The Reich Stuff

SoHo’s children are middle-aged these days, and composer Steve Reich, a fixture on New York’s rebellious downtown loft scene when he was a bearded youth, recently turned 60.

It is a becoming age for such a serious artist, another stage in what, in his purely Minimalist days, he called “music as a gradual process.” Reich has not yet run out of Bastilles to storm--at the moment he is mulling “the whole computer superstructure on which our society rests”--but he also has his son’s college tuition to pay.

“I don’t know how anyone makes a living here,” groans the artist who once drove a taxicab and ran a moving company to pay for his composing habit, and now says that 75% to 85% of his income comes from Europe. “There’s nothing going on in this country.”

It is symptomatic of the manic pace of his professional life that Southern California’s portion of “nothing going on” includes Thursday’s all-Reich UCLA concert at Veterans Wadsworth Theater (featuring his own ensemble and Theater of Voices, conducted by Paul Hillier); a performance of one of his signature pieces, “Drumming,” at a Green Umbrella New Music Series concert on Jan. 27; and the West Coast premiere of Reich’s multimedia work “The Cave” at Irvine Barclay Theater in Orange County on May 15.

On the recording front, Nonesuch last month released a CD of new works and is planning a 10-CD retrospective for release next March. Reich is one of the very few composers in America who can be sure that every piece he writes will be recorded and, most likely, sell.

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“How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life.” The one-line text of Reich’s 14-minute piece “Proverb” (which is on both the new CD and Thursday’s program), quoted from philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, could be the Minimalist credo. And it might once have been a perfect epigram for a composer who, as Reich did 30 years ago, twice built quarter-hour works--”It’s Gonna Rain” in 1965 and “Come Out” in 1966--out of nothing more than a phrase of speech, looped, doubled and repeated, with the two loops slightly out of sync.

Yet Reich is not a man of small thoughts or great patience. He is a wiry, edgy and voluble New Yorker who spits out ideas like a tennis ball machine, expressing his antipathies in categorical statements.

He dislikes orchestral string sections (“too fat, too wide a sound”) and composers with tenure (“the whole academic establishment could perish tomorrow and it wouldn’t change a thing”). He has no interest in the core classical repertoire (“I detest German romantic music--after Beethoven, I’m outta there”). He has no tolerance for composers who ignore rock ‘n’ roll (“If you don’t learn from it, then you’re a fool”), or those who imitate it too closely (“No one can pursue the style of the month and succeed”), or those with an ideological approach (“I don’t like people who have manifestoes”).

There is a reason he has tossed whole segments of Western culture from his life: to make room for a range of other influences, such as bebop, 12th century organum, Ghanaian drumming, musique concrete, Jewish liturgy and baroque canon. The soundtrack of the Manhattan household in which Reich grew up in was the standard symphonic one, but what he remembers most vividly was hearing Charlie Parker, Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” and Bach’s “Brandenburg” Concerto No. 5 at age 14.

“It was like I was living in some house and someone told me, ‘Look, there’s another room,’ ” he recalls.

There is nothing pastiche-like about the way Reich has assimilated these sources, though. However disparate they seem, Reich has found a way to bind them in his own style. From Stravinsky, he suggests, he extracted the notion of static music built on driving rhythms and a fondness for ostinatos (nuggets of melody that, rather than developing, simply repeat). From Parker, he lifted the indecorous jounce and skip of 1940s jazz. From Bach, he learned the practice of canon--the art of building a piece methodically from a melody that is doubled, layered and overlapped with itself.

Reich has always thought rhythmically, and his first love was the drums--at Cornell as an undergraduate he played with a weekend rock band. Even during his “serious” years as a student at Juilliard in New York and Mills College in Oakland, he kept one ear glued to the jazz world, especially that of John Coltrane.

A dozen years after Reich was shown that “other room,” he discovered A.M. Jones’ transcriptions of West African drumming in a four-volume set called “Studies in African Music.” Reich found himself powerfully attracted to African music and spent the summer of 1971 studying drumming in Ghana. He was intrigued less by the instruments’ exotic sound than the music’s structural bedrock: the dizzying but rigorously logical play of interlocking rhythmic patterns.

