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Steve Reich’s Minimalism Can Still Speak Volumes

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TIMES MUSIC CRITIC

The original members of Steve Reich and Musicians have gone gray. Reich, who recently turned 60, is getting lines on his face. And “Drumming,” excerpts of which concluded the first half of the ensemble’s UCLA appearance at Veterans Wadsworth Theatre Thursday night, is a quarter-century old. Yet this is still new music; the composer has not lost his cutting edge; and his ensemble remains one of the freshest and most exciting acts that music today has to offer.

The longevity of Reich, whose program Thursday brought back not just blasts from the past but also included examples of his recent work, is really less remarkable than it seems on the surface. Good music lasts. Minimalism is still going strong after three decades, even if the term remains a bugaboo to composers.

Young composers don’t rebel against Minimalism the way Reich and his colleagues did against older generation serialists; they embrace it. A new recording by a young British composer, Orlando Gough, on the Catalyst label, for instance, sounds at times unashamedly imitative of Reich. Another young British composer, Chris Hughes, put out his own New Age-like versions of Reich’s music on a Point Music CD a couple of years ago.

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One reason Minimalism has endured as a way of making music--whereas in the visual arts, literature and film, it was more a passing fashion--was clearly evident in the survey that Reich presented. In music, Minimalism has served as a clean slate that allows space for other musics. When Reich removed harmonic interest and focused attention on rhythmic phases--adding beats to a pulse so that they defract into exciting, complex patterns--he found partial inspiration from Ghana. There is both a sense of the ritual and the sound of African drumming in the first part of Reich’s “Drumming,” where four percussionists attack tuned bongos with sticks. But in the second part, where the players shift to marimbas and a couple of scat singers join in, the same procedures have more the quality of bebop, another big influence on Reich.

Indeed, one of the most intriguing aspects of Reich’s career has been the way he has been able to incorporate, one after another, his own musical and religious passions into what is on the surface the most limiting and abstract musical style ever invented. In Reich’s Sextet, written in 1985, one senses his love for Stravinsky in the interesting way he manipulates his patterns and pulses into near classical shapes.

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In one of his latest pieces, “Proverb,” heard locally for the first time on this program, Reich has finally found a way to pay homage to two other longtime influences--a favorite composer, Perotin, and a favorite philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein. The 12th century French composer took static chant and set it into radical rhythmic, melodic and contrapuntal motion, and thus was in many ways the father of Western music as we know it. Likewise Wittgenstein, with his pithy statements that can reverberate without cease in the mind, startled 20th century philosophy into a modernism.

Written for Reich’s ensemble of four percussionists and two keyboard players, along with the early music vocal quintet Theatre of Voices, which was also on hand Thursday, “Proverb” fills a quarter hour with one of those Wittgenstein lines--”How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life!” The score--essentially a layering of faux Perotin supported by Reichian pulses and interlocking rhythmic patterns played by organs and vibraphones--then becomes a beautiful, haunting instance of modern music and philosophy seeming to arise out of ancient musical times.

Reich also offered two additional local premieres. “Nagoya Marimbas,” from 1994, is a masterful, sophisticated five-minute update, for two marimbas, of the phase procedures of which Reich never tires. The other, an even briefer excerpt from “The Cave”--Reich’s evening-length multimedia exploration of the Old Testament and the current Middle East--was a pleasant tease for an upcoming full production of the work that Reich will bring to Irvine next May.

In the meantime, Reich and his absorbing, infallible musicians will repeat Thursday’s program tonight in Escondido. “Proverb” and “Nagoya Marimbas”--along with his astounding new piece, “City Life,” which does for modern Manhattan what “An American in Paris” did for the French capital in the ‘30s--are additionally the material of a great new CD from Nonesuch.

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* Steve Reich and Musicians, along with Theatre of Voices, perform tonight at California Center for the Arts, 340 Escondido Blvd., Escondido, 8 p.m. $19-$39. (800) 988-4253.

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