Steve Reich

20:44So you had two pieces of lead and he called them the prop pieces, but they were also terrifying because each sheet of lead was, you know, a thousand pounds and it was just the pressure of the leaning pole that was keeping this thing up on the wall. So you kind of wanted to not get too close. And of course, that's exactly the way a lot of Richard's early pieces were exhibited, with a roped off area in front of the sculptures to avoid such possibilities. So Richard's work was not repetitive in the sense in which I was doing, but there was something, the simplicity, the directness, the physicality of the work was inescapable and immediately comprehensive.

21:22It's not, you know, some recherche idea you have to sweat over. But the force of it is immediately transported. Saul Le Witt, very different. Saul working basically in geometric shapes, usually in primary colors, later in black and white. But again, very, very, very strong work, easily comprehensible, but you get the basic idea, but the longer you stay with it, the more you see. So it was kind of confirmation. There was something about the attitude of all this work, which is sort of, you know, here we are, It's this period of time. We are who we are and we're just naturally suited to one another.

21:56I mean, it's the way we look back on it often at the 60s at that time is that there was sort of a sense of unfettered freedom. And was it looking at the other artists in whatever medium they were working that almost gave you an affirmation that gave you license to carry on and do the sort of thing that you were doing? Affirmation is a perfect word. Yes. Here's somebody I really respect and they think it's great, too. Onwards.

22:34Your next choice for this cultural life, Steve, is the music of the 12th century French composer Perotan, who I think you discovered whilst you were studying music at Cornell University. Could you just describe Perotan's music for us? Well, I hope you could play a chunk. and one listen worth a thousand words.

23:01Basically, what Periton is doing is taking the Gregorian chant, which is not rhythmic music at all, and let's say you have a phrase with it, Maria, Maria. A Periton would say, okay, that first syllable is going to be extended. And then I'm running out of breath and then the tenor has to come in.

23:30And against this held tone, three other tenors are all singing in very rhythmic form. And basically in triple meter.

23:48overlapping lines of counterpoint against this held drone. It seemed a very radical way of making music. Take a melody, extend the individual notes of the melodies so they become the harmonic centre for completely other melodies. That struck me as ingenious and exceedingly beautiful stuff, which I think you will find if you listen to it.

24:11The work of Peritan directly influenced some of your early work, Particularly, we hear it in Four Organs, your composition from 1970, which builds over a period of time from the individual notes of a single chord played by four simple electronic organs and accompanied by a shaker.

24:35Just tell us how that piece started. I was lying in bed and this thought occurred to me, short chord gets long. and I wrote that down in my music book and went to sleep and then the next day I got up and I began what turned out to be months of very intensive work to have that be realised because it's a very complicated piece in many respects.

25:04Four organs is pretty severe, at least it was in 1970 or 71 when it was first premiered. and what was the audience reaction as you remember on that first performance well the first performance it was at the guggenheim museum to a small audience and they were mostly artists and dancers and musicians and they got it and they understood it and they were you know they're very interested when i talk about it but the real premiere in public was at carnegie hall in 1971 with michael tilson thomas who became interested in me in that piece and said he wanted to have that piece on a program with the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Carnegie Hall.

25:37And I said, you know, great, whatever you say, but my only condition is I want to be one of the performers. And when it was performed at Carnegie Hall, along with Liszt and Mozart, it caused a riot. People in the Carnegie Hall audience were not interested in hearing the same chord for 20 minutes, no matter how complex or interesting it became. Some loved it, and there were loud bravos along with the boos, but I'd say the boos won by a big numerical majority. Was it heard for, though, to be one of those four players? And you must have seen the reaction. You were facing the audience. I mean, how did it feel?

26:11Well, Michael was doing the cues because in four organs you have to nod your head after so many repeats to let everyone know in the ensemble that we're going to change to the next bar because the bars are repeated. And it was so loud that Michael began counting out loud. and the counts go up to like 24 counts per beat. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven. So it was sort of comical, but it was also panicky. I mean, you know, I had to lean in to hear acoustically his voice as opposed to all the voices coming in from the audience. So it was definitely an exciting performance, to put it mildly, yeah.

