist and member of Reich’s ensemble, Russell Hartenberger, refers to the Clapping Music rhythm as one “Steve discovered while trying to find a pattern similar to the rhythm of the gankogui, or double iron bell from West Africa, used in several Ewe pieces, including the Atsiagbekor dances” (Hartenberger 2013, 372). See my comments later in this chapter. 60. Jones and Kombe 1952, 22. 61. Ibid. 62. Ibid., 26, 28. 63. Ibid., 32. 64. Ibid. (emphasis in original). 65. Berliner 1981, 114. 66. Ibid. 67. Ibid. 68. Jones and Kombe 1952, 7. 69. See Berliner 1981, 115; Tracey 1970, 50. 70. Arom (1991) 2004, 181. 71. Ibid., 246. 72. This discussion draws on Cohn’s analysis of beat-class sets in Reich’s phaseshifting music. See Cohn 1992. 73. For examples of this important African phenomenon, see Scherzinger 2010; 2012, 84–105. 74. Reich 2002b, 34. 75. Ibid., 35. 76. On the invention of African rhythm, see Agawu 2003. Reich does, however, view pitch- and timbre-related matters (such as tuning and instrumentation) as less easily transferred between cultures than rhythmic ones, so the issue is not simply a matter of his not recognizing African pitch complexity but also feeling disempowered to appropriate it. For more on this, see note 87. 77. Kim 2000, 12. 78. Jones and Kombe 1952, 9.

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79. A sketch for Clapping Music, dated August 15, 1972, notes that the illustrated patterns in the sketch are “not musically interesting.” 80. Reich 2002b, 150 (emphasis added). 81. Interestingly, what gives the pattern its “African” character, according to Reich, is the phasing process to which it is subject in Electric Counterpoint, further underscoring the composer’s awareness of the origins of the phasing idea in Africa:  “If [the Banda Linda quotation] has any African qualities, it lies  .  .  .  perhaps in the fact that the close canon between voices makes it ambiguous . . .” (Reich 2002b, 150). 82. See, for example, Jones and Kombe 1952, 9, 30, 31. 83. In fact, Reich shows demonstrable awareness of the curious (legal) difference between the materiality of theft, on the one hand, and the seeming neutrality of immaterial appropriation of labor in the public domain, on the other. For example, the composer felt that using the iron bells (“ ‘gong-gong’ and ‘atoke’ ”), which he brought back with him from Accra, constituted a kind of “musical rape.” But using the glockenspiel instead, even if playing “the Hatsyiatsa patterns . . . I had learned in Ghana” on them, seems to have cleared the composer of charges of appropriation. In short, Reich writes: “I was free to use [the glockenspiel] as I liked” (Reich 2002b, 148). 84. See Lansky 1992. 85. Dan Lippel’s technical approach to Electric Counterpoint is unique for its responsiveness to structural behavior of the original African horn music. He achieves this, first, by inflecting each guitar with a different timbre, as if to assign each instrument with a “family” name in the Banda-Linda tradition: tuwule, ngbanja, aga, yaviri, and so on. Canonic lines thereby both separate and congeal in a less systematic manner than they would in the context of a single electrically dispersed instrument. Second, by deploying preparations on some of the guitars, Lippel paradoxically conjures the timbre of the African lamellaphone, an instrument composed of iron rods, with added buzzers (such as snail shells and bottle caps) affixed to its soundboard. These buzzing devices add a snare-like rhythmic component to the ensemble, and thereby also an element of patterned unpredictability. Last, Lippel expands the roster of motivic figures by returning to the African source material, where horn players inflect the signature figure with apparently infinite variation— held notes; embroideries; added, subtracted, split, and embellished notes; and, above all, variously felt rhythmic periodicities of the same basic figure by exploiting its temporal ambiguity. The performance thereby conjures not only an element of caprice in its patterned details but also the convulsions of the overall ensemble of the African original. Lippel’s performance is a story of music as much immersed in intricately patterned form as one immersed in much larger histories of musical experiment and achievement. It is a story not only of electricity and reproducibility but also of eccentricity and ephemera (see the digital booklet accompanying the release on New Focus Records, 2016). 86. See Winterson 2016, 65–89; the Bluecoats Drum Corps’ “Kinetic Noise” (2015); and the video game Civilization V. 87. Reich 2002b, 35.

13 That’s All It Does Steve Reich and Balinese Gamelan Michael Tenzer The new music scene of the 1960s and 1970s manifested both skepticism of and infatuation with non-Western music.* It was by turns dismissive of its value and in thrall of its potential to renew. These views roughly paralleled, in aesthetic terms, the split “uptown” and “downtown” New York scenes and were the stuff of everyday debates. The New York Times’ Donal Henahan, uptown apologist, derided Steve Reich’s interest in such music, saying that his compositions were “as much fun as watching a pendulum,” and that their basic inspiration is “Balinese gamelan music, with its . . . slight interest in dynamic variety.”1 As late as 1996, co-critic Bernard Holland sneered that “gamelan music has no direction.”2 From their high modernist perch, uptowners mirrored a European critique of minimalism in the dystopian spirit of German philosopher Theodor Adorno. Wim Mertens, hoisting the downtown flag in Belgium, dutifully depicts this view, in which minimalist repetition rejects Western music’s dialectical engagement with historical progress. It becomes an alienated vessel in which “nonWestern forms” were “stripped of their historical context and used as mere technical formulae and procedures.”3 Downtown in New York, Reich celebrated the same denuded structures as enabling “a music with one’s own sound that is constructed in the light of one’s knowledge.”4 As latter-day developments in contemporary music eroded the uptown-downtown barricades, modernists’ anxiety of appropriation gradually receded, in part because Reich’s open-access stance won the day, thrilling his audience and attracting diverse acolytes. But because it is the winners who write history, we do owe ourselves another perspective. The idea is neither to cast uptown-style aspersions, nor to imagine some mighthave-been Reich oeuvre engaging the Balinese and African musics he loves with a method more thorough and deep than the selective, practical approach he had.

* The author would like to acknowledge the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Paul Sacher Stiftung, Basel. Special thanks also to Evan Ziporyn for feedback on the first draft. 303

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Nor is it to question whether he did or should have done anything other than he claimed to do (he didn’t). Instead, in this chapter we observe some modalities of difference between select features and repertoires of Balinese music, and Reich’s emerging style during the period he directly engaged with them. On one side, there is Reich’s “own sound  .  .  .  [and]  .  .  .  knowledge” of Balinese music:  cherry-picked and shaped by his intuitions, taste, and choice not to advance beyond a neophyte stage, not to mention his own cultural subjectivity. Juxtaposed are Bali’s rooted “historical contexts,” with their rich significance for their own public, that Reich eschewed. A consideration of the differences and gaps between them launches a perspective that would remain hidden if we only take gamelan tones and rhythms as free-floating agents available for plucking from the vine. Like the famous trompe l’oeil of a goblet separating two faces, the differences and gaps constitute a negative space both empty (because of the truncated relationship between Reich and Bali) and full (of fallow possibilities). After studying in Ghana in 1970, Reich spoke of the “tidal wave”5 of culture and tradition that loomed above him, a wave he was sure he didn’t want to be swallowed by. Each musical tradition is a vast realm for its experts and practitioners; Reich entered Bali’s only long enough to sift needed items and then move on. Which did his studies offer him, which did he select, which not, and why?

Reich and Balinese Music: 1969 to 1974 In the early 1970s Reich wrote music in which the gradual phasing processes invented for the early tape music transitioned, after Drumming (1971), into a music of discrete patterns that maintain strict alignment to pulsation shared by all players. The use of patterned isochrony, brief periodicities, extensive repetition, and multiples of the same instrument set the musical conditions Reich restricted himself to in the run-up to Six Pianos (1973), so that he could work out how to construct the tactile, immersive sound he envisioned. Within intensely repetitive passages, addition or subtraction of notes within a pattern and the shifting and realignment of patterns with respect to pulse were the main process techniques used. In Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices, and Organ (1973) he introduced a layer of held chords, in a way reminiscent of Four Organs (1970), to carpet these procedures. The repetition of stretched-out groups of two or three chords, and their eventual replacement by similar groups of unpredictably different lengths, added a dimension of flexible periodicity heard against the consistent periods above. Reich’s affinities for the music of Africa and Bali were stimulated before and during these years by books and recordings. He listened to LP records available,6 admired the ensemble cohesion evident in the sound, and was moved by sonic

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manifestations of the oral traditions and social bonds that bound musicians together. He read A. M. Jones’s Studies in African Music (1959) and Colin McPhee’s Music in Bali (1966), the definitive (and practically the only) texts of the day, and stated his admiration for their musicological rigor, calling the McPhee a “masterpiece.”7 In the summer of 1969 the composer copied a passage for four Balinese crash cymbals transcribed in McPhee into a sketchbook, assigning pitches to the rhythms. He had mused about composing a “klangfarbenmelodie, only more Balinese than Viennese,” and soon sketched ideas for a piece (never realized) tentatively to have been titled “Chandetan”—the term McPhee gives for the first two of the cymbal parts and their paradiddle-like [AABABAAB] interlocking.8 In terms of how much Reich actively pursued knowledge of African and Balinese music, the latter could be seen as having exerted somewhat less of a pull on him than the former. He corresponded with A. M. Jones and Africanist ethnomusicologists Hugh and Andrew Tracey about technical matters that later directly impacted his work,9 though perhaps he would also have approached McPhee, who had died in 1964, leaving a lacuna for ethnomusicological expertise on Balinese music. Reich elected to go to Ghana and never went to study in Bali. In his 1974 Writings about Music, Reich devoted a full essay—replete with transcriptions of music he learned—to the music of the Ewe culture that he homed in on, but he did not accord Balinese music the same treatment, devoting only a short passage to it in the “Postscript to a Brief Study of Balinese and African Music,” and various still briefer mentions of it elsewhere.10 Postscript was written subsequent to taking a course in Balinese gamelan semar pegulingan with Balinese musician I  Nyoman Sumandhi at the American Society for Eastern Arts Seattle summer session in 1973, and prior to taking a second one in Berkeley a year later, this time on the unusual gamelan gambang, with teachers I Wayan Sinti and I Nyoman Rembang. Semar Pegulingan is an elaborate gamelan of the precolonial royal courts requiring about twenty players, with many kinds of metallophones, gongs, and drums; the gamelan gambang is a small ensemble of four wooden xylophones and two metallophones, quite sacred and ancient, felt to be endangered, and of special interest to the two teachers, both ardent preservationists. By fall 1974, Reich had finished with his world music “courses.”11

Concepts That Did and Did Not Filter In In and around this chronology, Reich’s music tells the gamelan story in several ways. Some of its features are common to both Ewe and Balinese music in a general sense, so it cannot be easily said that he was influenced more by one or the other. He was drawn to these traditions because he loved them,12 and he loved them in part because they presented fresh contrasts to dominant

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art-music currents. Reich conscripted the traditions to assist in his venture of resistance. Their predominance of percussion, repetition and cyclic structure, systems of oral transmission, integration of music and dance, and the communitarian, nonprofessional ethos of the performing ensemble’s closely interactive musical behavior—all were seen as in strong contradistinction to what was happening in Euro-American musical centers of the day.13 Some Balinese or African techniques are infused into Reich’s compositions in idiosyncratic syntheses that make it hard to pinpoint one or the other as a source. He was drawn to interlocking textures, for example, as we have observed. Both Balinese and African music (and Pérotin, another interest) use them, but differently. Most Balinese melodic interlocking generates a monophonic line from two syncopated parts, often rhythmically identical but displaced (that is, phased, or in canon), combining to fill every subdivision of the cycle with a tone.14 If the parts coincide at some rhythmic position, they do so only at the unison or a consistent fifth-like interval. Even Balinese partner drumming, using a mix of pitched and unpitched sounds, follows analogous principles of the seamless fusion of complements into a single stream. In contrast, Ewe drum interlocking overlaps and interweaves: the parts are distinct, independent, and stratified; they use different sized, timbrally distinct drums; and together they engender dialogic clashes of groupings and phrasings—hardly the single thread of Balinese interlocked parts. Their composite does not always fill all the subdivisional positions, and different combinations of them coincide irregularly. Reich invents, selects, and adapts from among these: consider, for example, the final system of Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices, and Organ. The four marimba parts often play at the same time, but where they do not, at least one part sounds. The parts combine melodically but not conjunctly, their composite fills most but not all subdivisions, and some parts are rhythmically related by phase and others not. The composite of the first six sixteenth-note pulses is neatly filled in a Balinese way, and the metallophone overlaps and extends this dense texture for the rest of the measure. The glockenspiels are phased with each other at the distance of half a measure, but their interwoven relationship to the marimba rhythms is more African than Balinese. More broadly, exposure to these traditions fueled Reich’s growing conviction that human interaction through ensemble performance was preferable to electronically made music. Time invested in 1968–69 building the Phase Shifting Pulse Gate device to help human performers execute gradual phasing while playing interlocking patterns had proved dissatisfying.15 The machineaided precision came to seem self-defeating: “It is actually tiny microvariations of . . . [a steady] pulse that give life to the music,” he wrote later;16 and further that “there is, when singing or playing, a complete fusion of mind and body into music—one is playing music, body and soul.”17 Drumming made it clear that phasing could be successfully done by pairs of human performers playing the same patterns, with one player incrementally increasing speed (analogous to

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tape loop phasing). But maintaining isochrony instead had the compositional advantage of making more kinds of polyrhythmic relationships available, for greater numbers of simultaneous parts, and accessible to musicians without special training in the gradual phasing technique. Yet Reich also wanted to keep the machine humming, so to speak. He sought a performance collectivity reliant on repetition at unchanging tempo that was designed to focus listener attention on compositional process. This led him to draw from Ewe and Balinese music as though they were canvases of patterns unfolding on neatly ruled tempo grids stretching to infinity. It was hardly Reich alone, of course, but minimalism itself that snubbed tempo change, due to negative associations with rubato, ritardando, and related markers of expressivity in the European, especially Romantic, tradition. Repetition of a static or slowly evolving cyclic pattern at a steady tempo was a vestige of the machine idea.18 It also seems to have been a default way to conceive of repetition, perhaps because no non-Western counterexamples were evident at the time, or because the obvious ones from Western classical music, like theme and variation forms, were already guilty by association. Though he was a jazz buff, improvisation was not Reich’s interest either. Jazz improvisation is expressive of an individual voice, hence incompatible with his thinking. He admired the “droning and repetitious” resemblances of Indian music to the processes he composed but rejected such modal musics as “more or less strict frameworks for improvisation.”19 Reich also pointed out: “Musical processes can give one a direct contact with the impersonal and also a kind of complete control,”20 and in Postscript he asserted admiringly, after reading McPhee, that “Balinese mallet playing is composed, and allows no improvisation.”21 He was not predisposed to envision how improvisation could be integrated into a collectivity, or ponder the possibility that it is not only in “microvariations” that ensemble musicians “give life to the music.” It was an outsider’s response to gamelan consistent with that of Benjamin Britten, who in the 1950s had described Balinese musicians as sleepwalking automatons, flawlessly executing fixed compositions, and expressive only on a higher, impersonal plane.22 It served Reich not to see individual expressivity in an oral tradition like Bali’s and view it as functioning on a higher plane. He may have rejoiced in the deprofessionalized, depersonalized social bonding he discovered in Ghana and Bali, and perceived in it an antidote to a soullessness endemic to the hyperprofessionalized career of the Western classical performer. Through such a lens, what is ultimately the difference between the depersonalized Balinese and the depersonalized Westerner? It is that the former is seen to draw power from the traditional collective and the latter is drained of power as an alienated modern subject. Therein lies a packed conflation of essentialism, postmodern anxiety, and Orientalism that Reich was no less liable to escape than any other cosmopolitan subject of his time.

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In any event, strongly collectivized though Balinese music may be, these calculations do not quite work out. Tempo change and improvisation may tilt too far in the direction of subjective performance expressivity for Reich to have assimilated them into his project. But they are nevertheless hallmarks of orality in Bali and constitute materialization of hard-earned Balinese musical wisdom and insight. They could only spring from rooted cultural practice cultivated through lifelong collaboration among performers, refined and passed down through many generations. Indeed, there is improvisation (of a particular sort—it isn’t raga or jazz) in many of the instrumental layers and formal procedures of Balinese music. On some instruments it is prominent and very much meant to be heard, while on others it is somewhat hidden, a source of pleasure-in-mastery for the performers and their co-musicians only. In some genres the lead drummer has wide leeway to spontaneously alter texture and form,23 while in others even the detailed, quicksilver enmeshing of interlocking parts can be improvised if pairs of players have partnered long enough.24 And there is radical flexibility of tempo at the very heart of gamelan ensemble virtuosity. Repetition and fixed tempo are often decoupled to the extent that high demands are placed on the listener’s mere recognition of a repeating structure. Some kinds of extended compositions have detailed narratives of tempo change wedded to their melodic structures. Balinese value both sides of the coin: they imbue their music with a freedom and rhapsodic sweep just as much as they power it with strict rhythms like those of interest to Reich, and encompass both within their particular world of collectivity.25 They speak of and value tempo as an expressive realm, rubbing against minimalism’s grain, and see in improvisation an effortless expertise. In the early stages of learning one must be perspicacious to assimilate these things, but passages in McPhee do address it clearly.26 Such practices rest on a chassis of melodic and rhythmic structural grammars with long historical trajectories. We need not call Reich to account for them, though we are entitled to point out the paradoxes and assumptions he brought to bear in overlooking them. In the open-minded act of facilitating the West’s encounter with Balinese music, Reich was unresponsive to the features that make that music most affecting to the Balinese themselves. However endemic such misreading may be to cross-cultural interaction broadly speaking, and however marvelous its outcomes can be (such as in Reich’s music), the phenomenon is a familiar case of a non-Western culture donning the mantle of modernity through Western agency, and on Western terms. Deeper Balinese musical practices are as one with the tidal wave of tradition that Reich wanted to escape. The fact that that he did so on his own terms does not mean that he did so fully, nor that the wave’s shadow is erased from the story of Reich’s relationship to gamelan. One cannot burn bridges without leaving a trace.

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Reich and Gamelan: Analytical Comparisons The world of traditional Balinese music is roughly bifurcated along a kind of folk/classical axis. It can be said to have two lineages: the autochthonous and the assimilated—that is, music before the accretion of religion of Indic origin (what is glossed today as Hinduism) on to local animist beliefs, and music during and after, up to the Dutch colonial rule of the early twentieth century (after this time, the music morphed at the characteristic faster pace of the modern era). The older musical stratum cannot be dated precisely but probably spans two thousand years or more. It comprises ancient animist rituals like cremation ceremonies, communal harvest, trance and exorcism cures, and initiations; and it mainly used singing, wood or bamboo percussion, repetition, brief periodicities, and interlocking rhythms.27 Later music developed into a family of classical traditions, riding waves of cultural influence originating from South Asia that eventually touched Bali earlier than a.d. 882 (the oldest written record). A set of text-based practices deriving from literate Indic cultures and their powerful monarchies, they gave rise to copious repertoires of voiced—that is, sung— poetry with complex scansions and long melodies in unmeasured rhythm. Between the fourteenth and nineteenth centuries, these melodies were transformed and assimilated into gamelan music, as bronze-casting technology advanced to enable the construction of the large instrument sets emblematic of gamelan today. This music is associated with dance and theater; bronze keys and gongs; extended cyclic periodicities; ambitious, multisection musical architecture; rhythmically stratified orchestral textures with slow rhythms in the bass and quick ones in the high range; fluctuating tempo and dynamics; and rich timbres produced by the shimmering of special tunings, instruments, and mallet techniques. Over time the music also fully absorbed the autochthonous structures, and some of the earlier music—in latter-day forms—absorbed techniques in the other direction. More or less original forms of both musics also continue to exist side by side in Bali.28 As with improvisation and tempo change, Reich was predisposed to value some features of melodic and rhythmic structure over others. Some genres in the autochthonous stream fit well with his vision of a dense, tactile, repetitive, and driving music, but less so the poetry and extended cycles, multipart forms, and labyrinthine melodies that are part and parcel of later practices. We find these throughout Balinese music, in the sacred temple ritual repertoire lelambatan, the court theatrical form gambuh, the shadow play music gender wayang, and much more. In fact, for most Balinese, the later music’s association with sacred, royal power and a contemplative, worshipful aesthetic led them to consider such genres as their most prestigious and profound. That foreign novices are typically drawn to the rhythmic features of the older lineage is a tendency not lost on Balinese musicians who have taught them. They are what Balinese musicians often point to as the reason why initiates don’t “get” how Balinese music “feels.”

