STEVE REICH

Richard Taruskin
Published in the New York Times, August 24, 1997

AS OUR CENTURY NEARS AN end, it seems a good bet that Steve Reich will
turn out to be the oldest 20th-century composer in whom 21st-century musicians
will find a kindred spirit.

This proposition can now be tested conveniently with the help of Nonesuch
Records, which has commemorated the composer's 60th birthday with a big box
of new and reissued recordings containing just about every composition on which
Mr. Reich's reputation is based (79451-2; 10 CD's).

That such an item strikes a major classical label as marketable suggests that
perhaps classical music is not coming to the dead end so many have predicted but
rather undergoing a systemic evolution. And it is particularly fitting to honor Mr.
Reich's achievement with recordings, because recordings are what made that
achievement, and that evolution, possible.

To composers imbued with a 19th-century world view, artistic traditions are

transmitted ''vertically.'' Nineteenth-century music historiography is an epic
narrative of texts arranged in single file. It assumes that artists are primarily
concerned -- whether to emulate or to rebel -- with the texts of their immediate
precursors. These assumptions have led to an obsession with lines of stylistic
influence, with stylistic pedigree, ultimately (and destructively) with stylistic
purity or, worse, progress. This is the altogether anachronistic view most
classical composers still imbibe in college or conservatory.

Mr. Reich went to college, at Cornell, but majored in philosophy. To him the
main medium of musical transmission was not texts but recordings, and his view
of the music surrounding him, accordingly, was ''horizontal.'' The epiphany that
made him a composer, he has said, came at the relatively advanced age of 14,
when he heard in close succession recordings of Stravinsky's ''Rite of Spring,''
Bach's ''Brandenburg'' Concerto No. 5 and bebop.

Someone trained to look at music in terms of vertical traditions would not have
sought a common denominator here, nor would such a person, at least in 1950,
have thought jazz, a largely unwritten music, to be commensurable with the
others. But the common denominator leapt from the records to Mr. Reich's
happily unprejudiced ear.
Stravinsky's ''Russian'' style, Bach's style and bebop are all driven and regulated
by what music theorists call a ''subtactile pulse'': a strongly articulated, rock-
steady rhythmic unit that lies beneath the level of the ''felt beat,'' or tactus, the
beat that conductors show or that we normally walk or waltz or exercise to.
(When the drill sergeant tells the platoon to march ''double time,'' he is telling it
to march at the rate of the subtactile pulse.)

Most ''Western'' music of the Germanic ''common practice'' period is strongly

tactile, with at best a weakly articulated subtactile component. But much music
of the rest of the world -- Asian or African music; earlier, later or more easterly
European music, and of course, American popular music -- is intricately
coordinated at the subtactile level, allowing overwhelming cumulative processes,
or fascinating asymmetrical patterning, or viscerally compelling lurches to take
place at the tactile surface. (Think of the ''Danse Sacrale'' from ''The Rite,'' or the
harpsichord ''cadenza'' in ''Brandenburg'' No. 5.)

Later Mr. Reich found more musics (always, at first, through recordings) that
exhibited this ''rhythmic profile,'' as he calls it: West African drumming,
Indonesian gamelan, medieval organum and hocket. These provided the models
for the ubiquitous chug-chug-chug without which Reich would not be Reich,
against which the gradually unfolding or playfully shifting surface processes of
his music are measured and become intelligible.

The best early demonstration of its magic is ''Four Organs'' (1970), the first Reich
piece to win a large audience, in which the systematically expanding phrases on
the surface would be as uninterestingly arcane as most contemporary classical
music, instead of riveting and elating, but for the maracas that sound out the
subtactile pulse.

Eventually Mr. Reich went to Ghana and to Berkeley, Calif. (where Balinese
gamelans flourished), to gain hands-on experience and body involvement with
the styles that now fascinated him. A few earlyish pieces sound a bit like
imitations of ''oriental'' musics in the manner of Cage's prepared-piano works or
Colin McPhee.

But Mr. Reich's most characteristic pieces fuse everything into a unique personal
idiom that arises out of the glorious assumption of an ecumenical heritage stored
electronically, in which sounding music from every time and place is instantly
available as part of a notional Here and Now to which we all have equal eclectic
access.

At more technical levels, too, Mr. Reich's breakthroughs would have been
unthinkable without recording technology. The earliest pieces that are
recognizably Reichian are his ''phase'' pieces of the mid-60's. The technique was
a serendipity discovered when Mr. Reich played two copies of a single tape loop
through different tape recorders into the two channels in a set of headphones.
(They contained the phrase ''It's Gonna Rain,'' drawn from a gospel sermon.)