26:53At the end of the piece, there was a moment of silence and then there was just an avalanche of noise. We went off the stage and Steve was as white as a sheet. I said, Steve, this is the greatest thing that's happened. Nothing like this has happened since the premiere of The Rite of Spring. For sure, by tomorrow, everyone in the world is going to know about you and your music. And that's just what happened.

27:24Perritan was also an influence on one of your best-known pieces which is Music for 18 Musicians

27:42Music for 18 Musicians was a breakthrough for me because it was organised harmonically with a whole list of 11 chords as opposed to a lot of the earlier pieces which would have either one or two or three harmonies preceding it. That was one of the marks of my music during that period of time and hence the word minimal.

28:11Music for 18 was a harmonic breakthrough and then an instrumentational breakthrough to really finding my own orchestra, so to speak.

28:22You mentioned minimalism there. It's a word that a lot of composers, I think including yourself, have resisted. But let's, for the sake of this conversation, use that term to describe the form of music for which you and people like Terry Riley and Philip Glass, of course, are associated. Propulsive rhythm, short, repeated phrases with tiny variations and an emphasis, I think, more on harmony than melody.

29:01What has this style of composition allowed you to do and continue to do? Well, it's allowed me to write music I love to write without feeling that I'm out of step with the earths of the world that I should be writing like Luciano Berio.

29:17It's also gratifying. I have some of my closest musical friends, David Lang, Nico Muley are, what, David is in his 60s, Nico's in his 40s, and they represent two different generations who have been influenced by myself and Violet and Glass and so on. And they're making remarkably, I think, good and interesting music, which is quite different from mine and quite different from my generation, but they make no bones about it. their starting point was what I did and what Riley did and what Phil Glass has done. And so it's very gratifying to be able to continue work. Personally, my orchestration has grown, and then it has clarified to the point where really I write for what could be called chamber orchestra, because I want the clarity that I had when I was younger, but I want to be able to greet a larger group of people.

30:03But I think my best music is in the chamber field.

30:16I think the music that was begun in the 1960s has continued, developed, flowered, and caught the attention of, I would say, the best of the younger composers that are around today.

30:43Your next choice for this cultural life, in fact, two books, Studies in African Music by A.M. Jones and Music in Bali by Colin McPhee. How did you come across these books, first of all? Well, I guess we're talking about 1962, probably, and we were in Ojai, which is a music festival just north of Los Angeles, and that particular year one of the well-known American composers holding forth down there That was Gunther Schuller, who was a great jazz lover, actually played on some Miles Davis recordings, playing French horn, believe it or not. And he mentioned that he was writing a history of jazz and that he had discovered these remarkable books about African music, which he felt lay at the root of jazz.

31:27Studies in African Music by A.M. Junes. I went to the music library in Berkeley, and lo and behold, there were these two large volumes, one just musical notation and the other just explanations and photographs. and I thought, this is so fantastic, I've got to buy it for myself, and I think it was like$50, which at that point was an unheard of amount of money to spend for a book. And I went over it, and I thought, this is incredible. Now I'm really seeing something that I haven't seen before musically, independent rhythmic voices lined up so that they don't coincide. Following on from that, I don't remember how I heard about Colin McPhee's music in Bali, but I had heard some recordings of Balinese music while I was at Mills College, and they had some recordings in the music library, and I thought, this is Krant, beautiful, fantastic music.

32:21Using the gamelan. The gamelan, yes, exactly, and there were different kinds of gamelan, too, it turns out. So I got McPhee's book, and again, musical notation unlocked the secrets of what are they doing. Well, here's what they're doing, look at that. Here's somebody playing 16th notes, and here's somebody playing eighths, and here's somebody playing quarters, and here's somebody who only hits the gong once every 32 beats. So you've got drastically different times going on simultaneously. And that was, again, a really striking new concept and found its way into my music.

