Reich @ 70 - An Appreciation
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“No US composer since John Cage has left a wider, deeper mark. Coming from
everywhere, created by a keen and constantly self-refreshing mentality,
this music has gone everywhere.”
–Paul Griffiths |
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Steve Reich. Those two long monosyllables. It is hard to remember that the
name was once unfamiliar, now that the name and the music are everywhere.
Everywhere is where this music came from. Reich’s visit to Ghana in 1970 was
a signal event in recent cultural history. To what had recently become the
first African country to achieve independence from a colonial power, a white
Westerner went to learn—or not so much to learn as to discover that his
musical intuitions chimed with those of his hosts. Later this same Westerner
studied the music of Indonesian metal percussion orchestras. Later still he
set himself to learn Hebrew and the traditions in which it is sung in Jewish
religious practice. And all the time there were the lessons that came from
the classical Western culture in which he was trained—lessons he drew not
only from his teachers (Darius Milhaud and Luciano Berio among them) but also
from Stravinsky, from Bach, and, going back eight centuries, from the medieval
Parisian master Perotin. There were lessons, too, to be learned right here
in his home city of New York—from the grid of the city’s streets and its
ribbons of movement at different speeds, from jazz, from diverse patterns
of speech.
Out of all these lessons and studies came something quite precise and
particular: a musical language instantly recognizable, growing all the
time but never losing its identity. Reich could draw on so much because
he always went for the basics—of beat, measure and short melodic profile.
And he goes on creating anew because the discovery he made in his 20s—that
music could arise from patterns repeating in processes of change—is
inexhaustible.
Constantly reformulating the layout of beats in a measure, or the lengths
of a rotating chain of harmonies, or the sounds of a recurring melodic
phrase, this music belongs to the digital age. And yet the music seems,
too, as ancient as humanity, involved with the ways we think and feel and
move. Placing percussion instruments at the center—whether alone, or as
part of an orchestra, or to support groups of voices and strings—the music
embraces rhythms of pulsation that come naturally to the body. Being made
out of innumerable similar elements, thus conveying information and
experience through the accumulation of the infinitesimal, the music also
accords with what science and insight can say about how ideas and emotions
form within us. While having no use for what is generally meant by “feeling”
in musical performance, the music can yet wield immense power through its
vibrant architectures of sound in motion, not so much expressing as directly
generating effects of excitement and release, of progress and achievement,
of joy, and sometimes of humor. This music can also listen to the sounds of
the world around, including those of human voices. It can observe and report.
It can warn.
No wonder it has found a worldwide audience. Having begun giving concerts
in the late ’60s in Manhattan, most often in museums and galleries, Reich
has been regularly in Europe since the beginning of the ’70s. The
repercussions were soon felt even by one of the most distinguished European
composers, György Ligeti; for younger musicians in all parts of the
world—and writers, dancers, visual artists—they have proved life-changing.
No US composer since John Cage has left a wider, deeper mark. Coming from
everywhere, created by a keen and constantly self-refreshing mentality,
this music has gone everywhere. It will stay.
Paul Griffiths’s most recent book is A Concise History of Western Music.
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