Forgive the pun, but the American composer Steve Reich has had his finger on the pulse of Western music for over six decades. Like the rudimentary shapes and colors of Sol LeWitt's deceptively simple-looking wall drawings, Reich's pulse is an elemental force and a rigorously applied building block.
At its most essential, Reich describes his work in terms of variations of the "Row, Row, Row Your Boat" round or canon. But in Reich's hands, the simple musical formula becomes complex, and ultimately transcendent. It's "a new twist on a very old technique," he told me. And that basic familiarity is key to how and why it works.
Reich has invented, developed and evolved interlocking patterns in his music since the day he gave a pulse away to his friend Terry Riley, suggesting that the musicians could stay together better if they had a steady beat in Riley's In C, the piece that helped launch minimalism in 1964.
The pulse is Reich's muse, his medium, his obsession. One that has found a full palette of expression over a long career. From his early work with tape loops on pieces like It's Gonna Rain, where he developed his "phasing" technique, to his 1970s masterwork Music for 18 Musicians to his speech melody pieces like Different Trains and his recent religious works, you can measure Reich's world — and ours — through his pulses. And at 88 years old, Reich is still writing music.
Reich's pulse has many followers. And, considering the countless accolades and awards, he's modest regarding his influence. His music, which is routinely performed (at least 14 pieces in seven countries this month), has fractured traditional classical borderlines, adored by the likes of Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood, and sampled by rappers JPEGMAFIA and Madlib, and producers DJ Spooky and The Orb.
From his winter home in Southern California, where he's working on a new large-scale piece, premiering around his 90th birthday, Reich joined a video call to talk about his long career, the new 27-disc box set of his music — basically, everything he's ever written — and the pulse that keeps him going.
You'd be tempted to call him a fast-talking New Yorker, but perhaps Reich's verbal deportment is as much a mirror of his music — quickly paced, with a flurry of ideas that interleave like gears of a clock, beating steady time.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Tom Huizenga: The last time we spoke was spring 2020, when COVID-19 was ramping up, there were no vaccines and everyone was frightened half to death. You were in Southern California for the winter, as you are once again. Now, five years later, it's a good time to check in with you to see how you are doing and how has life changed for you?
Steve Reich: Since COVID, the whole world seems to have changed a bit. I've been working away as a composer, and the works are played, I'm happy to say. But basically, for Beryl, my wife, and I, and our son Ezra who's out here, things have continued more or less as is.
But for me, time hasn't continued as is. The pulse of time has sped up dramatically over the last five years. And I'm thinking about how pulse and time are so integral to your music. Has the speed of time changed for you?
Tom, I've got bad news for you. As you get older, time seems to pass faster. I've noticed that. I'm 88 years old now, and it seems like things go "blink" and the day is gone. So hang on, because you might just find it getting faster yet.
When I was about 12, my parents bought me a snare drum. I loved it. Eventually, that grew into a small drum kit. I read that you also started playing the snare drum as a teen. Why did you want to be a drummer?
At the age of 14, for the first time, I heard in quick succession The Rite of Spring by Igor Stravinsky — on recording — the Fifth Brandenburg Concerto by J.S. Bach and Charlie Parker, Miles Davis and drummer Kenny Clarke. And it was exposure to that music that changed my life. I loved music but, I mean, this was a whole other level of attraction and love.
And I had a friend who said we have to start a band, modeled on Miles Davis and Kenny Clark. And I said, "Okay, I'll be the drummer." And I started studying with Roland Kohloff, who became the timpanist with the New York Philharmonic. And I started snare drum with him. It turned out that I took to it with a great deal of enthusiasm, much more than I ever had with my piano lessons. So that was a very formative time, which included studying percussion for the first time.
Your first compositions, in the early 1960s, were experiments with tape and tape loops. What was so interesting about tape loops then?
When I discovered tape loops what interested me was putting on a tape of speech and beginning to hear the speech melody.
When we speak, "da-da-dum," we almost sing — especially kids, who have less control over the larynx and they get emotional and you can really hear their excited interjections. If you record them and play them back a few times, you hear the exact pitches involved. And suddenly the speech melody becomes incredibly obvious. And if you have an incredibly obvious speech melody like the Black preacher Brother Walter, who I recorded in Union Square in San Francisco, then what is already melodic becomes overpowering.