33:02I understand that in 1970 you went to Ghana to study drumming and the rhythms there. And that same year, you composed your piece called Drumming, and then the following year, your rhythmic piece for two players called Clapping Music. How did that trip to Ghana inform those works? Well, again, I think the key word is, as you said before, was affirmation. I read the Jones book before I went there. I had written piano phase, violin phase, tape pieces before I went to Ghana. But in Ghana, I thought, this is not what I was doing, but it's in a similar world, and it's wonderful. And, you know, it was a big pat on the back, an international pat on the back, if you will, saying, you know, you're not crazy.

33:44This is a golden field to explore. And I had been a drummer, as I mentioned to you, when I was 14. So this was sort of out there waiting for me, if you will. And when I encountered it, it was just, you know, perfect timing and affirmed what I was doing and gave me the energy to continue.

34:04Clapping music started in a flamenco club, I think, didn't it? It did. My ensemble at this point, I had an ensemble of 12 musicians. We travelled to Europe fairly frequently, and to make sure that we had exactly what we needed, this is, we're talking early 1970s, we bought 2 ,000 pounds of amplifiers, loudspeakers, marimbas, xylophones, vibraphones, bongo drums, sticks, mallets. We had to rent trucks to drive around as a group. So we would do this. Now, I think we were playing in Brussels. We had those two trucks. And the person who ran the concert said to us after the concert was over, would you like to go out and hear some flamenco?

34:44So we kind of looked at each other and thought, you know, are we in Spain? No, we're in Brussels. And we went off into the foggy Belgian night and went to this nightclub. And we got there and we had some drinks. And then we heard two women playing the guitars. Now, they really were not such great singers, and their guitar playing was okay. But when they started clapping, we looked at each other like, wow, now it starts. Here comes the real show. And with a few drinks and clapping as a model, we went out into the foggy Belgian night clapping at each other. And I made a mental note, you know, if we did a piece with this, I don't need 2 ,000 pounds of loudspeakers and marimbus and xylophones.

35:21I can spring along my hands, and there it is. So I finally worked out the details and clapping music was a part of our programmes ever since. And it's frequently used as a wonderful concert opener. You know, it's a very friendly, look, my only bare hands.

35:42I've read also, Steve, that that visit to West Africa also had a personal effect on you and led you to rediscover your Jewish roots. How did that happen? there's no musical notation in Africa, so you can't say, well, I looked at the score and this is 400 years old. It's passed down orally from one musician to another. And so who knows what happened hundreds of years ago? But you get the feeling that this goes way back. And when I came back and I was thinking about all the aspects of studying there, I was thinking, what a wonderful idea to have this living tradition. And I thought to myself, well, I'm Jewish, and I have the foggiest notion of how the cantaloupe works, and how it's done or what it's based on.

36:24And so I began a study of cantalachia with a cantor in New York and realized there were, in the Western China, we called them nooms, they're short patterns of notes, which are built around parts of speech. Mer ha, tip, gaha, mer ha, saf, pasu, would be a very, very sort of grade school version of just how they would work. And this will vary. In New York and in the United States in general, there'll be one set of notes that realize these patterns. In Europe, there'll be a similar one, but if you go to Baghdad or Yemen, where there was large, flourishing Jewish communities, you'll get a whole different set of microtonal notes that realize these same patterns.

37:02In Koshin, India, there's a vast Jewish settlement there. And again, they have the same structure, but with different notes. And that idea was very, very interesting. Same structure, different notes.

37:23Tehalim is a composition from 1981 which sets psalms in Hebrew to music. This was the first choral or vocal-based piece that you had written. So what was the inspiration for that work? You're quite right. I hadn't written any music with a text. I had used the voice in Music for 18 in drumming, imitating the instruments, sort of quasi-jazz, scat singing, but this is not singing words and singing vocal music. I wanted to find a text that I wanted to set. And I went through the whole book of Psalms in Hebrew and in English. My English is obviously much better than my Hebrew. But when I came upon the text in the 19th Psalm, the heavens dictad the glory of God, I thought this is what I wanted to.