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As an example of the autochthonous music, consider the chanted vocal rhythms of Kecak, or the so-called “Ramayana Monkey Chant” that Reich heard on the Nonesuch Explorer series LP Golden Rain.29 He must have listened very closely. This set of interlocking, often phase-related rhythms regulated by a constantly sounding pulse corresponds significantly to the techniques at work in Music for Pieces of Wood. The LP, one of three devoted to Bali in the Explorer Series, was in Reich’s collection. Dubbed with this English nickname on the album cover, it is one of the most enduringly “popular” selections of Balinese music in the West. Its teeming, interlocking texture is powered by dozens if not hundreds of puffing bodies, seated but constantly in choreographed motion, jolting between explosive and hushed levels of rhythmic intensity. Reich remarked on this music at various times and lauds its iconic status.30 This is not a freestanding music but one part of an elaborate theater form mixing pre- and post-Hindu elements. Kecak dramatizes episodes from the beloved Hindu Ramayana epic, with the chorus switching among various kinds of vocal accompaniment and playing the roles of armies of warring monkeys in the story’s denouement. Most often seated in several concentric circles, the chorus interacts with the dancers, who enact the story. Specified dancers lead the chorus, engaging with them through gesture, song, and cue. Kecak was initially created in the early 1930s by expatriate German artist Walter Spies, Balinese dancer Wayan Limbak, and anonymous others, for a nascent tourist trade and—in the spirit of oral tradition—is even today subject to much variation and experimentation as a theatrical form. But the percussive choral cak rhythms themselves are an appropriated indigenous element that remains constant. A full set of cak rhythms (though susceptible to Balinese regional variants, etc.) is shown in Example 13.1. There are several classes of rhythms, labeled to the left of the system, with their Balinese designations. The names are given according to how many onsets of the syllable “cak” there are before the pattern repeats.31 The resulting grouping structure is also indicated. The various simultaneously sounding periodicities of the patterns (3, 4, 8, or 16 minimal pulse values) are bracketed above the parts. (In order to give some sense of a Balinese perception, I have altered the staff notation so the leftmost rhythmic position lies before the bar line.) Balinese attest to hearing the strongest position in a cycle as an ending, identifying the beginning as what staff notation represents as the beat’s second sixteenth. The end of the cycle corresponds to a gong stroke, vocalized onomatopoetically as sirrr with a strongly aspirated initial consonant and a pronounced rolled “r” mimicking an actual gong’s intense acoustic beats. For extra clarity in this representation, beams are suppressed and main beats are shaded gray.32 This beat is kept by a single singer barking the syllable “pung” with a piercing nasal timbre that cuts through the texture so everyone can orient their pattern to it. Usually a portion of the chorus sings a melody similar to the one shown in the bottom staff. Not all of the parts shown are necessary, and only large

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Example 13.1 Cak rhythms as taught by Balinese composer Dewa Ketut Alit in 2001.

and ambitious groups will attempt them all at once. The syncopated grooves of cak telu and cak nem are normally present and performed in the phase-related canons shown. Parts are not necessarily assigned in advance, though, and experienced cak-ers can spontaneously organize into rhythmic composites based on telu and nem that fill all minimal rhythmic positions. Numerous coordinated group breaks in the rhythm instigated with cues from a lead dancer, changes of tempo, and other interpolated textures and continuities complement the drama, which is after all the centerpiece. Cak’s direct antecedents include exorcistic village trance rituals called sanghyang, as well as the candetan cymbal patterns cited earlier in relation to Reich’s study of McPhee, which are used for cremation rituals. McPhee relates them to still older, probably original practices: This polyrhythmic cymbal accompaniment is identical in rhythmic impulse with the multi-part percussion accompaniment frequently performed to rice pounding. While women thresh the grain in a wooden trough, dropping their poles in regular alternation, different interlocking rhythms are beaten against the sides of the trough by a group of men. . . . Just as each cymbal has a characteristic timbre, so each sound produced by striking the edge, side, or end of the rice trough has its special resonance. . . . It adds a special rhythmic energy to the main activity, stimulating the workers as they raise and drop their poles.33

A closer cousin to Music for Pieces of Wood would be difficult to imagine. Example 13.2 shows the middle section of this piece at the point where all the

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Example 13.2 The middle section of Steve Reich’s Music for Pieces of Wood with some notes suppressed (in parentheses). See also Reich 2013a, 5:01–5:08, for this passage.

parts have fully entered. Each is grouped in 3+2+3 segments, but suppressing the second of each double clave stroke gives the cak telu rhythm exactly (see the box in Example 13.1), and the steady pulse is analogue to the pung. Reich assigns the rhythm shown in the top staff to two players and phases the others in immediate canon (starting one sixteenth apart), just as it is in cak telu, although the woodblock assigned the pulsation plays at a rate double that of the pung. Dividing eight minimal values with rhythmic imparity (two 3s and a 2) in a duple framework as cak telu does is a rhythm trope widely dispersed in musics of the world, including Africa and the African diaspora. Phasing them to interlock with an audible regulating pulse as Reich does nevertheless points to Kecak in its specific arrangement. Despite these resemblances there are naturally major differences between the contexts for these rhythms:  the candetan is not a composition at all; rather, it is a functional set of rhythmic activities meant for “stimulating the workers.” Cak takes these rhythms as a fixed formulaic module and draws on their autochthonous power, inserting them into an entertaining drama. They are stretched and varied to an extent, but subservient to a narrative that is a cultural heirloom promoting Balinese Hindu identity. Reich’s piece is an individual’s composition entailing an invented temporal trajectory and process, meant to engage the listener in distinctive experience. The rhythms’ deep origins and remarkable journey were never Reich’s task to convey, and they merged in his mind with other ideas and influences. However mute they are before their new non-Balinese audiences, as a structure they nonetheless encode their particular history, and always will. Example 13.3 illustrates the third and final melodic cycle (the pengecet)34 of Sinom Ladrang (hereafter Sinom), opener of the B-side of the 1972 Nonesuch Explorer LP Bali: Gamelan Semar Pegulingan/Gamelan of the Love God. In 1973, Reich learned to play the piece from Balinese musician I Nyoman Sumandhi at the American Society for Eastern Arts Seattle summer school. It is an elegant music in a “sweet” classical style dating from 1900 or earlier, with a typically serpentine alto melodic stratum played on the gong row trompong, shown in

Example 13.3 Pengecet Sinom Ladrang as partly transcribed by Steve Reich (completed by the author).

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the middle staff. Reich worked out a transcription in several attempts,35 and his most complete version agrees with my own, made in Bali four years later, also while studying gamelan with Sumandhi. I have filled in much of the trompong part that Reich only notated a bit of before stopping. He uses the scale E–F♯–G– B–C, as it must have more or less matched the gamelan brought to Seattle, and I retain it in the figure.36 Reich’s interlocking parts (kotekan) are slightly, insignificantly different than those on the recording. The figure represents his, my, and Sumandhi’s version. The top staff shows the kotekan as a composite, comprising the polos part (stems up) and sangsih part (stems down). The bottom staff gives the evenly spaced pokok or trunk tones. The modestly improvisatory trompong part is constrained to touch on the same pitch as nearly all pokok tones, typically through rhythmic displacement, as the dotted lines show. The large gong, shown below the pokok staff, sounds twice during the tune. Drums, cymbals, bamboo flutes, and a few other instruments are not shown. Though the pengecet is played thrice on the recording, only the second playing, at 4:56 to 5:35, corresponds exactly to the figure (the others include various tempo changes and textural contrasts). As with Example 13.1, the transcription is laid out to encourage listening as a Balinese would, for end-accented groups. At every level of the rhythmic hierarchy, the music moves toward the next arrival. The pokok tones are grouped with brackets below the staff. The circled tones are metrically weighted, the boxed ones more so, and the two gong tones even more. The kotekan is organized in patterns spanning one pokok tone, but to convey the end-accented flow by beaming notes to the left of the beat would make the music too disorienting to read. Nevertheless, the first note in each beamed group should be heard as the final note of the previous one. This is visually clearer at the end of each system where only the first sixteenth of the notated beat is shown, and at the beginning of subsequent systems, where the following three sixteenths appear. The thirty-four-note pokok comprises seven groups of four tones plus one group of six (tones 17–22), whose asymmetry with respect to the whole already hints at the music’s fluid, vocal origins. The pitch content, at every level of the rhythmic hierarchy, conveys particular kinds of motion. The gong on F♯ at pokok 16 is heard in relation to that on B at pokok 34. The arrival on F♯ at pokok 8 is static with respect to 16, but that on C at 26 is dynamic with respect to both 16 and 34; this in turn reflects a general tendency for Balinese melodies to be more active as they approach their ending. Hearing the circled notes’ connections to the squared ones in each system—B to F♯, G to F♯, B to C, and G to C, respectively— shows more movement at this level. In the pokok’s note-to-note successions we find mixtures of stasis, such as the alternating tones at 1 to 4, 17 to 20, and 21 to 25, and motion elsewhere. Concurrently the trompong unfolds passages of some repeating motives (1 to 4 and 17 to 20) to anchor the otherwise rhapsodic line. The last note of the more metrically stressed kotekan patterns (that is, those that end on an even-numbered pokok tone) matches the pokok pitch in rhythmic

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alignment and at the octave. Exceptions, in the interest of a shapelier pokok line, are at pokok 10 and 14. Odd-numbered pokok arrivals, metrically weaker, are heard as elaborative within the pokok itself and do not align with the kotekan. There are two kinds of kotekan patterns used: stable and moving—what Balinese call ngubeng and majalan. This gives them tonal qualities not too unlike that of harmonies in progression: ngubeng patterns keep a previously established pokok pitch in focus, and majalan ones transition to a new focus. In Sinom, each kind is used at numerous pitch levels and in one of two contours, mutually inverted. The left box of Example 13.4 shows the ngubeng contours, used when the pokok tone receiving tonal focus at that moment does not change; that is, two successive ngubeng patterns will always be at the same pitch level. The upper contour is heard several times in a row, stabilizing pokok pitches B (onsets 1–7 and 23–25), G (13–15), and C (27–29); the lower one stabilizes F♯ (onsets 9–11, 17–21, and 32). The tone E never receives such emphasis; its omission gives the whole a sense of four-tone modality within the five-tone space. The majalan patterns escort the music to a new tonal focus. Shown in the box at right (and with slurs in Example 13.3), the upper one is employed to move to G at pokok 12, B at 22 and 34, and C at 26. The lower one Example 13.4 Pattern contours in gamelan and Reich’s music.

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approaches F♯ at 8, 16, and 32, and G at 30. The inherent sense of motion or stability of the ngubeng and majalan patterns themselves is given by their internal grouping:  as Example  13.4’s brackets show, the former has a 4 + 4 structure, foldable across a midpoint axis, in which the last four tones invert the first four. The latter are grouped as an asymmetric and unfoldable 2 + 3 + 3. In a different expression of flow, there are only three majalan patterns before the melody’s first big gong stroke (one in the first system and two in the second), as opposed to five in the second half (two in the third system and three in quick succession in the last system), indicating systematic accelerated change in pitch focus as one approaches the gong at the melody’s conclusion.37 Because he went in-depth only on Sinom, it is arguably Reich’s synecdoche for gamelan. He was interested in the rhythms of the interlocking parts (he stopped before transcribing the whole trompong part) and created many of his own rhythms resembling those just discussed. The bottom of Example 13.4 shows that the ur-pattern for Drumming has inversional pitch contour symmetry similar to that of ngubeng kotekan patterns, and there is majalan-like pitch contour asymmetry in Six Pianos. The slow-moving chordal stratum introduced in Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices, and Organ and Music for 18 Musicians (1976) evokes the stratification and longer periodicities of Sinom in some ways, but Reich’s small harmonic palette does not budge whereas Sinom’s pokok is full of melodic change at multiple, simultaneous rates.38 It turns out that Sinom is a very particular melodic and tonal creature with varied internal movement that fatally contradicts any kind of repetition one could reasonably call minimalist. And, of course for Reich, eschewing directed harmony and expansive melody was exactly the point. What he heard in the music as being important turns out to have a tangential relationship to what the practitioners themselves regard as such. Conversely, the interests of Balinese composers are hardly Reich’s, but here we have glimpsed a Balinese side of the story.

Not Hearing Across At a gamelan lesson in Bali in 1977, a time of few paved roads and single-lightbulb villages, Nyoman Sumandhi told me with pride and excitement that Steve Reich had studied with him in Seattle, and that he was “a very famous composer.” In 1973, Sumandhi had been a young lecturer at the new Balinese High School of the Performing Arts. He was chosen and funded to pursue an MA in ethnomusicology at UCLA and became only the second in a long line of Balinese musicians who studied and taught internationally in the decades that followed. The opportunity to study abroad was (and is) rare for a Balinese musician, most of whom are poor and would have to depend on a foreign scholarship or grant. The very idea of setting foot in the Western world galvanized Sumandhi, but his remark was nonetheless one of celebrity adulation: he had never heard any of Reich’s music and showed no curiosity. He was joyously invested in bringing

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his culture to others, its newfound international legitimacy something of a wonder to him, his MA mainly useful as a rung up the ladder of the emerging Indonesian academic bureaucracy. In 1983, when my elder gamelan guru Wayan Tembres was in summer residence with our Northern California gamelan group Sekar Jaya. I  played the old Deutsche Grammophon recording of Drumming for him. He smiled and listened politely to part 1 but was unmoved and at last asked: “Is that all it does? Doesn’t it go anywhere?” A year earlier, on my borrowed piano in Bali, I played him some Brahms intermezzi and Bach preludes and fugues, provoking him to laugh them off as muddy and incomprehensible. I thought he might like Reich more, but I  ought to have known better. Why should a village musician like Tembres wish to step out of his zone? Reich “loved” Balinese music, and in so doing demonstrated a willingness to rupture his own identity. Indeed, a precondition for such love is an affinity for the other and a desire to become something else. The specifics of what is in the music come later. What Balinese of that era, save for a very few cosmopolitans or mystics, would have gone beyond lip service and really wanted such an experience?39 Not Sumandhi, not Tembres, not others of that time known to me. It is not only Reich’s Western critics, then, who hear his music as static. Either Tembres or Sumandhi would hear Drumming in contradistinction to a piece like Sinom Ladrang and be left unmoved by Drumming’s lack of tonal trajectory. I daresay that later Reich pieces, even those with more harmonic change, would not move them much more because the elements making their own music sound organic, feelingful, and alive for them—extended melody, formal and textural juxtapositions, techniques for shaping tempo and dynamics, and improvisation—are simply not part of Reich’s palette. Seen this way, Mertens was not entirely off the mark in terms of unwittingly positioning uptowners as strange bedfellows with traditional Balinese musicians of the day. They all share a cultural conservatism, holding—like Adorno—that repetition without sufficient change dulls the spirit. One who imagines that precosmopolitan Balinese are ideologically closer to Reich than Adorno may wish to reconsider. What is at stake in any cross-cultural musical experience is not whether a music is heard as static and muddy or comprehensible and alive. It is a matter of how (and how much) a cultural agent has an interest in expanding his or her consciousness. Reich, the consummate downtowner, surely did, for he was an empowered agent and a beneficiary of the cosmopolitan life. This did not mean he was empathetic to a Balinese view, although perhaps he thought he was, but he invented a new music of gradual process that would not have been possible without the encounter. Sumandhi and Tembres may well have been open to change, too, in the end, but one can hardly hold them responsible for being of a time, place, and context that did not explicitly equip them for such an encounter. Thus it is that the voices of Balinese musicians, and Reich, and their musical extensions called out to each other across a cultural gap, each landing—unheard by the other—in the cogs of cultural processes vaster and greater than either one.

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Table 13.1 List of recordings of Balinese gamelan in Reich’s collection Title

Contents

1.

Bali: Gamelan Semar Pegulingan/ Gamelan of the Love God [Nonesuch H-72046]

[“Tabuh Gari,” “Gambang,” “Tabuh Pisan,” “Barong,” Sinom Ladrang,” “Legong Kraton Playon”]

2.

Monkey Chant from Bali—200 men [most likely from Nonesuch H-72028, #5 below]

3.

A tape called Balinese Music, from Nonesuch H-72015 [from The Balinese Gamelan: Music from the Morning of the World]

“Frog Song,” “Genggong,” “Gamelan Gong,” “Barong Dance excerpt” [Pelog Scale E–F–G–-B–C] [also: “Baris,” “Gambang Betjak,” “Pemungkah,” “Flute Solo,” “Sekehe Gambuh: Sekar Leret,” “Lullaby,” “Gamelan Angklun: Margepati,” “Ketjak Dance (excerpt),” and “Gender Wayang: Ansarun”]

4.

From Lyrichord ST7194 [Gamelan Music of Bali: Gamelan Angklung and Gamelan Gong Kebyar]

Gamelan Angklung from Sajan (“Segara Madu”)

5.

From Nonesuch H-72028 Gamelan Gong Kebjar [full title: Golden Rain: Balinese Gamelan Music, Ketjak: the Ramayana Monkey Chant]

“Hujan Mas” [also: “Oleg Tumililingan,” “Ketjak: The Ramayana Monkey Chant”]

6.

From Col, 6445 or Odyssey 32160366 Gamelan Gong from UCLA [The Exotic Sounds of Bali: Balinese Gamelan Music Performed by Gamelan Gong Sekar Anjar and Gender Wajang Quartet Under the Direction of Mantle Hood]

“Selir” traditional, played in old style [also: “Baris Bapan,” “Sekar Sungsan,” “Tabuh Teluh,” “Rébong,” “Légong,” “Lagu Délem”]

7.

From???15535 Flute and Jew’s Harp

“Tluktak” Genggong Tjondong dance from Brunet tape via Gordon Bishop

Gamelan Gong Kebjar from Kedis Kadja (“Gambang Suling,” with Suling Flutes from the North) [also: “Topeng Angklung,” “Kebjar Teruna,” “Tabuhan Djoged,” “Gamelan Angklung,” “Kebjar Hudjan Mas”]

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Table 13.1 Continued 8.

Title

Contents

Bali Musique Sacrée CBS 65173 rec. Jacques Brunet

[“Gong Gédé de Tampaksiring,” “Gong Bebarongan de Tatasan,” “Gong Semar Pegulingan de Ketewel,” “Gong Angklung Klentangan de Sidan”]

9. Gong Gde Pudak Setegal Tampaksiring

[from CBS 65173, #8 above]

10. Gong Bebarongan Tatasan

[from CBS 65173, #8 above]

11. Gong Semar Pegulingan Ketewel “Brahmara”

[from CBS 65173, #8 above]

12. Gong Anklung Kelentangan Sidan

[probably from CBS 65173, #8 above]

13. Court Music of the Banjar of Belaluan Sadmerta Philips 6586008 [actual title Bali: Court Music and Banjar Music]

Side A: Court Music of the Puri of Peliatan. “Baris,” “Sekar Djepun,” “Gambang Suling,” “Pendet,” “Tari Terompong.” Side B: Banjar Music of Belaluan, Sadmerta. “Palewakia,” “Legong Kraton.”