Brother Walter is the preacher featured in your piece It's Gonna Rain. How did you discover this tape loop technique that you ended up calling "phasing" which gave you the early pieces It's Gonna Rain and Come Out?
I was listening to recordings of Brother Walter [saying], "It's gonna rain," and I had two Wollensaks — these are like $100 tape recorders back in those days. And I had this idea in my head, I wanted to make a kind of canon where you have the two versions of Brother Walter going: "It's gonna, it's gonna, it's gonna, it's gonna rain, rain, rain, rain."
To do that, I tried to make two loops which were as identical as possible of him saying that phrase. And I put them on the two machines and I pushed the two playback buttons at the same time, and miraculously they were exactly in unison. Now the odds against that are pretty steep, right? But that's what it was. I had my headphones on at the time and noticed right away it started to sort of move in the center of my head to the left side, meaning that the machine on the left was slightly faster. And it began to reverberate against the other recording, and eventually it moved further out of sync. Then slowly it worked its way back into unison. I just sat there listening, thinking, wow, this is so much more interesting than what I had in mind. You have the two starting in unison and gradually slipping out of sync or out of phase.
When you look back at those early tape pieces like It's Gonna Rain and Come Out, do you see the seeds of what would become your music?
Oh, sure. Basically, for me, it's the idea of canon or round — and the variations thereof. And if you have very short melodies which are just really "da-ba-da-dem" — like "it's gonna rain" — that technique has a very different effect.
Then, very quickly, you wanted to see if you could replicate the tape phasing with actual musicians and instruments, which is one way that seed had started to blossom.
I did It's Gonna Rain and Come Out and then I thought: "I'm going to spend the rest of my life cutting up tapes? No way!" So I made up a pattern on the piano, which is the pattern that begins Piano Phase. I recorded it and made a loop out of it. And then I played the loop back sitting at the keyboard and started out in unison and then gradually tried to make it as slow as possible, and get 1/16 note ahead. And I found, wow, I can do it. I'm not like the machine, but I can do it. You close your eyes and you have to have incredible control over your tempo so that you just gradually move it, hold, hear that relationship, then gradually do it again.
I had a very good friend, Arthur Murphy, who was another student at Juilliard at the time. He was a very good pianist and I said, "Art, we've got to try this." We were offered a small gig at a college in New Jersey, and we went over to rehearse and there were two pianos. So I said, "OK, here we go. All right, you stay put. I'll get gradually faster." And? Look mom, no tape! It worked. And that was a jubilant moment in my life, for sure.
You moved back to New York from San Francisco around 1966. I'm curious if you have memories of what the artistic scene was like back in New York in the late '60s.
Artistically, the abstract expressionists, Jackson Pollock and de Kooning were well-established. And these young artists like Rauschenberg and Johns were introducing pop art. And then very quickly after that came Frank Stella and Sol LeWitt and others and minimal art.
What was going on musically was basically everybody was under the spell of John Cage. And those who weren't — those who were more academically inclined — were under the spell of Boulez and Berio and Stockhausen. And both Cage and Boulez and company had one thing in common: There was no comprehensible melodic or harmonic information in that music. The music was written to avoid just those things. And don't get me wrong, Boulez is a genius, an incredible conductor. His Rite of Spring is the greatest I've ever heard. And Berio was one of my teachers and a lovely and very open guy. John Cage was a remarkable man, and I had a good deal of contact with him. But, you know, it ain't me, babe. That's not what I want to hear.
I'd much rather hear John Coltrane and Miles Davis and Kenny Clarke and learn something from that. And I would say to pinpoint one of the key moments for me is John Coltrane's Africa, which is 16 minutes in the key of E. How does he make E work for 16 minutes? Well, if you have incredible, complex, gorgeous and sometimes just screaming from the soprano sax, you've got melodic interest. If you have Elvin Jones, who's an incredibly polyrhythmic drummer, all over the place, then you've got rhythmic interest. And if you've got Eric Dolphy orchestrating, where shrieks sound like elephants coming through the jungle on French horns, then you've got incredible timbral interest. So, put it all together, there are other ways to have intense musical development by staying put, harmonically.
Around that time, were you responsible for organizing your own gigs — like Meredith Monk and Philip Glass did?