One loop began gaining on the other in time. ''The sensation I had in my head,''
Mr. Reich recalled, ''was that the sound moved over to my left ear, moved down
to my left shoulder, down my left arm, down my leg, out across the floor to the
left, and finally began to reverberate and shake'' and eventually ''came back
together in the center of my head.''

Of greatest interest here -- and, as things turned out, of historical significance --

is that Mr. Reich was more concerned with the effect of the music (first of all on
his own body) than with the technique of its fashioning. That implicit (in
modernist terms, heretical) solidarity with the audience was characteristic of the
early phase pieces, lending them a quasi-political -- shall we call it ''60's''? --
appeal that compensated for their sometimes thin musical content.

In ''It's Gonna Rain'' (1965), Mr. Reich was willing to decide that the phase
phenomenon itself was more interesting than anything he might do with it, so he
simply allowed it to play itself out. In its provocative modesty it was a genuinely
avant-garde, shock-the-bourgeois gesture, and it was amply repaid with abuse
from the relevant bourgeoisie, the technocratic modernists lately ensconced in
university music departments.

But the avant-garde Mr. Reich represented differed from previous ones, roundly
refuting the conventional ''theory of the avant-garde'' put forth by modernist
pundits like Renato Poggioli or Theodor W. Adorno. Like any avant-garde, it
was the opposite of conservative or nostalgic. It sought no return to older styles.
If it used consonant harmonies, it was only to focus the site of innovation
elsewhere, not to reinstate traditional harmonic hierarchies.

Unlike the ''traditional'' avant-garde, though, it was also the opposite of socially
alienated. It sought connection; indeed, the status of African drumming and
gamelan performance as models of harmonious social interaction was among
their attractions for Mr. Reich. Like those musics, his was viscerally engaging
and often produced euphoria in its hearers. It became popular with ''nonclassical''
audiences and commercially successful. And so, of course, the modern-music
establishment denied its seriousness. A popular avant-garde might seem as much
a contradiction as a tenured one.

An advance guard is avant-garde, however, only with respect to a status quo; and
in that respect Mr. Reich has been a potent, and a very serious, force for change.
He has remained not only a serious artist but also a restless one, whose
continuing creative quest has led him toward solutions to a couple of esthetic
problems that his ''serious'' contemporaries have notoriously failed to solve, or
even acknowledge.

One problem is that of addressing a whole person in music. We have had lots of
new music, God knows, that reduces listeners to their cerebral cortex, and in
opposition to that, lots (including most ''Minimalism'') that reduces them to their
autonomic nervous system. Mr. Reich, happily, along with Gyorgy Ligeti,
Conlon Nancarrow and only a few others, has seen the need to treat his listeners
as fully conscious, fully sentient human beings.

After discovering the ''phase'' process he immediately began adapting it to

traditional instrumental and vocal media, producing perhaps the earliest ''live''
music that deliberately aped recorded music. The complicated layered textures
that have resulted from this adaptation can be arduous to execute with the
required precision. Mr. Reich insisted on making the difficult ''back transfer''
where sticking to tape would have made things easy for all concerned, because
the effort and the arduousness conspired to humanize the product and make it
communicative.

But no matter how complex the patterns or processes in Mr. Reich's music, they
can be grasped by the naked ear and parsed by the rational mind, adding
intellectual to physical involvement and banishing the sort of discouraged mental
passivity so much new music induces.

Musically sophisticated audiences -- audiences who like ''challenging'' music --

find much to their liking in the textures and harmonic subtleties of Mr. Reich's
''Counterpoints'' for ''whole consorts'' of homogeneous timbre, prerecorded
instruments interacting antically with live soloists.

YET MR. REICH'S SONIC world is not just a multicultural playground. In the
1980's he began to expand his horizons, re-engaging with texts, first in ''Tehillim''
(1981), a lilting, melodically inventive setting of Hebrew psalms for three pure-
toned ''early music'' sopranos (usually in close ''phaselike'' canons) and orchestra.
Then, in ''The Desert Music'' (1983), an ambitious cantata stretched out over a
few earnestly exhorting fragments from poems by William Carlos Williams, Mr.
Reich broadened his harmonic palette into intense chromatic terrain and equipped
it to deal with sober, even somber matters.