This list has been assembled from reproductions of backs of reel-to-reel tape boxes in the Paul Sacher Stiftung, Basel. The labelings are Reich’s. Additional information (in square brackets) has been added. The original (and sometimes flawed) orthography has been preserved. In addition, Indonesian spellings conform to the official modernization of its orthography in 1972, when “dj” became “j”; “j” became “y”; and “tj” became “c.”

Notes 1. Henahan 1969, 1982. 2. Holland 1996. 3. Mertens 1983, 117. 4. Reich 2002b, 71. 5. Wasserman 1972, 48. 6. Research for this chapter was done at the Paul Sacher Stiftung (PSS), Basel, where Steve Reich’s archives are housed. A list of dubbed reel-to-reel tapes copied from these LPs is in the archive. See Table 13.1, included at the end of this chapter. 7. Reich 2002b, 70. 8. See McPhee 1966, 81–82. These three items are found in PSS, Reich Sketchbook [1] (January 6 to November 7, 1969), and are dated, respectively, July 5, June 30, and August 15. It is hard to know what kind of klangfarbenmelodie the

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composer may have imagined, but the notion suggests an outsider listening stance more alive to timbre and dynamics than the hard-to-decipher details of notes and rhythms. Reich’s ten-stave “Chandetan” sketch does not actually include interlocking parts, but a music in which a chord, pulsating in continuous eighth notes, is distributed among players in changing ways. The term chandetan, popular in Bali during McPhee’s 1930s fieldwork, has since been supplanted by kotekan, which Reich swapped for once he had studied with Balinese teachers. (In modern Balinese orthography it would be spelled candetan, and I use this henceforth. Here and in other Balinese words below, c is pronounced as in English ch.) 9. See Martin Scherzinger’s chapter in this volume. 10. These remarks were supplemented twenty-five years later in the foreword written by Reich to Tenzer 2000. 11. Balinese music is taught and learned without notation. One student who participated in the 1973 and 1974 summer sessions recalled that in class Reich “wrote everything out and played . . . from a huge long score that spilled out over both sides of the instrument. . . . I think he might have had it rolled into a scroll” (anonymous personal communication, June 2015). Jody Diamond, another who took the course, remembers “unsuccessfully trying to convince Steve Reich not to use notation in our Balinese gamelan class” (Bogley et al. 2004, 36). 12. Reich 2002b, 69. 13. Reich’s 1960s stint in countercultural California, itself an act of resistance against his East Coast roots, had placed him in musical situations with like-minded others—such as playing in the premiere of Terry Riley’s In C and contributing the repeating high C pulse part. See Reich 2002b, 14. 14. The Kecak and candetan rhythms analyzed in Example 13.1 are not melodic and therefore an exception; their interlocking rhythms may sometimes land together on the same subdivision. As will be explained, they derive from an ancient historical stratum predating the invention of melodic interlocking like that described here. 15. For more on the Phase Shifting Pulse Gate, see Kerry O’Brien’s chapter in this volume. 16. Reich 2002b, 44. 17. Sketchbook [4] (May 1 to July 3, 1971), page dated June 22. 18. Fink (2005b) has a great deal to say about the cultural significance of minimalist repetition and how it parallels characteristic patterns of mass media and consumerism in middle to late twentieth-century America, but barely mentions tempo. A sole reference is on page 212, where he links the idea of replicable and unchanging tempo to the “economic and technological imperatives” of the recording industry, and its need for repeated takes at unvarying speed. Musicians who could adapt to this demand were favored, and individuality of rendition and performance affect suffered. 19. Reich 2002b, 36. 20. Ibid., 35. 21. Ibid., 69. 22. Cooke 1987, 320.

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23. Tenzer 2000, 288–304. 24. See Tilley 2003, 2013. 25. For detailed consideration of tempo fluctuation in the Balinese piece Gabor, see Roeder and Tenzer 2012, 92–97. See also McGraw 2013 for similar analyses. 26. See, for example, McPhee 1966, 66–68. 27. Bali is a province of Indonesia, which declared independence from Dutch rule in 1946. 28. For a fuller view, see Tenzer 2000, chap. 5. By “original” it is not meant that they have been unchanged for centuries or more, only that they continue to be separate repertoires, with distinct social functions, and are played on special instrument sets belonging to particular villages or temples. 29. Lewiston 1969. 30. Reich in Tenzer 2000, xvii. In Sketchbook [2] (November 10, 1969, to February 10, 1970) he writes, amid a series of pattern sketches on January 29: “Voice Piece, Monkey Chant, Breathing in Sound, A DRUMMING OF VOICES.” 31. Other syllables such as “sek” or “tak” are sometimes substituted for timbral variety at the whim of a leader. 32. The patterns’ different periodicities suggest the “multiple downbeats” of African music that Reich has spoken of. In kecak this is not a possibility: the main beat is clearly materialized by the pung. 33. McPhee 1966, 82. 34. For discussion of the term pengecet, see Roeder and Tenzer 2012, 89–90. For more on the gamelan semar pegulingan genre, see Tenzer 2011, 92–94 and passim; Tenzer 2000, 145–82; and McPhee 1966, 140. 35. Sketchbook [12] (March 26, 1973–November 25, 1973), page dated May 31, 1973, and several pages following, including several inserted photocopies of some of the same pages, on which Reich made pencil additions (Steve Reich Collection, PSS). 36. The gamelan on the Nonesuch LP is tuned differently, closer to D–E♭–F–A–B♭. 37. On the recording, the musicians (from Teges Kanginan village, far from Sumandhi’s home village of Tunjuk) insert an additional majalan pattern leading to the fourteenth pokok tone, B, and a ngubeng pattern on B leading to pokok 15 (the kotekan would thus be exactly as it is leading to pokok 22 and 23 in the third system). The rest of the kotekan is exactly as shown here, but this means that on the recording the rate of majalan change is the same in the second and last systems. However, the third system still has one more majalan pattern than the first, thus preserving a sense of accelerated activity in the second half of the melody. Such difference is perfectly typical of regional variation and oral tradition in Bali, and, within the limits of musical norms, it is at the discretion of teachers and players to choose among such details. I preserve Reich’s (and my, and Sumandhi’s) version here, despite the small difference from the recording. 38. It matters little that all of these pieces were composed before Reich studied Sinom in summer 1973. He had absorbed McPhee’s book on Balinese music and was astutely able to hear the patterns in recordings, perhaps mentally juxtaposing them with similar African patterns. The encounter with Sinom gives a specific Balinese

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equivalent for Reich’s comment that his engagement with African music furnished “confirmation” for his approach in Drumming (Reich 2002b, 67). See also Fink 2005b, 248, for a discussion of this idea. 39. Things have changed dramatically, as one might expect, and there is now a vital cross-cultural music composition scene in Bali. Since the early 1980s, many Westerners have composed in Bali, and some Balinese have composed in the West, usually for gamelan, sometimes mixed with non-Balinese instruments. For more on the history of recent Balinese music, see McGraw 2013. Even minimalism has made it to Bali: American composer Evan Ziporyn composed Lapanbelas (“Eighteen”— an homage to Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians) for the Balinese group Semara Ratih in 2010; and US gamelan expert Wayne Vitale teamed with producer John Noise Manis to commission two Balinese composers to create pieces in homage to Terry Riley’s In C (Manis and Vitale 2012). This resulted in Made Arnawa’s In Deng and Dewa Putu Beratha’s In Ding—deng and ding (solfège names for tones in the Balinese pèlog scale) being, respectively, the pokok tones consistently coinciding with arrivals of the large gong in these works (see https://www.vitalrecords.ws/).

14 “Machine Fantasies into Human Events” Reich and Technology in the 1970s Kerry O’Brien On May 27, 1969, at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Steve Reich unveiled his Phase Shifting Pulse Gate—a phasing machine that he had built over the past year and a half with Larry Owens, an engineer from Bell Labs.1 In Reich and Owen’s conception, the device would phase incrementally at 120 pulses per measure, or, in a measure of 12/8, 10 pulses per eighth note.2 The invention of this machine marked a new development in Reich’s phasing technique: the Phase Shifting Pulse Gate could precisely divide each pulse into ten perfectly even divisions, synced to an internal digital clock, and then phase incrementally from one pulse to the next. Most important, the listener would not hear an entangled phasing process, as one might hear in a work such as Piano Phase (1967), because the sounding pulses played against a silent digital clock. As Reich described in his essay “Music as a Gradual Process,” which was printed in the catalog for the Whitney exhibition, “once the process is set up and loaded, it runs by itself.”3 The Phase Shifting Pulse Gate offered exactly that: a systematic, truly gradual, minute procession through a tenfold division of the beat, creating a wave of pulsed sound. This, as far as Reich was concerned, was the fantasy. The Whitney concert opened with Four Log Drums, performed by Jon Gibson, Arthur Murphy, Richard (Dickie) Landry, and Philip Glass (see Fig. 14.1). Reich served as a “programmer,” sending pulses via headphones to the four log drummers, who gradually transformed rhythmic patterns by playing simultaneously with the given pulse heard through their individual headphones.4 Listening back to the recording of this live performance many years after the event, one hears Four Log Drums proceed basically as notated until measure 5—one of the most straightforward sections of the work, in which the four log drummers combine to create a solid six-beat pulse (see Ex. 14.1). In the recorded performance, something goes wrong at measure 4, although it is difficult to know exactly what happens. Ideally, the composite rhythm in measure 4 would have slowly and subtly transformed into a solid six-beat pattern at measure 5. Log drummers 2 and 4 should have gradually collapsed their two eighth notes into a single double stop. However, as Jon Gibson explained, the Pulse Gate was “glitchy”5—the pulses sent through their headphones would 323

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Figure 14.1 Four Log Drums at the Whitney Museum of American Art (May 27, 1969). Example 14.1 Reich’s Four Log Drums, mm. 4–5 (Steve Reich Collection, Paul Sacher Stiftung (PSS)).

“hop” or lurch forward and skip a beat,6 and listening to the live recording, one can hear the log drummers scramble, some adjusting, others holding firm, while others simply stop. At these moments, the resulting sound becomes chaotic. After this point, the performance continues with sporadic glitches for another fifteen minutes.7

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Four Log Drums continues without break into Pulse Music, a work in which Reich operated the Phase Shifting Pulse Gate alone. In this work, oscillator pulses were audible rather than fed into headphones, hence the resulting glitches were far more apparent and continued intermittently for the duration of the piece.8 In theory, Four Log Drums and Pulse Music would have become the perfect manifestation of slow, phase-shifting music, since the Phase Shifting Pulse Gate was governed by a common clock. In practice, however, the gate’s glitches created such frequent irregularities as to become quite contrary to Reich’s principle of “music as a gradual process.” Once loaded, the process should have run itself. As performer Philip Glass tactfully put it, Four Log Drums was “a disaster––but we all have disasters.”9 Soon after the concert, Reich placed the machine in his home closet and never used it again. Having spent almost all of 1968 and early 1969 working on the machine and building his reputation up to this point largely through electronic music, Reich subsequently swore off electronics and technology for a decade.10 But although he stopped dealing with the tools of technology—tapes, synthesizers, and machines—his music was still thoroughly bound up with the logic of technology and the logic of technique. Reich’s written reflections reveal a composer struggling to shake off his reputation as a composer of controlling, mechanical music, and this goes far in explaining the trajectory his compositions took from the early 1970s onward. Furthermore, Reich’s music engages with a critique of technology that extends beyond mere machines. Considering techniques of the body and mind more broadly, Reich’s interest in—and increasing experience with—yoga practice proves essential in understanding the composer’s notions of musical time, compositional control, and performer freedoms in the early 1970s. In June 1969, just two months after the Whitney concert, Reich was still sketching ideas for his Phase Shifting Pulse Gate, but he made a note to himself: “The gate is best as instrument, not as programming device for people.”11 Another two months later, again in his sketchbooks, he wrote:  “The [Phase Shifting Pulse Gate] is still the making [concrete] of my musical fantasies. The phase pieces for instruments turn machine fantasies into human events. Needed: a new process for live music.”12 Reich’s new process was Four Organs (1970), a work for four electric organs and a maraca player who tirelessly played ceaseless eighth notes for the entire piece. The criticism that followed performances of Four Organs expressed the already established view that Reich’s music was “machine-like,” even though he was no longer operating large machinery. Reviewing a concert given in May 1970 for the New  York Times, music critic Donal Henahan remarked acidly, “Granted the pleasure of knowing humans are doing the job, one wonders if they really need bother, when machines can do it so much better.”13 A later critic noted that the “maraca players [sic]” in Four Organs were “relegated to the status of automatons.”14

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Such criticisms were due in part to the multiple publications of Reich’s 1968 essay “Music as a Gradual Process” throughout these years.15 This essay, first printed in the catalog for the 1969 Whitney exhibition, speaks to a unique form of control that Reich sought through musical processes. He wrote: Musical processes can give one a direct contact with the impersonal and also a kind of complete control. . . . By “a kind” of complete control I mean that by running this material through this process I completely control all that results, but also that I accept all that results without changes.16

During his first visit to London in June 1970, Reich was interviewed by composer Michael Nyman, then a music critic for The Spectator and New Statesman. Nyman questioned Reich about his reputation as a composer of “controlling” and “machine-like” music. Reich’s response was as follows: People imitating machines was always considered a sickly trip; I don’t feel that way at all, emotionally. I think there’s a human activity which might be called “imitating machines,” but which is simply controlling your mind and body very carefully as in Yoga breathing exercises, or in playing my phase pieces. This kind of activity turns out to be very useful psychologically as it focuses the mind down to a fine point. So the attention that “mechanical” ’ playing calls for is something that we could do with more of.17

This view is found throughout Reich’s essays and unpublished writings in the early 1970s. He maintains that a type of mechanical playing is useful, even productive, despite persistent criticism. It is notable that this “imitating machines” critique concerns performance: Reich’s ensemble does not use machines, yet they are, to an extent, playing like machines. This critique of Reich’s music is key in understanding his first evening-length work, Drumming (1971). The first movement of Drumming is scored for four performers playing four pairs of bongos. The work begins with a single note, which builds to a full pattern in 12/8. Once the pattern is established, two players phase this pattern until they lock into a second pattern one eighth note apart. After they have phased, new resulting patterns arise from the combination of these two phased parts, and in early performances of Drumming, Reich would sing the resulting patterns into a microphone. In April 1971, while Reich’s group was rehearsing Drumming, German composer and critic Hans G. Helms came to Reich’s studio in New York to film a rehearsal of the work for a German television documentary (see Fig. 14.2).18 This documentary was given the title Wasserpfeifen in New York: Musikalische Avantgarde zwischen Ideologie und Elektronik (Water Pipes/Bongs in New York: Musical Avant-Garde Between Ideology and Electronics).19 Reich’s Drumming was an outlier in this documentary, since by this point the composer was resolutely opposed to electronics. That summer of 1971, in the midst of his Drumming sketches, Reich wrote a lengthy note to himself examining his relationship to electronics:

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Figure 14.2 An image from the documentary Wasserpfeifen in New York: Musikalische Avantgarde zwischen Ideologie und Elektronik [45:46] (reproduced in New Music: Sounds and Voices from the Avant-Garde [44:32]).

DRUMMING is at opposite extreme from electronics. There seems to be a question of how deeply one can react to the sound of a machine. I used to think that the sound was the sound + that was that + in a sense I still feel that way, but more + more as time passes I feel that there is a limit as to how seriously I can take sounds made by a machine. They may be glorious, but there is something dubious about that glory. It doesn’t have the emotional depth that purely instrumental sound has. —Obviously there is a gradation here between a synthesizer to an electric organ to a drum. But clearly, a drum is at the extreme end of the scale . . . (I have thoughts like “what would happen to my music if all the electricity were turned off?” – This becomes more and more an issue.) What is the difference between an instrument and a machine? There is certainly something to be learned from working with machines. —My discovery of phasing process is completely indebted to the tape recorder. But if I hadn’t made the switch in 1966 to instruments I would not have been able to continue making tapes. Why?20

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Two days later, Reich revisited his sketchbook and returned to this question: The answer to the last question is that the body is not involved when making tapes the way it is when playing music on an instrument—or singing. There is, when singing or playing, a complete fusion of mind + body into music—one is playing music body + soul. Electronics tend to limit the bodily involvement + automate that + there lies the essential difference.21

Despite his decision to stop using electronics, critics continued to describe Reich’s nonelectronic music as being essentially automated; most important, they continued to characterize it as tightly controlled. In an interview in the New  York Times in October, leading up to the full Drumming premiere in New York City in December 1971, Donal Henahan published a lengthy piece on Reich that discussed the issue of control. In the article Reich commented: Certain people look at music that is totally controlled, written out, as a metaphor for right wing politics. But I’d suggest that the kind of control I try to exercise on myself and others who play this music is more analogous to yoga. These are two different conceptions of control—the one imposed from without, the other maintained from within.22

When asked further about his yoga practice, Reich continued by saying that the yogi’s inner discipline “is new information for us. It’s not like having a rightwing President telling you what to do, it’s nothing like that, couldn’t be further from it.”23 Reich’s response here appears unnecessarily defensive. No one—at least publicly—had criticized his musical control as a type of political control, and certainly not explicitly right-wing or fascistic in any way, but it was perhaps only a matter of time before certain critics started to describe his music in such terms. In February 1972, while Reich’s ensemble was in Europe touring Drumming, Hans Helms’s German documentary Wasserpfeifen in New  York aired on WDR, West German Television. The documentary included interviews with John Cage, Earle Brown, David Tudor, Gordon Mumma, Alvin Lucier, David Behrman, Thais Lathem, Philip Glass, Benjamin Patterson, Morton Subotnik, and Max Neuhaus—all American composers then steeped in the creation of electronic music. It also included Steve Reich’s Drumming rehearsal. In addition to interviews and performance excerpts, the documentary included an extensive spoken commentary by the director. The overarching thesis of Helms’s documentary was as follows: American avant-garde composers were hopelessly compromised by the uniform, mass-produced, efficient, and indifferent nature of electronic music manufacturing. He argued that uniform production processes produced uniform musical results. The sounds that composers could create were necessarily beholden to the sounds that electronic manufacturing companies would allow them to create. Despite counterarguments from Gordon Mumma and David Tudor—composers who built their own electronics—director Helms

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maintained his convictions. In the most dramatic moment in the documentary, Helms summarizes the conditions for musical practice in New York as follows: The music must be performed by few musicians for economic reasons, best by the composer himself and with his own instruments or devices, because the concerts take place almost without exception in museums, university spaces or churches, but not in concert halls. The instruments should be electronic or electronically powered to fill large spaces and to drown out the street noise or subway noise. The works should also have little musical development to conform with the prevailing fascist ideology of ahistorical arbitrariness and invariance.24

