Steve Reich

One can pinpoint with some precision the moment when an already much-maligned term – "minimalism" – suddenly broke free of the rigid premises that had first fueled it, reaching a truly epoch-making turning point. For several of the most important living composers, American and otherwise, the moment of maturity arrived with striking synchrony in 1976: as Paul Hillier notes [1], that year saw the completion not only of Steve Reich's absolute masterpiece, "Music For 18 Musicians", but also the monumental musical-theatrical work by Philip Glass and Robert Wilson, "Einstein On The Beach"; in Europe, Louis Andriessen was finishing "De Staat", freely drawn from Plato's "Republic", the Estonian Arvo Pärt put his signature on his first piece in the tintinnabuli style ("Für Alina", for solo piano), and the Pole Henryk Górecki delivered to the world his poignant Terza Sinfonia, a future bestseller in the live recording released by Nonesuch.

If authors and works so different in character and geographic origin have been loosely grouped under the same macro-genre, it's solely because of their shared desire to return to more essential compositional forms, "disillusioned" with the European avant-garde born out of the Second Viennese School and culminating in the Darmstadt summer courses (the so-called post-Webernism). It was thus in peripheral Europe and, above all, overseas that a different way of conceiving both chamber and orchestral form took shape, one now far removed from Romantic conventions and even further from the bombastic modern and contemporary reinventions – from Edgard Varèse to Krzysztof Penderecki.

It's curious that the coining of the term, at least in this context, is owed to one of the composers who still carries its banner today: in his early articles, critical writings and interviews with his contemporaries, Michael Nyman speaks of minimalism but also, more properly, of "new tonality", confirming the shift away from the offshoots of twelve-tone language. In the United States, meanwhile, critics latched onto the contemporary painting and sculpture movement to draw a direct link with the new generation of composers.
But the term also found justification, at least at first, in the extremely limited use of instrumentation: Philip Glass's first key pieces were written for solo keyboard or violin alone, while the spark behind Steve Reich's musical aesthetic was his discovery of the shifting intersections generated by dialogue between out-of-phase tape loops; pieces such as "It's Gonna Rain" and "Come Out" not only reveal the blueprint of his entire musical aesthetic but also show how, in many cases, the content precedes the overall idea and form of one of his works.

Steve Reich can't stand being considered a conceptual artist: his focus, he has said, has always been on music as a cultural expression first, rather than as a "palette" in which to seek out his own distinctive traits. From his youthful passion for the modal jazz of John Coltrane, in the 60s and 70s Reich devoted himself with growing interest to the study of Ghanaian and Balinese percussive music: not out of some vacuous fascination with the exotic, but for the impersonal quality of a ritualism in which "the participants accept a given situation and add their individual contribution to the details of its elaboration."
His music – like the Indian influences on his fellow travelers La Monte Young and Terry Riley – is opposed to any "museum-like" intent aimed at presenting a distant culture out of its context, whereas Reich instead hopes for a kind of study that inspires "a natural and organic influence" in Western composers. [2] This is the direction his research has taken since "Drumming" (1970-71) onward, in an attempt to absorb the sonic dramaturgy of tribal rites and stiffen their founding elements, crystallizing them into a machine perfectly calibrated in terms of rhythmic and melodic shifts: a process that reaches its peak, after two years of gestation, with the mixed ensemble of "Music For 18 Musicians", released on record in 1978 by what was then a pioneering ECM.

Following pieces for ensembles of all-identical instruments, with equally self-explanatory titles (preceded among others by "Four Organs", "Six Pianos" and "Clapping Music", a prodigious example of musical reduction to its bare essentials), the unusual makeup of the ensemble can only be the result of various experiments that led to a gradual increase in personnel, until reaching a sonic core of unmistakable grandeur. The very stage plan devised for live performance could easily be mistaken for an elaborate sound installation, with the pianos' tails meeting and the marimbas arranged in pairs.
It's a tightly structured yet entirely self-sufficient system, one that does without a conductor in the classical sense and instead relies on signals sent by the vibraphone and bass clarinet at the edge of each of the eleven sections, signaling the imminent move to the next one. These sections spring from as many chords laid out in the opening theme, whose linchpin is precisely that pulse which sets the piece in motion and accompanies it all the way to its mirroring conclusion – a full hour in length in the later CD edition, which, unlike the LP format, preserves its original unbroken flow.

