Searching for Light in ‘The Cave’ : Music: Steven Reich’s most ambitious project yet can be viewed as the culmination of a career.

Like most self-respecting artists coming out of conceptualism, composer Steven Reich has a problem with naming things. Blame it on an artistic nature that resists the status quo and linear explanation.

Reich is defined, historically, as one of the principal figures in the second wave of so-called Minimalists, alongside-- and sometimes in rivalry with-- Philip Glass. These days, the 58-year-old Reich accepts the M-word with a mild resignation bordering on graciousness. “It’s the best of a bad lot,” said the articulate, dark-clad but good-humored composer, ensconced in a Beverly Hills hotel room for an interview. “There are a lot more hideous things that it could have been.”

Two years ago, Reich unveiled his most ambitious and most convention-defying project yet, a multimedia piece called “The Cave,” which was performed in New York and Europe to generally rave reviews. Although the fully staged work won’t come to the West Coast until May of 1997, a recording was released recently on Nonesuch, giving it at least a sonic public availability locally.

“The Cave” examines the conflict between Arabs and Jews. In its staged form, it involves live singers and a small ensemble of musicians, flanked by five oversize video screens showing hypnotic snippets of taped interviews with Israelis, Palestinians and Americans, along with other visual decor. There is sung text, chanted text and, on the video screens, projected text and spoken text. The music is built from “speech melodies,” as well as sampled music and sounds; the mosaic-like libretto is taken from the videotaped interviews, the Koran and the Bible.

What Time magazine called “a tantalizing glimpse of what opera might be like in the 21st Century” began innocently enough. Reich and his wife, artist Beryl Korot, discussed the possibilities of collaborating on a project combining Korot’s growing interest in multiple-screen video and Reich’s manipulation of speech melodies and documentary-like materials, which the composer also deployed in his Grammy-garnering 1988 work “Different Trains.”

Reich recalled: “We had a meeting in November of 1988, and in about five minutes we decided that it had to be about the Cave of Machpelah. What else?” he laughed.

The cave in question, in the town of Hebron on the West Bank, is the burial site of Abraham, a rare place in the Mideast where Arabs and Jews literally come together. Both groups trace their lineage to Abraham--the Jews through his legitimate son Isaac, the Arabs through his outcast son Ishmael. For Reich and Korot, it added up to fertile artistic territory.

“On the one hand, we were after something that would be very contemporary,” Reich said. (“Unfortunately,” he added, in a reference to the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, “too contemporary.”)

“On the other hand, it [had] to be a classic story that really holds up to the demands of music theater. It’s a story that is at the root of Judaism, Christianity and Islam and is also at the root of a lot of what is going on in the Middle East as we speak.”

Together Korot and Reich amassed a body of videotaped interviews, conducted in both East and West Jerusalem, in Hebron, New York City and Austin, Tex., asking people to reflect on the meaning of Abraham and his descendants. Korot pored over the imagery on videotape, which would become the visual scaffolding of “The Cave.” Reich searched it for meaningful and musical bits of spoken text, which he then translated into tones and rhythms, turning them into musical notation by hand and on a computer and cataloguing them for use in the undulating tapestry of the piece.

“At the end of a week, I’d have two or three pages in my music notebook of little phrases, written down in musical notation with the words underneath, and a stack of floppy discs. In a sense, it’s composing in a straitjacket. But, for some people, the more constraints, the better off you are,” he commented.

While “The Cave” may seem a departure for Reich, who has always skirted the operatic muse, it can also be viewed as a culmination of a career that has included not only the speech melodies of “Different Trains,” but speech-to-music alterations dating back to the taped voice used in his 1965 piece, “It’s Gonna Rain,” and the use of Hebrew texts in “Tehillim” (1981).

Reich studied philosophy at Cornell before settling on music, proceeding to studies at Julliard and then earning an M.A. at Mills College in 1963, studying with composer Luciano Berio. But he was a man ahead of--or at least out of--his time, disinterested in the academic fashion of the moment.

“I became a composer because I loved Stravinsky, Bach and jazz. When I finally got into my graduate studies, the musical world was absolutely of one mind. There were two ways to write music, which sounded the same: You could either be aleatoric, a la Cage, or you could be totally organized, a la serialism. What it all ended up with was arhythmic, atonal music. I felt none of the above. That’s one reason I became a cab driver.”

The iconoclastic cabby never gave up composing, though, and the musical tide eventually turned. For Reich, and the overall reputation of Minimalism, his popular 1978 recording “Music for 18 Musicians,” with its rippling polyrhythms and harmonic instincts, was one of the catalysts.

These days, Reich is not alone in combining those rhythms and harmonies with other musical and theatrical genres. Robert Ashley began his series of visionary “TV operas” in the early ‘80s. And then there is Philip Glass’ operatic retrofitting of the Jean Cocteau film “La Belle et la Be^te.” That work was recently staged in Los Angeles, through UCLA.

Reich declines any significant point of comparison with Ashley or, especially, Glass. He speaks freely and at a rapid, erudite clip on other subjects but turns, well, minimalist, when asked about his former friend. (The two have been feuding famously for years.) Of their new works, Reich noted succinctly, Glass’ “is one way of going at it, and ‘The Cave’ is a very different way of going at it. Pay your money and take your choice.”

For Reich, “The Cave” represents a moment of self-definition on as grand a scale as he’s yet mustered. “The older I’ve gotten, as an artist and a person, the more I’ve wanted to bring my life and work together. I’ve been interested in the Bible and going back to my own religious roots. I wanted to bring them to the music.

“I think that’s the root of opera, to tell you the truth. Composers do operas because stories and things around them gather their interest and they want to bring it all together. The impetus for opera and the impetus for ‘The Cave’ are one in the same. The means for doing it are quite different. But it’s 1995, by my watch.”