Helms’s hyperbolic opinions were noted as such at the time. A staff writer for Der Spiegel called his conclusions “sometimes plausible but usually frantically interpreted.”25 Although Helms’s critique aimed broadly at the condition of all American avant-garde composers at the time, other German critics made this critique explicitly about Reich. In her work on the reception of American experimental music in West Germany, Amy Beal has written at length about Reich’s 1972 Drumming tour. As she has noted, numerous German critics equated Drumming with “musical fascism.” This critique was leveled at the composer’s music for two main reasons: either the performance style of the players looked machine-like and controlled, or the actual music sounded machine-like and controlled.26 Importantly, though, these critiques were not so much about technology per se but about the logic of technology—a logic of ultimate efficiency, uniformity, indifference, and control. In the May 1972 issue of Artforum, art critic Emily Wasserman again posed the question of control in relation to performer freedom. Reich responded: By voluntarily giving up the freedom to do whatever comes to mind, we are, as a result, free of all that momentarily comes to mind. The extreme limits used here then have nothing to do with totalitarian political controls imposed from without, but are closely related to yogic controls of the breath and mind.27

In such discussions, critics repeatedly pointed to this issue of control, but Reich persistently maintained that it is an inner, bodily control like yoga. It was appropriate, then, that Reich’s next composition would be composed for “no instruments beyond the human body.” In an interview in 1973, Reich explained this compositional move, describing Clapping Music (1972) as “[involving] no instrumentation at all, just clapping hands. I wanted to get all the way back to people.” Later on, the interviewer noted that Reich was always quick to mention that the instrumentation was “totally acoustical—no electronic devices.”28 In January 1974, Reich returned to Germany, performing some of his new, “totally acoustical” music but also programming older works such as Four Organs and Drumming. The German criticism continued along predictable lines, prompting articles such as “Musiker am Fließband” (“Musicians on the

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Assembly Line”). Reviewing a performance in Stuttgart, critic Manfred Gutscher wrote that “rhythmic patterns are punched out, hammered, reproduced so arbitrarily, so that the idea of a factory and production lines results quite naturally.”29 During this Stuttgart performance, Reich was hosted by composer and conductor Clytus Gottwald, who soon published in Melos the most extensive criticism of Reich’s music to date. In this article, Gottwald leveled all of the (by then) predictable criticisms of Reich’s music, stating: The overhanging microphones and the cable wires running to the amplifiers also draw attention to the technological, indeed industrial, aspect of the operation. The monotony of this here work-in process by no accident calls to mind the assembly line: always the same ordered steps produce always the same result. . . . [Reich’s music] reflects the neuroses of the machine age.30

In the next issue of Melos (May–June 1975), Reich’s lengthy response was published in the form of an “open letter,” wherein the composer stated: Please think very carefully about these “social implications” and perhaps you will begin to wonder who is “industrial” and “mechanical”—those with oscillators, modulators, synthesizers, digital gates and sequencers; —or those who use their bare hands and pieces of wood? Drumming quite obviously uses drums (possibly the oldest instrument in the world) made of skin (animal); marimbas made of wood (vegetable); and glockenspiels made of metal (mineral); and to these are added the human voice and piccolo. And you want to tell me that this suggests the factory and industry?31

In Reich’s view, these criticisms seemed to revolve around the issue of instrumentation, but what was being addressed in many of these reviews was the notion that technology was not defined by mere things—oscillators, modulators, synthesizers—but rather by the imperatives that lay behind them. As historians of technology such as Fred Turner and Anne Collins Goodyear have observed, the fraught ambivalence surrounding technology in the late 1960s was not just a reaction to technological objects but rather a reaction to the ideology that lay behind the logic of technology—the logic of maximum efficiency, productivity, uniformity, and control—and, most important, technology’s relation or indifference to human involvement.32 The logic of technology, many critics argued, was becoming pervasive in all spheres of human activity, including social and political relations. In 1969, Theodore Roszak theorized this as the “technocracy”: By the technocracy, I  mean that social form in which an industrial society reaches the peak of its organizational integration. It is the ideal men usually have in mind when they speak of modernizing, up-dating, rationalizing, planning. Drawing upon such unquestionable imperatives as the demand for efficiency, social security . . . the technocracy works to knit together the anachronistic gaps and fissures of industrial society.33

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Roszak was channeling a broad critique that went by many names; while he termed it “technocracy,” Alain Touraine called it “programmed society,”34 and Herbert Marcuse35 and Jacques Ellul spoke of a “technological society.” In Ellul’s formulation, “technological society” was not the product of mere machines but again the logic of control that animates machines. Ellul clarified this notion of technique: The term technique, as I use it, does not mean machines, technology, or this or that procedure for attaining an end. In our technological society, technique is the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency . . . in every field of human activity.36

Technique had pervaded every sphere of human activity on a mass scale incompatible with individual experience; technique, as Ellul saw it, was out of control. Lewis Mumford called this all-encompassing situation the “megamachine,” which operated “without regard for human needs or human purposes.”37 How, then, was one to react? As historian Fred Turner has argued, one response within the postwar counterculture was to turn tools and techniques “inward, toward questions of consciousness and interpersonal intimacy, and toward small-scale tools.”38 In this way, as Erik Davis has written, the dreams of technique, though redirected, were still very much alive: Alongside their embrace of certain technologies, the hippies must also be seen as revising, rather than rejecting, the dreams of technique. Freaks created an entire mythos around self-empowering tools and instrumental skills, an organic and imaginative transformation of technical manipulation that is nowhere more evident than in the generation’s powerfully innovative spirituality. Rejecting the arid and authoritarian religious institutions of the West, the freaks decided to get their mystical hands dirty, to pry open the human sensorium and uncover what was inside. Which is why, from yoga, to psychedelics, from the Kama Sutra to the I Ching, countercultural spirituality is characterized by nothing so much as techniques, especially what Mircea Eliade called “techniques of ecstasy.”39

It was this notion of technique that Reich repeatedly bowed to in criticisms of his music. Was control in Reich’s music the same as “imitating machines”? No, Reich maintained; it was like “controlling your mind and body very carefully as in Yoga breathing exercises.”40 Did his music exert an odious type of external control, like “right-wing politics”? No, Reich insisted on an inner control similar to yoga, a control “maintained from within.”41 Did the loss of freedom in performing Reich’s music relate to “totalitarian political controls”? No, Reich asserted, they “are closely related to yogic controls of the breath and mind.”42 Finally, when Gottwald once again compared Reich’s music to a Fließband—an assembly line—Reich responded:  no. Instead, his music was “meditative and ecstatic.”43

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Reich repeatedly and insistently maintained that he was concerned with a type of inner control, often comparing it to yoga. Numerous scholars of Reich’s music have only briefly noted this and have neglected to address the matter in depth, perhaps because the history of yoga in America is incredibly varied and complex.44 As yoga historian Stefanie Syman notes, “Yoga is so massive and complicated, so contradictory and baroque, that American society has been able to assimilate any number of versions of it, more or less simultaneously.”45 As a result, it becomes difficult to know exactly what Reich meant by “yoga” when making references to it. Writing in 1974, Reich explained that he had been practicing hatha yoga and Prāṇāyāma since 1966.46 He also taught yoga to a number of friends, including Ramon Sender, Laura Dean, and Russell Hartenberger.47 Although postural yoga (Āsana) is best known in America, it is clear that Reich practiced other limbs of yoga.48 Hartenberger, a longtime member of Reich’s ensemble, recalled learning yoga from Reich following late night Drumming rehearsals: In the morning, after we both woke up, Reich and I did yoga together. Reich explained that the type of yoga he practiced was called hatha yoga, and that it involved postures, breathing exercises, and meditation. He and I  put towels on the floor and went through his set of exercises together beginning with the salute to the sun and progressing to the last posture, the headstand. We would end the sessions with breathing exercises which we would do in groups of eight and in the ratio of 1 : 4 : 2—breathing in through one nostril for 8 counts, holding for 32 counts, then breathing out through the other nostril for 16 counts.49

As one of the six orthodox schools of classical South Asian philosophy, yoga was systematized in early texts, such as the Yoga Sūtras of Patañjali, and the Hatha Yoga Pradipikâ is one foundational text for Hatha Yoga in particular. Both the Sūtras and the Pradipikâ have attracted many glosses, commentaries, and expositions over the years, creating a sizable corpus of subsidiary texts to those early sutras. In addition, many mass-marketed yoga books were published in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s, including supplemental commentaries, exercise programs, and self-help guides.50 There are certain general characteristics that Reich’s music shared with yogic practice, particularly techniques that offer control of the body and mind. Hatha yoga is often defined most simply as a collection of techniques. For instance, Alain Daniélou writes in Yoga:  The Method of Re-integration (1991 [1949]): “Hatha yoga is the name given to the technical practices and disciplines by which the body and the vital energies can be brought under control.”51 A deeper reading of certain texts in the yoga literature helps to illuminate some of the more enigmatic lines of Reich’s essays, particularly his foundational text, “Music as a Gradual Process.” Toward the end of Reich’s essay, after

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describing notions of compositional control, he describes the effects of listening to a gradual musical process: Listening to an extremely gradual musical process opens my ears to it, but it always extends farther than I can hear, and that makes [it] interesting to listen to that musical process again. That area of every gradual (completely controlled) musical process, where one hears the details of the sound moving out away from intentions, occurring for their own acoustic reasons, is it.52

The essay concludes:  “While performing and listening to gradual musical processes one can participate in a particularly liberating and impersonal kind of ritual. Focusing in on the musical process makes possible that shift of attention away from he and she and you and me outwards towards it.”53 When considered within the tradition of Western classical music composition, “Music as a Gradual Process” is cryptic. What is it? However, considered within a much broader corpus of techniques of the body and mind, and techniques of liberation, Reich’s text takes on an uncanny sense of familiarity. Consider, for instance, Mircea Eliade’s explanation of liberation in his text Yoga: Immortality and Freedom: For let us imagine the life of a “liberated” person. He will continue to act . . . but this activity is no longer his; it is objective, mechanical, disinterested—in short, it is not performed in view of its “fruit.” When the “liberated” man acts, he is not conscious of an “I act” but of an “it acts”; in other words, he does not draw the Self into a psychophysical process.54

Most simply, Eliade defines yoga as “the means of attaining to Being, the effectual techniques for gaining liberation. This corpus of means constitutes Yoga properly speaking.”55 In his dissertation on the politics of race and liberation in Reich’s works of the mid 1960s, Sumanth Gopinath has also pointed to a yogic form of emancipation to contextualize “Music as a Gradual Process,” and he characterizes this yogic liberation as necessarily stifling the human individual in pursuit of a higher abstract liberation.56 However, it is crucial to understand the centrality of the physical body in the practice of hatha yoga. Historians of yoga have repeatedly pointed to hatha yoga’s tantric origins and its characteristic emphasis on the physical body as the site of transcendence.57 Historian of religion Jeffrey Kripal points to a broad countercultural shift in the American reception of Asian religions, a reception that tended toward tantric forms of both Hinduism and Buddhism in the 1960s and 1970s. Such tantric traditions, Kripal argues, insist on the fundamental unity of the immanent and the transcendent, and so liberation is not at all abstract, and the body is not suppressed. Rather, in hatha yoga, liberation is considered to be a matter of full embodiment.58 Beyond a technique of liberation, Reich repeatedly emphasizes the impersonal nature of his musical processes, and this notion of impersonality is

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common in yogic literature and practice. One example is a commentary on the Yoga Sūtras of Patañjali by Swami Krishnanada, which took the form of lectures given in the mid-1970s. In reference to the fourth pada (or chapter) of the Yoga Sūtras, Krishnanada stated: [Tackling the problem of karma] amounts to saying that we have to raise ourselves to an impersonal state gradually; and yoga is nothing but that. Ultimately, we have to become the most impersonal of things—that is purusha. Purusha is not man. It is the impersonal Reality, and that is the goal of yoga; and we are moving towards it, we are approximating towards it, we are tending towards it, we are aspiring for it, and our aim is only that. Therefore, every step in our effort is a purification of ourselves towards this higher impersonality—though it comes gradually.59

Throughout the early 1970s, Reich repeatedly insisted that his music was akin to a technique of the body and mind, even as his critics most often likened the music to industrial machines, like assembly lines. The logic of the machine, however—that insatiable quest for productivity, efficiency, and control—appears much earlier in the history of technology. Lewis Mumford argued that the logic of the machine could be traced back to the mechanical clock: “The clock, moreover, is a piece of power-machinery whose ‘product’ is seconds and minutes:  by its essential nature it dissociated time from human events and helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences:  the special world of science.”60 Mumford suggested that the mechanical clock privileged abstract time over lived daily experience: When one thinks of a day as an abstract span of time, one does not go to bed with the chickens on a winter’s night: one invents wicks, chimneys, lamps, gaslights, electric lamps, so as to use all the hours belonging to the day. When one thinks of time not as a sequence of experiences, but as a collection of hours, minutes, and seconds, the habits of adding time and saving time come into existence. Time took on the character of an enclosed space: it could be divided, it could be filled up, it could then be expanded by the invention of labor-saving instruments. Abstract time became the new medium of existence. Organic functions themselves were regulated by it: one ate, not upon feeling hungry, but when prompted by the clock: one slept, not when one was tired, but when the clock sanctioned it. A generalized time-consciousness accompanied the wider use of clocks: dissociating time from organic sequences.61

The clock, a technology for organizing time, morphed into a “new medium of existence.”62 But in Mumford’s view, the object, the clock, was not to blame; it was this shift in consciousness that privileged abstractions over individual experience.

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Whether termed the “megamachine,” the “technical state of mind,” or the “technocracy,” this was technique on a mass scale: total abstraction from human involvement and human experience. This explains precisely why techniques of the body and mind became so attractive; practices like Yoga and meditation can be tethered to concrete individual experiences. In Reich’s concluding refutation to Gottwald’s criticisms, he ends his essay with a postscript remark: My new work-in-progress for a New Orchestra will be even richer in sound and will use violin, cello, two clarinets, 6 female voices, 4 pianos, 4 marimbas, 2 xylophones, and 1 metallophone. I am afraid it will make your “industrialmechanical” image extremely inappropriate—even more out of place than it is right now. But perhaps after reading all this you will have begun to wonder if you have in fact given this image to the wrong composer in the first place and that the “social implications” of my music, of which you are so concerned, might actually turn out to be particularly humane and well suited to this time of our life on earth.63

Reich’s work for a New Orchestra would eventually be titled Music for 18 Musicians. At a work-in-progress concert in May 1975, critic John Rockwell noted a new element in Reich’s style:  the opening sequence of eleven chords presents “swelling and receding in time to human breathing.”64 In Reich’s program notes for the Music for 18 Musicians’ premiere, the composer wrote: Rhythmically there are two basically different kinds of time occurring simultaneously in Music for 18 Musicians. The first is that of a regular rhythmic pulse in the pianos and mallet instruments that continues throughout the piece. The second is the rhythm of the human breath in the voices and wind instruments. The entire opening and closing sections plus part of all sections in between contain pulses by the voices and winds. They take a full breath and sing or play pulses of particular notes for as long as their breath will comfortably sustain them. The breath is the measure of the duration of their pulsing.65

This indication for breath is present in the original manuscript with the simple indication “one breath” visually presented as a cascading series of pulses (see Ex. 14.2). This element is now almost completely lost in the Boosey & Hawkes edition, which uses a simple asterisk on the first page to indicate “in one breath.”66 However, one of the most striking features of Reich’s early manuscript copies for Music for 18 Musicians is just how many indications there are in the score of when and how to breathe (see Ex. 14.3). The opening “Pulses” section progresses event by event—one series of breaths prompts the next series of breaths. There is an audible difference in two approaches to time: first, the ceaseless pulse in the keyboards; second, the cascading series of breaths.

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Example  14.2 Music for 18 Musicians manuscript [2/10], p.  1, mm. 1–8 (Steve Reich Collection, PSS).

Example 14.3 Music for 18 Musicians manuscript [2/10], p. 84, mm. 577–82 (Steve Reich Collection, PSS).

In the opening “Pulses” section of Music for 18 Musicians, Reich inscribed human measure into his music: breath, a unit of measure inextricable from the human body. There was a time when common units of measure were bound up in the body—what we today call anthropic units. There was a time when distance, for instance, was judged by paces—how many physical steps one might take (a mile indicating a thousand pairs of paces). But with countless

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technologies—the clock, the train, the assembly line, the Phase Shifting Pulse Gate—in the quest of efficiency, productivity, and control, time and space were reconfigured and fundamentally detached from the measures of humans. That fundamentally modern impulse, as Norman Mailer would phrase it, “that Faustian urge to conquer time by mastering nature,” took hold as measure was abstracted from man and nature.67 It took hold, as Lewis Mumford had it, with the “clank of the clock.”68 In critiques of Reich’s music—critiques of the controlling assembly-line-like nature of his music—it was not technique per se but technique’s indifference to humans, to performers, and to the body. Reich held this concern from the beginning, as well, but with Music for 18 Musicians he challenged that criticism musically by employing a unit of measure inseparable from the body: breath. Within yogic philosophy the breath is a fixed measure of being; since each person is granted a predetermined number of breaths in life, practitioners who learn to extend their breath also learn to extend their life.69 Reich’s musical employment of breath and his broader pursuit of yoga, however, was no safe haven from the mechanized state of mind decried by critics of the technocracy. Rather, within its myriad postwar incarnations and translations, modern postural yoga was often infused with the same ideals of technocratic mastery and control. In a popular book like Yoga and Health (1953), which underwent numerous editions and reissues, the authors make repeated appeals to achieving mastery over the body through “absolute control.” In some postwar interpretations, yogic principles offered no escape from technical mastery, only a transmutation and internalization of such techniques of control.70 The criticisms did not end with the success of Music for 18 Musicians. As Reich noted, underneath the waves of the human breath remained the constant pulsing of the keyboard instruments. Writing for the Village Voice following the Music for 18 Musicians premiere, composer and critic Tom Johnson asked, “Steve Reich: exerting too much control over his musicians?,” adding, “Now, as I watch Reich’s musicians going through their paces with such precision, I can’t help noticing that they look even more machine-like than players in a traditional symphony orchestra.”71 In terms of the music, Johnson latched on to the ceaseless pulse in the keyboards, noting that “the tempo was about as steady as an Accutron watch.”72 Of course, Johnson compares this pulse to a watch—a clock. The clock represents an orientation toward time that is uniform—every second, every minute, every pulse is perfectly equal and perfectly indifferent. That ceaseless and characteristic pulse would continue to attract criticism. In his recent book Present Shock, media theorist Douglas Rushkoff makes a useful distinction between two basic orientations toward time by drawing on the Greek words chronos and kairos. Whereas chronos captures our contemporary notion of clock time, kairos more accurately translates to English as “timing”— that particular instant when it is just the right moment to act.73 In Music for

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18 Musicians, Reich embedded kairos and “timing” into his music. A  singer sustains her voice not for ten or twelve equal beats but however long her breath will take her, and the next entrance by the bass clarinet is a question of timing— completely relational to when the women’s voices fades out. This turn in Reich’s music is remarkable; just seven years prior, Reich had built a chronos machine— the Phase Shifting Pulse Gate—120 perfectly even divisions of a bar, synced to an internal digital clock. The criticisms of Reich’s music throughout the early to mid-1970s concerned that type of clock logic and its indifference to human parameters and human input. The kairos in Music for 18 Musicians is not clock logic; breath is body logic. By 1974, Reich’s yoga practice had begun to overlap with his rediscovery of his Jewish heritage. It was natural, then, for Reich to find connections among his practices.74 In an interview describing this period, Reich recalled:  “I remember when I first got interested in [Judaism] I did the first thing anybody who had been doing ten years of Hatha yoga, which I had done, and [pranayama]—I went and bought a book on Kabbalah published by Straight Arrow Press, which publishes Rolling Stone.”75 This book, Charles Poncé’s Kabbalah, is notable for its lengthy comparisons of kabbalah to yoga and meditation, and the author even writes of a “yoga of the Kabbalah.” Pointing to Abraham Abulafia, Poncé notes that this medieval Kabbalist “not only laid down rules of body posture for the student to follow during his meditations on the Sefiroth, but a breathing discipline as well—a discipline found at the heart of every yogic system.”76 While the focus on breathing came to the fore in Music for 18 Musicians, Reich considered incorporating breath into his music at a much earlier date. Writing in his sketchbook in August 14, 1971, he states: While doing yoga this morning I thought of a piece where a huge drum would pulse at about the same rate as heart beat—60–72 and low wind or brass instruments would play long slow tones for a full breath so that the analogy of breathing + heartbeat would be clear. If the tempo were very slow, say 56–60, players could sing or play low tones for 12 beats and [breathe] in for 4 or 6 beats. This would make [the] piece a breathing exercise. Depending on where people breathe out and in, their phase relation, different harmonies could be created.77

In this technique, Visama Vṛtti Prāṇāyāma, inhalation and exhalation are of unequal lengths.78 It appears in Reich’s sketches that his impulse to fuse his spiritual and musical practice had been present for some time. And, indeed, throughout more than ten years of practice, Reich’s study of yoga was thoroughly enmeshed in his working thoughts and processes; it infused his writings, his sketches, and his interactions with fellow musicians, and it affected his compositional style and aesthetic. The thread that connected his experiments with the Phase Shifting Pulse Gate up until Music for 18 Musicians was technique,

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particularly techniques of control. Though he put his machine in a closet in 1969, these techniques of control prevailed throughout his work during this period. Whether he was controlling knobs on a Phase Shifting Pulse Gate or controlling his breathing through Prāṇāyāma, Reich’s fantasies, it turned out, extended beyond machines. Although the clock-like chronos would continue ticking in his music, the kairos of breath worked to forge new fantasies.