38:10And so I began thinking, well, you know, who wants to read Kafka in English if you can read Kafka in German? Who wants to read Flaubert in English if you can read him in French? And if you really want to understand the Psalms, you better understand some Hebrew. I mean, you know, they're wonderful in English, but they were written in Hebrew. That's the fact of the matter. So I thought, that's what I'm going to do. And I didn't, my Hebrew was not that good at all. But I went over these texts and over these texts and over these texts and had my pronunciation checked by Israeli Hebrew speakers. So I was saying this first phrase,

38:44and then one, two, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, one, two and I thought to myself, well, what is that? Well, that was undoubtedly the writer's spring, the changing meters finding their way, my unconscious from many years before a study of many years earlier, bubbling up into the setting of the psalms so who knows how pieces of musical knowledge work but it happens spontaneously and when that happens you're wise to go on and follow. And in turn, all four movements just continued the same constantly changing meters, which fit the flexibility of the language. It was a very positive musical situation where a new technique fits hand and glove with the text.

39:40I think it's interesting that all of your choices for this programme have been musical ones, but I think it's fair to say that you are often influenced by real-life events or by existing documents. In general, where does a new work start? Does it start from a story, an event, or a sequence of notes? All of the above, nothing in general. What is the working day like, Steve? Do you have a regular composing schedule or routine? I tend to work very late. I tend to work until 2 in the morning. I really get going in the late afternoon, take a break for dinner and then work after that. Hence, I wanted to do this interview with you later in the afternoon before I would get to work.

40:20And so that suits me. And it's not every day, but every day I can make it that way. You are 88 years old now and you're still composing. Your most recent work, Jacob's Ladder, is being released this year. Do you still feel as creative as ever? Well, I'll leave that for other people to decide. Yes, I want to get to work. My greatest pleasure, composing is something I love to do. I get totally lost and involved in it. That's a blessing. But I'll leave the results. I do the best I can at all times, sometimes obviously better than others. And that is not my decision. It's more yours. Well, I think we can draw a line between your work and particularly the work in the early 60s and so much modern popular music, the repetitive beats of electronic dance music or the sampling we hear in hip-hop or those pulsing scores in film soundtracks or even podcast soundtracks.

41:12It is the soundtrack to the modern world. Do you hear your influence and your legacy all around you? Yes, yes. It's hard not to. That must be very gratifying, isn't it? Well, it's gratifying, yes. sometimes you wince at the gratification. But yes, of course, it's very gratifying to feel that you've been part of the world that you live in and that what you've done has had an impact on that world around you. And by and large, it's been a positive one. So yes, absolutely. It's a wonderful one. And finally, what drives you on creatively? God knows. I don't. You're happy for it to be a mystery? Well, at that level, it is a mystery.

41:53I mean, somebody could cook up something, but I mean, I think the more appropriate response is God knows. Steve Reich, thank you very much indeed for sharing your cultural life with us. My pleasure. Thank you so much for yours.

42:18Well I do hope you enjoyed that conversation with Steve Reich who's just one of several world class composers including John Adams, Max Richter and Errolin Wallen who have told us about their creative influences on this cultural life you can find them and over 120 other guests from all artistic fields in our archive, which is available on BBC Sounds. And please do subscribe to the series on sounds or wherever you get your podcasts internationally. From me, John Wilson, and series producer Edwina Pittman, thank you very much indeed for listening to This Cultural Life.

43:05When politics is as fragmented, as unpredictable, as fraught as it is now, it can be hard to cut through the noise. That is precisely my aim on Political Thinking, my podcast from BBC Radio 4. I have extended conversations with those who shape our political thinking. I try to get to the heart of what makes these people tick. What lies behind what you're seeing or hearing on the news? That's Political Thinking with me, Nick Robinson. You can listen on BBC Sounds. Thank you.