Actually, Phil and I briefly had a moving company together. That didn't last very long. Carrying heavy couches down steps in the Lower East Side is not the best way to make money. But we created the Guggenheim series of concerts and also, through our friend Richard Serra, the sculptor, set up concerts at the Whitney Museum. In those days, there was real personal contact between composers and visual artists. And for me it was particularly Sol LeWitt and Richard Serra. Through them, the people who ran the Whitney, people who ran the Guggenheim, were open to the fact of having concerts as part of a show since the artists were all sort of banded together anyway. That doesn't seem to have continued, but it certainly was happening very strongly in the '60s, and I was definitely a part of that.
Just after that time, you formed your own ensemble. Philip Glass and Meredith Monk both founded their own groups early on, mainly to teach the musicians how to perform their pieces. Was that the same for you?
Yes, I would say that. My first ensemble was basically Arthur Murphy and Jon Gibson, who is a saxophone and clarinetist from San Francisco, who came back East when I did. Then I got a call from Russell Hartenberger, around 1970, saying, "I heard you have been to Ghana studying drumming, and I'm going to do the same thing. Have you got any travel tips?" My big tip was: Make sure you get your shots, because I got malaria while I was there. But I said, "I've been working on a percussion piece (which was Drumming), I would love you to come down and maybe join the ensemble." And he did.
The bottom line is that Russell became the right hand of my ensemble. And he brought in Bob Becker, who is one of the great percussionists of his generation. Then James Preiss came in from the Manhattan School of Music. And all of a sudden I was surrounded with really first-rate percussion players, right around the time that Drumming premiered in 1971.
There were a lot of rehearsals in those early days. But today it seems so different. Many ensembles can just pick up a Steve Reich piece and play it, with just a couple rehearsals, because it's part of our musical DNA now. That must feel satisfying.
That's absolutely true. The reason it took us so long is because everybody had to learn the basic language. Also, there wasn't a pool of players. If somebody couldn't make a rehearsal, somebody else would have to come in who hadn't the faintest idea how to do this. We wanted to develop a level [of playing] so that we would have the kind solidity you hear when the Juilliard Quartet plays Beethoven. And to do that in those days, we had to really put in a lot of rehearsal time, and we did have that solidity. It was a pleasure playing in my ensemble.
You also hit on something which is a general musical reality. When Bartók wrote his string quartets, people would look at him and say, "Are you kidding? You expect us to do that?" But a couple of quartets dug in and spent time and really rehearsed them and came up with beautiful versions of them. Anything that really introduces new techniques and new difficulties is going to first appear in the hands of specialists.
Drumming, your first large, ambitious piece, is often linked to your study of West African drumming that you mentioned earlier. You traveled to Ghana in 1970, studied in Accra, came back and then wrote Drumming, which the critic and composer Tom Johnson at the time described in The Village Voice as, "African and European elements so thoroughly fused. Almost as if we really did live in one world." Had you read that quote back then?
I think most composers read the critics, even if they deny it. Yeah, I remember that review and I thought, "Wow, he really got it. How nice." Because I felt, I'm clearly not African, but I'm clearly influenced by that. And, a lot of my friends here are clearly not Indians, but they're obviously influenced by that [music].
Was it a true fusion in your mind?
In my mind, it was what I wanted to do — and do the best possible piece of music I could — with the instruments and the ideas in my head. I fly by the seat of my pants when I'm composing, although I am a very systematic composer. Basically, the absolute root of everything is your instincts, and Drumming is no exception to that. But in fact, I am an American and I am a Westerner. And I did go to Africa. And so all these things are really in me, and that's probably why the piece works because it's not trying to pretend to be something that it's not.
One of your pieces from the 1970s that I love dearly is Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices and Organ from 1973.
Me too.
Maybe it's because it reminds me of the gamelan music I studied and performed in college. Or maybe it's because of the work's warmer timbre and smoother edges. Did it seem like anything of a departure for you?
Oh, I just fell in love with the piece. The idea of simply using the normal Western procedure of mixing instruments in one ensemble. And it was like, wow, what a pleasure to have these different timbres and harmonies happening all the same time. Welcome back to Western music — while keeping all the habits and insights that I acquired in the previous years. And of course, Music for Mallet Instruments is definitely the parent of Music for 18 Musicians.