Notes 1. Reich and Owens worked together through the organization Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.). For an early history of the organization, see O’Brien (2018). Reich previewed the Phase Shifting Pulse Gate at a concert at the New School in April 1969. See Reich 1969b. 2. Reich 1974, 17–27. 3. Reich 1969a. 4. In his proposal to Experiments in Art and Technology, Reich wrote, “The gate can also be used as a phase variable metronome to ‘program’ live performers. . . . When the ‘conductor programmer’ shifts the phase relations between the channels each performer receives a shifted pulse which he follows thus producing complex rhythmic melodic patterns that would otherwise be impossible to perform.” Reich, “The Continuous Phase Shifting Pulse Gate,” E.A.T. Records, Getty Research Institute, accession no. 94003, box 12, folder 53, page 3. See also Reich’s 9-page proposal, “Phase Shifting Music Gate,” box 6, folder 29, page 2. 5. Jon Gibson, interview with the author, January 6, 2010:  “The things had glitches and wouldn’t do exactly what Steve wanted. . . . The boxes would sort of hop somewhere else that they weren’t supposed to . . . [it] was glitchy stuff.” 6. Glass, interview with Dean Suzuki, April 9, 1982; in Suzuki 1991, 480. 7. Reich, Four Log Drums (May 27, 1969)  [CD 40, Track  4], Steve Reich Collection, PSS. One explanation for the additional confusion can be found in Reich’s program notes for the Whitney concert. Reich explains that when the log drummers arrived at a steady eighth-note pulse (such as in measures 5 and 7), they were instructed to maintain that pattern while “one, two, or three [performers] at a time, drop out and rest, creating sub-patterns by their absence.” From the recording, it sounds as though the performers began this “dropping-out” process before arriving at measure 5. See Reich 1969e. 8. Reich, Pulse Music (May 27, 1969)  [CD 23, Tracks 1–2], Steve Reich Collection, PSS. 9. Strickland 1993, 209. 10. Reich 1974, 27. Reich returned to electronic music with Mein Name Ist (1981), written for Clytus Gottwald. On Reich’s history with Gottwald, see Pymm 2015. 11. Reich, Sketchbook [1], June 28, 1969, p. [46L], Steve Reich Collection, PSS. 12. Reich, Sketchbook [1], August 12, 1969, p. [71R], Steve Reich Collection, PSS. 13. Henahan 1970, 15.

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14. Snyder 1970. For more on Four Organs, see Sumanth Gopinath’s chapter in this volume. 15. Reich printed this essay both in full and in excerpts in programs. See, for example, Boston Symphony Orchestra Concert (September 8, 1971); New  York University Concert (November 11, 1971), Barnes Hall Concert (October 12, 1972). See also Reich 1971, 1972a, 1972b. 16. Reich 1969a, 56. 17. A typed excerpt from this interview by Reich, labeled “Part of a discussion between Steve Reich and the British musician and critic Michael Nyman recorded in London in June of 1970 and published in slightly different form in The Musical Times of March 1971,” is now kept at the Paul Sacher Stiftung. The published version of the interview was edited and condensed by Nyman; see Nyman 1971, 229–31. 18. There are two entries in Reich’s daily planner regarding this filming: Thursday, April 1, 1971: “Drumming Rehearsal for German T.V. to see 9 pm”; Thursday, April 9, 1971: “Drumming Rehearsal for German TV – 7:30.” Reich Agenden 1971, Steve Reich Collection, PSS. 19. Helms 1972. A copy of this film is held at the ZKM|Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, Videocollection/Laboratory for Antique Video Systems. Excerpts of this film have been reassembled and rereleased under a new title, New Music: Sounds and Voices from the Avant-Garde. This 2010 release has removed the lengthy and extensive German commentary by Helms that runs throughout the 1972 documentary. 20. Reich, Sketchbook [4], p. [33], June 22, 1971, Steve Reich Collection, PSS. 21. Reich, Sketchbook [4], p. [33–34], June 24, 1971, Steve Reich Collection, PSS. 22. Henahan 1971. 23. Ibid. 24. “Die Musik muss aus ökonomischen Gründen von wenigen Musikern, am besten von den Komponisten selbst und mit mitgebrachten Instrumenten oder Geräten aufführbar sein, da die Konzerte fast ohne Ausnahme in Museen, Universitätsräumen oder Kirchen, nicht aber in Konzertsälen stattfinden. Die Instrumente sollten elektronisch oder elektrisch verstärkt sein, um grössere Räume zu füllen und den Strassen- oder U-Bahnlärm zu übertönen. Die Stücke sollten zudem wenig musikalische Entwicklung aufweisen, um mit der herrschenden faschistoiden Ideologie der ahistorischen Beliebigkeit und Invarianz in Einklang zu stehen” (Helms 1972, 40:14–40:51). 25. “Ausschnitte aus privaten Avantgarde-Zirkeln und Gespräche mit Komponisten liefern Helms manchmal plausible, meist aber krampfhaft gedeutete Indizien für den Notstand der amerikanischen Neutöner” (Der Spiegel 1972, 161). 26. Beal 2006, 197–201. Beal notes, for example, that critic Hans-Klaus Jungheinreich described Reich’s performers as resembling “high performance machines.” 27. Wasserman 1972, 46. Reich echoed this sentiment in an unpublished essay, writing, “When performing I  don’t want to be free to do whatever momentarily comes to mind, I  want to be free of all that momentarily comes to mind.” Reich,

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“Personal Observations towards a Yoga of Performing Music” (Textmanuskripte, Steve Reich Collection, PSS). 28. Roos 1974, 78. 29. “Rhythmische Muster (‘Patterns’) werden ausgestanzt, eingehämmert, beliebig reproduziert, wobei sich ganz von selbst die Vorstellung von Fabrik und Fließband ergibt” (Gutscher 1974). 30. “Die Monotonie des hier sich abspielenden Arbeitsprozesses erinnert nicht von ungefähr an das Fließband:  immergleiche Handgriffe produzieren Immergleiches. Sicherlich partizipiert Steve Reichs Musik darin an der Übermacht der heute produzierten Industriemusik, wie diese reflektiert sie die Neurosen des Maschinenzeitalters” (Gottwald 1975, 4). 31. Reich 1975, 200; Reich sent a copy of his original article (written in English) to Gottwald, along with a cover letter to Melos/Neue Zeitschrift für Musik. Reich’s article was dated March 4, 1975; this English version is held in the Clytus Gottwald Sammlung, IIIb 1973–79, PSS. 32. Goodyear 2002; 2008, 169–73; Turner 2006. 33. Roszak 1969, 5. 34. Touraine 1971. 35. Marcuse 1964. 36. Ellul 1964, xxv (emphasis in original). 37. Mumford 1970, 66. 38. Turner 2006, 36–38. 39. Davis 1998, 145. 40. Reich, “Part of a discussion between Steve Reich and the British musician and critic Michael Nyman recorded in London in June of 1970 and published in slightly different form in the Musical Times of March 1971” (Textmanuskripte, Steve Reich Collection, PSS). 41. Henahan 1971. 42. Wasserman 1972, 46. 43. “I would also suggest that it is somewhat because of the inhuman thoughts about relinquishing control in music that John Cage has unfortunately made popular for a few years, that in this curious time pocket we are living in at the moment, certain people think of control in music as somehow mechanical—instead of meditative and ecstatic” (Reich 1975, 199–200). For Reich’s English version, see Clytus Gottwald Sammlung, IIIb 1973–1979, PSS. 44. See Cole 2010, 88; Fink 2005b, 72; Chapman 2013b, Gopinath has given the most attention to Reich’s yoga practice; see Gopinath 2005, 60–61, 150–51. 45. Syman 2010, 7. On the problem of defining yoga, see Alter 2004. 46. Typed on a three-by-five notecard to be sent to Who’s Who in America in December 1974, Reich wrote:  “I have a strong need for a personal self-discipline with ancient universal roots. Since 1966 I  have regularly practiced Hatha Yoga and Pranayama (breathing exercises)” (Steve Reich Textmanuskripte, Steve Reich Collection, PSS). Fellow composer Philip Glass has divulged much more about his

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yoga practice; see Glass 2015, 191–200. See also Glass’s interview with Tworkov and Coe, republished in Glass 1997, 316–29. 47. Sender recalls learning yoga from Reich in Manhattan in September 1966 (see Cole 2012). On her résumé, dancer Laura Dean also credits her yoga education to Steve Reich. She went on to teach yoga beginning in 1971. See Dean 1973. 48. The eight limbs of yoga are found in the Yoga Sūtras (2.29): “1. Yama (universal moral commandments); 2. Niyama (self-purification by discipline); 3. Āsana (posture); 4. Prāṇayama (rhythmic control of the breath); 5. Pratyāhāra (withdrawal and emancipation of the mind from the domination of the senses and exterior objects); 6. Dhāraṇa (concentration); 7. Dhyāna (meditation) and 8. Samādhi (a state of super-consciousness brought about by profound meditation).” See Iyengar 1994. 49. Hartenberger 2016, 49. 50. De Michelis 2004, 181–207. 51. Daniélou 1991 (1949), 31. 52. Reich 1971, 30 (emphasis in the original). This excerpt does not appear in the Anti-Illusion printing of “Music as a Gradual Process.” The essay underwent numerous revisions. 53. Ibid. 54. Eliade (1958) 2009, 33–34. 55. Ibid., 3. 56. “Unlike New Leftist political liberation, in which personal liberation meant a fuller realization of one’s human potential, this latter meaning of liberation appears to be anti-humanist, in that it suppresses the earthly individual in favor of some kind of higher abstract liberation, whether spiritual or communal or both” (Gopinath 2005, 64). 57. See Eliade (1958) 2009, 227–36. 58. Kripal 2008, 16–24. 59. Swami Krishnananda’s lectures on the Yoga Sūtras were delivered from March to August 1976. A transcript and audio recording of this lecture are available online through the Divine Life Society. The transcribed lectures are also compiled in book form. See Krishnananda 2007, 569–70. 60. Mumford 1934, 15. 61. Ibid., 17. 62. Ibid. 63. Reich 1975, 200. 64. Rockwell 1975. 65. Reich 1976. 66. Reich’s directions in the scores for Music for 18 Musicians are as follows: “in one breath; breathe when comfortable; fade in/out through repeats.” 67. Mailer (1957) 1959, 338. On the postwar critique of abstraction, see P. Ford 2013, 151–77. 68. Mumford 1934, 14. 69. Sivananda (1935) 2000, 29.

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70. See Yesudian and Haich (1953) 1972, 10, 44, 176. When asked how he learned yoga, Reich recalled learning pranayama from Ramón Sender in San Francisco. However, Ramón Sender reports learning pranayama from Reich in Manhattan. See Cole 2012. Reich also recalled, with some uncertainty, using the book Yoga & Health to learn yoga. Reich, interview with author (September 9, 2016). 71. T. Johnson 1976, 121. 72. Ibid. 73. Rushkoff 2013, 112–13. 74. This accords with what historian of religion Catherine Albanese (2006) has called the “combinative practices” of American metaphysical traditions—the tendency to commingle various religious discourses and practices. On religious bricolage, see Altglas 2014. The countercultural classic for such bricolage of spiritual techniques was Ram Dass’s Be Here Now, which reads: “This manual contains a wide variety of techniques. Everyone’s needs are different and everyone is at a different stage along the path. But as with any recipe book, you choose what suits you.” Ram Dass 1971, n.p. 75. Reich 1987a. 76. Poncé 1973, 155. 77. Reich, Sketchbook [5], August 14, 1971, p. [14], Steve Reich Collection, PSS. 78. This technique is described in Iyengar 1994, 454.

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Index

Page numbers followed by f and t indicate figures and tables, respectively. Unless otherwise indicated, works listed are by Steve Reich. “Abegg” Variations, op. 1 (Schumann), 36–37 “Abraham & Nimrod” (Reich), 97–98, 98t Abulafia, Abraham, 338 accent markings (ta’amim), 114, 119 accents, New York, 167 acoustic music, 329–30 Adams, John, 105–6, 159, 171, 192 Adangme people, 282–83 Adorno, Theodor, 10, 58, 303–4, 317 aesthetics, 17–106 asystematic, 289–91 compositional, 264–65, 297 reconciliatory, 93–106 testimonial, 76 Africa, occidental, 259–67 African American and African American–derived vernacular music, 36–37 “African horn polyphonie” (1987), 250, 250t African music, 9–10, 70, 305 Ageshi drumming, 293–95 Akache drumming, 278, 283–85 Amadinda, 264–65 Banda Linda music, 270, 271, 274–76f, 280f, 295–97, 298–99

drumming, 53, 260, 278, 283–85, 293–95, 298–99, 306 in Electric Counterpoint, 259–99 of Ewe, 277–78, 305–6, 307 gankogui bell patterns, 278, 287–89, 288f, 293–98 Ghanaian, 264–65 Gogo songs, 282–83 harmonics, 265–66 Icibitiku drums, 262–63 Icila dance, 262–63, 265–66, 278, 283–86, 289–91, 298–99 Ikulu drumming, 278, 283–85 inherent patterns and rhythms, 262–63, 264–65, 287–88 Kagan drum, 278 Kalimba, 281 Katanga guitar, 281 Kigandan Amadinda, 263–64 likembe, 262–63 Lugandan, 263–64 makwa handclapping patterns, 283–89, 286–88f, 293–97, 298–99 Matepe, 278, 298–99 Mbira dza Vadzimu, 278, 281, 289–91 melodic techniques, 280–81, 282

369

370

African music (cont.) The Music of Africa (Nketia), 282 Ngwayi drumming, 298–99 phasing, 261, 262, 277–78, 294–99 “Postscript to a Brief Study of Balinese and African Music” (Reich), 305, 307 “Sound of Africa” series (Tracey), 281–82 staggered canons, 277 Studies in African Music (Jones), 260, 261, 262–63, 264, 265–66, 277–78, 304–5 traditional, 37–38, 277, 297 typological features, 262–63 Ugandan, 262–63, 264 Xhosa Umrhube mouthbow, 281 Xizambi friction bow, 281 xylophone, 262–63, 264, 270, 283 African Music: Journal of the African Music Society, 264, 278 African Music from the Source of the Nile (Kubik), 263–64 Africanism, 140 afterlife (World to Come), 167–71, 173 aga, 271 Ageshi drumming, 293–95 Akache drumming, 278, 283–85 Akhnaten (Glass), 56 Alit, Dewa Ketut, 311f Alorworye, Gideon, 260 Amadinda music, 263–65, 298–99 American Minimal Music (Mertens), 55–56 American Society for Eastern Arts, 305, 312–14 Americanism, real, 167 analytical concerns, 17–106 ancientness, 11–12 Anderson, Virginia, 21–22 anthropic units, 336–37

Index

anti-colonialism, 98 Anti-Illusion catalog, 229 anti-Semitism, 98 ap Siôn, Pwyll, 8–9, 10 Apple IIC, 247 Arab-Israeli conflict, 93, 97–99 The Cave as resolution of, 102–6 Arom, Simha, 270–72, 288–89 ndereje balendoro model, 271–73, 272f Aronson, Marc, 160 art, 19, 93 art music, 21–22 Artforum, 329 Āsana (postural yoga), 332 “Ashes to Ashes” (Bowie), 297–98 Ashkenazic traditions, 64–66 Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, 218 asymmetric patterns, 287–89 asystematic aesthetics, 289–91 asystematic systematics, 289–91 audio data, 186–87 augmentation technique, 31, 32 Austin, William, 59, 245, 264 auteurism, documentary-cinematic, 10. See also Reich, Steve, as director, 164–71 authenticity, 160 authority, 113–32 autobiographical approach, 172 avant-garde, 218–19 neo-avant-garde, 55–56 Reich’s critique of, 230 Wasserpfeifen in New York: Musikalische Avantgarde zwischen Ideologie und Elektronik (Water Pipes/Bongs in New York: Musical AvantGarde Between Ideology and Electronics) (documentary), 326, 327f, 328–29

Index

Bach, Johann Sebastian Balinese responses to, 317 Reich’s view of, 171, 245 The Well-Tempered Clavier, 167–71, 169f Bachauer, Walter, 55, 56–57 Baker, Mrs., 146t, 151 Baker, Wallace, 144, 146t, 149–51, 153 Bakker, Twila, 9, 10 Baldwin, James, 154 Bali: Gamelan Semar Pegulingan/ Gamelan of the Love God (Nonesuch), 312–16, 313f, 318t Balinese High School of the Performing Arts, 316–17 Balinese music, 9–10, 53, 70, 305–6, 307 gambuh, 309 gamelan, 53, 265–66, 315f, 316–17, 318t gender wayang, 309 improvisation, 308 lelambatan, 309 mallet playing, 307 Music in Bali (McPhee), 304–5, 311 partner drumming, 306 “Postscript to a Brief Study of Balinese and African Music” (Reich), 305, 307 BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music), 100, 240t, 245–46 Banda Linda music Electric Counterpoint quotation, 274–76f, 280f, 295–97 Ippy horns, 271, 298–99 xylophone scale, 270 barococo, 11–12 Baroque tradition, 245–46 Barthes, Roland, 162–63 Bartók, Béla, 53, 69, 170–71, 245 bass, 79 The Beatles, 29

371

Beethoven, Ludwig van, rst Resulting Patter 171, 279–80 Behrman, David, 328–29 Beirens, Maarten, 8–9, 10, 56 Beiser, Maya, 168 Belkin, Alan, 248–49 Bell Labs, 32 Bellevue Hospital, Lower Manhattan, 149 Bemba people, 261, 298–99 Benjamin, Walter, 8 Berio, Luciano, 3, 29, 241 Berlin Festival, 55 Berliner, Paul, 285, 286f Bernard, Jonathan W., 192 Bernstein, Leonard, 223–24 Biareishyk, Siarhei, 153 Bira ceremony, 286 Blacking, John, 281–82 Bloom, Harold, 69–70 Bonham, John, 27 Bosco, Mwenda Jean, 281 Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO), 7 January 18, 1973 performance of Four Organs, 8–9, 19–21, 34–35 Spectrum concerts, 19–20 Boulez, Pierre, 3, 159 Bowie, David, 297–98 Brahms, Johannes, 171, 279–80, 317 breath and breathing, 337–38 breath control, 335, 337, 338 breathing exercises, 332, 338–39 Music for 18 Musicians, 335, 336f, 337–38 Pranayama, 332, 338–39 Brecht, Bertolt, 93 Britten, Benjamin, 307 Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), 100, 240t, 245–46 Brooklyn Philharmonic, 240t Brown, Earle, 328–29 Brown, James, 27