The idiom may have been different but the working principle, Reich discovered, was not unlike that underlying Bach’s canons. That idea of synchronizing motives of varying lengths, so that they move gradually out of phase with each other, gave rise to “Drumming,” the landmark work he wrote when he returned to the U.S., and to “Nagoya Marimbas,” a tiny but intense new percussion duo on the UCLA program.

“Canons are an empty vessel,” Reich explains, “but you can fill them with whatever you grew up with”--melodic or rhythmic phrases, even recorded speech.

Today, Reich’s omnivorous borrowing has come full circle. The provocative experimenter long ago joined the establishment, and his music has become part of the common culture--as he discovered recently in a London nightclub, where, in the middle of a pop song by an emerging British pop group, he heard an unadulterated, patently plagiarized section of his own 1987 “Electric Counterpoint.”

Reich called Robert Hurwitz, the president of his record company, Nonesuch. “I said, ‘Should we sue?’ ” Reich recounts. “Bob said, ‘Nah, they’re not big enough yet.’ It’s poetic justice, in a way.”

Reich’s audiences (and imitators) are not limited to connoisseurs of classical composition, and he is proud of how difficult it is to profile one of his fans. “I have never figured out who buys his records,” admits Hurwitz. Someone does, though: His 1988 work “Different Trains” sold more than 100,000 copies, an enormous number for a modern composer.

In his SoHo days, Reich’s listeners were often chemically exalted and barely awake, and for a time his static style got tagged with a phrase he finds abhorrent: trance music. Like most composers, Reich prefers his listeners alert and concentrated. Still, he says, “If you can’t wash dishes to one of my pieces, it doesn’t work.”

To some, Minimalism, the term with which his style has been associated since the mid-1960s, was always a double-edged label. To those who claimed it as an analogy to a stern, monochrome aesthetic in the visual arts, Minimalism as applied to music described a style made not of development, harmonic tension, melody and climax, but of layered, repetitive rhythmic patterns and the intricate alignment of details. To those who used the term pejoratively, it meant interminable repetition, simple-minded and decorative doodling stripped of events and expressivity.

Whatever the spin, “Minimalism” as applied to Reich has been a misnomer for at least the past 15 years, during which he has written lush and complex orchestral works such as “The Four Sections” and “Desert Music” and the grand video-musical-theater-documentary work “The Cave.” In “City Life,” the longest of the works on the new CD, the energy of Reich’s music is more urban and less karmic than ever. Pulsating chords that mix with car alarms, pile drivers, police radios and snippets of speech. It is in the tradition of George Antheil, Edgar Varese and Snoop Doggy Dogg; it is a high-tech, high-art rap.

If “City Life” captures the Manhattan raucousness outside the composer’s door, “Proverb” distills the contemplative Reich. The source for “Proverb” is liturgical music by the 12th century composer Perotin. Once again, the choice was not haphazard: Medieval polyphony, like Ghanaian music, is built on the cross-relations of repeating patterns. The music may be of Christian extraction but both the idiom and the Old Testament echoes of the title link it with another neo-medieval vocal work, Reich’s 1981 “Tehillim” (Psalms), making it the most recent expression of his resurgent interest in Judaism.

Though his father was Jewish (his mother is Christian Scientist), before Reich could allow what he calls his “religious gene” to flourish, he had to put some distance between himself and his downtown peers. “The Bible,” Reich says wryly, “was not on the SoHo reading list.” In 1974, after a decade of Yoga and Buddhism and feeling a low-level spiritual dissatisfaction, Reich “got this intuition: Maybe there’s something in my own backyard.”

To Reich, who describes himself as 99% vegetarian (and therefore almost kosher) and 85% Sabbath-observant, Judaism serves something of the same function as traditional African music and 12th century polyphony. It is a periodic refuge from frantic modernity and the noisy, frequent-flier life of a successful composer.