And it's that piece — Music for 18 Musicians — which is often thought of as your most beloved piece, your masterwork. What is it about the music that continues to appeal to large audiences, especially early on, with the 1978 album that sold very well?
On one level, the answer to the question is "who knows?" On the other hand, it is a piece in which you have to look at everything that's going on. Rhythmically, it continues throughout, more or less, in the same tempo. But a lot of the enunciation of those rhythms is done through pulses on woodwind instruments, which have to take a deep breath. And you feel that organic crescendo and the decrescendo as they run out of breath, running along with the fixed time in the mallet instruments, which can go on as long as you like. I think that combination of impulsive rhythm and organic feeling of a constant, everything sort of running together, is an interesting contradictory combination, which miraculously works very well.
The success of the piece must have had a great effect on you.
Well, it changed my career by giving me a whole lot more listeners and a whole lot more requests for concerts for our ensemble. It was a great shot in the arm. And, temporarily it was a complete block to doing anything further, because I had to measure everything by it. I had to do as good as that, or better, or I can't do anything. And of course, that kind of attitude leads you nowhere.
The album busted through a lot of musical borderlines.
In those days you went into a record store and there was a section for classical records, and [Music for 18] was in those bins. And there were bins for contemporary rock, and it was in those bins. And they had contemporary jazz and it was in those bins. And ethnic music and it was in those bins. It ended up selling over 100,000 copies in the first year. And that was unheard of for a classical record. It was a real event in my life for sure.
Not everyone was immediately thrilled with Music for 18 Musicians. That same critic, Tom Johnson, who sadly passed away late last year, after hearing a preview performance of Music for 18, described you as a "minimalist, turning away from minimalism." Then adding, "I miss the strength, toughness and severity which characterized his early works." But it's important to know that he wasn't actually snubbing the music itself, just reacting to what he called this "sharp stylistic change." Was it a stylistic change for you?
Not at all. It was a continuation of Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices and Organ, which Tom Johnson didn't pay any attention to. And people change, you know? No composer worth two cents is going to do the same piece over and over again. That's an organic change. And Drumming has something which Music for 18 doesn't have, and every piece has something to offer and some pieces have more than others. And Music for 18 put together a lot of pieces in my musical background and new things I also wanted to introduce.
Before Drumming, you immersed yourself in the culture of West African music, but then you turned to your own cultural roots in 1976, when you began studying Hebrew and the Torah. You made a trip to Israel to hear singers from various communities. What led up to that decision?
I had very little Jewish education as a kid. I certainly knew I was Jewish, but it didn't play any active role. And then when I got involved in studying African music and Balinese music, I thought, "Well, gee, I don't know anything about the music of my own culture." So I began to study Hebrew cantillation with a cantor in New York City and with a musicologist. Then I decided I was going to record cantillation from the different strains of mostly Sephardic, non-Western, Jews living in Israel. I found this really remarkable music and I made recordings of it and then wrote an article analyzing the music and tried to present it to people. And the effect it had on me was to write a piece called Tehillim in 1981. Tehillim is the word for Psalms. Literally, it means praises.
I'd like to spend a moment talking about Different Trains, another one of your best-known pieces. It's part autobiographical, about your cross-country train rides as a child from 1939-42, juxtaposed with the train rides that Jews in Europe were forced to take to death camps during that same period. There is so much going on in the music, especially the spoken texts you incorporate, but I'm first wondering if you think any differently about the piece today, some 35 years after you wrote it.
Certainly, anti-Semitism is alive and well in the world today, that's for sure. But I can't say I think of Different Trains in terms of what's going on today. But I think it's one of the best pieces I ever did. You don't get an award for subject matter. You get an award for how well you do something. But sometimes the subject matter will force you to do something better than you would have done without it. And I think that's why it's important. The texts that composers choose, or spoken or written words they choose to set, is going to be important in terms of what they produce, how moved they are.
Different Trains was my own background, my own youth as a kid traveling with Virginia, the woman who took care of me because my parents were divorced. She really was like my mother for the first 10 years of my life. And then juxtaposed with people who I didn't know at all, but who are my age. They had their hands up and they got on a cattle car and they were put in an incinerator — and they're not here. Getting recordings of their voices is a very powerful experience, both in terms of just the fact of it and the fact that it's basically people in my generation. It was something that I lived through. That confluence of realities, I'm sure, had a lot to do with it.