372

Brown, John (Nelson), 141 Brown, Oscar, 144 Bryars, Gavin, 54–55 BSO. See Boston Symphony Orchestra Buddhism, 333 Cage, John, 19–20, 34, 218–19, 328–29 Notations, 223–24, 225, 230–31 cak rhythms, 310–12, 311f Calkins, Judge, 152 call and response, 271–72 Cameron, Catherine, 243 candetan cymbal patterns, 311 Candid Records, 144 canon, 243–45 staggered canons, 277 Western art music, 251–52 cantillation. See chanting or cantillation Carnegie Hall: January 18, 1973 performance of Four Organs, 8–9, 19–21, 34–35 Carter, Elliott, 19–20 Casey, Celia, 9, 10 Casio diskettes, 184 Casio FZ-1 digital sampling keyboard, 96t Catapano, Peter, 247 Caux, Daniel, 56–57 cave, Plato’s, 117–20 The Cave (1993), 8–9, 75–90, 115, 161 act 1, first Hagar scene, 83–84, 84f act 1, “Isaac” scene, 84, 85f, 85 act 1, scene 1, mm. 10–30, 113 act 1, scene 1, “Opening Typing Music,” 125f, 124, 127 act 1, scene 7, 128, 129f act 2, 117 act 3, 104–5, 117 as Arab-Israeli conflict resolution, 102–6

Index

chants, 120, 123–24 development of, 94–95, 96t, 97–102 digital documents, 188 documentary approach, 161 familial keys, 103–4, 104f framing questions, 120–22 harmonic structure, 78– 79, 81– 89, 83t, 84–85f, 90, 103– 4, 104f language layers 1 and 2, 120–23 language layers 3 and 4, 123–24 linguistic material, 120 orthography, rhythm, and voice in text, 124–27 political evolution of, 96t, 97–102 reconciliatory aesthetic, 93–106 “Reconciling the Family of Man,” 100, 102–6 sampled answers, 120–23 score, 125f, 126–27, 130–31 scriptural episodes, 120, 123–24 selection of words and voices for, 81, 82 speech, music, and repetition in, 115–17 speech melodies, 83–84, 84f staging, 120, 124, 129–25f subject, 93 thematic tie with Different Trains, 99–100 “Video Handwriting,” 121–22, 124–26 work tapes, 182 Cave of the Patriarchs (Cave of Machpelah), Hebron, 93–94, 116, 123 Cello Counterpoint (2003), 241, 266 Central African Republic, 270–71 Banda Linda music, 270–71, 274–76f, 280f, 295–97, 298–99 Centre Culturel, Paris, 54

Index

Chambers, Steve, 54 “Chandetan” (never realized), 304–5 chanting or cantillation in The Cave, 123–24 Hebrew biblical cantillation or chant, 37–38, 61, 62–63, 64–66, 70, 114, 119, 123 medieval chant and organum, 28–29, 36–37, 265–66 “Ramayana Monkey Chant” (Golden Rain, Nonesuch Explorer), 310, 318t Charter Group for a Pledge of Conscience, 142, 143 Chopin, Frédéric, 19–20 chord progressions, 28–29, 79, 192–94 Music for 18 Musicians, 194–99, 196–209f, 200–10, 211, 335 oscillating chords, 205–10, 207–9f, 211 Christianity, 103 City Life (1995), 161 autobiographical elements, 172 documentary approach, 161 “It Has been a Honeymoon—Can’t Take No Mo’,” 172 source recordings, 162–63, 167 the CIVIL warS (Wilson), 56 clapping. See handclapping Clapping Music (1972), 3, 21–22, 227, 283–85, 329 gankogui/makwa pattern, 295–97 phase relations, 261–62, 283–85, 284f rhythmic patterns, 260, 283–85, 287, 294–95 sampling from, 297–98 sketches for, 287, 294–95, 296f Clinton, George, 32 clocks, 334, 337 Cohn, Richard, 4, 26 Coldcut, 6–7

373

Coltrane, John, 97–98, 218, 262 Come Out (1966), 2, 29, 35–36, 225 archival recording, 145, 146t inherent patterns, 264–65 narrative strands, 148 phase relations, 278 prehistory, 139–54 premiere, 139, 143–44 as response to violence, 162–63 royalty payments, 10, 154 speech extracts, 10, 145–48 temporal distortions, 163 commissions, 55–56, 59, 239–40, 240t, 241, 246, 247 compositional aesthetics, 264–65, 297 compositional practice, 29, 172, 249–50, 251–52, 259, 261–62, 264, 278–79, 281, 294–95, 326 autobiographical approach, 172 working methods, 247–48, 249, 251 compositional tools, 247–52. See also specific tools computer software, 247–50, 251–52. See also specific tools computers, 247–52 Concerto (World to Come) (Lang), 167–71 control, 328, 329, 331, 332–33, 337 of breath, 335, 337, 338 inner, 332 techniques of, 338–39 Cook, Nicholas, 5 Corigliano, John, 159 Cornell University, 245, 264, 278 Cosgrove, Kevin, 164 Cotter, Jim, 22–23 counterpoint, 245 Counterpoint series (1980s), 9, 239–52 Cello Counterpoint (2003), 241, 266 critical reception, 240–41, 242, 245–46

374

Counterpoint series (1980s) (cont.) e-sketches, 248, 249, 250–52, 250t Electric Counterpoint (1987), 9–10, 78–79, 240t, 241, 245–46, 247, 251, 259–99 history, 239–46 New York Counterpoint (1985), 240t, 241, 242, 244, 245 performance tapes, 181–82 premieres, 245–46 Vermont Counterpoint (1982), 240t, 241–42, 243–44, 245–46, 249–50 Courage, Alexander, 30–31, 31f, 36–37 Cousins, Elaine, 248–49 Cowan, Rob, 4 Cowell, Henry, 223–24 Craig, Mrs., 146t, 152 Crawford, James “Sugar Boy,” 26 Cunningham, Michael, 1–2, 5–6, 7, 11 cymbal patterns, 311 Czerny, Carl, 19–20 da Silva, Howard, 142 Dachau 1974 (Korot), 95 Daniel Variations (2006), 2 Daniélou, Alain, 332 data, digital analog-to-digital conversions, 183 deterioration of, 183–84, 186–87 hybrid-digital (paper, data, back again) media approach, 182–87 Davies, Peter Maxwell, 19–20 Davis, Erik, 331 Davis, Lawrence, 77, 79–80, 165 Davis, Miles, 24f, 24–25 Davis, Ossie, 143, 154 de Leeuw, Reinbert, 59 Dean, Laura, 55, 332 The Death of Klinghoffer (Adams), 105–6, 159

Index

Debussy, Claude, 53, 245 DeLuca, Edward, 148–49 Democratic National Convention (1988), 98 depersonalization, 307 Der Spiegel, 329 Derrida, Jacques, 118–21, 122, 128–29, 131–32 The Desert Music (1983), 6, 56, 78–79, 97, 240t, 247 dhimmi, 100 diatonicism, 24–25, 79, 191, 210 Diddley, Bo, 22–23, 26 Different Trains (1988), 2, 8–9, 75–90, 93–94 African influences, 266 analog-to-digital conversions, 183 analytic studies, 183 audio expansions, 183 autobiographical elements, 172 commissioning, 240t composition, 251 critical reception, 239–41 digital data, 184–87, 185–86f documentary approach, 160–61 harmonies, 78–79, 81–89, 86–88f, 90 movement 1, 88f, 88 narrative progression, 105 performance tapes, 181–82 as response to Holocaust, 106, 159 selection of words and voices, 79–82 sketches for, 183 source material, 165, 182 thematic tie with The Cave, 99–100 digital data, 184–87, 185–86f analog-to-digital conversions, 183 deterioration of, 183–84, 186–87 hybrid-digital (paper, data, back again) media approach, 182–87

Index

Digital Performer (software), 185–86 digital repetition, 128–32. See also repetition dissonance, grouping, 287–88 The Dixie Cups, 26 DJ Spooky, 6–7 docu-music, 9. See also WTC 9/11 documentary-cinematic auteurism, 10. See also Reich, Steve, as director, 164–71 documentary music video theater, 75, 93 Dodson, Dan, 142 dominant-seventh chords, 24–25 dominant-ninth chords, 24–25 dominant-eleventh chords, 31 The Doors, 36–37 Dorfman, Mrs. Ralph I., 240t Dorian mode, 197–98 double phasing, 291–92, 292f Double Sextet (2007), 181 drugs, psychedelic, 34 drumming African, 53, 260, 262–63, 278, 283–85, 293–95, 298–99, 306 partner, 306 Drumming (1971), 21–22, 60–61, 69, 78, 206, 326 Balinese responses to, 317 critical reception, 240–41, 330 inherent or rhythmic patterns, 260, 264–65 meter, 244 performances in Europe during the 1970s, 54–55, 56–57 phasing, 306–7 positioning of marimba players, 264–65 Reich on, 327–28 tonality, 317 Duet (1993), 11–12 Dylan, Bob, 20–21

375

Eames, Charles and Ray, 32 Ebright, Ryan, 8–9, 10 ECM records, 239–40 ecstasy, 331 trance rituals, 311 Eight Lines (1979), 8–9, 53–70, 170–71 analysis, 59–69, 60–68f combined piano 1 and 2 parts and flute melody, 63f, 63–64, 65f commissioning, 240t comparison with Piano Phase, 59–60, 60f consolidatory features, 60–61 extended melodies, 53, 61–64, 62f, 65f, 67 extended melody in flute, 64, 65f, 67 flute melody and mode, 68f, 68 flute melody and piano 1 part, 61–63, 62f harmonics, 78 innovative features, 60–61 nine-note set, 68f, 68–69 “open fifth” fingerprint, 67 opening lines, 59–60, 60f opening section, 64, 65f, 67 premiere, 59 scalar combinations, 67f, 67, 68 section 1, 68f, 68 tonal regions, 66f, 66–67 18 Musicians. See Music for 18 Musicians (1976) Einstein on the Beach (Glass), 95, 211–12 Elective Affinities (Goethe), 8 Electric Counterpoint (1987), 9–10, 241, 245–46, 247 African components, 259–99, 267–92f asynchronous modalities, 287–88, 289–91, 290f Banda Linda music, 274–76f, 280f, 295–97

376

Electric Counterpoint (1987) (cont.) commissioning, 240t compositional tools, 251 critical reception, 242, 246 double phasing, 291–92, 292f e-sketches, 248, 249, 250–52, 250t gankogui/makwa pattern, 293–94, 295–97 handclapping patterns, 285–86, 287–88f, 287–88 harmonics, 78–79, 269, 270f horn figures and patterns, 272–77, 273–80f, 278–80 introduction, 269, 270f makwa/gankogui pattern, 293–94, 295–97 metrics, 287–89, 288–89f phase relations, 283–85, 292–93 phasing, 289–93, 290f premiere, 245–46 releases, 298 rhythmic and resulting patterns, 267–70f, 267–69, 283–85, 287–91, 288–89f, 292–94 score, 287 sketches, 248, 249–52, 250t, 283–85, 284f, 287 staggered canons, 277 versions and sampling from, 298 electronic music, 328–29 electronics computers, 247–51 “An End to Electronics” (1968–70), 247 multitrack tape, 242, 247 Reich’s opposition to, 326–28 Eliade, Mircea, 331, 333 Ellul, Jacques, 331 Emancipation Proclamation (Lincoln), 144 embodiment, perspectival, 19–38 Emerick, Geoff, 29

Index

“An End to Electronics” (1968–70), 247 Engels, Friedrich, 35–36 Ennanga music, 278 Epstein, Paul, 3–4 Epton, Bill, 152 ethics, 76 Europe, 54–59 Evans, Bill, 218, 224–25 An Evening of Music by Steve Reich (January 5, 1967), 226, 228–29 program, 221–22, 223t Event III (February 1964 performance for civil rights activists), 142 “Events/Comments: Is New Music Being Used for Political or Social Ends?” (Reich), 94–95 Everist, Mark, 5 Ewe music, 277–78, 305–6, 307 Exodus, 113, 168, 173 experimentalism, 218–19, 230 Explorer series (Nonesuch), 310, 312–14, 313f extended melodies, 53, 61, 62f, 65f, 67 Fairleigh-Dickinson University art gallery, Madison, New Jersey: An Evening of Music by Steve Reich (January 5, 1967), 221–22, 223t, 226, 228–29 Farfisa Mini Compact combo organs, 23, 29, 31, 32, 36–37 Farrakhan, Louis, 97–98 Farrell, Colin, 5–6 fascism, 57–58, 329 Fendrich, Laurie, 159 Feynman, Richard, 34 film: Reich’s interests in, 162–63 film scores, 5–6 Fink, Robert, 4–5, 9, 10, 21–22, 64–66, 78

Index

First Intifada, 97 “First Resulting Patterns” in Electric Counterpoint (1987), 249 Fisher, Matthew, 36–37 flight-as-escape, 37–38 Ford, Andrew, 168 Foster, Stephen, 226–27 Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts, 223–24 Four Log Drums (1969), 323–25, 324f Four Organs (1970), 7, 169–70 arrangement of performers, 32 Carnegie Hall performance (January 18, 1973), 8–9, 19–21, 34–35 chord comparisons, 24f, 24–25 chord transformations, 28–29, 78, 79 critical reception, 19–22, 325 dominant eleventh chord, 78 European performances (1970s), 54 hermeneutics, 19–38, 25–31f interpretation, 31–38 melodic theme, 30f, 30–31, 32 moment 1: measure 0, 0:00–0:02, 22–23 moment 2: measure 0, 0:02–0:05, 23–27, 24–26f moment 3: measure 11, 1:34, 27f, 27–28 moment 4: measure 23, 3:38, 28–29 moment 4: measure 26, 4:11, 28–29 moment 5: measure 37, 7:37, 30f, 30–31 pitch comparison, 31f radicalism, 21–22 reduction, 27f rhythmic groupings, 24–25, 25f, 36–37 scoring, 19 Shandar LP recording, 57 tape-reversal effects, 29

377

3-2 clave and tresillo patterns, 26f, 26, 31 tonality, 79 Four Pieces (1963), 218 The Four Sections (1987), 240t France: government of, 240t Frazier, Frederick, 144 “The Freedom Now Suite” (Roach and Brown), 144 Freeman, Betty, 95, 163, 240t Fried, Michael, 259–60 Friendship Baptist Community Center, Thirtieth Street (NYC), 144, 145 Fromm Music Foundation, 240t gambuh, 309 gamelan gambang, 305 gamelan music, 53, 265–66, 303–17 analytical comparisons, 309–16 pattern contours, 315f Reich’s collection of recordings, 310, 318t gankogui bell patterns, 278, 287–89, 288f, 294–98 Gann, Kyle, 3–4, 242, 246 Geismar, Maxwell, 142 gender wayang, 309 General Motors, 154 Genesis, 103, 123, 124 geographic contexts, 10 Germany, 58, 329–30 Getman, Jessica, 30–31 Getz, Stan, 218 Ghanaian music, 264–65 of Adangme people, 282–83 of Ewe people, 277–78, 305–6, 307 Reich’s drumming studies, 260, 305 rhythmic patterns, 287 Sogba or Sogo dances, 287 of Wala people, 282–83

378

Gibson, Jon, 54, 221–22, 223t, 226, 230, 323–24 “Ginny in the Mirror” (Shannon), 23 Glass, Philip, 22–23, 54–57, 230, 262, 323–25, 328–29 Akhnaten, 56 Einstein on the Beach, 95, 211–12 “Rome” section of the CIVIL warS (Glass & Wilson), 56 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 8 Goffin, Cantor, 168 Gogo songs, 282–83 Golden Rain (Nonesuch Explorer), 310 Goldstein, Baruch, 93 “Gong-Gong” pattern, 287 Goodyear, Anne Collins, 330 Gopinath, Sumanth, 8–9, 10, 55–56, 70, 140, 226–27, 333 Gordon, Michael, 159 Gottschalk, Louis Moreau, 26 Gottwald, Clytus, 10, 58, 330, 331 grain: of voice, 162–64 “The Grain of the Voice” (Barthes), 162–63 grammatology, musical, 128–32 The Greatest Moments in Sport (1955), 141–42 Greenwood, Jonny, 298 Gregory, Dick, 143–44 Grierson, John, 172 Grimes, Ev, 59, 141 grouping dissonance, 287–88 Guernica (Picasso), 93 Gutscher, Manfred, 329–30 Hamm, Daniel (Danny), 139–40, 141, 144–45, 149–51, 152–53 payments to, 10, 154 tape transcriptions, 146t Hamm, Mary, 146t, 151 Hancock, Herbie: “Maiden Voyage,” 24f, 24–25, 27–28, 28f

Index

hand-over-hand variations, 227–28 handclapping, 283–94 makwa, 283–89, 286–88f, 293–97, 298–99 Hardin, Louis (Moondog), 22–23 Harlem Defense Council, 152 Harlem Hospital, 149, 151 Harlem Six, 139, 144–45, 148, 153–54 Harlem Youth Unlimited, 145 Harlem’s Six Condemned, 9, 139–54. See also Come Out (1966) tape transcriptions, 145, 146t harmonics. See also specific works African, 265–66 parallel, 282–83 Reich’s approach to, 6–7, 10, 75–90, 192, 265–66 return to, 192 watermelon harmony, 24f, 24–25 harp music, 262–63 Hartenberger, Russell, 22–23, 59, 69, 332 Haskins, Rob, 173 Hatha Yoga, 332, 333 Hatzalah, 160 Havens, Richie, 154 The Hawketts, 26 Hayward Gallery, London, 54–55 Hebrew biblical cantillation or chant, 37–38, 61, 62–63, 64–66, 70, 114, 123 ta’amim (accent markings or signs), 119 “Hello Steve Reich Mix for the DFA” (Murphy), 297–98 Helms, Hans G., 326, 328–29 Henahan, Donal, 3–4, 57, 303, 325, 328 Hendrix, Jimi, 29 Hentoff, Nat, 142 hermeneutics, 10–11 Hessischer Rundfunk, 240t Hexaméron (1837), 19–20

Index

Hillier, Paul, 5, 76 Hindenburg disaster, 161 Hinduism, 309, 333 historical contexts, 10 Hoek, David J., 5 Holland, Bernard, 246, 303 Holly, Buddy, 22–23 Hollywood film scores, 6–7 Holocaust: artistic responses to, 99–100, 159, 160–61 A Home at the End of the World (Cunningham), 1–2, 5–6, 7, 11 Horkheimer, Max, 58 horn music Banda Linda, 270, 271, 298–99 Electric Counterpoint, 272–77, 273–80f, 278–80 “horn polyphonie” (1987), 250, 250t Ippy horns, 271, 298–99 ndereje balendoro, 267–80, 272–73f “short horn polyphonie” (1987), 250, 250t “horn polyphonie” (1987), 250, 250t hosho (rattle), 285 The Hunger Games (film), 6 Hurwitz, Robert, 239–40 hybrid-analog (paper plus tape) media approach, 181–82 hybrid-digital (paper, data, back again) media approach, 182–87 Icibitiku drums, 262–63 Icila dance, 262–63, 265–66, 278, 283–86, 289–91, 298–99 The Icila Dance: Old Style (Jones), 262–63, 283–85 Idelsohn, Abraham, 119 identity, 111–73 “Iko Iko” (The Dixie Cups), 26 Ikulu drumming, 278, 283–85 “I’m Only Sleeping” (The Beatles), 29