Finally, in ''Different Trains'' (1988), Mr. Reich went the full distance and earned
his place among the great composers of the century. For here is where he solved
the other problem. He has composed the only adequate musical response -- one
of the few adequate artistic responses in any medium -- to the Holocaust.
With famous and flatulent self-importance, Adorno announced that after
Auschwitz, poetry had become impossible. The kind of art Adorno upheld --
pretentiously abstract, ostentatiously alienated and self-involved -- surely did ring
hollow after the art-loving Nazis, co-opting the masterpieces of the past, had
unmasked the moral contingency of high ''humanistic'' esthetics. What was
desperately needed, though, was a poetry that gave significant form to that
contingency and disillusion.

Most of what was put forth, from the heavy tomes of existentialist philosophy to
the bloated cantatas of the Socialist Realists, ludicrously contradicted by its
bombast the sensibility it sought to embody. Or else it sought with mendacious
sentimentality to retrieve a message of uplift from the abyss.

Arnold Schoenberg's ''Survivor From Warsaw'' (1947), the most famous musical
memorial to the Holocaust, falls easy prey to these pitfalls. Were the name of its
composer not surrounded by a historiographical aureole, were its musical idiom
not safeguarded by its inscrutability, its B-movie cliches -- the Erich von
Stroheim Nazi barking ''Achtung,'' the kitsch-triumphalism of the climactic,
suddenly tonal singing of the Jewish credo -- would be painfully obvious, and no
one would ever think to program such banality alongside Beethoven's Ninth as
has become fashionable. That kind of post-Auschwitz poetry is indeed a
confession of art's impotence.

''Different Trains'' does it, well, differently. In a tradition going back through
Janacek and Mussorgsky to the music of the Greeks as the Renaissance Italians
imagined it, Mr. Reich based the melodic content of the piece on the contour and
rhythm of ordinary human speech. But in his case the speech consisted of
fragments of oral history (recordings again!), looped into Reichian ostinatos, then
resolved into musical phrases conforming to the normal tunings, scales and
rhythms of ''Western music,'' imaginatively scored for string quartet. These
speech melodies were set in counterpoint with the original speech samples, all of
it measured against the constant Reichian chug.

Only this time the chug is given an ''objective correlative'' in the actual chug and
clack of moving trains, evoked also by periodic whistles adjusted to the ever-
modulating tonalities of the speech samples. In the first of three sections, the
speech samples are voices from Mr. Reich's own past, recalling the
transcontinental train rides of his childhood. In the second, train whistles give
way to air-raid sirens, and the collage of speech melodies is drawn from archival
tapes of Holocaust survivors recalling their childhood ride to Auschwitz. A third
section synthesizes the two sets of recollections over the unremitting subtactile
pulse.
There are no villains and no heros. There is no role for a Ralph Fiennes or a
Werner Klemperer to flatter your sense of moral superiority. And there is no
bathetic glory to comfort you with a trumped-up Triumph of the Human Spirit.
There is just the perception that while this happened here, that happened there,
and a stony invitation to reflect.

THE ONLY MOMENT THAT could be said to point a moral is the matter-of-
fact statement by one of the speakers in the third section that ''today, they're all
gone.'' Remembering his voice from the first section, we know he was talking
about the American transcontinental trains of the 30's. But we also remember the
second section, so now he's talking about the Jewish children, too. It is a true
synthesis, and it is also an exquisitely understated closure of the musical form. It
brings an ache, and a shiver.

So successful a mapping of structure and meaning, so thorough an

interpenetration of sonic material and conceptual metaphor, is the mark of a
master composer. (The word, recall, means ''putter-together.'') More than that, it
is the work of a mature human being, perhaps even more of a rarity in today's
musical world. So perfectly realized is ''Different Trains'' that I was sorry to see
Mr. Reich, in later works like ''The Cave'' (1993) and ''City Life'' (1994), turning
the voice-sampling technique into a routine. And I was sorry to see the pithiness
and indirection of ''Different Trains'' turn, in ''The Cave,'' into a rambling,
somewhat hectoring sermon on Arab-Israeli relations. The work as presented
here was adapted from the soundtrack to a reportedly dazzling video
documentary. Perhaps it was not a good idea to issue it as an independent audio
experience.

As far as I am concerned, Mr. Reich can go permanently astray now and never
lose the distinction of having given classical music back first its youth and finally
its soul in the waning years of the 20th century. It is something for which the
musicians of the 21st century will remember him and be grateful. We can be
grateful already.

Mr. Taruskin is generally recognized as the greatest music historian and

musicologist of our day. He recently completed his 6 volume Oxford History of
Western Music