And it comes full circle with your earliest pieces like It's Gonna Rain, because you actually transcribe snippets of speech as melody for the musicians to play with, and off of.
That's absolutely correct. In English, take simple words. How they're said conjures up two entirely different situations in life that we could supply for it. And so the speech melody is an essential part of what's being said. There are languages, in China for example, whereby the meaning is in the melody of the speech, but it really gets to various degrees in any language. People will say, "It isn't what she said, it's how she said it." Speech melody is not just an interesting experiment in the musicality of human speech. It's actually getting into the emotional impact of everyday speech.
I think a lot of people are interested to know how artists create what they create. I suppose for many years you've fielded commissions, right? But what is your beginning, middle and end like? And how do you start?
Actually, the commissions are wonderful, but they're self-sought. In other words, I get in my head what I want to do and then I try to figure out how.
Ah! That's clever.
I learned that from Stravinsky. He was a very astute composer. But the beginning is absolutely the worst part of my life. And that's when the garbage can really begins to overflow, whether it's on the desktop or whether it's pieces of paper being shredded up. Then once I get clear, and that can be the basic harmonic underpinning of the piece, which began with Music for 18, but certainly didn't stop there. Or it can be certain melodic material. Or, in the case of the speech pieces, listening to the speech and trying to arrange it. A lot of spadework goes in at the beginning and you really have to do it right, otherwise you're going to start floundering around in the middle.
This new box set — 27 discs in all — must be strange to hold in your hand, no? Practically everything you've written over nearly six decades. Has putting the set together made you think differently about your collective body of work?
Not on that scale. I mean, it makes me feel very good. It makes me happy that they'll end up in university libraries and probably get stolen piece by piece. [Laughs] It makes me feel very glad that I've been working with Nonesuch all these years. In other words, it's another way of saying the music is going to get out there. The music is going to have a life independently of me. And I think every composer is very concerned with that, whether they say so or not. It's a great thing. And I'm very proud that it happened. And now I'm busily working on the next piece.
Your two most recent pieces — Traveler's Prayer and Jacob's Ladder, which only appear on the new box set — deal with religious themes. Are you thinking more about religion these days?
Absolutely. I'm thinking about both Judaism and religious perspective as I get older. Bach spent his life as an employee of the church, and Stravinsky had the Symphony of Psalms earlier on and a whole bunch of [religious] works at the end of his life. So, I think that's a natural thing.
And Traveler's Prayer is also a little bit of a technical innovation. And that's interesting to be able to do something in your 80s that's not like what you were doing earlier on.
Judaism focuses more on the present, I know, but Jacob's Ladder makes me wonder if you're thinking more about heaven and the idea of the afterlife?
The basic Jewish attitude, to which I agree, is that we have a firm belief that there is an afterlife but we're not going to spend hardly any time thinking about it because we can't, really. But we can be influenced by the quality of the life we're living today. And that will undoubtedly be the foundation of whatever we experience after we're gone.
Because you are now 88, you're blessed with a long view. So where was music when you started out? Where is it going now? And where do you want it to go?
When I started out, in the 1950s and '60s, it was basically the descendants of Arnold Schoenberg doing serial music — namely Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen and Luciano Berio. And in America — in a sense, because Schoenberg was his teacher — John Cage. But through myself and Terry Riley and Phil Glass and Arvo Pärt — by far my favorite European composer — and the slightly younger John Adams, things have completely changed. And I'm very proud to be a part of that. Because I think we've returned "classical music" to the general population of the planet, as opposed to a very small coterie of mostly academically inclined listeners.
A lot of younger composers are carrying that forward again in unseen, wonderful ways. Caroline Shaw, Nico Muhly, Timo Andres and many others are going on in their own distinctive voices, but using the basic materials of melodic interest, harmonic interest in new and fresh ways, drawing from sources both in Western history and from all over the world. And I say, "God bless you. Carry on."
Over the years, you've received a lot of praise. Here are a few quotes: "Reich is our greatest living composer," which is a New York Times blurb on the cover of your book Conversations. Then there's this from Timo Andres, writing in the essays booklet that accompanies the new box set: "For percussionists, Reich's ensemble works have become foundational literature as Beethoven's sonatas are for pianists." What do you do with all the accolades?
You smile and you say, "That's great." And you go and write your piece.
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