379

imaginary space travel, 30–31, 31f, 32–34, 36–37 impotence, political, 94–95 improvisation, 217–31 in Balinese music, 308 Piano Phase, 226–29, 230–31, 237f Reich’s attitude toward, 34–35, 218, 219, 229–30, 307 Improvisations on a Watermelon (1966), 221–22, 223t, 226–29 first variation, 226–34f, 227, 228 premiere, 221–22, 223t, 226, 228 second variation, 227–29, 234–37f title, 226, 228 In C (Riley), 225 indeterminacy, 218–19 Indian music, 307 Indonesian music, 37–38 inherent patterns and rhythms, 260, 261, 262–63, 264–65, 287–88 Institute of African Studies (University of Ghana), 260 Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, 54 Institute of International Education, 260 instrumental music, 225 instrumentation, 330 intention, 36 Intifada, 97 Ippy horns, 271, 298–99 Isaac, Ephraim, 122, 123 Islam, 103 Israeli-Arab conflict, 93, 97–99 artistic responses to, 161 The Cave as resolution of, 102–6 It’s Gonna Rain (1965), 2, 29, 114–15, 225 autobiographical elements, 172 inherent patterns, 261, 264–65 phase relations, 261–62, 278 preparatory tape collage, 141–42 program notes, 118–19

380

Jackendoff, Ray, 268 Jackson, Jesse, 97–98 James, Tommy, 23 Jameson, Fredric, 11–12, 35–36 Janáček, Leoš, 69 jazz, 70 Jazz Workshop, 218 Jeffries, Leonard, 98 Jepson, Barbara, 246 Jewish music, 53, 70 Hebrew biblical cantillation or chant, 37–38, 61, 62–63, 64–66, 70, 114, 119, 123 Reich’s, 113–32 Jewish Music (Idelsohn), 119 “Jock-A-Mo” (Crawford), 26 Johnson, Tom, 3–4, 194–95, 259–60, 337 Jones, Arthur M., 264, 277, 282–83, 287, 293–95, 297, 305 The Icila Dance: Old Style, 262–63, 283–85 Studies in African Music, 260, 261, 262–63, 264, 265–66, 277–78, 304–5 Jones, Willie, 145 Judaism, 37–38, 103, 338 Hebrew biblical cantillation or chant, 37–38, 61, 62–63, 64–66, 70, 114, 119, 123 music of, 53, 70 orthography of “God,” 130 “World to Come” (afterlife), 167–71 “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” (Rolling Stones), 22–23, 27 Kabbalah, 338 Kagan drum, 278 Kalimba music, 281 Kassel, Matthias, 9, 10 Katanga guitar, 281

Index

Kecak, 310 Kehr, Klaus-Peter, 97 Kelly, Wynton: opening in Miles Davis’s “Someday My Prince Will Come,” 24f, 24–25 Kershaw, Baz, 105–6 “Ketjak: The Ramayana Monkey Chant” (Golden Rain, Nonesuch Explorer), 310, 318t key releases (on Farfisa organs), 31, 36–37 Kigandan Amadinda music, 263–65 Kim, Rebecca Y., 294–95 King Tubby, 32 The Kinks, 27 Kombe, L., 262–63, 265–66, 283–86 Korekore people, 298–99 Korot, Beryl, 2, 93, 94–95 The Cave (see The Cave (1993)) Dachau 1974, 95 Text and Commentary, 95 Kramer, Lawrence, 4, 10–11, 36 Kripal, Jeffrey, 333 Krishnanada, Swami, 333–34 “Kronos Piece Notes,” 79, 80–81 Kronos Quartet, 240t Ku Klux Klan, 143–44 Kubik, Gerhard, 262–64, 277, 278, 283 Kyagambiddwa, Joseph, 263–64 Ladzekpo, Alfred, 260 Lala people, 261, 277–78 Icila dance, 262–63, 265–66, 278, 283–86, 289–91, 298–99 Landry, Richard (Dickie), 323 Lane, Cathy, 160–61 Lang, David, 173 Concerto (World to Come), 167–71 Lansky, Paul, 297–98 Lathem, Thais, 328–29 Laura Dean Dancers and Musicians, 240t

Index

Lawrence, Jennifer, 6 Leacock, Eleanor, 142 LeCompte, Elizabeth, 104–5 Led Zeppelin, 27 Leibowitz, Yeshayahu, 128–29, 130 lelambatan, 309 Léonin, 28–29 Lerdahl, Fred, 268 Lesch, Helmut, 57–58 Levine (Packer), Renée, 97 Lewis, George, 218–19 LeWitt, Sol, 259–60 liberation, 333–34 Liganda people, 298–99 “Light My Fire” (the Doors), 36–37 likembe music, 262–63 Limbak, Wayan, 310 Lincoln, Abbey, 144 Lincoln, Abraham, 104–5, 144 Lincoln Square Synagogue, 98–99 Lippel, Dan, 298 Liszt, Franz, 19–20 “Little Fluffy Clouds” (The Orb), 298 Livelihood (1964), 29, 141–42 logocentrism (Derrida), 9, 127, 128–29, 130 Longhair, Professor, 26 “Love Is Lost” (Bowie), 297–98 Lucier, Alvin, 328–29 Lugandan music, 263–64 luxury, 11 Lycée de La Source, Orléans, 54 Lynd, Staughton, 142 Lynn, Conrad, 143–44, 153–54 lyre music, 262–63 MacCann, Richard, 172 Macintosh computer data, older, 186–87 Macintosh Plus, 247 “Magic Bus” (The Who), 22–23 Mahler, Gustav, 31f, 171, 279–80

381

“Maiden Voyage” (Hancock), 24f, 24–25, 27–28, 28f Mailer, Norman, 336–37 Maimonides, 97–98 makwa handclapping patterns, 283–89, 286–88f, 293–97, 298–99 mallet playing, Balinese, 307 Mallet Quartet (2009), 266 Mallets. See Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices, and Organ (1973) mambo, 26 Mangano, Nick, 103 Manzarek, Ray, 36–37 maracas, 22–23, 27, 31, 35–36 “March of the Puritans” (Bellini), 19–20 Marcuse, Herbert, 331 “Mardi Gras Mambo” (The Hawketts), 26 Mark of the Unicorn (MOTU), 247 Martin, Carol, 106 Martin, George, 29 “Massa’s in de Cold Ground” (Foster), 226–27 Matepe music, 278, 298–99 maximalism, 4 Mbira dza Vadzimu music, 278, 281, 289–91 makwa handclapping patterns, 283–89, 286–88f, 293–97, 298–99 McClary, Susan, 4 McPhee, Colin, 304–5, 307, 311 meaning, musical, 10 “Meat Grinder” (NYPD TwentyEighth Precinct station), 144, 149, 150 media classification, 185–87 medieval chant and organum, 28–29, 36–37, 265–66 meditation, 331, 335, 338

382

megamachines, 331, 335 melodic techniques in African music, 280–81, 282 extended melodies, 53, 61, 62f, 65f, 67 parallelism, 282–83 speech melodies, 83–84, 84f, 117–18 Melodica (1966), 29, 230–31 Melos magazine, 330 Menuhin, Yehudi, 11–12 Mertens, Wim, 3–4, 55–56, 303–4 Metamusik Festival, Berlin, 55 Metaphysics of Presence, 117–20 Metheny, Pat, 240t, 242, 298 metric ambiguity, 287–88, 288f metrical preference rules (MPRs) (Lerdahl and Jackendoff), 268 Meyer, Howard N., 142 MIDI control data, 186–87 The Militant (newspaper), 143 Mills College, 29, 218, 241 minimalism, 3–4, 7, 11–12, 21–22, 24–25, 56, 57–58, 78, 297 European critique of, 303–4 European demand for, 56–57 modular-repetitive, 225 myth of, 259–60 repetition in, 192, 303–4 spiritual, 6–7 stages of, 192 minor ninth chords, 24–25 A Minstrel Show (San Francisco Mime Troupe), 143 minute sound details, 269–70 “Mirage” (Tommy James and the Shondells), 23 Mitchell, Virginia, 77, 79–80, 165 Mixolydian clusters, 24–25 Mizrahi chant, 123. See also Hebrew biblical cantillation mnemonic devices, 283–85

Index

MNS (music notation software), 247–50, 251–52. See also specific tools modality, 192–94, 197–98 asynchronous modalities, 287–88, 289–91, 290f modern art, 19 modes, 192–94 modular-repetitive minimalism, 225 Molino, Jean, 270–71 Monk, Thelonious, 24–25, 36–37 Moondog (Louis Hardin), 22–23, 36–37 moral considerations, 89 Morris, Mitchell, 140, 162 MOTU (Mark of the Unicorn), 247 Moussaoui, Zacarias, 164 MPRs (metrical preference rules) (Lerdahl and Jackendoff), 268 multitrack tape, 242, 247 Mumford, Lewis, 331, 334, 336–37 Mumma, Gordon, 328–29 Murphy, Arthur (Art), 54, 323 collaboration with Reich, 217, 221–22, 223t, 224–25, 228–29, 230–31 Murphy, James, 297–98 music African, 9–10, 70, 259–99, 305 African American and African American–derived, 36–37 art, 21–22, 251–52 in The Cave, 115–17 docu-music, 160–61 electronic, 328–29 as gradual process, 325 instrumental, 225 Jewish sacred music, 37–38, 53, 61, 62–63, 64–66, 70, 114, 119, 123 Occidental, 53 popular culture, 5–6 protest music, 144

Index

speech-based, 154 traditional, 37–38, 277, 297 vernacular, 36–38 Western art music, 251–52 Western classical tradition, 53–70, 79 zither, 262–63 “Music as a Gradual Process” (1968), 7, 229–30, 242, 293, 323, 326, 332–33, 335 music critics. See also specific individuals response to Reich, 3–4, 19–22, 54–59, 239–41, 245–46, 303, 317, 325, 326, 328, 329–31, 337 Music for 18 Musicians (1976), 9–10, 21–22, 53–54, 78, 114–15, 169–70 African influences, 266, 295–97 Balinese influences, 316 chord cycle, 194–99, 196–201f, 200–5, 211, 335 chord sequence, 208, 209f commercial release, 239 contrast with Einstein on the Beach (Glass), 211–12 critical reception, 240–41, 335 development of, 60 early manuscripts, 335, 336f early sketches, 200–5 in film and television, 5–6 gankogui/makwa pattern, 295–97 harmonics, 10, 86–87, 199–200, 210–11 modality, 193 “Opening Pulse,” 202, 203f, 204, 205, 335–37 oscillating chords, 205–10, 207–9f, 211 pitch material, 193, 204, 210 “Pulses” sequences, 2, 195, 197, 199, 200, 204, 212, 335–37

383

pulsing chords, treble only, 201f, 201 rhythmic patterns, 260 section VI, 5–6, 204 sketches for, 10, 191–212 stacked fourths and fifths, 197–98 tapes, 181–82 time elements, 335, 337–38 tonality, 191–212 world premiere, 245–46 “Music For A New Orchestra.” See Music for 18 Musicians (1976) Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices, and Organ (1973), 60–61, 199 Balinese components, 306, 316 chord transformations, 79, 205–6, 304 final system, 306 marimba parts, 306 Music for Pieces of Wood (1973), 3, 60 cak telu rhythm patterns, 311–12, 312f comparisons with Balinese gamelan music, 310 gankogui/makwa pattern, 295–97 meter, 244 middle section, 311–12, 312f phase relationships, 261–62 rhythmic patterns, 260, 294–97, 311–12, 312f sketches for, 294–95, 296f Music for Two or More Pianos or Piano and Tape (1964), 218, 221, 223–25, 230–31 last known performance, 222, 223t, 225 Music in Bali (McPhee), 304–5, 311 music notation software (MNS), 247–50, 251–52. See also specific tools The Music of Africa (Nketia), 282 music publishing industry, 252

384

music terminology, 243–46, 251–52, 262–63 music theater, documentary, 75, 93 Musica Elettronica Viva, 218 musical grammatology, 128–32 musical meaning, 10 Musical Quarterly (journal), 3–4 musical ventriloquism, 292 new musicology, 4 Musik unserer Zeitfestival, Stuttgart, 55 Muyinda, Evaristo, 263–64 My Name Is (1967), 118–19, 120–21, 127 Nagoya Marimbas (1994), 266, 295–97 narrative sequences, 75–90 Nattiez, Jean-Jacques, 270–71 natural speech, 116 ndereje balendoro, 267–72 Arom’s model, 271–73, 272f different model, 272–80, 273f Nelson, Robert, 24–25 Nelson, Truman, 139, 141, 143–44, 145–48, 152, 153 neo-avant-garde, 55–56 Netherlands Wind Ensemble, 59 Neubauer, Simon, 56–57 Neuhaus, Max, 328–29 New Focus Records, 298 “New Orchestra.” See Music for 18 Musicians (1976) New Statesman, 326 new tonality, 194–95 New York accents, 167 New York City, New York, 55 New York City Fire Department, 160, 161 New York City Police Department: Twenty-Eighth Precinct station (“Meat Grinder”), 144, 149, 150

Index

New York City World’s Fair (1964), 150–51 New York Counterpoint (1985), 240t, 241–42, 244, 245 New York Philharmonic Horizons Festival, 245–46 New York School, 218 New York Times, 19–20, 57, 303, 325, 328 “Benefit Aids Appeal of 6 Convicted of Harlem Killing,” 143 Korot and Reich’s statement (1994), 93, 94–95 Newport Folk Festival, 20–21 Newsweek, 55–56 The Next Day (Bowie), 297–98 The Next Wave series, 245–46 Nexus, 240t ngbanja, 271 Ngwayi drumming, 298–99 Nijinsky, Vaslav, 20–21 Nimrod, 97–98 9/11 attacks, 95–97, 113–14. See also WTC 9/11 (2010) Reich’s personal reflections on, 172–73 Nketia, Kwabena, 281–83 non-Western influences, 9–10, 53, 70 Nonesuch Records, 239–40, 298, 312–14, 313f nonsense syllables, 283–85 NORAD, 160, 161 Northern Rhodesia. See Zambia “Not Fade Away” (Holly), 22–23 Notations (Cage), 223–24, 225, 230–31 “Notes on the Ensemble” (1973), 230 Notre Dame Cathedral, 28–29 Nsenga people, 281 Nyakusa people, 282–83 Nyman, Michael, 54–57, 95, 242, 259–60, 326

Index

objective processes, 161 O’Brien, Kerry, 9–10 Occidental Africa, 259–67 Occidental music, 53 Octet (1979). See Eight Lines (1983) “Ode to Joy” (Beethoven), 279–80 Of Grammatology (Derrida), 118–19 “Oh! Dat Watermelon” (Schoolcraft), 226–27 Oh Dem Watermelons (1965), 226–27, 230–31 watermelon-canon chord transposed to A major, 24f, 24–25 Okukonera, 263–65 Okunaga, 263–64 Okwawula, 263–64 Omukonezi, 263–65 Omunazi, 263–64 Omwawuzi, 263–64 onto-theology, 131–32 The Orb, 298 organum, medieval, 28–29, 36–37, 265–66 Orientalism, 307 orthography, 124–27 “Video Handwriting,” 121–22, 124–26 oscillating chords, 205–10, 207–9f, 211 Otte, Hans, 55, 56–57 overdetermination, 10 Owens, Larry, 323 Oxford History of Western Music (Taruskin), 24–25 Page, Tim, 245–46 Paine, Herbert, 146t, 148–49 Palestinian-Israeli conflict. See ArabIsraeli conflict Pangwa people, 282–83 paradiddling, 206

385

parallelism, 268, 282–83 pattern contours, 315f See also inherent patterns and rhythms Patterson, Benjamin, 328–29 Paul Sacher Foundation. See Paul Sacher Stiftung (PSS), Basel Paul Sacher Stiftung (PSS), Basel, 8, 77, 79, 261, 264 digital holdings, 187 paper archive and context, 180 Steve Reich Collection, 179–88, 219 Pendulum Music (1968), 54 Performer (software), 247, 251 Perloff, Carey, 102 Pérotin, 28–29, 53, 306 perspectival embodiment, 19–38 Perspectives of New Music (journal), 3–4 Petrushka (Stravinsky), 36–37 Phaedrus (Plato), 120–21 The Pharoahs, 23 Phase Patterns (1970), 54, 57, 206 phase shifting and phasing, 9–10, 154, 229, 244–45, 261, 262 in African music, 261, 262, 277–78, 294–99 double, 291–92, 292f Phase Patterns (1970), 54, 57, 206 Piano Phase (1967), 3–5, 9, 54, 78, 79, 191, 192–93, 217–31, 218t, 221–22f, 223–31t, 237f, 244–45, 264–65 Reed Phase (1966), 221–22, 230–31 Violin Phase (1967), 61, 229–30, 241, 264–65 Phase Shifting Pulse Gate, 28–29, 306–7, 323–25, 336–38 Phase to Face (documentary), 221 Philips Exeter Academy, New Hampshire, 220 philosophical perspectives, 10

386

Philosophy of New Music (Adorno), 10 Phrygian mode, 197–98 Piano Phase (1967), 191, 219, 244–45 B minor motive, 219, 221f, 221 comparison with Eight Lines, 59–60, 60f contribution to Notations (Cage), 223–24, 225 early versions, 219–20, 220t, 228, 230–31 European performances (1970s), 54 evolution, 9, 217–31, 218–20t, 231t harmonic structure, 78, 79, 193 improvisation, 226–29, 230–31, 237f inherent patterns, 264–65 modality, 192–93 opening lines, 59–60, 60f pitch classes, 78, 192–93 premiere (January 1967), 219–22, 221f, 223t, 228–29, 230–31 stacked-fourth motive, 219, 221f, 221 stacked-hand disposition, 221, 222f structure, 3–5 tonality, 193 Ugandan xylophone music link, 264 Picasso, Pablo, 93 Piece for Four Pianos (Feldman), 224 Piekut, Benjamin, 218–19 Piersig, Fritz, 56–57 Pierson, Marcelle, 119 pitch. See also specific works Reich’s approach to pitch and harmonic content, 10, 75–90, 192, 265–66 Pitch Charts (1964), 218 The Plastic Haircut (1963), 29, 141–42 Platonism, 120–21

Index

Plato’s cave, 117–20 Polaczek, Dietmar, 57–58 political events, 11–12, 17–106, 96t Polyphonies et Polyrhythmies Instrumentales d’Afrique Centrale (Arom), 270–71 Poncé, Charles, 338 popular culture, 5–6 Portraits (1975), 119, 122–23 postminimalism, 6–7, 78 “Postscript to a Brief Study of Balinese and African Music” (1974), 305, 307 postural yoga (Āsana), 332. See also yoga Potter, Keith, 4, 9, 10, 53–54, 56–57, 59, 78, 86–87, 140, 224 Powers of Ten (Eames and Eames), 32 Prado, Pérez, 26 Prāṇāyāma, 332, 338–39 precursor texts and traditions, 70 Prescott, Megan and Kathryn (Skins), 6 presence metaphysics of, 117–20 self-presence, 118–19 Pro Musica Nova festival, Bremen, 55, 56–58 Procol Harum, 36–37 Professional Composer (software), 185–86, 247, 248–49, 251 “Change Rhythm …” option, 250 “Merge Staves” feature, 249 “Transpose Interval” command, 248–49 “Transpose Key …” option, 250 “Variations” menu, 248, 249, 250 Professor Longhair, 26 Progressive Labor Party, 152 protest music, 144 “The Proxy” (RJD2), 298 Psalms, 131–32