A principle that, at least at the outset, united Glass's additive processes and Reich's phasing was the constant self-generation of musical material through these very techniques, like an unstoppable drive capable of creating endlessly shifting patterns. Because of this, many works belonging to the minimalist style follow a circular structure, and so it is in Reich's magnum opus, where the shifting of accents fuels the melodic lines and provides a natural engine for the development of the piece as a whole, effectively turning it into a chain of "twin" sequences.
In the opening theme, strings, winds, percussion and voices follow the pulsing notes in syncopated step, where each chord corresponds to an inhalation and exhalation of the clarinet, up until the exposition of the eleven main chords that will later be developed in their respective sections, roughly five minutes each. As the composer explains in the liner notes, these chords play the same role as the principal note in the twelfth-century cantus firmus, centered on a single harmonic axis around which choral polyphony would sprout.
But what up close might understandably look like a rigorous scaffolding, seen from a wider perspective, turns out to actually be a "lung" that, in the exact exercise of its function, finds its own harmonious, liberating spontaneity.

"Music For 18 Musicians" was consciously composed with a feeling of self-liberation from rigid structures. I needed to have a strong formal organization because that's how I feel, but once those eleven chords were established at the outset, each section was in some way an invention. Within certain sections you'll find rigid constructions operating in strict canonic relationships, and then they'll be harmonized, purely as a matter of taste with no further justification. Still, the eleven different sections relate to one another like members of a family: some traits will be shared, others will be unique. [3]

The "living" mechanism, in short, escapes both the mathematical coldness of European atonalism and the gamble of Cagean chance, and likewise leaves no room for moments of improvisation: "Once the process is set up and loaded it runs by itself... What I'm interested in is a compositional process and a sounding music that are one and the same thing." [4] At least at first glance, then, Reich's music is always the product of a great many choices, within which the only element of indeterminacy allowed is the one tied to the psychoacoustic effects of overlapping patterns, effects capable of drawing attention to different phrasings and details in each listener's ear; a trait that can already emerge from the mere intersection of two distinct rhythmic/melodic lines, and which, in an ensemble as imposing as this one, further amplifies the resonance of the complex musical organism.

Thus, having laid the groundwork with his early manifesto-works, the New York composer arrives with extreme clarity and resolve at his compositional peak: a monument to the power of music, or rather musics, as living, self-signifying matter; an egocentric dance that reconciles the "new" and "old" world within a universal horizon that knows no cultural distances.
As Alex Ross rightly points out [5], Reich has never shied away from taking sides in political and social debate: his work has grappled from the outset with the question of race in the United States, then with the memory of the Holocaust (the survivors' testimonies in "Different Trains"), with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and, finally, with the unhealed wound of the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers ("WTC 9/11"). But while it logically lacks the heightened expressive quality of programmatic music, within the creative frenzy of its cultural context "Music For 18 Musicians" marks the indirect conquest of feeling, or rather of that primordial pulse that was absent from the drive and formal precision that characterized the founding works of American minimalism.

Notes:
[1] Steve Reich. Writings on Music 1965-2000 (Edited with an introduction by Paul Hillier), OUP USA, 2004 ↑
[2] Steve Reich: an interview with Michael Nyman, Musical Times, 112, marzo 1971, pp. 229-31 ↑
[3] Michael Nyman, Steve Reich: Interview, Studio International, 192, novembre/dicembre 1976, pp. 300-07 ↑
[4] Steve Reich, Music as a Gradual Process, 1968, in “Writings on Music”, pp. 34-6 ↑
[5] Alex Ross, Fascinating Rhythm. Celebrating Steve Reich, The New Yorker, 13 novembre 2006 ↑

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11/02/2018