“Taking into account all the creative power you have and voluntarily desisting, this is powerfully restorative,” he says. To make sure that the Sabbath does not take him by surprise, Reich keeps it on his home computer. If it’s in the hard drive, he explains, “then that’s the way it is, it’s part of life.”

There is some poetry to the fact that Reich regulates his religious life with the help of a computer, since in his music, too, he weaves antiquity with technology, and the relationship between the two is much on his mind.

Reich and his wife, video artist Beryl Korot, who collaborated on the “The Cave,” are working on “Three Tales,” a multimedia treatment of three disastrous moments in man’s struggle to dominate his own inventions. The first act is called “Hindenburg,” and Reich envisions accompanying the famous 1937 footage of the gas-filled dirigible bursting into flames with singers intoning the words of a German official: “It could not have been a technical matter.”

“That story is so prototypical of a kind of hubris toward technology,” says Reich, who has learned something about placing too much faith in hardware. “The Cave” requires a computer-controlled phalanx of television monitors, miles of cable and roughly $200,000 to mount in its full-scale version. It is a groundbreaking work of music theater, but, as Reich now admits, it is also a “glorious white elephant.”

Chastened, Reich and Korot have pared down their technical demands for “Three Tales”: The multichannel kaleidoscope of images will be created on a computer and then transferred to 35-millimeter film, so that the only equipment needed for a performance will be a standard projector and a movie screen.

“Hindenburg” will have its premiere in Bonn next June, but the rest of the work is still in the planning stages: The second act, “Bikini,” will center on the first test detonation of a hydrogen bomb in 1952, and the third, “Challenger,” will chronicle the midair explosion of the space shuttle in 1986.

For all his skepticism, Reich is no Luddite. “I don’t trust people who don’t love and hate technology,” he says, and his own use of studio techniques is the chronicle of a craftsman hunting for cheap and available tools. “My motto is, ‘If you can’t buy it on 48th Street, I’m not interested.’ The technology serves a musical idea.”

Still, in recent recording sessions, Reich kept the engineers scratching their heads, trying to reconcile the capabilities of their machines to the composer’s demands. “He’ll push the technology as far as it will go,” says producer Judith Sherman. “And when it won’t go any further, he just waits until it will.”

For much of his life, it seems, Reich was waiting for the invention of the sampling keyboard, a programmable piano in which each key can be made to produce not just a note but any recorded noise: On such a machine, play middle C and you can get the clanking of a subway turnstile.

Reich had used tape recording technology since the ‘60s but says that “it wasn’t until the sampling keyboard came along that I said, ‘Aha! Here’s a new way to do music theater.’ I always felt it was made for me personally.”

The sounds he sampled for “City Life” and that a keyboardist plays in performance are not studio-clean but surrounded with the city’s gritty air and noise--”Check it out,” yells a sidewalk vendor. And muffled lines like “It’s fulla smoke” are not generic but are aural artifacts of the World Trade Center bombing.

The piece’s journalistic, snapshot approach is part of Reich’s working method, one he applied to “The Cave,” in which Arabs, Israelis and Americans discuss the Mideast conflict by talking about the Cave of Abraham in Hebron. “Three Tales” begins with a headline, projected on the screen and rapped out by singers and drums, announcing the Hindenburg’s demise.

That his art is grounded in the historical moment is what Reich trusts will keep it from dating. “Anything that’s really worthwhile is not just the expression of a person but the expression of a time and place,” he says. “What’s conceived of as universal is usually just a waste of time.” Hence his lack of interest in 19th century repertory, which the music world treats as transcendent and pure and which he thinks of as simply out of date.

His model is Kurt Weill, whose orchestras included banjos and saxophones and elided the difference between opera and cabaret. Weill’s “Three-Penny Opera,” Reich asserts, “is the Weimar Republic.”

It’s just the sort of aphorism Reich would undoubtedly like someone, someday, to apply to a work of his. “ ‘Three Tales’ is the last years of the 20th century”--that would be nice.

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* Steve Reich and Musicians, with guest artists Theatre of Voices, Veterans Wadsworth Theater, Veterans Administration Grounds. Thursday, 8 p.m. $9-$30. (310) 825-2101.