Index

PSS. See Paul Sacher Stiftung, Basel psychedelic drugs, 34 psychedelic science fiction, 19–38 psychedelic studio effects, 29 publishing industry, 252 Pulsa group, 32 Pulse Music (1969), 28–29, 325 pulses and pulsing, 1, 35–36, 335 maraca pulses, 22–23, 27, 31, 35–36 Music for 18 Musicians “Opening Pulse,” 202, 203f, 204, 205, 335–37 Music for 18 Musicians “Pulses” sequences, 2, 195, 197, 199, 200, 204, 212, 335–37 oscillating chords, 205–10, 207–9f, 211 in popular culture, 5–6 Pymm, John, 9, 10 Quinn, Ian, 24–25 radicalism, 103 Radio Bremen, 55 Radio Frankfurt, 59 Radio Rewrite (2012), 6–7, 298 Radiohead, 6–7, 298 “Ramayana Monkey Chant” (Golden Rain LP, Nonesuch Explorer), 310, 318t Ramble John Krohn (RJD2), 298 rattle (hosho), 285 Reagan, Ronald, 241 Reagan/Thatcher era, 3 real Americanism, 167 reconciliatory aesthetics, 93–106 recorded voice, 10 grain of voice, 162–64 Reich’s selection of, 79–81, 82 recording, tutti, 270–71 Reed Phase (1966), 221–22, 230–31 Refrain (Stockhausen), 224 Reich, Ezra, 162–63, 252

387

Reich, Steve. See also specific works, by title acoustical music, 329–30 on Adorno’s Philosophy of New Music, 10 aesthetic approach, 36–37, 242–43 African drumming studies, 260, 305 African influences, 259–99 ancientness, 11–12 approach to pitch and harmonic content, 6–7, 10, 75–90, 192, 265–66 as artist, 55–56 augmentation technique, 31, 32 autobiographical approach, 172 on avant-garde, 230 on J. S. Bach, 171, 245 Balinese gamelan music studies, 305, 310, 316–17, 318t Balinese influences, 309–16 on Bartók, 245 canon, 243–45 commercial success, 245–46 commissions, 55–56, 59, 239–40, 240t, 241, 246, 247 as composer, 12, 55–56, 78, 239–40, 326 compositional aesthetics, 264–65, 297 compositional practice, 29, 172, 249–50, 251–52, 259, 261–62, 264, 278–79, 281, 294–95, 326 compositional tools, 247–52 on control, 328, 329, 332–33 creative development, 60 critical reception, 3–4, 19–22, 54–59, 239–41, 245–46, 303, 317, 325, 326, 328, 329–31, 337 development of, 78, 247 diatonicism, 191, 210 on Different Trains, 75

388

Reich, Steve (cont.) digital development, 247 as director, 164–71 discussions with Nelson, 141 docu-music style, 9, 159–73 e-sketches, 248, 249, 250–52, 250t on Eight Lines, 59 1980s compositions, 239–52, 240t on electronics, 326–28 in Europe during the 1970s, 54–59 in fiction, 1–2, 5–6 film interests, 162–63 on Four Organs, 20–21 global success, 55 hostility toward, 3–4 hybrid-analog (paper plus tape) media approach, 181–82 hybrid-digital (paper, data, back again) media approach, 182–87 impersonal approach, 161 on improvisation, 34–35, 218, 219, 229–30, 307 influence of, 5–6 inspirations, 11–12 Jewish heritage, 338 Jewish music, 113–32 logocentrism, 9, 127–30 melodic techniques, 61 metaphysics of presence, 117–20 new beginning, 251–52 on 9/11, 159, 160, 172–73 non-Western influences, 9–10, 53 notebooks (papers), 181, 249–50 phase relations, 278 popularity, 56 pulsing technique, 1, 5–6 repetition technique, 131 resulting patterns, 229–30, 262–63, 264–65 sampling from, 297–98 sampling techniques, 2 self-assessment, 245

Index

sketch tapes, 182 sketchbooks, 24–25, 27, 32, 33f, 200–5 sound collage for the Harlem Six, 139–54 stacked-fourths style, 197–98, 219, 221f, 221 stacked-hands practice, 221, 222f stop-action sound technique, 163–64, 169–70 as student of the Torah, 131–32 tape compositions, 58, 262 as taxi driver, 141–42 terminology, 243–46, 251–52, 262–63 theory of political impotence, 94–95 topics or themes, 89 training, 29 treble-dominated approach, 199 vernacular influences, 36–38 Western classical influence, 53–70 working methods, 247–48, 249, 251 world music studies, 305 on WTC 9/11, 163 yoga practice, 328, 332, 333–34, 338–39 Reich Remixed (1999), 6–7 Reich studies, 3–5, 8, 12 Rembang, I Nyoman, 305 remixes, 6–7, 298 repetition, 111–73, 317 in The Cave, 115–17 digital, 128–32 in Jewish music, 113–32 minimalist, 192, 225, 303–4 replication, 11 restoration, 11–12 resulting patterns or rhythms, 229–30, 262–63, 264–65. See also specific works

Index

“Resulting Patterns” in Electric Counterpoint (1987), 249 Rethinking Music (Cook and Everist), 5 rhythm and rhythmic patterns, 124–27, 244–45, 260, 262–63. See also specific works asymmetric patterns, 287–89 cak rhythms, 310–12, 311f inherent rhythm, 260, 261, 262–63, 264–65, 287–88 Kecak, 310 resulting patterns, 229–30, 262–63, 264–65 rhythmic oddity, 288–89 3-2 clave rhythm, 26f, 26 tresillo rhythms, 26f, 26–27, 31 rhythmic augmentation, 60–61 Rice, Mrs., 146t, 152 Rice, Robert, 145 Rich, Alan, 3–4, 55–56 Richards, Keith, 27 Riley, Terry, 225, 262 Riskin, Shlomo, 98–99 The Rite of Spring (Stravinsky), 20–21 rituals spirit possession, 264–65 trance, 311 RJD2 (Ramble John Krohn), 298 Roach, Max, 144 Roberts, Dallas, 5–6 rock music, 36–37 rock organ quartets, 21–22 Rockwell, John, 335 Rolling Stone, 338 Rolling Stones, 22–23, 27 “Rome” section of the CIVIL warS (Glass & Wilson), 56 Rose, Barbara, 259–60 Roszak, Theodore, 330 Rothko Chapel, Houston, 240t royalty payments, 10, 154 rumba, 22–23

389

Rushdie, Salman, 101–2 Rushkoff, Douglas, 337–38 “Russian Dance” (Stravinsky), 36–37 Rycroft, David, 281–82 Sam the Sham and the Pharoahs, 23 sampling Radio Rewrite (2012), 6–7, 298 from Reich, 297–98 speech, 76, 79–81, 82 techniques, 2 San Francisco Mime Troupe, 55, 105–6, 143, 152 San Francisco Symphony, 240t San Francisco Tape Music Center, 29, 55, 262 Sandow, Gregory, 242 sanghyang trance rituals, 311 Saxophone Phase. See Reed Phase (1966) “Say Man” (Diddley), 22–23 Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) (Bowie), 297–98 Scherzinger, Martin, 9–10, 161 Schola Cantorum, 58 Schonberg, Harold C., 3–4, 19–22, 34, 36 Schoolcraft, Luke, 226–27 Schumann, Robert, 36–37 Schwarz, K. Robert, 3–4, 59, 142, 161, 199, 242, 244–45 Schwerner, Michael, 143–44 Schwerner, Nathan, 143–44 science fiction, psychedelic, 19–38 Scott-Heron, Gil, 34–35 secondary witness, 106 Sekar Jaya, 317 self-presence, 118–19 Sellars, Peter, 97 Semar Pegulingan, 305 Semitic cantillation, 61, 62–63, 114, 123. See also Hebrew biblical cantillation or chant

390

Sender, Ramon, 332 sensory deprivation tanks, 34 Serra, Richard, 259–60 Sextet (1985), 6, 78–79, 240t, 244, 295–97 Shandar LP recording, 57 Shannon, Del, 23 Sheraton-Palace Hotel, San Francisco, 142 Shmira, 167–68 Shona people: Mbira dza Vadzimu music, 278, 281, 289–91 Shondells, 23 “short horn polyphonie” in Electric Counterpoint (1987), 250, 250t Shorter, Wayne, 27–28 Sibelius (software), 247–48 Silver Apples, 32 “Sinom Ladrang” (Bali: Gamelan Semar Pegulingan/Gamelan of the Love God LP, Nonesuch), 312–16, 313–15f, 318t Sinti, I Wayan, 305 Six Day War, 98–99 Six Marimbas. See Six Pianos (1973) Six Pianos (1973), 60–61, 78, 240t, 261–62, 304 sketch studies, 177–252 sketch tapes, 182 sketchbooks, 24–25, 27, 32, 33f, 200–5 doodles (1969), 33f notebooks (papers), 181, 249–50 Skins (BBC), 5–6 Slow Motion Sound (1967), 28–29, 169–70 SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), 98 Snow, Michael, 259–60 Socrates, 120–21 Sogba or Sogo dances, 287

Index

Solie, Ruth, 4 “Someday My Prince Will Come” (Davis), 24f, 24–25 Sontag, Susan, 259–60 Soul of Mbira (Berliner), 285 “Sound of Africa” series (Tracey), 281–82 The Sound of Two Hands (Lansky), 297–98 Source magazine, 94–95 South German Radio, Stuttgart, 240t Southern Rhodesia. See Zimbabwe space travel, imaginary, 30–31, 31f, 32–34, 36–37 “Speak No Evil” (Shorter), 27–28 The Spectator, 326 speech and identity, 111–73 music based on, 154 natural, 116 New York accents, 167 writing-as-speech, 127, 129–30 speech melodies, 83–84, 84f, 117–18 speech samples, 75–76 The Cave, 115–17 City Life recordings, 162–63 Different Trains source material, 165 in Jewish music, 113–32 Reich’s selection of, 79–81, 82 WTC 9/11 source material, 162–63, 164–65, 165f Spies, Walter, 310 spirit possession rituals, 264–65 spiritual minimalism, 6–7 St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, 240t stacked fourths, 197–98, 219, 221f, 221 stacked fifths, 170–71, 197–98 stacked hands, 221, 222f Stafford, Frank, 144, 146t, 149, 151

Index

Star Trek (NBC): title cue music, 30–31, 31f, 36–37 Stark, Judith, 163 Stella, Frank, 69, 259–60 Steve Reich Collection, 9, 77, 179–88, 219 digital section, 184 hybrid-analog (paper plus tape) media, 181–82 hybrid-digital (paper, data, back again) media, 182–87 papers (notebooks), 181 sketch tapes, 182 tape archive, 182 work in progress, 187–88 Steve Reich Ensemble, 124 Stockhausen, Karlheinz, 159, 223–24 Stoltzman, Richard, 240t stop-action sound, 163–64, 169–70 Straight Arrow Press, 338 Stravinsky, Igor, 20–21, 36–37, 245 Strickland, Edward, 4 Stringfellow, William, 143 Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), 98 Studies in African Music (Jones), 260, 261, 262–63, 264, 265–66, 277–78, 304–5 studio effects, psychedelic, 29 Suárez, Juan, 162–63 Subotnik, Morton, 328–29 Sugar, Frank and Margit, 144–45, 151 Sumandhi, I Nyoman, 305, 312–14, 316–17 “Super Bad” (Brown), 27 Suzuki, Dean, 224 Syman, Stefanie, 332 “Sympathy for the Devil” (Rolling Stones), 22–23 Symphony no. 1, mvt. 1 (Mahler), 31f

391

ta’amim (accent markings), 114, 119 Tage der Neuen Musik festival, Hannover, 55 tantric traditions, 333 Tanzania, 282–83 tape compositions, 181–82. See also specific works African influence in, 278 hybrid-analog (paper plus tape) media approach, 181–82 magnetic tapes, 181–82 multitrack tape, 242 performance tapes, 181–82 sketch tapes, 182 tape loops, 262 tape reversal, 29, 34 tape slowdown effects, 29 Tapera, Jege A., 281 Taruskin, Richard, 24–25, 89, 159 technique, 331 technocracy, 330–31, 335 technology, 323–39 computers, 247–52 music notation software (MNS), 247–50, 251–52 Tehillim (1981), 2, 114–16, 131, 170–71, 239–40 commissioning, 240t gankogui/makwa patterns, 295–97 harmonics, 78–79 television, 5–6 Tembres, Wayan, 317 temporal distortions, 76, 163 Tenzer, Michael, 9–10 terminology, music, 243–46, 251–52, 262–63 terrorism, 93, 95–97, 113–14. See also WTC 9/11 (2010) testimonial aesthetics, 76 Texan accents, 166–67 Text and Commentary (Korot), 95

392

theater documentary music theater, 75, 93 political efficacy of, 105–6 Théâtre de la Musique, Paris, 54 The Thin White Duke (Bowie), 297–98 Thomas, Michael Tilson, 7, 19–22, 34–35 Thomas, Mildred, 146t, 152 Thomas, Walter, 152 Three Movements (1986), 6, 240t Three Tales (2002), 2, 75–76, 89, 97, 103, 161, 163, 188 3-2 clave rhythm, 26f, 26 time-stretching and temporal distortions, 76, 163 timelines, 287–88 timing, 337–38 Tomlinson, Gary, 119–20 Tommy James and the Shondells, 23 tonality Music for 18 Musicians, 191–212 new, 194–95 putative, 79 topics or themes, 89 Torah, 131–32 Hebrew cantillation or chanting of, 37–38, 61, 62–63, 64–66, 70, 114, 119, 123 The Torture of Mothers (Nelson), 139, 143, 145–48, 152, 153 totalitarianism, 58, 331 Tourine, Alain, 331 Tracey, Andrew, 278, 285, 305 Tracey, Hugh, 277, 278, 281–82, 305 traditional music, 37–38, 277, 297 traditionalism, 2 trance rituals, 311 translation, simultaneous, 123–24 treble-dominated approach, 199 Tregear, Peter, 173 tresillo rhythms, 26f, 26–27, 31

Index

Tubby, King, 32 Tudor, David, 328–29 Turner, Fred, 330, 331 tutti recording, 270–71 tuwule or tutuwule, 271, 273 Two Variations on a Watermelon. See Improvisations on a Watermelon (1966) Uganda, 264–65 Ennanga music, 278 Liganda people, 298–99 xylophone music, 262–63, 264, 283 ugliness, 11–12 Umrhube mouthbow, 281 University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), 316–17 University of Ghana, 260 University of Legon (Ghana), 281–82 variations, 2 hand-over-hand, 227–28 Variations for Vibes, Pianos and Strings (2005), 2 Variations for Winds, Strings, and Keyboards (1979), 2, 170 Variations on a Watermelon. See Improvisations on a Watermelon (1966) Veal, Michael, 22–23 ventriloquism, musical, 292 Vermont Counterpoint (1982), 240t, 241–42, 243–44, 245–46, 249–50 vernacular music, 36–38 Vesalii Icones (Davies), 19–20 video, documentary music, 75, 93 “Videotape and a Composer” (1975), 119 Village Theater, Lower Manhattan, 154 Village Voice, 242, 337

Index

violence: artistic responses to, 162 Violin Phase (1967), 61, 241 inherent patterns, 264–65 resulting patterns, 229–30 updated version (See Vermont Counterpoint (1982)) Visama Vṛtti Prāṇāyāma, 338–39 vocabulary, music, 243–46, 251–52, 262–63 voice grain of, 162–64 recorded, 10, 79–81, 82 self-present, 118–19 in text, 124–27 Vox Continental organs, 23 Wagner, Richard, 97–98 Wala people, 282–83 Walker, Junior (Jr.), 37–38, 262 Warburton, Dan, 4 Wasserman, Emily, 329 Wasserpfeifen in New York: Musikalische Avantgarde zwischen Ideologie und Elektronik (Water Pipes/Bongs in New York: Musical AvantGarde Between Ideology and Electronics) (documentary), 326, 327f, 328–29 “watermelon” harmony, 24f, 24–25 Watson, Chris, 247 Wayfarer’s prayer, 173 WDR (Westdeutscher Rundfunk), 54–55, 328–29 We Insist! Freedom Now (Candid Records), 144 Weill, Kurt, 93 The Well-Tempered Clavier (Bach), 167–71 Prelude no. 1, 168, 169f, 169 West African drumming, 260. See also African music

393

West German Radio, Cologne, 240t Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR), 54–55, 328–29 Western art music, 251–52 Western classical tradition, 53–70, 79 “A Whiter Shade of Pale” (Procol Harum), 36–37 Whitesell, Lloyd, 140 “Whitey on the Moon” (Scott-Heron), 34–35 Whitney Museum of American Art, 323 The Who, 22–23 “Whole Lotta Love” (Led Zeppelin), 27 Wilson, Ransom, 240t, 241 Wilson, Robert, 56 witness, secondary, 106 Wlodarski, Amy Lynn, 76, 106 Wollheim, Richard, 259–60 Woodley, Ronald, 67, 79 “Wooly Bully” (Sam the Sham and the Pharoahs), 23 word(s) logocentrism, 9, 127, 128–29, 130 political words, 11–12 Reich’s selection of words and voices, 79–81 World to Come (afterlife), 167–71, 173 World to Come (Concerto) (Lang), 167–71 World Trade Center 9/11 attacks, 95–97, 113–14, 159–60, 164 1993 bombing, 161, 172 World’s Fair (1964), 150–51 Wright, Robin, 5–6 writing-as-speech, 127, 129–30 Writings about Music (1974), 7, 217, 229–30, 243, 305

394

Writings on Music, 1965–2000 (2002), 5, 7, 139, 217 wtc. See World to Come (Concerto) (Lang) “WTC” (initials), 167–71 WTC 9/11 (2010), 9, 89 “9/11,” 160 “2010,” 160 autobiographical elements, 172 digital documents, 188 docu-music style, 159–73 harmonic reductions, 169, 170–71f, 170–71 interviews, 164–65, 165t, 166–67 opening, 162–63, 170f pitch framework, 167 source material, 162–63, 164–65, 165f stop-action sound, 163 third movement, 167–68, 169–70, 170f “WTC,” 160 xenophobia, 113–14 Xhosa Umrhube mouthbow, 281 Xizambi friction bow, 281 xylophone music, 262–63, 264, 283 Amadinda, 298–99 Banda Linda scale, 270 Yale University, 32 yaviri, 271

Index

yoga, 9–10, 328, 331–32, 333–34, 335, 337, 338–39 Hatha Yoga, 332, 333 postural (Āsana), 332 Yom Kippur War, 98–99 You Are (Variations) (2004), 2, 295–97 “You Really Got Me” (The Kinks), 27 Young, La Monte, 37–38 “Young Turks,” 246 Zambia, 261, 264–66 Bemba people, 298–99 Icila dance, 262–63, 265–66, 278, 283–86, 289–91, 298–99 Lala people, 277–78, 298–99 Zezuru people: makwa handclapping patterns, 283–89, 286–88f, 293–97, 298–99 Zimbabwe, 264–65 Bira ceremony, 286 Korekore people, 298–99 makwa handclapping patterns, 283–89, 286–88f, 293–97, 298–99 Matepe music, 278 Mbira dza Vadzimu music, 278, 281, 289–91 rhythmic patterns, 287 Zionism, 98–100 zither music, 262–63 Zulu praise poetry, 281