Hype Threatens to Drown Out Reich’s Hypnotic Music

On a winter’s eve early in 1973, Michael Tilson Thomas caused a minor scandal at Carnegie Hall when he included Steve Reich’s “Four Organs” on a Boston Symphony Orchestra program. The young composer had an equally young following for his hypnotic music, built on repetition, which he performed with his own ensemble in downtown lofts and art galleries. But the music establishment had little use for him.

“Four Organs” is a particularly aggressive piece. Based on a single chord percussively repeated and extended on four electric organs, it seemed like torture to an unsuspecting symphony audience. People tried to halt the performance by shouting it down. “Stop, stop--I confess,” a woman screamed.

On Tuesday night at another uptown bastion of high culture, Lincoln Center Festival 99 finished a four-concert tribute to Reich with a performance of two works from the early ‘80s: “Tehillim” and “Desert Music,” now modern classics. Alice Tully Hall held a sold-out audience of all ages and all manner of dress, from shorts to suits. Outside, hopefuls begged tickets. Inside, the crowd listened to thrilling performances with rapt attention and applauded the composer with explosive enthusiasm.

But Reich has not just arrived, he has been canonized. On a poster, the festival advertised the concert with a quote from a London newspaper that put Reich among “the handful of composers who can legitimately claim to have altered the direction of music history.” In the Stagebill for the concert, musicologist K. Robert Schwarz extended that claim: “Even fewer have done so without abandoning the larger listening public,” he wrote. In the Village Voice, Kyle Gann insisted that Reich “may now be considered, by general acclamation, America’s greatest living composer” and suggested him as the likely candidate for world’s greatest.

These are disconcerting remarks. They are not fact. Reich’s music has a strong following but hardly a universal one. (A New York Times review of Tuesday’s concert recommended that it was best “to leave your intellect in the lobby.”) And as someone who found in Tuesday’s concert both enduring substance and deeply moving sentiment, I fear that the coronation of Reich as a kind of king of modern music may actually undermine his true significance.

This Reichian elevation overreaches in its implication that Minimalism is the only crucial movement in music during the past 30 years (it’s important, but one of many interesting movements). It further implies that Reich deserves all the credit, and that Philip Glass is chopped liver. Reich and Glass are the most famous of the first generation of Minimalists, but Reich generally enjoys greater support from musicians; Glass, from the broader public.

In fact, the two are far more different than alike. Reich has little of Glass’ feeling for the theater. His music is far more abstract and exquisitely crafted. If Glass is, in a sense, our Handel, than Reich is our Bach (though hardly so prolific). But where Reich is unique among today’s composers is that he has succeeded entirely on his own terms.

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Both Reich and Glass concentrated on writing for their own ensembles in the ‘70s (a time when Reich wrote his two early masterpieces “Drumming” and “Music for 18 Musicians”). Glass easily entered the larger musical world of opera and orchestral music in the ‘80s, and Reich initially followed suit. “Tehillim,” written in 1981, extended his percussion-based ensemble to include winds, strings and four women’s voices; he also used text for the first time--Hebrew from the Psalms. Three years later, he had worked up to a full 45-minute work for chorus and large orchestra, “Desert Music,” with text taken from William Carlos Williams’ poetry.

But after another three years, Reich swore off orchestras for good, preferring to work with his own virtuoso group or with specialist new music ensembles. A control freak and a counterpoint freak, Reich has always felt compelled to oversee every detail of performance. He prefers clean, tight, amplified sound in which one listens with a sense of intimacy to the musical lines (anyone who doesn’t like amplification, he once said in an interview, can go to hell). And this might seem just the recipe to keep Reich limited to his own small corner of modern music.

Yet it has been his genius to focus his musical arguments with such clarity and originality that his best works can encompass a remarkably wide experience and an even more surprising spirituality. On the surface, the music has a rhythmic elan that turns on the young--Nonesuch has lately released “Reich Remixed” with his music sampled by popular DJs. But I was struck Tuesday by just how much “Tehillim” and “Desert Music,” both given in the chamber versions that the composer now prefers, contain all the other qualities of lasting, important music as well.

The wonderful performances, featuring David Robertson conducting members of the Orchestra of St. Luke’s and the superb British vocal group Synergy, were lively and precise, yet sounded different from any others I have heard. And the accumulation of repeated patterns playing off each other contrapuntally led the mind directly into contemplation of profound texts.

There are a number of new recordings that attest to the fact that Reich’s music also has a life beyond his ensemble and his domination. The German new music group Ensemble Modern has a strong new performance of “Music for 18 Musicians” on BMG. Another German group, the Ensemble Avantgarde, returns to the very early phase pieces and includes a downright beautiful account of the once-frightful “Four Organs” on a recent Wergo release. French clarinetist Alain Damiens offers a lyrically fresh version of “New York Counterpoint” on a stunning new Virgin disc, which also includes clarinet concertos by Carter and Adams, with David Robertson conducting Ensemble Intercontemporain.

Being labeled the greatest is musical politics, not music. Reich doesn’t need that burden. Being great is sufficient for any composer. And in that sense, he has very much arrived.